austin_dern

I liked how this worked last time, so let me go over my mathematics-blog posts from the past week before giving you pictures. Running over there, as you might recognize from your Friends page or else your RSS feeder, have been:

• Reading the Comics, October 29, 2015: Spherical Squirrel Edition, which is about where we left off last time. They're not fat squirrels, mind you.
• How October Treated My Mathematics Blog, which is, ``not so bad as September but it's been better''.
• Reading the Comics, November 1, 2015: Uncertainty and TV Schedules Edition in which I work out that Stone Soup made a couple mistakes in irrelevant jokes twenty years ago.
• The Set Tour, Part 7: Matrices, which won't qualify you to understand differential equations, but won't hurt, either.
• Reading the Comics, November 4, 2015: Gambling Edition because the cartoonists talked about gambling, not me.

And now for my last bunch of Canobie Lake Park pictures, at least for this run. I hope you don't mind moving on to more parks.

Back in the kids rides section of Canobie Lake Park. The rounding board --- on top --- clearly dates to about 1960 and has this lovely gold-leaf-like background pattern. The cars are clearly quite new, though.

Another Canobie Lake Park kids ride. The rounding boards have a similar patterning, obviously not gold leaf. And oh, those hippocampuses.

Sunset brings the warning that our time at Canobie Lake Park is to end soon. But it softens the blow by being gorgeous, like this.

The launch station of Untamed, as seen at night. This heightens the hunting-lodge theme and the beautiful wood that goes into it. The chandeliers, yes, look like antlers.

The Yankee Cannonball roller coaster encircles the parking lot, which means we could only get a good view of its whole length while riding, or while exiting Canobie Lake Park.

Trivia: The translunar injection burn for Apollo 17 was the first one done over the Atlantic Ocean, rather than the Pacific. The change improved fuel economy but was possible only because the rocket was scheduled for a nighttime launch. Source: Where No Man Has Gone Before: A History of NASA's Apollo Lunar Expeditions, William David Compton. NASA SP-4214.

Currently Reading: The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed, John McPhee.

Canobie Lake Park pictures here, so as to coax you into reading about my mathematics blog.

Caterpillar! The canopy on the caterpillar ride caught in the midst of closing over and catching its riding prey. There aren't many caterpillar rides running anymore, and almost none with working canopies, so it was great that this was running and ridable.

The canopy on Canobie Lake Park's caterpillar ride almost done catching its prey.

Molly! Whom we guess is a mouse and some kind of mascot for Canobie Lake Park. We weren't there long enough to understand the full dynamics of the park's costumed-animal representatives.

Canobie Lake Park's mascot Patches, the patchwork teddy bear who's a ringer for Waldameer's Wally Bear. bunny_hugger and I noticed this figure about the same time, and looked to each other with the same awed, silent feeling of the scales falling from our eyes.

A child clearly eager and happy to shake the hand of Canobie Lake Park's teddy bear Patches, and not at all terrified or goaded by the adults around it to doing something he doesn't really understand.

As I've mentioned, there's my mathematics blog, available in RSS feed. If you don't read that, then, here's the last week's worth of essays:

• The Set Tour, Part 5: C^n, actually from the previous week, but did you read it? If not, why not?
• Reading the Comics, October 22, 2015: Foundations Edition, in which Popeye lets me get quickly to demon-summoning in logic.
• Fish Autumn Update, just letting people know how many fish we've got.
• The Set Tour, Part 6: One Big One Plus Some Rubble, because not every set common enough to be named is all that useful.
• Reading the Comics, October 29, 2015: Spherical Squirrel Edition, in which I explain a grand old joke.

And you could put the blog up on your Friends page, which might be easier.

Trivia: A comet appearing in the morning sky in November 1680 and in the evening sky after sunet in December were taken to be two distinct comets. Isaac Newton does not seem to have considered trying to predict its motion. Source: In Search of Planet Vulcan, Richard Baum, William Sheehan.

Currently Reading: Voice and Vision: A Guide To Writing History and Other Serious Nonfiction, Stephen J Pyne.

After the weekend I had another two days in the office and they went without a lot of interesting stuff going on. The woman who kept insisting we needed to have a serious talk about reorganizing my project kept putting it off to tomorrow. There were rumors that the boss was in town, but there were also rumors he was in Florida instead. I thought I did see his car in the parking lot once as I was going out to lunch, but it wasn't there when I got back, and I never did see him. Now and then we talk on the phone, when he promises we need to catch up and get on the same page of everything.

