austin_dern

I've mentioned my skepticism about furry convention themes before. Most of the times I went to Morphicon or Furry Connection North the theme affected the art on the cover of the con book and little else. Last year's AnthrOhio theme was more prominent: all the rooms had art that was on-theme, and there were these RFID readers for your con badges, to check in at places and earn achievements. This year's AnthrOhio theme was ``Corporate Takeover''. I thought that was a spectacularly closed theme for a con; what's fun in fiduciary responsibility and oversight statements? I mean to someone who's not me, who would probably play a video game that was Commercial Paper Tycoon. (Commercial paper is unsecured short-term promissory notes.)

This shows my lack of imagination, or the convention taking the theme not so literally. The real theme was Office Space, or at least the bull-filled world of the corporate office. There were events (that we missed) named stuff like the ``Corporate Teambuilding Exercise'' or ``Business Casual Meet and Greet''. The RFID checkin stations were back, too, with achievements that fit the stuck-in-the-office-job 90s-style dystopia. People connected with the con suiting in their khakis and dress shirts. Everyone already had lanyards, of course, and that's maybe the only spot that could have done more with the theme.

We made it as ever to the Cake Decorating contest. The challenge was to do something on theme and, with neither bunny_hugger nor I thinking broadly enough about the theme, we were stuck. Also sticking us: once again while they provided tubes of frosting, they didn't have the tips used to guide the frosting to a specific, thin shape. With the lack of ideas we settled on mine: the New Reorganizaton Chart. This might be visually dull but I think we made up for it with the subtle madness of the scheme. Like, of course, there's one first-level group. There's three second-level groups, each reporting to the first-level group. There's four third-level groups. One reports to a second-level group and to the first-level group above that. One reports to two different second-level groups. One reports to another third-level group, which leaves one of the second-level groups with nobody reporting to it. Then there's a tangle of reporting lines underneath the third-level groups, which is where the cake runs out. I think it had that distinctly me comic touch of being just a little bit more fastidiously odd the more you looked at it. Also in being pitched way wrong for the audience, as the judges basically took a quick look at it, saw a bunch of colored rectangles, and moved on to more visually interesting cakes. Like the ones reproducing the BoxOwl Logo, a touch of wonderfully sinister corporate branding used to reinforce the con's theme. Well, they gave us a chance to explain our cake designs, and the judges seemed to agree that ours was a correctly-formed joke-like structure and very likely there was someone in the world who would find this funny.

We stopped in to check the rabbits again before going to the Raccoons and Procyonids SIG. This would be the lone panel I hosted this year; I was slow about submitting the other stuff I might have done and they apologized but said the schedule was done. Fine enough. For once I didn't have one of the death slots of Sunday early morning or noon; I had Saturday at 7 pm. You know, at the same time as the What's My Lion improv comedy show. And the Foxes and Peppers concert from Fox Amore and Pepper Coyote. So given all that we had a pretty good turnout of like five people. I finally gave away some of the Grauniads of the Galaxy pinball promotional flyers I've been carrying around forever (Stern gives away SO MANY of these things), and we tipped over the candy bins, as traditional. This was held again in the Executive Boardroom where bunny_hugger's panels had been. The broken curtain rod had been removed and not replaced.

Afterward I remembered I had intended to talk about Rio Rita. This is a 1929 RKO movie featuring the comic team of Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey. (Imagine a Groucho and Chico Marx as a duo, without Chico doing the weird Italian thing, only I'll admit not quite so good.) This is only important because it's a (then) modern-day Western with the main plot being about the search for the notorious bandit The Kinkajou. I'm not positive anyone having anything to do with the movie knew quite what a kinkajou is, but it's a quiet thrill for us fans of the lesser-known members of the raccoon family just to hear everyone wanting to know the fate of the Kinkajou.

bunny_hugger did a bit more puppeteering, bringing her ostrich around. This is always an attention-getter because the ostrich has a nice big head and wings that your hands fit into, so you can do that Muppet Show thing where he drums his fingers on his chest. And, in curiosity, we poked into the board game room where the jigsaw puzzle had made much more progress. Someone found the missing edge piece, offending bunny_hugger, but the whole board was much nearer finished. The board game room was about to close for the night and someone pointed out that the con had four and a half hours to finish the puzzle --- they were scheduled to be open only from noon to 4 pm tomorrow. It looked like the con might maybe finish the puzzle? Who could say?

The Saturday dance was not so busy as the Friday dance, but then we got there later in the day. bunny_hugger went in her Stitch kigurumi while I went in Angel, and so we made an even more adorable pair than usual and everybody knew it. Also I really, really like the energy I bring to a room by being a big guy dressed in all pink. The dance ended at 1 am, to our great surprise; we'd just assumed it was going on until 2 am. All right.

