austin_dern

We spent our day at Lakeside Park wandering back and forth along it. The layout is roughly a rectangle, albeit one that runs up against a lake and hugs around that, with the Wild Chipmunk the far end of that section of the park. Many of what we take to be its oldest attractions hug the park: the Autoskooters, for example, the bumper-car ride that's got that great buidling. Or the Merry-Go-Round, or the defunct Staride. The miniature train that wraps around the lake. A small inlet of rides including a Satellite captive-flying-machine ride and a Rock-o-Plane. Lakeside Park also has a Roll-O-Plane and a Loop-O-Plane, which bunny_hugger noted meant they had nearly a full set of the vintage Eyerly Aircraft Company's O-Plane amusement park rides; Only the Fly-O-Plane is missing. We didn't ride them; they have more low-speed upside-down looping than we care for. But we were so glad to have so many historic rides represented, and in good order there.

A ride almost perfectly between the Wild Chipmunk and the Cyclone is the Spider. This is like you might find at other parks, a spinning ride with cars on the end of eight arms. The thing is, the Spider ride which had been there was removed before the 2017 season started. This is a new Spider, one with a modern package of color-changing LEDs that's dazzling in its brilliance. What makes this noteworthy is that the Spider has a queue sign, of course, and defunct ticket booth. It's a great green slanted panel with green strands that, at night are lit neon tubes and host a white neon-tube spider. So they got an identical version of the ride, apparently to match the gorgeous sign they had for it already, rather than replace it with something original (we would recommend the Kang-a-Bounce, generically) that would need a replacement sign. It's not a bad plan; the ticket booth is so beautiful it would be a shame to have it be pointless.

We spent a good time exploring the entrance, the Tower of Jewels with its 'REDIT' sign. It may not be in regular use anymore, but it's set up to be. It's got signs advertising the place as a good birthday party location. And fresh-looking stickers celebrating the Century of Fun, making us wonder when the park's centennial was. (2008, we learned later.) The entrance leads to steps, flanked by lions as if it were a public library, and down to the central square with the Merry-Go-Round and Cyclone to the right and a lighthouse for a boat ride straight ahead.

And to the left, much more of the park. Some nice rides, like the Skootaboats, a bumper boat ride built (says Wikipedia) out of the pond formerly a Shoot-the-Chutes. The Dragon family coaster, your common enough Dragon Wagon. It's on the location that through the mid-80s was the funhouse. It's a pity to lose a funhouse (and apparently locals really want to know what happened to the Laughing Sal formerly outside it). Any roller coaster is a good thing, yes, but I will admit this isn't so unique or quirky as to be better than a funhouse.

They have a Whip ride. Allegedly it dates to 1913, the same year as the Staride. The Whip is still running and in good-looking shape. This would be one of the handful of century-old amusement park rides we've been on. It's housed in a lovely late-30s building, rounded ovals painted aqua and lined in neon. The enclosing wall is topped with hundreds of small circular translucent glass, separated by empty space, so that the ride is surrounded by small blurry glimpses of what's actually behind it. It's beautiful design, executed so gorgeously that even the park's age and signs of deferred maintenance can't hide its glory. Inside the ticket booth are even stained-glass W discs. The Whip's machinery is hidden inside a structure, naturally; the structure's made to look like a barn. Neat touch.

And there's a Kiddieland area, off away from the lake and adjacent to the parking lot. Not sure if that's the original area or if they moved it there to be more convenient for packs of kids to not get lost. The ticket booth in that area is decorated with these very circa-1960 stylized pictures of a bunny in a loose suit or a cat dressed as a flapper, that sort of thing. There's a bunch of the smaller rides common to a kiddieland, especially for an older park. W F Mangels pony carts, circular-path boat and motorbike rides, a kiddie carousel, all that. The Midge-O-Racer, a miniature car ride made by the Eyerley Aircraft Company. And this was when we started to realize, hey, Fly-O-Plane, Midge-O-Racer, there's a pattern here. Also we wondered if the Midge-O-Racer was a flat-ride allusion to the midget car racetrack that the park used to support. That's likely coincidence, and Midge-O-Racer probably was just the company's name for a small car ride.

They also have a kiddie roller coaster, Kiddie Coaster. It's a small thing, a modest oval-track thing that looked like Little Dippers across the country. It also looked like a severe knee-banger. Kiddie coasters tend to be bumpier to start with, for some reason, and this was clearly an ancient ride. We thought again and again about checking whether unaccompanied adults could ride. And then we noticed one of the rides getting at least eight circuits around the track before it ended. So we stopped looking. Perhaps we could have ridden it, and we don't want to be snobs about a small roller coaster. But there are so many joints we have which would not forgive us that.

Trivia: In 1961 United States Army researchers used LSD in field tests as an interrogation device, testing in Europe on nine foreigners and one American, James Thornwell, who had been accused of stealing classified documents. Source: The Secret Histories: An Anthology, Editor John S Friedman.

Currently Reading: Spacesuit: A History Through Fact and Fiction, Brett Gooden.

PS: We lapped Storybook Land and poked back around some of the first things we had seen.

Two of the Three Bears, making porridge and not worrying about Goldilocks these days.

Turns out the Three Bears are kind of self-absorbed. Or they're just happy with the stuff they got from licensing their story to the papers.

Ben Franklin's workshop! Which is mostly an electrical substation, like you see here, but don't you love making such a boring thing more interesting than it needs to be?

So what all's been happening in my humor blog? My usual sorts of nonsense. Here's some of it; enjoy.

• Fairy Tales Are Why I Can’t Get Anything Done Today
• Today’s Excuse For Getting Nothing Done Involves Doctor Who
• Statistics Saturday: Some Outcomes of Coin Tosses
• What’s Going On In Gasoline Alley? What Is Walt Wallet’s Toothpaste Conspiracy Thing? April – July 2018
• Looking Back: Reviewing the Plants and Animals of Australia
• The Popeye Two-Reelers: Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad The Sailor
• All Right, Wikipedia, I Dare You
• In Which I Keep Score At A Baseball Game

Goats, as we get to the last hour at Storybook Land.

Stockade ready for everybody in the park to take a picture and send it to their mother. ... I need to send the picture bunny_hugger took of me to my mother. Just a second.

