austin_dern

And now I mention my mathematics blog could be on your Friends page, and if that doesn't work out for you, it could be on your RSS reader. Or there's just the stuff I posted the last week, which was a fairly tame one:

• Reading the Comics, December 13, 2015: More Nearly Like It Edition as I search for a good break point that involves not having too many or too few comics in one essay.
• Where Are The Unfair Coins? a challenge to my understanding of coin tossing.
• Reading the Comics, December 17, 2015: Caught Up Edition, as I get the backlog of comics with mathematical themes cleared up, temporarily.

And now, the end of Lake Compounce, for us.

Kennywood arrow spotted at the Lake Compounce bumper cars ride. I am curious whether the arrow does correctly point in the direction one would go to get to Lake Compounce's sister park in Pittsburgh, or whether they just use it as a vain effort to direct the flow of traffic. The Lake Compounce bumper cars drivers seemed to get stuck, and confused, a lot, but that might have just been that we were there on a bad day. Still, the ride was stopped for a while as we waited in line. And the drivers needed a lot of direction about getting stuck.

Wipeout, a Trabant-style ride in front of the Boulder Dash roller coaster, with the train in view. Neat variations on this from the standard Trabant: half the seats face backwards, and the ride accelerates its rotation as it levels out again, so what's normally the sad close of the ride has a little saving bonus.

Old Wipeout paint and logo visible beneath the current paint. I'm surprised the paint is this bad, and also that the old logo only dates to the 90s. I would have sworn that logo style to be one, maybe two decades older than that.

Ride operator at the Wildcat roller coaster playing his ruler like a guitar. He was having a great old time and it did energize a slow-moving line at Lake Compounce.

Lake Compounce's Wildcat roller coaster ride operator Joel Hodgson plots his Mystery Science Theater 3000 remake!

Main entrance of Lake Compounce in the evening light, just after the park's close.

The underpass entrance to Lake Compounce in the early night.

Trivia: Kurosawa Akira's four wartime films were among the 236 ``feudal and militaristic'' movies that the Supreme Command for the Allied Powers ordered destroyed in November 1945. Source: Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, John W Dower.

Currently Reading: Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing, Po Bronson, Ashley Merryman.

Mathematics blog posts that you didn't see on your Friends page or on your RSS feed? Here's your chance to catch up with the last week's reading:

• Exam Grades And Ramsey Theory, just pointing to a useful grade-calculating plan I have, and a neat question in Ramsey theory that you will understand, I promise.
• Reading the Comics, December 5, 2015: Awkward Break Edition in which I run a piece with fewer comic strip entries than usual in the hopes of having a decent-sized set the next time.
• The Set Tour, Part 10: Lots of Spheres and that weirdest of all things to see in my mathematics blog, actual information about me.
• Reading the Comics, December 11, 2015: So, That Didn’t Work Edition because the mathematically-themed comic strips come in awkward bunches after all.

That done, here's some Lake Compounce for you.

Down Time, a powered drop ride. We didn't take the time to ride it but man look at that theming. Our New England Parks Tour finally disabused us of the notion that Roller Coaster Tycoon made up its almost cartoonishly broad station and shop designs.

Close up of the carousel's band organ at Lake Compounce. bunny_hugger was riding the goat figure, left.

From the performance show inside what I believe used to be the ballroom. The stunt show was familiar with many of the stunts and props we'd seen at the Skeleton Crew show for Cedar Point's Halloweekends shows.

Again from the stunt show: the performers are starting the process of hopping off the structure onto a trampoline and running side to side, with doors in the upper structure opening up so they can hop in and vanish. It's energetic and gets fine gasps of surprise from the audience when it's done.

Horror-movie-style host doing the ride explanatory spiel outside the interactive dark ride. The Boo-Blaster thing (unrelated to the Boo Blasters of many Cedar Fair parks) is the usual sort of animatronic props triggered by lasers.

Trivia: Stalin selected the name ``Bagration'' for the Soviet's early-summer 1944 offensive, timed to match the Invasion of Normandy. Prince Piotr Bagration was a Russian national hero for the Battle of Borodino, 1812. His widow Katarina Bagration, the ``Russian Siren'', was renowned as a dangerous force in the Congress of Vienna. Source: 1945: The War That Never Ended, Gregor Dallas. (Or so Dallas says. I don't offhand remember her doing anything noteworthy at Vienna, but I've only read a couple books on the Congress and none in the last few years.)

Currently Reading: The Great American Hoax, Alan Abel.