There was also another Mystery Science Theater 3000 event going on, this one with like eight people on-stage loosely riffing on Reefer Madness. This was maybe too many people talking at once to really be heard, especially with the audience also all talking along. Also with people calling out take-a-drink moments like someone new in a hat entering the scene. So, mm. It's nice being around people who are having so much fun, but I can't say we were into the event. It may have hurt that we came in pretty near the end, so we had not seen what I imagine the progression to be from loosely but actually organized thing to sloppy drunks talking over each other.

And in wandering around the dispersing crowd at 1:30 am we noticed something set up in one of the hangout spaces. It was the convention's Cubicle Playset, a little spot with partition walls and a 90s-era office phone and IBM Electric Typewriter which brought both of us memories of typing classes. And of just how good real typewriter keyboards felt back then, with their heft and their solid physical feedback. You can understand how people just had naturally better typing habits when keyboards were designed by people who thought out how keyboards should work.

While there we met someone whose name I forget. He was just at the convention on a day pass, looking around for anyone to talk to after the friend he'd meant to attend with bailed on him. So we were just there, talking with him and being part of that casual simple hanging-out talk, for someone who did not think he would ever go to AnthrOhio again, but at least was having a nice moment in his last hour there.

We went to bed.

Trivia: The Casablanca Conference of 1943 identified the bombing targets in Germany to be, in order of priority, German submarine construction yards, the aircraft industry, transportation, oil plants, and other war industry. Source: The Second World War, John Keegan.

Currently Reading: When The Mississippi Ran Backwards: Empire, Intrigue, Murder, and the New Madrid Earthquakes, Jay Feldman.

PS: Getting closer yet to Medusa Steel Coaster, and to my 200th logged roller coaster!

And a look back on the ride, showing off just how much of it is these great loops around the hillside, with inline rolls added to make things more dizzying.

Finally! The launch platform! We went to the back seat for my 200th logged roller coaster ride.

The outside of the lift station, walking the long way to the exit. There was, I believe, a photo booth but by the time we got to it they'd cycled out of us and, anyway, we only rarely get ride photos, even for something like this. We both have the exact same expressions in every ride photo anyway: me, eyes wide open and mouth agape like I'm hollering, bunny_hugger grimacing like she's been punched in the stomach.

Among the Morphicon/AnthrOhio traditions not yet gone or changed is the pizza party. They offer food for all guests; they offer a pretty good dinner one day of the con. So hospitality was filled with pizzas, and the outside filled with a great line of people not sure how many slices they could take per person. All you'd want, really: they cut the pizzas into squares, so there was plenty of unwanted edges. And they had plenty of vegetarian pizzas, pure cheese or just vegetables, a welcome change. (The usual failure mode for pizza is to get a bunch of, like, pepperoni, plus one or two pure cheese or pure vegetable for the vegetarians, and forget that people who'll eat pepperoni will also eat plain cheese.) Anyway, they had far more pizza than even the convention, more populated than even last year's, could eat.

This was an accomplishment we wouldn't fully appreciate at the time. The con ran short on food Saturday and Sunday. Sunday all I could grab for bunny_hugger's needed breakfast were two oranges, all they had except for peanut butter sandwiches. Maybe we were just there at bad times. Maybe the con is growing at such a rate that rooms like Hospitality are getting caught under-prepared. This is not to say they did anything wrong; just that they underestimated what was needed.

We were able to get to the tail end of one of the few SIGS we didn't run. This was the Macro/Micro meet-and-greet, for people with extremely large or small characters. And while we're not particularly excited by being macro or micro, we have a lot of fun with people who are. We missed the first half owing to the pizza party, though, and basically got to say hi to folks and bring the good news that mucks were not yet dead. Really, for not having a particular mucks-and-mucking sig we spent a good time talking up the idea of furry mucks to people.

They had a video game room. We wouldn't spend much time in it, although we were impressed by the Dance Dance Revolution-like machine set up. The dance pad looked to be wood, which seemed neat and weird. The game itself seemed to be some possibly open-source clone of Dance Dance Revolution. It included a lot of My Little Pony-based songs, if we were reading other people's scrolling correctly.

We spent more time in the board games room. Almost right away bunny_hugger signed us up for a session of Betrayal at the House on the Hill, a game we like but never get to play with more than four people, and usually only play with three. That would be Saturday early afternoon, but that's all right. It would be after the fursuit parade and we didn't know of anything else we really wanted to get to. Also in the board game room was a jigsaw puzzle, put out as something for everyone who visited to work on. bunny_hugger has gotten into jigsaw puzzles pretty seriously lately, and she was confident she would get the meandering project under control. It was harder than she anticipated, in part because the picture --- a Thomas Kincade picture of a lakeside cottage in the evening light, with a chunk of white dwarf star in the dining room --- has the sort of very faint, gradual changes of color that make it hard to do. She focused on her traditional start, finding all the edge pieces, and was ultimately foiled, one edge piece missing. A board game room organizer said she had checked the puzzle --- gotten from Goodwill --- and found it had the 1,000 pieces promised on the box.

bunny_hugger, more learned in the ways of jigsaw puzzles, knew something which startled me and may shock you: when a jigsaw puzzle promises to have a specific number of pieces, they usually mean ``about'' that many pieces. The only way to actually know whether a jigsaw puzzle is complete is to complete it. It will be complete if it's come from the factory --- manufacturing just doesn't make missing pieces plausible --- but second-hand? Good luck. The board game person speculated on thrift shops test-assembling jigsaw puzzles, likely as a break room activity, which ... well, bunny_hugger and I could not believe that the thrift shop put much labor into checking that its $2 used puzzles were complete. But the puzzle would make only slight progress on Friday. The edge would be incomplete. On Friday.