In the back of Storybook Land were animal exhibits and yes, we worried about what might find there. It isn't unheard-of for an otherwise great amusement park to have some animal it really shouldn't be keeping, like one of the great cats or bears or something. But, no, they keep animals that are within the range of a small family park to care for reasonably, such as goats and deer and sheep and such.

bunny_hugger buying some food for a billy goat who, you'll notice, already knows exactly how this is going to go down.

Gruff billy goat is pretty well done waiting for bunny_hugger to put the feed in the bucket and winch it up to the house. Also, goat eyes: the heck, right?

So the goat helps out getting the bucket of feed up there.

The sweet, sweet taste of successful goat work. ... Again with the goat eyes.

And a squirrel who happens to live in the park, near a railroad car that's a snack stand.

The North Pole! Pretty near Santa's Workshop, just off the entrance of the park. I must have missed photographing this earlier.

One of our last rides was on the Candy Cane Express, a train of cars that putters around the park. Bubbles the Coaster's in the background on the left, there.

Trivia: Alfred Moen developed his faucet design, controlling hot and cold water flow with a single handle, in the late 1930s. It was not manufactured until after World War II, and sold only 250 units its first year in production. Source: Small Things Considered: Why There Is No Perfect Design, Henry Petroski.

Currently Reading: Spacesuit: A History Through Fact and Fiction, Brett Gooden.

I thought I was going to get ahead on my mathematics blog, and then the week got in the way. Well, here's what I have got recently.

• Reading the Comics, July 11, 2018: GoComics Hardly Needs Me Edition
• I Don’t Have Any Good Ideas For Finding Cube Roots By Trigonometry
• Reading the Comics, July 14, 2018: County Fair Edition
• Reading the Comics, July 17, 2018: These Are Comic Strips Edition

And then! One of the more exciting of these to come up in ages. What's Going On In Gasoline Alley? What Is Walt Wallet's Toothpaste Conspiracy Thing? April - July 2018 in the century-old comic strip.

Oh, wait. There's more Storybook Land pictures than I realized when I wrote the last two entries' PS's. All right. Won't be running out of pictures for a couple days yet.

The Old Woman who lived in a Shoe. And for this one they include the nursery rhyme. This one goes on about twice as long as I ever remember hearing it and so the last couplet whipped me fairly soundly.

Upper floor in the Old Woman's shoe, complete with a bunch of children and one of the busy storks.

And if you happen to be extremely tall and have long arms you can reach up to this sort of upper half-level shelf high up in the Old Woman's Shoe you can set your camera to photograph ... uh ... I guess there was something there at some time.

The big canal that's appeared some in previous photographs, such as with the ducks or the bridge that the Old Tyme Car Ride used. Here, an animatronic Tommy Tittlemouse whom I never heard of before either pulls a fish out of the water over and over and over again. Notice how low the water level is, by the way, on the right.

So here's how low the water was. This was a couple feet to the north of Tommy Tittlemouse there. Not sure where the water's from --- maybe one of the fountains? --- but it's not doing much to keep the channel flowing.

From the station of the miniature train ride, which circumnavigates most of the park: it starts with these mannequins for reasons I don't know.

Bubbles the Coaster as seen from the miniature train, chugging along the opposite and fenced-off area of the park.

Scenery visible only from the train: High Diddle Diddle, Cat, Fiddle, Cow, Moon, and Jump.

The train chugs through a Santa's Warehouse building and there's briefly the chance to see all kinds of toys. I don't think any of them were set up as animatronic figures.

Trivia: From 1935 through the outbreak of war about 30 percent of Greece's exports were to Germany. Source: A Low Dishonest Decade: The Great Powers, Eastern Europe, and the Economic Origins of World War II, 1930 - 1941, Paul N Hehn.

Currently Reading: How To Read Nancy: The Elements Of Comics In Three Easy Panels, Paul Karasik, Mark Newgarden.

We entered Lakeside Park from the parking lot, beside the abandoned Speedway. There's not an obvious barrier or entry point or anything, just the curb separating traffic entering the lot from the rides on its side. First thing encountered is the Phantom Pavilion, a mysterious name we supposed reflected some old ride. And hidden behind that was the Zyklon roller coaster, standing and apparently assembled. But there weren't any cars on it, and the launch station wasn't yet assembled, and even the sidewalk leading to it looked new. It was roped off. We passed rides --- a Flying Scooters, I assume of the original generation --- and a Ferris wheel. A free-standing ticket booth. Most of the rides have ticket booths, dating to the time when you could buy a ticket anywhere. There's something like four of them where you can still buy ride tickets or wristbands. We'd get ours from the one at the Merry-Go-Round.

I have to say something for the ticket booths, though. Like, the free-standing one near the Ferris Wheel and the not-yet-named new Zyklon roller coaster and all. They are these Art Deco beauties. If you want to see them, look at the city settings for any circa-1940 Fleischer Studios Popeye cartoon, all these slick smooth curves that just radiate human warmth as expressed in geometry and typeface design. It was all over the place. The Auto Skooter bumper-car ride, with an entrance that looked like Grandmom's Toaster That She Got From Going To The Movies Every Thursday For A Month. Long, gently curved concrete walls with benches snug against them. A tower of ... we weren't sure. We hypothesized it was a local, park-exclusive radio tower. It turned out to be the central tower from a captive-flying machine, the cars long since lost and the center tower still standing. Arcade games that were still closed up, but many of which would open as the day went on. The Skoota Boats, inflatable bumper-boats in a small artificial pond. (Lakeside Park is alongside an actual lake, Lake Rhoda --- named for Rhoda Krasner, now the park owner --- but it isn't open to swimming or to rides presently.)

So yes, we got distracted looking at the geese that had occupied a central park along the midway. The geese families, some with a handful of goslings, some with their own little flocks. This was just in front of the Tower of Jewels, looking ... magnificent in silhouette and a bit ratty in person. The midst of day hides the burned-out bulbs, and obscures the ones that are just missing, but makes obvious where the paint has peeled off. This is also in front of the Merry-Go-Round, where we would buy our wristbands, and that is just such an oddity.