I flew back on Wednesday, from Newark airport, not Trenton. Renting a car one-way from Portland, Maine, to Trenton, New Jersey, costs slightly more than building a factory to make a car. But a one-way trip from Portland to Newark is actually not much more than renting it from and returning it to Newark. It's all about where they need cars.

For a change I didn't fly back to Detroit or Lansing. We had pinball league that night in Grand Rapids, and there's an airport in Grand Rapids. I figured if I got the flight arriving at 4 pm, then I could arrive, get luggage, get something to eat, and be ready in time for the 7 pm start of the league. Even a minor delay would give us the chance to do so. I was right about the time calculations and there weren't any delays in the flight. bunny_hugger found me right about where she'd figured to find me.

We did have trouble finding somewhere to eat. We figured, we're near the airport, there's plenty of coffee shops around. We picked one out of the satellite navigator's choices. It brought us to a shop that yes, properly speaking, sold coffee. But the place was really about selling beans and grounds and coffee implements and all that. They had some cookies and coffees and teas for immediate drinking, and a handful of tables. But it was clear their hearts weren't in it.

Still, we made league night, and I had a pretty good night --- one first-place, one second-place, and three third-place finishes against an honestly better set of players than I am. (We had missed the previous league night, for the tour, and a substitute player --- one better than me --- filled in.) I'd drop from sixth place to eleventh in that league, which is closer to where I actually belonged. And finally we got mercifully back home together.

Trivia: Following the Second Opium War (1856 - 58) and the Sack of Peking (1860) not just the British but also France, Russia, and the United States received concessions from China. Source: The Age of Capital, 1848 - 1875, Eric Hobsbawm.

Currently Reading: The Mapmakers, John Noble Wilford.

Come the weekend, well, I had some more time to kick around. One of the things I did was to hit up the local used book stores. The guy who runs the Book Garden --- holding its anniversary clearance sale, incidentally --- recognized me which isn't bad considering I've been in one or two times per year since 2012. He remarked about how I had lost a lot of weight recently, which is true, although I lost it in 2009. To be fair he kind of knew me as someone who came around tolerably regularly from about 1992 through 2009 first, and it takes so much time to overcome an impression like that.

Sunday was a beastly hot day, the hottest I'd endured the summer. It also struck me I hadn't been to the Popcorn Park Zoo in years. Well, fair enough considering the limited time. And that the coati I'd originally sponsored had died several years ago, as had the binturong they transferred my sponsorship to, and the next binturong after that first one passed away. I'm not sure who if anyone I'm sponsoring now. They did have a raccoon, named Peanut, who'd been rescued after having his head stuck in a peanut butter jar for months. (There was a hole in the base so he was able to drink and eat, but not well.) He was put in the shelter that used to be the coati's. I couldn't see him, though; if he was in at all --- and that could be erratic; you know how small rescue zoos can be --- he wasn't coming out of his shelter, possibly because it was early afternoon, possibly because it was ninety degrees above boiling. In the enclosure next to Peanut (?) I did see a rabbit, sprawled out and not deigning to bother with anyone. I don't know if this is a rescued animal, though, or something that realized an unoccupied cage was a pretty good deal. It was unlabelled.

I didn't spend long at the zoo, because it was way too hot. Even the animals were mostly hiding out of the sun. After reviewing my options I went over to the Silverball Museum, which might have been a mistake. It was a Sunday and there was some major concert going on outside the Stone Pony. There was barely any parking to be found, and I was on the last lap before giving up when I located something almost as far from the Silverball Museum as it's possible to get.

The Silverball Museum had its usual array of great machines. It had a couple new rarities too, such as Big Bang Bar which we'd seen in the VFW Pinball Museum but not elsewhere. And it's always fun playing good old electromechanical games, now that I've learned how to play them. But mostly I was feeling like I could get back to the hotel-home and get back online to see bunny_hugger again.

Trivia: After spending 1869 and 1870 as one of the first openly (and legitimately) professional baseball teams the Cincinnati Base Ball Club reverted to amateur play in 1871. Source: But Didn't We Have Fun? An Informal History of Baseball's Pioneer Era, 1843 - 1870, Peter Morris.

Currently Reading: The Mapmakers, John Noble Wilford.

Thursday/Friday, my humor post roundup. And for you faithful readers, some Canobie Lake Pictures. There's a bunch of these. The park really is this wonderful. You've got to see it.

Just inside the front gate at Canobie Lake Park: a popcorn vendor. This is far from a unique picture but boy does it blend the line between reality and Roller Coaster Tycoon. Note a couple spilled kernels on the overhangs. And that the trash bin beside the popcorn stand is of the same design.