They had a dance Friday, as they would each day of the convention. bunny_hugger broke with tradition a bit by going in fursuit the first night. I went in my Angel kigurumi. The dance floor was a bit sparse, although nothing so dire as some of the dances we'd been to in the old hotel where they never really found a good space. This was held in main events, nice and easy for everyone to find. We danced, with a couple of breaks to rest. In one of them bunny_hugger sat on a chair outside the ballroom, and several people came up to ask whether she was too hot (she wasn't) and whether she knew where the headless lounge, with a lot of air conditioning, water, and a place to unsuit momentarily, was (she did; she just didn't need it). I'm glad for the people being attentive to a potential fursuiter in distress, but really, she did just need to get off her feet a moment.

Despite the breaks we saw the dance through to the end, at 2 am, before going back to our room and resolving to get a full night's sleep before the fursuit parade. It was supposed to start at 12:30, and was supposed to have everyone gather at noon. We would not get eight hours' sleep before then, but, we'd try as best we could.

Trivia: Trip Hawkins priced the release of the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer, released in the United States in 1993, at $699, on the grounds that this was the initial retail price for the complete Commodore 64 setup, and the game console was more capable. Source: The Ultimate History of Video Games, Steven L Kent.

Currently Reading: The Classic Era of American Comics, Nicky Wright.

PS: And now to Medusa Steel Coaster at Six Flags Mexico! ... Soon!

And after the mine, the queue goes through an area with a Mystery House, where the floors are built at weird angles and the lack of external reference makes it look like gravity's going all wrong. Here bunny_hugger and I stumble through what ought to be a flat floor that's actually going pretty steeply downhill.

The Mystery House design continues outside, thanks to the walls around the queue and all being high enough to obscure the true vertical.

And finally a good look at the roller coaster! The twisty steel tracks give some idea how much the RMC conversion changes the layout of a wooden coaster; there's spirals that you just won't get on wood, most of the time.

The obvious change when we got to Opening Ceremonies was the stage's arrangement. The stage was set to cut diagonally across the ballroom, rather than run parallel to a wall. It's probably a good way to seat most people closer to the stage. There was an awkward side rectangle of seats staring at nothing but a TV screen which, at least at Opening Ceremonies, had nothing on it. As changes go, nothing bad or alarming. Somewhat alarming: they didn't have the puppet stage anymore. Morphicon used to have a puppeteering track, withered away as the people who knew what they were doing moved away. But they kept the PVC stage setting through to last year's AnthrOhio, even as bunny_hugger and I were the only ones even bringing puppets to the con. So we can't fault them dropping a thing that's probably complicated to assemble and not really used for anything. But it's another old piece of the convention gone.

This year's charity was The Pipsqueakery, a rabbit-and-rodent rescue. We already had a weird relationship with them: some of their volunteers got into a Facebook War with the rabbit rescue from whom we adopted Stephen and Penelope. Private animal rescues seem prone to drama, possibly because the low budgets and great need select for people who are very passionate amateurs. Possibly because it is very easy to get your own idea about how to take care for these creatures you love, and any variations are dangerous things. And, like, it's easy to worry that some other shelter is actually taking poor care of animals, since they're all desperately overloaded, and it's easy to suspect that any problem is a sign of systematic failure. I am not informed enough about the specifics of their Facebook War to say just what happened. Nor am I competent to judge whose accusations of what are more of the truth. I'm naturally inclined toward the rescue from which we got two wonderful rabbits.

But the Pipsqueakery was allowed to set up animals for show inside the hotel, an improvement on the old place. They had several large tables with a guinea pig enclosure, as well as cages for rats, chinchillas, degus, and the like. And, on the floor, several big enclosures full of rabbits. Some large rabbits: they had two Flemish Giants or New Zealand whites, bigger than even Columbo was. Some small rabbits, including a couple that had leg problems making them barely amble to move around. And one lop-eared rabbit with such an endearing long head, and enormous ears, that bunny_hugger was tempted to adopt her on the spot. The ears were so long that she sometimes got them caught under her feet. Really our only serious reservation about adopting any of them was would they get along with our Sunshine. Recall that she did not get on with Penelope in the slightest. That might have owed to Penelope's grumbly nature. But female rabbits are notoriously territorial, and bringing a second into one's home needs to be done with delicacy, and even then might not work. If it were possible to ``date'' them, and see whether they could stand each other to start with, we'd have tried.

bunny_hugger got some in-cage time with the rabbits, and that wasn't enough really. Meanwhile the guinea pigs meant that I got even more, and longer, looks from people trying to work out whether my guinea pig puppet might be real. The actual guinea pigs seemed willing to at least investigate my puppet, when it was up against their cages, but then they remembered they could not be bothering with things, which is really what makes guinea pigs charmers.