Most carousel structures are one of two alternatives. One is your classic Golden Age of Carousels rotunda; it's either the actual antique building or a modern replica of it, a (usually) wooden dome above a circular or octagonal structure. Or else it's a sparkling jewel-box of glass held up by metal framework, the better to show off the carousel. This is neither. This is again an Art Deco beauty, a white birthday cake roof above partial cement walls, and fronted by an overhang that wouldn't look out of place as a sidewalk movie theater's frontage. With a cylindrical pillar, wrapped in vertical blue neon tubes, and a yellow-neon-tube sphere atop that. The central running boards don't have paintings; they have mirrors. It's a bizarre structure. We would come to learn how bizarre the carousel inside is.

Because this is a weird carousel. Even an amateur eye would see how it's different. The animals are four to a row, common enough. But the outer two animals are on the base level of the carousel. Then there's a step up, and a row of smaller animals on the inside. And then another step up, to a row of even smaller mounts yet. It's rare enough to have a carousel with two levels to the platform; I think we've only been on one before. We had never seen a carousel with three. I'm not sure any other carousels with three levels like this exist.

And then ... the animals. bunny_hugger enjoys her carousel-enthusiast street cred of being someone who can identify the major carvers. At least the major carving styles, if individual carving studios are hard to pin down. This ride ... she couldn't make sense of it. The horses weren't flamboyant like Coney Island horses are. They weren't realistic like Philadelphia Style horses. They were too good for the County Fair style of the other carvers around the United States. And they were too different. There were horses, yes. There were four rabbits, painted in random pastels. There were giant cats. Who puts more than one lion and one tiger on a carousel? Whoever this was, as they put two of each. There were burros. There were deer. There were dogs. There were monkeys and bears. A month ago we would have accepted a bet that no classic carousel had a monkey on it. Here was incontrovertible proof there was. (Bears were rare, but did exist; many were repainted to pandas in the Great Panda Craze of the 1930s, when Grandmom got her toaster.)

The heck? This carousel had non-horse figures, ``menagerie'' figures as they call them. Many carousels have a couple. This had, literally, more menagerie figures than horses, which just did not happen before the opening of Carousel Works in the 1980s. The carousel had no historical plaque, no caption explaining any of its past. It would be a mystery. We spent a lot of time studying the ride hoping for any clue about its origins, its make, its bizarre collection of figures, and couldn't get anything from it. Just the agreement of ride operators that it was a fascinating carousel.

The paint on the animals isn't all that good; you can see, for example, not only that the rabbits were apparently dipped in pastel green (or whatnot) but that it's faded, worn down by people getting on the animals. There's a large box that pretends to be a band organ, labelled Organ Wagon #69 by someone who thought he was very funny. There are some painted scenery panels on the inside, scenes from fairy tales and painted in a style you might call ``non-avant-garde 70s pinball style'', which is to say the women have quite a lot of breast and have deployed nipples under their clothing. It's an odd bit of dubious taste for what is otherwise a kid-friendly park.

The National Carousel Association census reports the ride is a C W Parker carousel, most likely built in Kansas in 1908. This would make it a County Fair-style carousel. The carvings appear to be idiosyncratic, assembled from wherever the first owners of the carousel could find them. Wikipedia thinks many of the animals look like Charles Looff carvings, out of Coney Island. This is unusual, but not unheard-of. The carousel at Lake Compounce in Connecticut similarly has a collection of animals gathered from at least four different makers. The National Carousel Association does not know who the original owner was, or where it was originally set. Nor does it know when the carousel moved to Lakeside Park. I imagine it arrived there before the building was put up, sometime in the late 30s. But, wow. I don't want to make any assumptions about this ride. It is too much a puzzle.

Trivia: The foundations for the first pier of Old London Bridge were laid in 1176, according to the Annals of Waverley Abbey of 1291. Source: Old London Bridge: The Story of the Longest Inhabited Bridge in Europe, Patricia Pierce.

Currently Reading: How To Read Nancy: The Elements Of Comics In Three Easy Panels, Paul Karasik, Mark Newgarden. OK, so in the 20s Ernie Bushmiller tried a bunch of little narrow-focus comics, the way people tried in those days. One of them: Cross Word Cal, entirely crossword-puzzle-themed jokes. 1920s newspaper comics were such 1990s web comics.

PS: Storybook land! We're nearer the end of the day than you maybe realize.

And when you've got through the Alice in Wonderland cave, you step out into the card maze. Which ... is less challenging than it might be, since the cards are about four feet tall. But it'd be a lot harder for a kid. Yes, they us several instances of cards. There's at least two 4's of Clubs and two 5's of Hearts in this picture straight away.

Cinderella pumpkin carriage that's presently tucked inside a gazebo. It at least used to be in park parades. I believe it's been retired from all those now.

Humpty Dumpy, and a park alphabet-block sign that I think dates to the opening of the park in 1955. If I'm not remembering wrong the blocks after 'N' and 'J' carry '.'s.

Lakeside Amusement Park, Denver, opened in 1908 as one of your classic trolley park/White City parks. It occupied nearly half the small town from which it took the name. Its front gate is the Tower of Jewels, this magnificent World's Fair-grade pillar, encased in lights, originally topped with the spotlight from the 1904 World's Fair Ferris Wheel. On its base, as you leave, is the cryptic invitation ``REDIT''. It means ``Return'', but it does sound a little ominous put like that.

In the 1930s a fellow named Ben Krasner bought the park, and he had it renovated and built in the most Art Deco style humanly possible. The place became this astounding festival of beautifully shaped concrete moulds and lined with neon lighting. It still is. The park has passed to Krasner's daughter, Rhoda Krasner, who still owns the park and is still active and careful about the park's management. It's possible to see her walking the park, consulting on even the individual business of which rides need to close and for how long that day. We believe we saw her.

Admission is by the main parking lot; the great Tower of Jewels --- opening onto the sidewalk, like Kennywood or d'Efteling or other amusement parks that are in their city --- is closed off, at least ordinarily. It's $4 per person, and that gets you a 50 cent credit for buying ride tickets or pay-one-price wristbands. A 50 cent ride ticket is enough for one ride on the carousel; even the priciest of rides like the Cyclone roller coaster is only $3.00. So you see this isn't a pricy day at the park. The first thing noticeable inside the parking lot is the Lakeside Speedway.

It's abandoned. It had been one of the last spots for Midget-Car Racing, until a nasty accident when a car went off the track, killing a person and injuring a dozen more. Rhoda Krasner, horrified, closed the track immediately. There are, apparently, always rumors that the Speedway will be torn down, or renovated into something else (it had been a baseball park before it was a racecar track). But none of the plans has ever quite happened. It's been three decades. The Speedway stands there, derelict and becoming even more a natural object for wonder and curiosity and surely high-school urban legends.