Canobie Lake Park's antique carousel. It's an unusual one for the variety of carvers represented on it and for being a two-level carousel. The non-jumping row is a step down from the rest; it's a neat look.

Pinball Alley! The park has nineteen, count 'em, pinball machines in the main arcade, and a few more scattered across the park. These include some modern games, like Spider-Man and (not pictured) AC/DC, as well as some of the all-time greats like Twilight Zone and Monster Bash. They've also got some real old ones, such as Space Invaders, the pinball (not working the day we were there, alas.) Also in view: Shrek, a reskinned version of Family Guy that's enormously more playable. And every game is a quarter. Even the new ones.

The international food court! This might be the most lickable set of amusement park buildings outside the original soft-serve-ice-cream styled buildings at Great Adventure's oldest sections.

Yankee Cannonball: Canobie Lake Park's classic wooden roller coaster. See how anxious and/or dreadful the passengers are.

So with that, let me invite you to read my humor blog. Run there the past week:

• What I Think Of Whatever It Was I Just Got, this week's major piece. Me complaining about my health because you don't get enough of that already.
• Bob and Ray Put Up The Storm Windows, pointing to an installment of the old-time radio classic.
• Why I’m Not In A Good Mood (Kinda Icky Edition) from back when I thought my sickness was over with already.
• Why I’m In A Good Mood (Cedar Point Edition), a spot of found comedy from the past weekend that I loved.
• H L Mencken’s Bathtub Hoax, which you've heard of yes, but have you ever read it? You should. It's worth it.
• Statistics Saturday: Amusement Park Content, In Three Charts, a powerfully silly little thing that got someone else to mention d'Efteling, delighting me.
• Nothing Is Happening In Apartment 3-G: But It Is A Lovely Day Outside, last week's report on the great void of comic stripping that's there. Yes, I plan to address the rumors in tomorrow's installment.
• What Is Art, And What Can It Do To You?, last week's major piece. An answer to what art is and how you can know you're doing it.

If you'd like these posts to appear on your Friends page, please add the Livejournal Syndication account to it. If you'd like these posts in your RSS reader, you can add the RSS feed to it. Are RSS readers a thing still? I see little ``RSS'' buttons now and then, so I guess they probably are. I don't know. I still read Usenet, for crying out loud, what do I know of the Internet?

Trivia: Groucho Marx's You Bet Your Life began 27 October 1947. Source: Quiz Craze, Thomas A DeLong.

Currently Reading: The Mapmakers, John Noble Wilford.

So, driving from Connecticut to New Jersey. The satellite navigator wanted us to go through New York City. I desperately didn't want to do that because I know how slow it can be. I also didn't want to take the other alternative, the Tappan Zee Bridge, because everybody in the New York City area knows the Tappan Zee is going to collapse catastrophically one of these days. But given the time constraints that seemed the better choice; the bridge just had to last, like, two more hours. I couldn't figure how to make my navigator take us to the Tappan Zee from where we were, though. I figured, well, if I just take I-84 West I'll go right over it, easy to do.

I was mistaken. The Tappan Zee is not I-84. It's I-87. This diversion too us achingly far north, although the time lost to that probably balanced a lot of time we'd have spent in traffic. And we got to take in some gorgeous views of the Hudson River valley. Michigan has abundant natural beauty, but --- at least in the lower peninsula --- it hasn't got mountains, not like this.

But the time spent on this, and on heavy traffic in North Jersey, ate away my crazy idea for a way to obliterate the taste of the Boulder Dash incident. It had struck me the night before: what if I surprised bunny_hugger by driving not to our hotel but rather to a lighthouse? The Barnegat Bay Lighthouse, for example, is near enough Seaside Heights, and it's a lovely one. But I worked out the time and even assuming we had a quick lunch and hit no traffic we couldn't visit the lighthouse before its visiting hours closed. Ah, but the Sandy Hook lighthouse? Much farther north, and more historically significant. And if everything went right we might be able to get to the visitor's center, and get the lighthouse-passport stamp, with as much as fifteen minutes to spare before it closed. That was always a slender hope, but it evaporated as we waited in a jam to get on the Parkway.

I probably couldn't have pulled off the surprise anyway. bunny_hugger may be vague on New Jersey geography but she knows the Shore edge from the Trenton area, and there'd be no hiding the surprise for its last forty minutes of driving. And to work at all we'd have to hit absolutely no Shore traffic on an August afternoon. Similar logic ate up the last chance, a visit to the Navesink lighthouses.

So, my love, I'm sorry that I couldn't surprise you with a lighthouse visit. But it would have required ditching chefmongoose, really, and the New York metropolitan area having much less traffic than it did. And my not making the I-84 mistake.