Another, developing, tradition of the con is the grease trucks parked outside. At least the first day there was the crepes truck we'd been happy with last year. This year we got one of their breakfast crepes for a lunch that was bigger than we realized it would be. So that all worked very nicely.

One longrunning tradition of the convention has been species SIGs, get-togethers of everyone with an interest in some particular animal or group of animals. Their number had dwindled some so bunny_hugger offered to host a bunch of panels. They all got accepted. Her first panel, Avians Assemble, offered a place for everyone with a bird or bird-adjacent character (like gryphons) to gather and talk about themselves. She's had a couple bird characters, mostly corvids, in the past, and wore her peacock kigurumi to host the event. And it was well-attended, maybe because birds haven't got enough attention, maybe because it was mid-afternoon the first day of the convention. When we get Sunday morning panels they're always dead.

Another longrunning tradition is giving out shaky directions to any panels. There were places to put signs describing what's going on in each room, but no signs. So I started making up signs and slipping them in myself. These got a tiny bit more sophisticated over the weekend --- by the time of the Rodents SIG, it included a very rough sketch of a curious-looking mouse, and the warning that this was not your buffet. But never anything much.

bunny_hugger's next SIG was in the same room, Scalies. This was meant for reptiles, dragons, amphibians, and fish. Anything that might have scales or be thought of as scaled. This ended up mostly populated by dragons, as you might figure. No signs of any amphibians. This got some confusion as apparently there was disagreement between online and con-book schedules about what room it should be in. I went to the other room we heard about and asked the meager audience --- two people, plus the person presenting whatever --- if they were looking for the Scalies, and felt bad that I was poaching their group. They weren't looking for Scalies anyway.

Also one of the curtain rods in the conference room fell down. The guy from the convention who was doing a room-population count ran off to tell the hotel about this, and they sent someone within seconds to inspect the situation. The screws holding the bracket to the wall had fallen out, and there was nothing to be done; soon, that part of the curtain rod would be removed altogether, to wait for someone who could patch the wall and re-do the curtain rod. We have not been held accountable for all this, yet.

Trivia: In 1864 Princeton awarded President Abraham Lincoln an honorary Doctor of Laws degree, in absentia. Source: Down In Jersey, Earl Schenck Miers.

Currently Reading: The Classic Era of American Comics, Nicky Wright. I feel like there's just something ... not ... quite there, in Wright's research. Like, the book is old enough I can't fault Wright for repeating Bob Kane legends about the creation of Batman; Kane did a good enough job establishing a creation-mythos that even a diligent researcher might not realize there was something more there. But, like, there's a mention to the Green Hornet comics that reads like Wright was unaware this was an established radio character brought into the comics. There's also a mention of Our Gang comics, based on ``a series'' of M-G-M comedy shorts. Which is literally true but, like, I'd think especially anyone reading this book would know them as ``the series'', or at least would know them if prompted that the series was titled The Little Rascals for TV.

PS: Stepping through the gates of Six Flags Mexico! Yeah, this is going to be a lot of photos of this one day.

The other side of the park's entrance is not so interestingly signed and also makes me think of Casa Bonita for some reason.

While ``juego'' may mean literally a game or a play (there's just no way to know for sure), it also covers amusement park rides, which doesn't seem like a great etymological leap. So these ``resting games'' were the warning of what rides were out of operation that day.

Entrance plaza, with a couple of shops and the teacup right right up front. Note the guy on the left selling the ``cheapest tickets'' for the Ghostbusters laser-tag game.

We had entered the building for Ghostbusters: Los Cazafantasmas: La Aventure Laser when it was dusk, the sky growing dim but it still being daytime. When we left, twenty or so minutes later, it was night. We had entered from the front of that building. We exited to the side, towards the carousel and the center of this convergence of the walkways of the park.

The lights were on.

Many, many lights. Canopies of Christmas lights. It was a cathedral ceiling done up in lights, painted in strands of blue and red and yellow and purple. buildings strung out in red. Trees made out in green zig-zags. Figures of polar bears and reindeers that were bundles of white lights underneath scrim. We were overwhelmed. It was like the time we exited the Fort Pitt tunnel the first time onto the brilliantly illuminated nightscape of Pittsburgh. It was overwhelming, like taking in a whole fireworks show at once. Everything we might have imagined the Christmas At The Park show to be was here, and it was dropped on us without warning. We were just smothered under this beauty.

It was amazing. It was beautiful. There in the slight evening cool, with brilliant lights on a dazzling background we were in the middle of an amusement park, a carousel sparkling as if it were a tree by itself, with Christmas carols on the park's speakers and this was everything we could have hoped Christmas in the Park to be.