Almost along the side of the lake, in a prominent and unmissable spot while walking along the main drag, and certainly the centerpiece of the park's skyline as seen from on or across the lake (as, for example, from the miniature train ride that orbits the lake) is the Staride. It's a Ferris Wheel-type ride, with spokes that reach out from the central wheel so that the park looks like a star, cars dangling from the ends of those points. It was installed in 1913. It might be the only example of this particular kind of Ferris Wheel made. It has never run in bunny_hugger's lifetime. It might never have run in mine. A fire in 1973 destroyed the drive system for the Staride, and all but one of its cars, and also its blueprints.

The ride is still there, though. Perhaps from fear that without the Staride and the Tower of Jewels, Lakeside Park could not be Lakeside Park. Perhaps from the dream that maybe someday, if they could put the money together, someone could retrofit a set of plans and design new cars and a drive system, and make the ride run again. The ride isn't well-kept; it's sitting there, fenced off and overgrowing with weeds; there's a tree that's woven into the wheel, as though this were a ride at a long-abandoned amusement park. But the ride is there, in this strange state in which it's unrideable and probably can't be made rideable. But it's not replaced, nor is it repaired, nor is it made to look as if, well, maybe next year they will be able to repair it. It's even more mysteriously abandoned-in-place than the Speedway is. And, worse, it goes unexplained; a sign explaining the ride and its history would do much to turn this from a weird and ominous portent into a touchstone.

The Tower of Jewels is less jeweled, too. The tower itself had, at least according to the publicity, something like ten thousand light bulbs illuminating it and half the City of Denver at night. There's maybe ten still working. The lights have just been burning out, as they will, apparently without replacement. It inspires grim thoughts about the park, and a joke at least in amusement park fan circles that the park figures to just wait until the last bulb goes off and then close the park. The Speedway and the Staride encourage the impression of a park that's limping out its last days; the burned-out lights seem to confirm it.

And, something we did not know at the time. Among the park rules is a prohibition on photographs. Which sounds like madness. But is also understandable. The place is washed over with deferred maintenance. The Staride alone looks unreal. The burned-out light bulbs on the Tower of Jewels. Buildings whose 1930s Art Deco gorgeousness overcomes the peeled, faded paint and water stains. Heaps of once-useful junk tucked behind but still visible from rides. It would be easy to take pictures of the park and make it look sad and depressed and dismal, like those disaster-tourist web sites showcasing victims of capitalism like Detroit or East Saint Louis or something.

But, then. Park admission is four dollars. The most expensive single ride, bought a-la-carte, is three dollars. That's below what you even pay at a county fair, for both admission and a-la-carte rides. Concession prices are similarly cheap; a soda or a frozen Icee is about a dollar. You could double any of these and still have a pretty cheap park, and enough profit to replace all the light bulbs and have enough to do something with the more decrepit structures too.

People have noticed. Rumor is that Krasner has heard all this. And gotten offers from people who would like to invest in the park and bring it back to the glories anybody can see on looking at it. She turns them down, solidly. An elderly woman clinging to control of a family business, possibly to the detriment of the place? That's a familiar story and an easy one to suppose. But is it so?

Because here's an answer to all that. They're putting in a new roller coaster this year. They had it assembled but not running when we visited. We learned about it the day we arrived in town and cursed ourselves because they promised to open ``in June'' and here we were, in June, and missing the new coaster. (New to them. It had previously been Nebraska's only non-kiddie roller coaster and, before that, was at the Saginaw, Michigan, county fairgrounds.) Had we gone but two weeks later we --- would have been disappointed again; the ride still hasn't opened. New rides always open late. Still, while the ride --- a Pinfari Zyklon --- would not be, like, Cedar Point's Big New Ride for the year, it's still a pretty big, pretty exciting thing, one of those roller coasters big enough to be thrilling but not so big that Mom would refuse to ride it. Great for a family park. And an expansion of the place.

And another answer. We got to the park on a Saturday, usually the busiest day. It was early summer, the weather was great. The place was packed. The staff was up to it. There weren't weirdly long queues for things, there weren't weird blips of something in the park obviously needing attention and not getting it (like, overflowing trash bins or dirty bathrooms or something). They had the staff to cover a bustling day, and it did not look like the staff was stretched thin. Park operations were smooth and, so far as we could tell, problem-free. That's a sign of a park that's got the money it needs to run about as it is, and keep the show going well.

All right, but then why not a $5 admission and a $2 frozen Icee? ... And here again, rumor is, Krasner knows. But has decided that the park's mission is to be a place that larger families and poorer people can afford to go. That even if you don't have major-amusement-park money you should be able to go somewhere and ride a roller coaster and play a redemption game and smash bumper cars and go on rides that spin you very fast. She's right of course. And she's maybe atoning for the park's long history as a segregated park. (The side of classic old parks that white amusement park enthusiasts never discuss is how many were white-only, and how many closed rather than desegregate, which had more to do with local parks closing in the 60s and 70s than is generally admitted.)

An amusement park can approach the democratic ideal that all persons mingle together, equals before the Ferris wheel. But you have to pay for the ride. All right, but the ride can cost as little as possible and still allow the ride to go. And if that means the sparkling but, fundamentally, non-essential lights on the Tower of Jewels go unrepaired? Maybe that's an acceptable trade.

So this gives you a sense of the physical and the philosophical layout of the amusement park we spent Saturday in, after we'd eaten at Casa Bonita. Do you think that we enjoyed ourselves? ... Write down your answers, read on, and we shall see whether you were correct.

Trivia: The British islands officially imported about six tons of tea in 1699. A century later they imported about eleven thousand tons. Source: A History of the World in Six Glasses, Tom Standage.

Currently Reading: How To Read Nancy: The Elements Of Comics In Three Easy Panels, Paul Karasik, Mark Newgarden.

PS: Storybook Land, a family-owned park that doesn't give the vibe it's ever had money problems.

Your mouse guide to the Tick-Tock Clock Drop, a time-themed drop tower. The ``clock repair'' building peeking out from behind the sign is a bit of a lie; there's just some park machinery inside.

Mouse creeping on you behind the seats of the Tick-Tock Clock Drop.