Since it's Sunday night let me give you all the posts from my mathematics blog the past week. And you know they're available for your Friends page or are available for your RSS feed.

• Reading the Comics, November 27, 2015: 30,000 Edition, celebrating a nice round number of page views.
• A Timeline Of Mathematics Education, pointing out a nice little thing I saw.
• How November 2015 Treated My Mathematics Blog, well, see the above thing about 30,000 page views.
• Reading the Comics, December 2, 2015: The Art Of Maths Edition, because there were comic strips about mathematics work looking pretty.
• Exam Grades And Ramsey Theory, pointing out what you need to get on your final, and a nice little question in Ramsey Theory that isn't about inviting people to dinner, but is instead about what you serve them once they're there.

That business done, let's return to Lake Compounce:

Bunny at the junior carousel. It was a busy at the park, but the bunny was occupied all the time. But it is a small ride and the day was quite busy.

Dinosaur grounds located next to the Zoomerang shuttle coaster. And why have a dinosaur ground at the park? Well, why wouldn't you? It isn't far off the kiddieland section, though the park is narrow enough that it's hard for anything to be that far from anything else.

The Zoomerang shuttle coaster catches a bit of sun. It's the same model roller coaster as at Morey's Piers in Wildwood, and I would swear we've ridden this in a third spot but I can't think where. The important thing is the clouds are treating it very well.

A gargoyle sitting outside the Ghost Hunt interactive dark ride. Behind it are the main hill and a turnaround for the Wildcat roller coaster. Lake Compounce has a quite hilly terrain, so there's many rides you can look down on and the older roller coaster is one of them.

What's in the box? Publicity for the Phobia Phear Coaster. Fears listed on the box are those of 'speed', 'height', 'confined spaces', 'darkness', and 'rollercoasters', all of which sounds roller-coaster-related enough. They also list the fears of 'spiders', 'clowns', and 'snakes', which suggests the theming on this one is going to be out of control.

Trivia: According to a United States Strategic Bombing Survey study of how Japanese people felt on hearing of the surrender, four percent of the population felt ``worry about Emperor, shame for Emperor, sorrow for him''. Source: Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, John W Dower.

Currently Reading: Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, Sean Howe.

So. The last hour at the park, and where everything went terrible.

We got in the line for Boulder Dash. Clearly everybody else had the same idea to get a last ride in. The line was long, possibly longer than it was for our afternoon ride. We started so far back we weren't even on the bridge over the main valley; the ride was far, far off in the distance.

And it wasn't getting much nearer. I believe they were running only one train, instead of two, baffling under any circumstances but annoying on a busy day like this. And ... once again ... people were just cutting ahead of us. Every park has some people who'll cut lines, but Lake Compounce has easily the worst line-cutting problem we have. As one pair of folks pushed ahead, saying, ``Excuse me'', bunny_hugger indignantly asked, ``Why should we?'' They said they had to get to the station. Well, we all do. They went on ahead. We grumbled.

I don't know why I was this bothered. I shouldn't have been. But when the next bunch of people came barreling though I decided to make a stand. This turned out to be a couple kids. They ignored me saying ``excuse me''. I touched one's shoulder to get his attention, and knelt down so I wasn't just towering over him. I told him he was line-cutting, and that was very rude and he shouldn't do it.

Then the people behind us got into the act. I don't know why. They looked vaguely like minor characters in Portlandia, the ones who react to stuff instead of move things forward. The guy scolded me for making a fuss over some kids who were just coming back from the bathroom. The woman told me I shouldn't be grabbing other people's kids. I protest the characterization of tapping the kid's shoulder as ``grabbing'', but goodness knows what it looked like from her. So I went back to the kid, knelt down, and said, ``She's right. It was rude of me to grab your shoulder to get your attention and I should not have done that. Just as you should not be cutting in line.'' And let them go because, what, did I want these kids with us? Of course not.

Now it gets bad.

A couple minutes later the kid came back, leading an angry-looking guy demanding to know who it was grabbed his kid. Before the kid could say anything, or I could say anything, the couple behind us did, pointing out how it was totally me that grabbed the kid and they told me how I shouldn't have done it. The father yelled at me for daring to touch his kid and warned that if I wanted to fight he'd meet me in the parking lot when the park closed.

The couple behind us had no problem with us fighting, and were rooting for it. bunny_hugger demanded they say why they had any business in this, and they said it was because we were causing the trouble. Meanwhile, I looked at the guy and worked out whether I could repeat my Red Roof Inn overnight experience, looking intimidating enough to make him go away. Pretty quickly worked out that I couldn't. So I told him: his son was a line-cutter and he shouldn't be doing that. He promised to meet me in the parking lot and stab me.