The music. They were playing Christmas carols, yes, and so we had one bit of curiosity answered: they do play ``Feliz Navidad'' in Mexico. Or Six Flags just has it scheduled as part of the holiday show regardless of what country any particular park is in. But, you know, we'd wondered. Also we heard someone's cover of the Kinks' ``Father Christmas'', causing us to reflect that the song never turns up on our Christmas music radio stations back home. I'm not sure I've even heard it on Deep Tracks, which is about 15% Kinks by volume. But there it was, played by someone who replaced the line about a ``Steve Austin outfit'' with, I think, a ``Batman outfit'', wiping out a lot of the datedness of that phrase at the cost of throwing off the meter. (bunny_hugger had heard it as, I forget, but something like ``Pac-Man outfit'' that would be only very slightly less dated and thus a baffling change for anytime after Like 1984. And why not a Spider-Man outfit, that would avoid aging so fast and still sound right?)

So we revelled in the park dressed up for the darkness for a good hour-plus. We went to major attractions like Medusa Steel Coaster for a night ride, and to the Dark Knight Coaster for a dark ride with much less waiting this time around. We walked around the park, looking at everything. The park isn't organized into separate national sections, the way Six Flags over Texas was. But it has got some regions. The kiddieland that's all Warner Brothers cartoons. A Polynesian area because, sure, why not. A Mexican area. A Metropolis and a Gotham City and those kind of blend together because they want a Batman coaster next to the Justice League dark ride. Hollywood. We looked a good bit at the Giant Ferris Wheel, but that's not a ride that bunny_hugger feels comfortable on, and I was happy to walk the park with company rather than take the ride alone. Through the arcade (all games, physical or video or redemption; no pinball). And then as we got nearer 7:30, figuring out a spot to wait out the parade. We saw some figures moving. Two of the Three Wise Men. Santa Claus. Belatedly, a third Wise Man.

We went back to the carousel area, figuring to watch the parade so the carousel and its canopy of lights was the background. We got trapped behind the wrong side of the chain fence roping off the parade area, and figured we had enough time to duck under and dash across. Many people did. We knew the scheduled start time for the parade, but not where it was starting from, or which direction, and so we had that awkward time of being one of a mob of people waiting for a thing that might be anywhere.

Finally a pair of security people, holding a red ribbon between them, walked down the cleared area, shooing off any stragglers, and the parade would begin.

And then came the parade. Our nearest model for it was the Silver Bells In The City parade, naturally, floats just barely visible and traced out by lights. These floats had fewer lights, actually; part of Lansing's parade rules are a minimum number of lights each float and encouragement to use as many as possible. But they were more strategically deployed, with wireframes and strands of lights to make great swooping pillars for fairy princesses to stand on, or to cast the image of a dragon out of lights. A cityscape with gargoyles and a faintly Tron-esque figure standing between skyscrapers. No marching band, but people in band uniforms doing rhythmic steps. Wile E Coyote working the line of the crowd. The Three Wise Men, in a float that looked like an Age of Exploration sailing ship. Well, how else would they get to Mexico City? I guess? Dancers with giant snowflake costumes. Near the end more of the Looney Tunes characters, Porky Pig and Foghorn Leghorn still in green Santa decor and yes, Lola Bunny. At the end of the parade, on a sleigh-shaped float with the outlines of packages in lights around it, Santa Claus sharing the seat with Bugs Bunny in a Santa suit, plus Sylvester and Tweetie Pie as brownies. On the back of that, the renowned closing slogan for Looney Tunes: ``Es todo Amigos!'' And past that, an aggrieved Daffy Duck pedaling a tricycle with a garbage can.

And that broke up the parade, and the whole lined up mob filled the parade route and started shuffling off, out of the park. There were fifteen minutes to the close of everything.

We didn't have time to grab any rides on anything, but we could walk around a place we don't figure to be back to anytime soon. It's a beautiful spot. But aren't all parks beautiful by night?

On our own way out we stopped in the last big gift shop up front. I hoped to find a park T-shirt that would be uniquely, distinctly Six Flags Mexico and pretty near failed. The park had T-shirts for the various Superfriends and the Looney Tunes characters but you can get those at any Six Flags park. There wasn't anything with the name of any specific ride on it; if I could have got a Medusa Steel Coaster shirt I absolutely would have. No go; best I could find was a plain brown Six Flags Mexico Recreation Department shirt. bunny_hugger hoped for a Christmas ornament, anything that specified Six Flags Mexico. During the day she'd seen an ornament, I think in that gift shop that was access to Batman The Ride, which had the Superfriends on it but did at least say Six Flags Mexico Christmas in the Park. And it was at least an ornament you could hang from a tree and everything. But we couldn't find it at the shop in the front of the park, and she berated herself for not buying the ornament earlier and lugging it around all day. (Parks so need a claim check system and to store souvenirs at the front. Why is nobody doing this well?)