Instead, we drove to our hotel. It's the long-term-stay hotel I used last year, and that already felt homelike. The rooms are little efficiency-apartment rooms, bed and small kitchen and everything in one comfortable room. We set stuff down, and grabbed some cookies, and moved out to drive across the state again.

Because this would be bunny_hugger's only evening in New Jersey, incredibly, and we couldn't dare skip going to the Silverball Museum. This was the first time she's had the chance to visit since she became a serious player in the world of competitive pinball, and she could look to the machines with a new confidence, and expertise. She knew how FunHouse ought to work, compared to how it did.

We wouldn't have enough time at the Silverball Museum. My I-84 mistake must have cost us at minimum a net half-hour, possibly more. Traffic cost us more. But ``not enough time'' must be considered one of the themes of the New England Parks Tour. We had many fantastic experiences at parks that were all magnificent, apart from problems with three people at Lake Compounce. But we didn't really have enough time to do what we hoped to do, and the clock kept taunting us with how little we would get to do.

This makes the whole thing sound sad. The thing is, it wasn't, apart from that last hour at Lake Compounce. There was frustration, in wanting to be at Funtown Splashtown USA, or Santa's Village, longer than we were, or in wanting to have more time to do things and less time spent waiting for them. But, oh, how much happier the whole thing would have felt if I hadn't got in that fight, or if I'd been able to sneak us into a lighthouse. I just don't se how we could have done it, is all.

Trivia: The second Mighty Mouse cartoon was unveiled a month after The Mouse Of Tomorrow, the character's debut (as Super Mouse). Source: Of Mice And Magic, Leonard Maltin. (Wikipedia gives the debut dates as the 16th of October, 1942, and the 27th of November, which does seem close enough.)

Currently Reading: Media Hoaxes, Fred Fedler.

Let's be happy again. It's Sunday/Monday, so, let me finish off Story Land pictures and give you a last look at Story Land.

Props from inside Heidi's Grandfather's cabin, one of the story-book adventure settings in the park. The presence of not just one but two copies of Heidi suggests a dangerous breach in the walls between fiction and reality in the Heidi's Grandfather cabin. Or maybe Heidi is a more modern, fourth-wall-breaking adventure than I imagine. I dunno.

Polar Coaster, and some of the eating venues, as seen from the hilltop beside Heidi's Grandfather's cabin.

Interior animatronics of the Cuckoo Clockenspiel. It's a spinning-tubs ride, with a heavy clock theme that's really rather hypnotic.

So that's what they were up to! The decals and appliques that staff was getting ready to put up, but not quite doing, at the Friends Around The Word Food Fair were put on sometime between lunch and the later part of the day.

Fairy tale characters! This is a photo through the fence as character, including Dutch Wonderland's Duke the Dinosaur, get ready for a public event of some kind. Kennywood's parent company bought Dutch Wonderland from Hershey a few years back, and Duke's been appearing at all their parks ever since, and we're still a little weirded out by that.

And in my mathematics blog the past week? Here's what you could be reading about.

• The Kind Of Book That Makes Me Want To Refocus On Logic, which dear bunny_hugger gave me for my birthday.
• Reading the Comics, October 10, 2015: Wordplay Edition, plus I talk some about 'x'.
• The Set Tour, Part 4: Complex Numbers, with one weird thing you won't believe you can't do.
• Reading the Comics, October 14, 2015: Shapes and Statistics Edition, in which I explain my thesis in about 200 words.

Trivia: It was 1741 before King George II settled whether the border between New Hampshire and Massachusetts began three miles north of the mouth of the Merrimack River (as New Hampshire claimed), or three miles north and east of the mouth (as Massachusetts did). The King ruled, mostly, for New Hampshire. Source: How The States Got Their Shapes, Mark Stein.

Currently Reading: Media Hoaxes, Fred Fedler.

We were drawn to something a bit out of character for us. Among the rides is the Saw Mill Plunge, a mid-80s-era log flume. We don't do log flumes often, but it was sunny and pretty warm. And we looked at people coming off, who didn't seem all that soaked. We could risk it. It's from the era when log flumes were first becoming must-have attractions for parks, and that generation of log flumes is becoming rarer. And it's from Arrow Dynamics, the people who did so much to put looping steel roller coasters in every amusement park in the 1980s.