Sign for the Happy Dragon ride (in the winter they take the dragons off and put up reindeer-pulled sleighs on it), along with a sign that would seem to explain the height requirement, but that leaves so many options for the slightly older kid to rules-lawyer their siblings into crying fits.

OK, so, rabbit health update.

We have scheduled Penelope's surgery. She's to go in next Monday, to be observed overnight. Next Tuesday, all going well, she'll get the operation. We hope that they will find something peculiar but easily removable in her abdomen, and close her back up, and send the removed thing out for a biopsy which reveals that it is not cancer or something else ominous. She's then to spend another night in hospital under observation, before coming ... well, not home. Wednesday we're scheduled to drive down to Pittsburgh, to enjoy Anthrocon in the off-season when it's quieter and there's more pinball machines. The locals call it Pinburgh.

Ordinarily we leave rabbits with bunny_hugger's parents for this sort of thing. But bunny_hugger's mother doubts her considerable skills at watching a bunny recovering from surgery. I have no doubts to her ability, mind you. But it would be rotten of me to impose this on someone against her own self-evaluation. So instead we plan to have her boarded at the veterinary clinic until we get back home early next week. Which does mean for the first several days of her recovery she'll be under the eye of, well, the technicians who were able to keep Stephen alive and reasonably functional for so long despite his infirmities. The recovery period for an operation like this, for a rabbit like this, they project at being a week to ten days.

So all going well, we'll take her back home six or seven days after surgery, and she will slowly come to forgive us putting her through this. We'll not speak of the many things that could go sadly for us and worse for her.

The day after we got Penelope back last week, bunny_hugger noticed the rabbit wasn't peeing. She had always peed parsimoniously, with outstanding litter habits. The week before we brought her in for the mysterious-growth diagnosis we noticed she was peeing in random spots, another sign of trouble. But now this? Bad enough she wasn't eating --- and we resolved to start force-feeding her Critical Care if she didn't pick up more food on her own --- but not drinking? We worried she wouldn't even last the thirteen days to her surgery, or the anaesthesia, or the operating table.

So Thursday morning I called the vet's to ask if they noticed when she peed last, and they said to bring her in. They had an appointment right away, as in in twenty minutes, so I went without waking bunny_hugger. (My noise woke her anyway, but she didn't have to rush to get vet-office-emergency-visit presentable.) The vet found that he could ``express'' her bladder, but just barely. Her urethra was full of xanthine crystals. She likely couldn't urinate through that.

The treatment: fluids. 200 mL of saline solution, injected into the scruff of her neck, just as we had done with Stephen when he was recovering from a gastrointestinal stasis incident and, I think, from the flystrike. Her body absorbs the fluid, and then has plenty to excrete, diluting the crystals to the point that her bladder is strong enough to work it.

She is, like other rabbits we've done this to, strangely serene at having a needle injected into the loose skin on the back of her neck. Possibly it's that insensitive. She gets squirmy at having a lot of room-temperature fluid pour under her skin. bunny_hugger gets squirmy seeing the bulge of warm-ish water, especially when it pools into the bunny's dewlap. But within two days she was dribbling little spots of urine here and there. While trying to make a getaway from her force-feeding she also sprayed my leg with maybe a couple teaspoon's worth of urine. So very good to see. I still took a quick shower.

And the force-feeding. Critical Care is this high-nutrient power that, mixed with water, will at least keep a rabbit going until it feels like eating again. We also mix that with some pumpkin-apple mixture, in the hopes of making the thing more palatable to Penelope. She does not like having this injected. We have a plastic syringe that bunny_hugger pokes into the side of her mouth, to squirt from three to five milliliters at a time, until the rabbit's chewed down about 60 mL total. Twice a day.

This is straining our relationship with Penelope. At least it's straining her feelings about us. But she is looking stronger. And her droppings have grown from the tiny little bits that were another warning sign of great distress into something more roughly normal. We're getting fairly good at this. We're supposed to keep up the Critical Care injections until she eats on her own. But our guess is that the thing in her abdomen is ruining her appetite. We're emotionally prepared to keep doing this until she goes in for surgery.

When I was at the vet's for the no-peeing problem, I asked about a fear that had grown over that Wednesday: if Penelope looked like she wasn't going to make it until the surgeon got back from holiday, the 24th, was there an emergency surgeon they would recommend? The vet said yes, in case of emergency, they had someone. But he didn't think that likely. He thought Penelope looked good. And that, from feeling her abdomen --- without doing X-rays, mind --- he thought the growth in there had ``if anything, gotten smaller''. At least she certainly wasn't looking worse.

Sometime Wednesday or Thursday --- we haven't set the appointment --- we're to have a follow-up for the urine condition. This will be another chance to check whether her growth has gotten bad enough we have to take emergency steps. I'm so hoping that we don't need to. In the ideal timeline, the growth is a side effect of these xanthine crystals (a possibility that is entirely my fantasy and has no support from any imaginable veterinary authority) and a week and a half of fluids will break it up to the point that she goes back to a normal happy bunny life with no surgery needed, while the sitting President, Vice-President, and Speaker of the House are arrested and resign in disgrace. I admit this is a stretch, but we all must have our hopes.

Trivia: Charles Guiteau's attorney against the charge of murdering the President of the United States was George Scoville, his brother-in-law. Scoville was a patent attorney with little criminal justice expertise, but few lawyers were willing to even consider the case. Source: Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President, Candice Millard.

Currently Reading: Academia Waltz and Other Profound Transgressions, Berkeley Breathed. So the first half of the book is reprints of the circa-1980 collections of Academia Waltz strips. That would be a pretty slender volume because, like, two or three semesters of a college newspaper strip isn't that much copy. The back half of the book is more artwork Breathed had from the time, photographs of the drawing boards on which he worked. Which is great except that it includes pretty near all the comic strips already printed in the first half of the book. Except that it's all out of order, and none of it is dated, and none of it is annotated, including the stuff that only makes sense if you know Austin, Texas, city politics of 1979, except if one of his penciled notes on the edges of a sketch help things out.

Also a missed chance: there's a bunch of jokes and setups that Breathed reworked into Bloom County, sometimes more than once. There's some good editorial matter to be built on how the rewrites changed and, I think, always improved them. One thing not improved: Steve Dallas, introduced here, is (of course) younger than he'd be in Bloom County. But for all his incompetent macho swagger already in evidence, this college-age Steve Dallas also has a crippling fear of actually having sex. Maybe that's there in subtext in the main strip, but having it front and center makes his general boorishness more interesting.