And as I was buying my t-shirt, she saw the shop did have them. In this little pile on an uppe shelf behind the register, where we'd naturally not see them. She was able to explain, between the Spanish she did master and pointing, what she wanted. It's a silly ornament and really is Justice League themed and it looks a bit ridiculous. But it's an amusement park souvenir from this particular park.

Our one last challenge: get back to the hotel. I tried asking a customer service guy and he told us that outside the (something) exit was a taxi stand. All right. Someone else overheard us and ran up, offering that we should call an Uber. I thanked him for the advice without explaining that we couldn't, and that even if we could, we wouldn't. (Meanwhile this interaction worried bunny_hugger, who got the idea that even the park employees wanted us to take an Uber rather than hire a taxi.) I lead us to the exit where the cars were going and realized ... you know, there were a bunch of taxis but over at this other exit. So we had to cross the path of exiting cars, and walk past a lot of empty parking lot, to find the pedestrian exit. And there there were taxis picking up people from the street. No Authorized Taxi stand, with the comforting and reassuring vouchers and pre-arranged payment and all. But what choice did we have? We took one of the street taxis and were back at the hotel in about 25 seconds.

Had we gone a couple days later, when I was more comfortable with the area, I'd have known just how close we were and how easy a route it was --- just keep on the service road with the elevated highway on our left and we'd be led right to the hotel after maybe 20 minutes walking downhill. But we didn't know that then, and anyway if we had waited until we really knew the area we'd have missed the Christmas at the Park. That was running only until Sunday, and Sunday was already committed.

One oddity. The park proclaimed the holiday event as Christmas In The Park. In English, that is, not in Spanish. Well, fair enough; surely they want to keep the name and logo and all that uniform across the whole chain? Except that in the United States it's Holiday In The Park. I can understand having an alternate name for a country that's got a much stronger dominant religion. But why go halfway with the alternate name? Why not put it in Spanish? If they could arrange a ``Christmas in the Park'' variation on the event logo they could surely do ``Navidad en el Parque''. What's the decision-making process here?

Well, no idea. We have to trust they know what they're doing, as if big businesses ever did.

Trivia: In 1904 Ransom Olds bought the Bancoft Peat Fuel & Cement Company, which was unsuccessful and which he abandoned in 1910. In the meanwhile he traded some shares for control of a gold mine that proved also to be unsuccessful. Source: R E Olds: Auto Industry Pioneer, George S May.

Currently Reading: A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel. And I'm really, really liking this book, so I may have a new author I have to go searching out. I mean, to refer to seeing someone reading a book by a favored author and wanting to give them a hint you're of the same faith? Wow.

Raccoons are naturally the focus of attention! They don't need extra height but it helps!

Come, fur with us, Danny.

Jane, the bunny set out on the porch for showing off after the parade and related activities.

One thing bunny_hugger's Spanish teacher in high school assured her was that Spanish speakers did not speak of the baño when they meant a public restroom. After all, where are the baths? Yeah, so, either the common use of the language has changed in the short while since she was in high school, or Mexican Spanish is different on this point from Spanish Spanish, or the teacher was speaking of a more formally ``correct'' language than is actually deployed in the field. I remember my French teacher pointing out how one might go to la salle de bains, or to la WC, but I don't remember whether she was fussy about a salle de bains having to have a tub in it. Anyway, we found a good number of baños at the park --- and outside Six Flags Mexico, so the term can't just be something imposed by Yankee executives who know Google Translate and little else --- as well as sanitorios.

I mention because as we were getting organized again after using a baño, I noticed a squirrel in the trees. I'm always delighted by wildlife at amusement parks and especially, for some reason, chipmunks and squirrels at them. I assume it was a Mexican Grey Squirrel. Looked a good bit like an eastern grey, although not bulked up for winter. It was winter in Mexico City, as we understood from the number of trees dropping every leaf possible, but it wasn't a hard winter. We watched the squirrel doing his business of shaking even more leaves off a tree, and even got some decent pictures, or at least so we hope.

Afterwards we found, finally, the park's carousel. It's not an antique; it's the sort of two-level Venetian that you see at shopping malls with upscale food courts. The carousel was surrounded by Christmas decorations, and we could make out the strands of lights not yet turned on for the Christmas In The Park show. bunny_hugger started taking the best photos she could, for her 2019 homemade carousel calendar. As she noted, this could take the place of the Crossroads Village Carousel for a December picture.

We made another approach on Batman The Ride, this time venturing through the Comics Shop to find the way down the hill and into the little area holding the roller coaster. There were only two rides there just now, Batman and the Justice League interactive dark ride. There'll likely be three soon; we could see the track being assembled for the Wonder Woman Coaster. As in 2017 we made a weirdly early-in-the-year visit to a Six Flags park we had no reason to think we'd ever see and got there before a roller coaster had opened.