So with as much wisdom as I had on hand, I turned to the side and ignored the guy. He ranted a bit more, to a blank wall, which was probably the best I could do. But I did break down a bit to remind him that his son was a line-cutter. And, really, I should have pointed out that he was showing his son that he could get what he wanted (I'm not sure what he wanted at this point) by threatening people with violence. On the other hand, he clearly wasn't getting whatever he wanted, for all his threats. The guy left, back to his spot somewhere up by the station.

And with this bit of misery done, the couple behind us resumed scolding us for all this. They challenged us to say how this was line-cutting when the kids had just left to go to the bathroom or whatever their excuse was. Park signs --- none of which were around --- do explain that it's line-cutting even if you're just going to the bathroom, and that it's Not Allowed. But there weren't signs there, and there wasn't a definition of cutting on the park map, so we didn't have at least the weight of the printed word to back us up.

(Later on, I realized that if the kids had run off to the bathroom, then we should have seen them leaving the queue, and we didn't remember seeing that. It's possible that they left before we joined the line, or that we didn't notice them leaving. But we had been in line quite some time when the whole thing started, and there weren't many people leaving the Boulder Dash queue. I make a very slow-moving detective. But in my heart, I'm confident the kids had been on some other ride with their mother, and then run through the queue to join their father who'd gotten on line first to save a space for them.)

They kept fighting with bunny_hugger, challenging us to get park security if we were so sure we were right. We weren't going to leave the line for that, obviously, and didn't carry phones to call them; we told them they could call if they were so sure they were right. bunny_hugger asked why they were even arguing this anymore. They said it was because she was ruining their day. I kept up my staring off into the distance, not responding to the provocation, and eventually things started dying down to a sullen silence.

Another couple, young adults, came barrelling through. We cast out ``excuse me''s to them, which didn't slow them down at all. The couple ahead of us, who'd been mostly neutral in the struggles, agreed that was obnoxious.

bunny_hugger was worried about the father's threat to stab me. I wasn't seriously worried, until I noticed: he was still at the ride station. And was staring at me, which I only caught in glimpses because I was pointedly not looking at him. He had started pretty far ahead of us and could easily have taken a ride and gone back to his business, and he wasn't.

On the one hand, all the time-saving he had managed by getting his kids to cut the line was wasted. On the other hand, why was he waiting for me to get there?

As we got to the station and he stayed near I got more worried and decided that I would say something after all. We went to the queue for a back-seat ride, delaying us one more train, so the guy was putting his seat belt on before he could see I wasn't on the train with him. I got the ride operator's attention and told him, the guy in that seat had threatened to stab me in the parking lot. He went to get security but warned me that if the train got back and discharged before security arrived they didn't have anything they could do to restrain him. Fair enough.

He had his ride. Apparently the ride operators let him know that another passenger had complained about his threat of violence, because as we were strapping in, he ran over to me and yelled that if I had a problem with him I should take it up with him in the parking lot at 8:00. And then I saw park security coming up the exit path.

After our ride the operator said that security had to talk with me too, and I had figured that. I recounted the story as best I could. But there wasn't anything they could (or would) do besides tell us to not go near one another the rest of the day, which wasn't much. The rides were closed for the night now. I would have felt vindicated if the guy had been formally thrown out, even if it was a meager symbolic measure. The security people told me that line-cutting was against the park's rules and they take it seriously; and I do now regret saying that no, obviously, it's not.

So we walked out. Slowly, at first, so that we didn't get out of sight of security; there's parts in the exit queue and the bridge where ambush would be plausible. I did a sound job of not looking for the guy; so good a job, in fact, that bunny_hugger had to steer me away from paths that would've brought me near. I literally did not see him. We got some food from the supermarket, got back to the hotel, ate in misery while I tried to insist that this wasn't all that we'd remember from the tour.

And that's it. A fantastic day turned to ashes in the last hour.

Don't tell me I shouldn't have started things. I don't want to hear it. bunny_hugger went to the Usenet group rec.roller-coaster looking for sympathy --- amusement park enthusiasts tend to be supportive of park rules --- and got mostly told, ``well, what did you expect would happen?''

It could have been much less bad, if the father had taken his kid's shaming, or if the couple behind us hadn't been stirring it up, or if the couple ahead of us had made their weak protest earlier, or if security had acted. But it's ultimately my fault. If I had just rolled my eyes and grumbled about the kids we'd have ended the night and the amusement-park visiting happy.