PS: the carousel and the bad assumption we made about it and the surprising story of Storybook Land behind it.

Ooooh. Maker's plate for the kiddie carousel. Its 1955 date lead us to think this was one of the park's original attractions, as Storybook Land opened in 1955 too. No! The carousel's a relatively new addition. I want to say it's been at the park since the late 90s but I can't find confirmation of that.

And the Allan Herschell kiddie carousel, as it looks in the fine and cheery daylight. See the picnic pavilion in the background? We didn't pay attention to that at the time. It would come back to surprise us.

Jewel-box image of Storybook Land's kiddie carousel, in amongst the trees which survived the derecho of 2012 which it turned out was exactly five years to the day before we visited.

Elitch Gardens is not just a place of roller coasters and an antique carousel. Granted those are the things most of interest to us, particularly as the park in its current grounds isn't that old and hasn't got much astounding landscaping. It's got some nice things, including a floral clock that nicely leads up to the Ferris Wheel. But it's not vast like Waldameer or lush like d'Efteling or overgrown with strange historic quirks like Kennywood. We spent some time, as we do, thinking about what other parks Elitch Gardens feels like. I thought Kentucky Kingdom the best match, which is curious as it's also a relatively new park (opened in the late 80s), owned for a while by Six Flags, and surrounded by city. The transitive curiosity is that Elitch Gardens doesn't feel much like Michigan's Adventure, which was the park we had thought Kentucky Kingdom felt most like, at that time.

Where Elitch Gardens is strongest in theming is the Old West stuff, admittedly a common thematic strength for parks. (Old West is the only themed area Michigan's Adventure is able to put together, for example, and it's the clearest themed area at Cedar Point too.) But the Denver setting probably encourages them to try a little harder on the Old West theme. The big central (and enclosed) food court goes wild with this, including featuring oil-painting posters that explain the Jackalope and its history.

We stopped midday for food, with their Parmesan Cheese Fries seeming the most promising alternative plus letting us compare to Cedar Point. What we did not expect was that we would get a pile of fries large enough to bury our car, covered in enough Parmesan to cover Lansing to a depth of three inches. It was good, mind you. And we ate at a great spot, on a bench overlooking a relatively undeveloped spot that looked like it turns into a lake when it rains. We just didn't realize there'd be so much of it.

Later in the day --- staying hot and sunny, despite the rides' interruptions for weather --- we stopped for frozen ice. That was sold out of a van, and they just gave you the raw ice. There were like two dozen syrups beside it, for you to pour on where and as much as you liked. And maybe it was the setting and the heat and all those other incidentals, but this was really, really good. And carried us through another couple hours. And demanded we stop in the bathrooms again to wash up since that syrup could be really astoundingly sticky, given the chance.

I mentioned getting to the magic show. We were also ready to get on the Thunder Bolt, their Musik Express ride, when that ride too went down for weather and that time it did rain a little bit, enough to drive us forward in the park. It also gave us the chance to see (but not ride) their swinging-Viking-ship ride the Sea Dragon. Unlike its twin at Michigan's Adventure --- and many other instances of this ride --- this one still has the short mast and fake crow's nest, which most parks have taken out as it's an inspection and maintenance hassle.

We picked our day just about perfectly for visiting Elitch Gardens. It was hot and sunny, yes, and the storm threatened in midafternoon and actual in early evening closed rides for a while. But they also kept the place from overcrowding as it could plausibly have, and the latter forced us to walk around the park looking at things rather than riding. A park at night is normally glorious, although the rides that weren't operating --- basically, any without cover --- turned their lights off. So there was less that jungle of light; but then it did have this fascinating blend of islands of light with crowds gathered around, say, the teacup ride (which we did enjoy, with care taken to not spin faster than really either of us are up to these days), and others turned off as if tucked in for the night. And somehow all this lead to Half Pipe opening just in time for us to ride it, long after we'd supposed it wouldn't be running at all that day.

And, yes, we made a mistake. I lead us to the back of the park and Twister II for a last-ride-of-the-night. The gift shop closed by the time we got to the front of the park. We hadn't seen a park T-shirt that was quite appealing. But they did have these brass Christmas ornaments that were exactly of the kind bunny_hugger collects. We hadn't gotten one earlier because we didn't want to carry it around the rest of the day, and figured we could just get one on our way out instead of buying it then and taking it out to the car. So we learned, as we should have before, to just buy the thing and take it out to the car, especially considering the shop was right up by the front gate. We had hopes that we might get someone who was planning to go to Elitch Gardens anyway to pick one up. So far, we haven't found one. So this closed the night on a bit of our cursing our own folly.

Nevertheless, it was a great day overall, and we had no trouble getting home, to the accompaniment of the Beatles Channel on the satellite radio, and getting to our basement apartment without (so far as we know) disturbing our AirBnB hosts. The first full day in Denver was a grand success.

Trivia: The calendar of the Coptic Church has twelve months of thirty days each, followed by five (in leap years, six) days not belonging to any month. The calendar starts (through to 2099) on the Gregorian calendar's 11th of September. Source: Marking Time: The Epic Quest to Invent the Perfect Calendar, Duncan Steel.

Currently Reading: Academia Waltz and Other Profound Transgressions, Berkeley Breathed. Complete collection of his late-70s college newspaper comic, plus miscellaneous stuff that I guess was editorial cartoons. Most disappointingly there's no attempt to give any of this context. You can understand where stuff is joke-shaped, but when it makes a reference that clearly made sense to someone at University of Texas in 1979, and you're not them, it's a bit like reading fog.

PS: Storybook Land has a lot of neat stuff to look at that isn't rides, including a lot of animatronics.

Animatronics set up inside Santa's Workshop. One deer works the adding machine, and another writes out, and there's an elf just off-camera so as to raise the question: wait, why do you give the jobs requiring manual dexterity to the animals that have no fingers? Huh?

So before there was the Philly Phanatic, there were Phil and Phillis, mascots for Veterans Stadium. Statues of them were set up on the outfield wall, and when the team hit a home run Phil would pop out and hit a baseball to strike a Liberty Bell, which lit up, and then the ball went over and hit Phillis, who'd pull a lanyard to shoot off a cannon. (I can't find any videos of this but it sounds like it would've been fun.) Anyway, the Phanatic came in, and the comparatively personality-free Phil and Phillis got sold off to Storybook Land, and here they are. (South Jersey is a suburb of Philadelphia.) The seats are a couple pulled from Veterans Stadium before its demolition.