Batman The Ride is an inverted, loop-heavy roller coaster, the same model as Thunderhawk at Michigan's Adventure or the Mind Eraser at Six Flags New England (the major New England park we haven't made it to), or Infusion at Blackpool Pleasure Beach (which we had). So if we knew anything to expect it was our ears being boxed by the over-the-shoulder restraints, and it didn't disappoint here. But the ride was nicely operated, everyone loading and unloading faster than Michigan's Adventure, even though the restraint system is the same. Around this point I came to the realization that the Six Flags Mexico park, at least, defies the chain's reputation for slapdash operations. It can't all be that many of the roller coasters don't have seat belts --- which really slow down loading and unloading, since people are bad about fastening belts, clumsy unbuckling them, and they have to each be individually checked --- and make do with the original manufacturer's restraint systems. It might just be that effect where ordinary routine stuff like safety checks are just done better outside the United States.

And by now we had ridden six of the park's eight roller coasters. We couldn't go on Superman El Ultimo Escape; it was down the whole day, and we came to accept that more or less as we waited for Batman The Ride. We had a good view of the Superman roller coaster all through walking up to and waiting for and riding Batman The Ride, and saw no trains, no test trains, no nothing. The other one we hadn't ridden was Dark Knight. We saw it, early in the morning, walking between Medusa Steel Coaster and Roller. But the sign out front said the wait for it was 100 minutes and while that's plausible we weren't going to start the day on that. Since we'd made it to everything else, and it wasn't quite 4 pm yet, we could think about trying our luck with Dark Knight. Who knows; maybe the queue would have dissipated, or maybe the morning's dismal report had been a mistake.

Since it was the other thing in this cul-de-sac we went to the Justice League interactive dark ride. It was built in a replica 70s Cartoon Hall of Justice, just like the one at Six Flags Over Texas that we had tried to ride the year before and that went down before we could. It seemed to be the same ride, too. The entry queue had the monitors with the same computer-animated Lex Luthor and Joker taunting Cyborg, although this time in Spanish so it was even harder to understand that we were going to go through settings where we had to shoot the targets. They had good settings, though, a nice bunch of Metropolis-or-possibly-Gotham-City street scenes with enough real stuff moving that it was a decent show too. And we even got the hang of what to shoot at before the ride was over. And now we had a fair idea of what we had missed when we didn't wait for the possibility of that ride in Dallas the year before.

As we walked through the long path into the building, we spotted another squirrel, this one digging about in the grass and by one of the light fixtures.

Trivia: The Edison Machine Works moved from New York City to Schenectady in 1886. The new property was purchased for $37,500, well below cost, thanks to the help of the Schenectady Chamber of Commerce. Source: Edison: A Biography, Matthew Josephson.

Currently Reading: Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich , Norman Ohler, translator Shaun Whiteside. Then it gets into the parts about Hitler's heavy drug use and oooh, yes, that's that great History Channel History's Mysteries 7-to-9 pm block of yeah let's just say this is educational programming and oh but that feels nice and cozy and weirdly nostalgic.

PS: Closing out AnthrOhio on Friday.

What a great-looking suit.

And now I get arty at the dance.

bunny_hugger's shy turn away whenever I tell her how beautiful she is.

We took a taxi. We could have walked, and had we been going a week later when I'd had more experience walking around the vicinity of our hotel we might have. But we didn't feel that confident in our ability to navigate. Because the hotel, and Six Flags Mexico, are right by a major expressway there's one-way service roads beside it, and it's a crowded city, and the result is it's surprisingly hard to get from the hotel to the park without a lot of turning around and backtracking.

At the parking lot we saw a nice mix of familiar and not-quite-home. Six Flags branding, a pack of high school(?) students gathering in an unfocused mass outside the metal detectors, entry gates done up in a loosely Southwestern mission style, banners advertising the Pase Anual (and I wondered if a season pass bought in Mexico would be good for US Six Flags parks, and if we'd be liable to go to any this year). A sign warning us of the ``Juegos Descansando'' and ``Shows Descansando'', in case their not running would change our mind about buying tickets. ``Juegos Descansando'' translates literally as ``Games Resting'', bringing up the slight surprise that Spanish refers to amusement park rides as games. We weren't sure where to buy tickets, so tried the customer service desk, and got pointed to the right place, which was the entry gates not with a huge pack of teenagers milling around.

And then inside! An entry plaza that made me think a lot of the old, original Great Adventure midway. Not in details --- that one was a thickly Americana-ish corrodor --- but in style. A mock little picturesque Spanish town, with some park guy trying to take photos to sell. Also a Christmas tree still decorated and a nativity scene set up in the gazebo. This because of something I'd noticed on the signs around town. We were there the 19th of January. They hadn't finished their Christmas In The Park show yet. We've wanted for a long time to get to an amusement park's holiday show, but never been near enough one that was even open in November or December. Here, in a foreign country and nearly a month after Christmas, we were.

The first major ride we passed was Superman: El Ultimo Escape, the queue for the roller coaster tucked inside a building that looked like it could've housed an arcade or a restaurant or whatnot. The ride was closed, and would be closed the whole day. It'd be the only roller coaster of the park that we wouldn't ride. But we could see, most of the way, the huge wooden pile that was Medusa Steel Coaster and just had to find another --- any other --- roller coaster to ride before that.