And the terrible thing about this, besides everything else? We got to ride Boulder Dash in the back seat. It turns out the back seat is a fantastic place to ride this from. All the hills are more thrilling, all the air time better. It's a fantastic roller coaster, and we had one of the best rides we've had on anything from there.

But after this ... how can we go back there?

Trivia: From the 16th of August, 1924, the New York Herald Tribune ran Sanford Jarrell's expose of the Flying Dutchman, a Prohibition-skirting cruise ship offering gambling and liquor to wealthy clientele. The 23rd, the Herald Tribune reported the firing of Jarrell, who had hoaxed the newspaper. Source: The Paper: The Life And Death Of The New York Herald Tribune, Richard Kluger.

Currently Reading: Media Hoaxes, Fred Fedler.

PS: Reading the Comics, October 14, 2015: Shapes and Statistics Edition, with infinite monkeys (again).

After the big Boulder Dash roller coaster we went to the Wildcat, Lake Compounce's other wooden roller coaster. It claims to date to 1927, a great era in wooden roller coasters. However there's classic problems of identity to be made from that. The roller coaster was ``totally reconstructed in late 1985'', according to the American Coaster Enthusiasts plaque denoting it as a Roller Coaster Landmark, ``closely following [ legendary designer Herbert P ] Schmeck's original design''. How much can you rebuild a wooden roller coaster before it's just a new roller coaster following the same design? Bearing in mind that eventually every piece of wood gets replaced, eventually? And what does ``closely following'' mean?

Well, whether the ride dates to 1927 or to 1986, it's a nice, reasonably handsome-looking roller coaster, done in classic white boards with a path that brings it over to the front of the park and back again. The queue takes you on a bridge over the first part of the track, so you get nice dramatic views of people leaving the station. And the ride operators, at least while we were there, were making a fuss about people having birthdays (or claiming to), leading several rounds of happy-birthday calls. We also noticed they put out little green traffic cones with ``Seat Reserved'' in front of various lanes. We're not sure what people do to get reserved seats, but had to admire the operational efficiency of all this. I'd say the ride had the best interactions between operators and riders. One of the ride operators even spent free time doing a little dance with the yardstick, to measure kids for minimum sizes, as his cane.

That said, I must admit the ride was a bit disappointing. Probably anything would be immediately after Boulder Dash. But Wildcat was a bit rougher, and a bit more abrupt, than I hoped. Particularly the string of bunny hops to end the ride gave less airtime, and batted my legs against the lockdown bar, more than I really cared for. I think I could probably get quite into it, especially if the ride operators were always as charismatic as they were this time around. And I wonder if I'd think better of it had we ridden this first.

(The ACE plaque mentions the Wildcat replaced the park's earlier coaster, Green Dragon. That's a curiously poetic, personable name for a 1914-era roller coaster and we're curious about it. Alas, Roller Coaster Database hasn't got any pictures of it, though Wikipedia has an old postcard glimpse of it.)

By this time we were back by the carousel and took in another ride. And once there we noticed they were getting ready to hold a show in the former ballroom. We've been getting more into appreciating amusement park shows, and we'd done all the must-ride targets, so we went in and got front-row seats, although on an end so we weren't exactly in range to get a hand-slapping high-five from one of the performers running around the edge of the stage.

But we recognized the show almost from its props. It had different costuming, but was in essence the ``Skeleton Crew'' cirque-style performance done at Cedar Point's Halloweekends show. There's several stunts almost exactly duplicated, including a performer building her own tower out of rickety-looking wireframe boxes, and the eye-catching and gasp-inducing routine of people jumping down from, and bouncing back up along, a wall with several cutout windows. It's a hypnotic show, especially since the cutout windows are revealed by someone jumping through one that had been closed up to moments before. So it was a good show and a delightful glance into the secret world of how someone or other is selling identical show scripts to amusement parks across the country.

After the show we went over to the Ghost Hunt dark ride. That's another Sally Interactive dark ride, puttering around a mansion and shooting infrared guns at targets. We really would prefer a simple dark ride where the show performs itself but that's just not what we can get anymore. The most fun part of it, I think, was part of the theming out front. It had a silly gadget, labelled ``Prof. Phearstruck's Boo-Blaster Command Center'' and a guy who looked for all the world like a local horror-movie host explaining how ghosts blah blah shooting at them for points. The horror-movie host routine looked appealing, though goodness knows if he's actually part of anything, anywhere.