Torn-up track for the Old Tymers antique-car ride. It's still not running, a year later. It looks like they're removing the wooden bridge and part where it goes over this channel, to our regrets since antique-car rides are generally better longer. Aw.

My humor blog. Let's take a look at it. Not to be blunt but I'm emotionally dealing with Penelope right now which is why the humor blog is even less original funny stuff than usual this week.

• On Looking At The Liberty Bell
• A Tip for Rabbit Health and Happiness in the Hot Weather
• Statistics Saturday: Uncertainly Named United States
• What’s Going On In Prince Valiant? When Does Prince Valiant Take Place? April – July 2018.
• Looking Back: The New England Cheese Controversy
• What Did I Learn From Watching Nearly Every Talkartoon?
• In Which I Maybe Fail My Civic Duty
• How To Have A Small Business

Here's more Storybook Land pictures. I hope you like. It's a sweet place.

Bunny looking for direction! ... Actually most everything seems to be in the same direction, but it's good to know what nursery rhymes and fairy tales you're in for.

The birthday cake! A fixture of Storybook Land, apparently, for decades. And something to make bunny_hugger envy kids who have birthdays during amusement park seasons. According to the park's history, the upper little layers of cake are recent additions, arranged and put in as a surprise by the kids of the park owners-founders in 2005 for the park's 50th anniversary. Reportedly all the upper layers were trucked in in one night.

Decoration outside the Three Bears' House. Which may be a noncanonical addition but that I'm cool with.

Santa Claus is a sometimes visitor to the park. (Not that day.) His house is there all the time. And this elf is giving us the look at that says: should this elf be giving us that look?

Model railroad, one of several tracks, set up inside a building that used to be a post office.

Yeah, so, if you want to make seven-year-old me very happy, have an amusement park that's got a bunch of model railroad sets with things that get activated when you press buttons. Even the modern-day age me was pretty darned happy with this.

Glance inside the fire station, which houses the antique cars used for parades, including one that's still dressed for Christmas and one that's got a couple of kid figurines riding it.

Dalmation figure and some kind of standee set up inside the fire station. I have no explanation for this phenomenon.

Goosey Ganders Castle: wait, who's Goosey Ganders? I don't know. But according to the park history they had for years let ducks inhabit this enclosure, fending off the many patrons who asked why not geese instead. And the answer is, of course: something. Anyway now they have geese again in the goose castle.

Trivia: A space shuttle pilot in training might expect to simulate ten landings in one 90-minute practice session. Source: Sky Walking: An Astronaut's Memoir, Tom Jones.

Currently Reading: Mission to Saturn: Cassini and the Hugyens Probe, David M Harland.

PS: Reading the Comics, July 7, 2018: Mutt and Jeff Relettering Scandal Edition as I actually look at the word balloons.

Denver has two major amusement parks. So which to visit on the first of our three full days in town? Lakeside had a high priority since we weren't too sure it would be around next year. Elitch Gardens, meanwhile? That's probably not going anywhere. (It just went somewhere 25 years ago, the whole park moving to a new location slightly less land-constricted.) Saturdays are generically the busier day for amusement parks, so if Lakeside was having staffing problems then Friday would probably make for better riding. But --- Lakeside's web site warned that the Friday would have groups. I think they warned school groups and maybe some corporate group. Fair warning. These make places crazy, busy and full of impossibly dense groups of slow-moving people who all want to be on the same roller coaster train but can't organize well enough to do that. So Elitch it was!

Elitch originally opened in 1890. In 1995, the landlocked park relocated to a new spot, downtown and beside railroad yards, but less constrained. It was owned by Six Flags for a decade, then sold to (ultimately) a real estate company, then sold to the guy who owns the Denver Nuggets. It's still operated by Premier Parks, a different company from the one that was Six Flags's corporate overlords. Premier Parks also owns Clementon Park, something I think we knew when we visited that South Jersey park back in 2013.

We got to the park on a blazingly hot, sunny day and were grateful to have a huge, pitch-black car to ride around in. The park is downtown; we had the weird sensation of driving towards the skyscrapers and over good-sized bridges before getting our first look at the place. And this was where they went because the old park had been landlocked. Well. We stepped through the entrance gate to a huge rotunda that was obviously the carousel building. It was not the carousel building. It was the gift shop. We started the day there, figuring to better scout out what we might want to buy. We ended up failing to buy anything, as we put of getting something --- the flat, brass Christmas ornaments bunny_hugger collects --- to the end of the night when it turned out the gift shop closed early. Had we known, we'd have done this thing differently.

The actual carousel building was behind this. It's Philadelphia Toboggan Company carousel #51, installed in the original park in 1928. A plaque at the ride says it was ``to replace the original carousel purchased by Mary Elitch'' but doesn't explain what happened to the replaced one. (That one, PTC #6, relocated to the Kit Carson County Fairgrounds in 1928. Three horses and a donkey were stolen off it in 1981, but recovered.) It's in fine shape. In a novelty, the chariots are actually connected to the horses in front of them. At least, there's a yoke that leads out in front of the leading horses as if they were pulling.. You're not allowed to ride the chariot-pulling horses now, possibly ever (they don't have saddles). But it's a touch of realism to the chariots that stands out. The chariots themselves lean over backwards, slanted, so that if you sit in them (we did, one ride) you're on an incline. This might be more authentic to an actual two-wheel chariot's ride.

Elitch Gardens, like Kentucky Kingdom, was a Six Flags park and I feel like there's signs of that yet. Mostly in the decor of things like the building fronts around its entrance midway. Apparently Six Flags had built the Trocadero (``1917'', says the outright lie of its sign), a theater that uses the name of the old park's ballroom and dance hall. We would see a fine magic show there, one that did some nice metamorphosis and disappearance bits, and that also did a stunt about destroying and repairing an audience member's sneaker that was fun. But both of us realized the basics of how the shoe-replacement was done. And how they managed to have a destroyed shoe that looked like the volunteer's actual shoe. We don't go looking for chances to spoil the magic; sometimes, though, you just spot it. The Trocadero has pictures in the lobby of performers who'd done shows at the old Elitch Theater. Some of them are pretty impressive: Sarah Bernhardt, ``leading lady of the 1906 season'', co-starring with Douglas Fairbanks Senior. Edward G Robinson, 1922 season. Frederic March, the 1927, 1928, and 1929 seasons. Some sound more like jokes you might make: Chloric Leachman, 1982 (for the one-woman show Grandma Moses). Some have gone beyond all ability to appreciate except ironically: William Shatner, 1975 season, in a picture that could only be more 1975 if it were served inside a brick of Jell-O on top of a fondue pot as a Let's Make A Deal prize.