We found it in Roller, a ``family'' coaster. It was small and, importantly, had no line, saving precious early hours when the queue for Medusa might not be too long. It's a cute little thing with a roller-skating motif for its cars. And we got our first challenge trying to follow ride operator instructors in Spanish. We fumbled the directions about which car to get in; I didn't think there was any way we could both fit into the same car. But they're not quite as narrow as I'd thought. And there was no seatbelt, appropriately, as it's not that fast or steep or dangerous a ride. The restraining bar was fine. We were off and launched onto what I counted as my 199th roller coaster in no time.

Back to Medusa Steel Coaster, where the sign out front warned there was a wait of 15 minutes. Which is great for a major ride. It had a huge queue area with a part about Hiring Miners, No Experience Necessary (and this in English, a bow to keeping the flavor of something I'm not quite sure what). Early on the queue divides into a couple areas, one leading into the Hiring Miners building and apparently taking us away from the roller coaster, the other leading into twisty queue passages all alike. Which way to go? We didn't know, but some teens behind us plunged ahead and into the twisty queues. So we started to follow that and realized we were kind of walking in circles, when one of the park employees watching the front gate came in to guide us all the right way and put up a chain across the not-needed switchback's area.

The building had a path leading through it, and a lot of props for a mining-town setting. Common enough. But it also had a Mystery House air to it. The paths were built at weird angles, so that you were walking at what looked like impossibly steep or gravity-defying angles relative the 'ground' or 'walls'. There was a lot of entry queue, and a lot of it was, essentially, this secondary attraction. Also a fearsomely tricky one to walk; I'm glad we weren't there on a drizzly day. But we emerged from the Mystery House mining shack and got to ... still more queue areas. A long, narrow path wending its way back and forth underneath the roller coaster track, which is great certainly. But also raises the terrifying thought: they expect this much queue to be needed, at least at peak season. How long must that take? We passed one set of switchbacks where people were just giving up and ducking underneath; there was too much queue for the actual need. It seemed like a good omen for the riding day if a major, prominent ride like this was essentially a walk-on, although remember that as huge as Mean Streak at Cedar Point was, it never really got busy.

Finally we got to the station. And got our pick of seats, too, as we were to be the first ones onto the next train. We went for the back seats, and bunny_hugger grabbed some quick pictures of me holding up my '200' sign while I did my best to smile and try not to cover my T-shirt (for Leap the Dips, at Lakemont Park). I succeeded in smiling, not in leaving my T-shirt visible. And then she sat down, quick, because they were loading up the ride fast. Seat belt, shoulder restraint, visual check and we were going.

So what was my 200th logged coaster like? A very satisfying ride, if it couldn't be on a wooden coaster. A lot of the feel of the wooden ride Medusa has to have been. Magnificent views of the park around it. Several great long drops, including drops with helical turns that feel almost a bit much, really. A lot of sideways action; if I were ever able to make myself heard above a thing I'd have joked about it being a Gravity Group coaster.

(To understand why this is a correctly-formed joke and thus quite funny, understand that many Gravity Group wooden coasters, such as Waldameer's Ravine Flyer II, spend as much as 150% of the ride time banked 90 degrees to vertical. Also that Medusa, whose structure was used to make Medusa Steel Coaster, was a Custom Coaster International-designed ride; when CCI inevitably went under most of its team reformed as Gravity Group.)

We were cheering, clapping, hooting as the ride pulled back into the station, marking us as way more demonstrative than the average rider there. Well, we're always glad to have ridden a roller coaster. bunny_hugger got another couple snaps of me before we got out of the way of the oncoming riders. I had the impression the ride operators were baffled by all this photo-taking that we did. But we did our best to not be in the way and to get things done as quick as possible so it's not like they said anything to us about it. If they talked with each other about these weirdos and their camera and their '200' sign, it didn't do us any harm.

We did stop a couple times on the exit queue for more pictures of the ride's beautiful lift hill, and an insurance shot of me holding my sign by the ride in case none of the on-ride pictures came out. And went on, having we truly believed made it to my milestone.

Trivia: ``Pedant'' first appears in print in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. Source: Semantic Antics: How and Why Words Change Meaning, Sol Steinmetz.

Currently Reading: Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich , Norman Ohler, translator Shaun Whiteside. It's very breezy, easy reading. Although the breathlessness with which Ohler-through-Whiteside talks about drug use in World War II Germany --- and his-their habit of pointing out how Pervitin was ``basically crystal meth'' every few pages --- give it the slightly trashy, yes-it's-technically-educational tone of a 90s History Channel documentary. This is not to call it bad. It's just that for as relentlessly as every paragraph has citations I'm not sure how much to believe.

PS: Let's get back to the AnthrOhio Friday dance.

bunny_hugger sitting at the edge of the stage, ready to photograph a DJ and dancers.

Dancers at the threshold, not quite come in to the floor.

The guy who does dinosaur/reptilian suits at every Morphicon/Anthrohio.