The line was enormous, and we did wonder several times if it was wise to join it. But the line was also moving, quite a bit, thanks to people ahead of us giving up and drifting away. That was counteracted some by people, mostly kids, sneaking back in and ducking under the queue rails to get wherever they were going. One thing we were clear about by this point: Lake Compounce has a lot of line-cutting people in its crowd. The last half-hour or so of waiting was one of a lot of seething, as what already seemed to be a slow-moving line got slowed down by people just squeezing in ahead of us.

It's a pleasant log flume, though. And its warning sign, a cheezy cartoon promising ``You'll Absolutely, Positively Get Soaked On This Ride!'' overstates things. Like many log flumes of the era it sprays a lot of water out, but not so much back into the boat. And the boat ride takes you up and into the woods. It's surely close to Boulder Dash, although I don't think we get more than a glimpse of the roller coaster from there. Mostly it's a chance to drift on an artificial river into the slightly mysterious distant woods, far enough even the noises of the park don't carry. It makes for some lovely tranquility in the late day.

We went walking along the outside path of Boulder Dash, mostly, and found a lovely surprise. There's a classic streetcar-style trolley at the park. Lake Compounce had started as a trolley park, though trolley service from the Bristol and Plainville Tramway Company ended during the Great Depression. Their streetcar trolley, bright yellow but otherwise looking quite like the trolley that runs to the Land of Make-Believe, runs a little path along a lakefront. On the walkway beside the trolley path is a fence marked by a ``Lake Compounce Time Line''. The signs explain the state's ``a great state to learn geology''. So it's got one of those science-museum type walks, matching distance along the fence to the deepness of time, going back to the Precambrian era.

We walked the way out, the better to see and copy-edit the geological-history signs and to watch Boulder Dash at its extent. We took the trolley, ``Special Car to Lake Compounce' number 1414, back. It's got advertisements in the overhead, things that look vintage for stuf like Fels-Naptha and Sloan's Liniment that may still be in existence but that feel like they're products that disappeared generations ago. The historic plaque explains the car's a survivor of the open cars that used to run in Connecticut, though it doesn't promise that this car --- on loan from the Shoreline Trolley Museum in East Haven, a thing I didn't know existed but now would kind of like to see --- actually ran to the park in its day. That's all right; the true thing would be like this.

We got in another carousel ride, of course. And then went to bumper car ride. There was some weird delay getting started. It appeared to be something needing the intervention of maintenance. And there were weird clumps of people when the ride got going. That happened on the ride cycle ahead of us, and there was a similar problem when we got our turn. Somehow, the Lake Compounce crowd apparently doesn't quite get bumper cars. They needed a lot of guidance from the ride operator, particularly, on ``if you keep your foot on the gas and keep turning the wheel you'll eventually go backwards, and get out of the jam''. Goodness knows why people were just getting stuck instead.

But we noticed something which delighted us on the ride. There's arrows pointing the direction of travel, of course. They come in different colors and some in different shapes, wriggly arrows or ones without tails or things like that. But there is one perfectly formed Kennywood arrow. We don't know that it actually points the correct path to Kennywood. But the little touch, something sure to delight anyone who was an amusement park enthusiast, or any Pittsburgh-area local who was in Bristol for some reason, brought us joy.

Another thing we rode was the Wipeout. This is a Chance-built modern version of the Trabant, a spinning-disc ride that gets tilted upward on an axis that itself rotates. That'd be good enough by itself, although this adds a twist to the ride. When the ride is lowering back to horizontal, the end of the cycle, the rotation of the platform speeds up, which just never happens. So what's normally a sadder part of the ride, its gradual close, instead has an interesting and exciting part. Obviously any ride could have that; I just don't remember being on one that made anything of the endgame like that.

Also delightful is that we could see an older era of paint, underneath the modern paint job. It was fragmentary in only a couple spots but we could see where what's now solid blue used to be red, with silver, curly inset letters reading WIPEOUT. We love peeks into what the park used to be such as that.

With the end of the day approaching we figured the thing to do was get one more round in on the wooden roller coasters. Wildcat first. It was about as far away, but we figured it would have a shorter queue, and that we'd be able to get a ride on that and then a ride on Boulder Dash to close out the night. We were right about the queue being shorter, although it wasn't yet short. The operators were no less chatty and sociable and there were one or two more Happy Birthday rounds while we waited.

So after that we were expecting the end of a really very good day on a fantastic roller coaster.

Trivia: J C F Guntsmuth's 1796 rules for das englische Base-ball indicates that if a batter swung at and missed the third strike of an at-bat, then the batter was obliged to run for first base. The game had no catcher, giving the runner a fair chance at making it. Source: Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search For The Roots Of The Game, David Block.

Currently Reading: Media Hoaxes, Fred Fedler.

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.