Trivia: The entire first shipment of Nintendo Famicoms in Japan was recalled, due to a bad chipset causing game crashes. Nintendo President Hiroshi Yamauchi held that protecting the Nintendo name was more important than maintaining sales momentum. Source: The Ultimate History of Video Games, Steven L Kent.

Currently Reading: Media Hoaxes, Fred Fedler. Or someone who says he's Fred Fedler, anyway.

Near the entrance Lake Compounce is a pinched, narrow park. There's a carousel-style horse mounted on a pole in front of the entry gates, much as at its sister park Kennywood. Then there's the entrance, and behind that a midway-row of redemption games. Behind that is the older wooden roller coaster, Wildcat. Behind that is a drop tower, and behind that the mountainous ride along which their new roller coaster, Boulder Dash, runs. In pictures it looks about forty feet wide. In reality it stretches back easily as much as forty-five feet.

Much of our first impression was spent just admiring the look of the place. After the park's brush with extinction, the Kennywood and then Parques Reunidos corporate overlords worked hard to get the park back in respectable shape. That's well-done; the park looks neat, tidy, fresh-painted, in overall good order. They've got an historical marker presenting the park's claim to antiquity, dating to an ``electrifying scientific demonstration'' on the spot which one Samuel Botsford drew people to in October 1846 (``it was a dud'' that inspired one Gad Norton to open the area as a picnic park). And we found mysteries, such as the remnants of what look like trolley tracks in the park. Surely they didn't have a trolley or miniature railroad line running that recently in the park? But then surely it'd be better paved-over if it wasn't recent? Maybe it was a parade path?

Well, one of the things they do have, and I think the first thing we rode, was the Antique Carousel, of as their explanatory sign in front puts it, ``Our Beautiful Carousel''. It's been at the park since 1911, and has got mounts from at least four different carvers: Looff, Carmel, Stein-and-Goldstein, and Carmel. The National Carousel Association census reports the carousel had been at Savin Rock in West Haven, Connecticut, from 1896 to 1911, and that it was originally built in 1893. The park's sign suggests that owner Timothy Murphy ``began assembling the carousel'' in the early 1900s which makes it sound like he was just buying mounts as he could afford them. (Savin Rock operated, the Roller Coaster Database says, from the 1870s through 1966. Savin Rock's 1909-to-1940 carousel is now, the National Carousel Association census says, at Six Flags New England. The park's 1925-to-1929 carousel is now at Rye Playland. I have no information on what if any carousel they had from 1940 onward or where that's gotten to.)

Anyway, ``Beautiful'' is a fair description of the carousel. It's three abreast, with local scenery in the panels on the inside. It's a simple tan overhang with leafy patterns on the canopy. The carousel's antique, but the building is new, going back to about 1990 or so. It's located on a hillside --- this is the hilliest park we've been at since Kennywood surely --- and next to what seems to be the old ballroom, a place now used for live-entertainment shows. Oh, and it's got one of those chariots featuring a long, winged Chinese-ish dragon that looks worried by everything. I'm not sure why that's the style of older carousel chariots but it is. (The one at Rye Playland even has the dragon being intimidated by a teeny little serpent hissing at it.)

After the carousel we took advantage of one of the park's novelties: free soft drinks. Just like at Holiday World, Lake Compounce has 12-ounce cups and Pepsi-product soft drinks free for the taking. This raises the question: why does Lake Compounce have free drinks but not its sister parks? It's understandable if the chain experimented with free drinks at one park, to see if it made sense for their chain. But then if it works at one park, why not extend it to other parks? If it doesn't work, why do they keep doing it? The best fit we can make to the evidence is maybe they started doing it to make a price hike seem more palatable, and that it maybe increases goodwill or business a little bit, but not enough to bring to other places, but enough that they're stuck against changing back now. Maybe. It did strike us that the all-day meal plans for Cedar Point and its sister parks don't cost very much more than a standard admission price, suggesting that parks might be reaching the point where free food or drinks are actually thinkable alternatives.

That said, free food hasn't reached Lake Compounce. We went to The Potato Patch, part of the entrance midway, to get some of the less-complicated-looking potatoes on offer. We sat at the edge of the kiddieland area and had lunch.

Trivia: A sumptuary law passed in Rome in 161 BCE specified the amount which could be spent on food and entertainment on each day of the month. Source: A History of the World in Six Glasses, Tom Standage.

Currently Reading: Symmetry In Mechanics: A Gentle, Modern Introduction Stephanie Frank Singer.