We really wanted to get to the roller coasters, naturally, but were distracted by stuff like Hollywood and Vine. This is a Breakdance ride, a spinning-cars-on-spinning-axles thing. This is a fun thing we've been on in a few places; what caught our eye about it particularly was that the park signs out front warned it wasn't running that day. So something went well for them that they weren't expected, apparently.

Also we wanted to ride Dragonwing, a Chance-made Aviator. It's this two-seater ride, with wings on the outside that you the rider can adjust, as in a Flying Scooters, to lean inward or fly outward. It's dragon-themed with these nice bat-like wings (apparently when the park was Six Flags Elitch Garden it was a Batman-themed ride), and a sweet logo of a dragon clinging to the word Dragonwing. As we were being secured we noticed a sign in front warning that the combined passenger weight in one car couldn't be more than 300 pounds. Not saying bunny_hugger and I are fat, but, the two of us are more than 300 pounds. The ride operator told us not to worry about it; the sign wasn't right anyway. ... all right, then. We weren't expecting the place to be quite such a Pennsylvania park. (The seats are sized for adults. No idea how they figure two adults could fit in under 300 pounds. 400 would be less unrealistic.)

The sun and heat was such that we expected it would rain. It did. Before that, we figured to ride the Ghost Blasters, another Sally interactive dark ride where your carful of people shoot lasers at targets and make stuff happen. The queue area suggested that when the ride gets a line it gets an enormous line, and it was one of the handful of enclosed rides, so getting on that before the rush was a good move.

And while we were nearby, we got to our first roller coaster of the day, Mind Eraser. Though we had never ridden it before we knew it well. It's the same model ride as Thunderhawk at Michigan's Adventure, where the restraints always batter our ears. Also the same ride as Infusion at Blackpool Pleasure Beach, and Batman The Ride at Six Flags Mexico. We'll surely get to others of the ride; its twins are also at Darien Lake in New York and at Six Flags New England, Canada's Wonderland, and Six Flags America. It's a bit of a headbanger, just like the twins of it that we have ridden.

The ride queue's sign has a clock in it. It runs in reverse, something not so obvious at a glance as there aren't any numerals on the sign. It left me confused about just how it was earlier in the day than I thought until I did work this out. Then I could act all smug and ``oh yeah, didn't you know?'' when bunny_hugger noticed. (I didn't.)

Trivia: Britain's King William IV spoke constantly during, and walked out early from, the funeral service for King George IV. Source: The Invention of Tradition, Editors Eric Hobsbawm, Terence Ranger.

Currently Reading: Mission to Saturn: Cassini and the Hugyens Probe, David M Harland. It's comfort reading, for me, a lot of talk about what mass spectrometers found and trivia about stuff like those moons that keep swapping orbits and stuff. It looks like history but it doesn't even hint at answering, ``why did these people do this thing in this way at this time'' and that's sometimes what I need.

PS: How To Calculate A Square Root By A Method You Will Never Actually Use, a technically practical and useable post!

PPS: Getting into Storybook Land.

OK, but seriously, the entrance: bunny_hugger using the doorway in that was not roped off that morning.

The locking gates to keep your kids together until you've paid for their entry. Why yes, that mouse and that bird do look like they come from somewhere, somehow. The music that plays is, if I remember correctly, ``Hail to the Chief''.

And here's what's through the door at Storybook Land. Go ahead and re-create this in Roller Coaster Tycoon. Off center-right is the Little Red Schoolhouse where Mary brings her little lamb --- spot the lamb? --- and behind that a watering-can building that's a frozen-ice stand.

Some more scenes. Three men in a tub, in a little pond by a mock mill. The mill was for 'The Merry Miller', a nursery rhyme I don't know anything about. We got pictures taken from inside Moby Dick's mouth and wondered why not Monstro. Looked into Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater's shell. Into the crooked house. The Old Woman Who Lived In A Shoe's shoe. A mysterious bit of doggerel:

Little Tommy Tittlemouse
Lived in a little house
He caught fishes
In other men's ditches

He had a fishing pole and hooked 'fish', above a water canal that was almost empty. We never heard anything like this bit before.

There's a miniature railroad that goes around the park, and we took a loop on that. It offered some good views of the far side of rides and features and also a good view of Hey-Diddle-Diddle and that barn. Then into the Gingerbread House for a snack. It's a gorgeous building, by our lights, since it looks like it hasn't been changed since the 80s and that tickled us. The room had a bunch of news clippings. What compelled our interest was the front page from the 1st of July, 2012, exactly five years before our visit. The articles were about the derechos that had swept through South Jersey the day before, and that had destroyed many trees and damaged rides at the park. As we were marrying, this gorgeous little park was being torn up by intense winds and severe rain. We felt that weird sense of knowing exactly where we were and exactly what we were doing while this event we had no idea happened went on.

More features. Mary's little lamb, and the schoolhouse. They had an actual lamb, in a sandy pen. While we watched the lamb picked up a plastic dish (a feed dish?) and walked along the perimeter, rattling the dish against the bars, just like in a prison movie.

We walked to the far back of the park, with some trepidation about the promise there were ``animals'' there. We got stopped along the way. They had this fun ``Pirate Blasta'' feature. Water cannons shooting at pirate-ship-themed stuff. For a change of pace we actually played it, and had a great time shooting stuff so it knocked over. We had never seen this before. We would see it again at a park later in the day, and then again several more times over the summer.

Anyway, past this Bader-Meinhoff game, we got to the Billy Goats Gruff. This had two elevated little houses, connected by a rope bridge, and a couple of Nubian goats prowling around. You can feed them, too: drop your pellets into a bucket and wheel the bucket, by a pulley, up to the goat's houses. Or just put the pellets in, since the goats have figured out how to pull the bucket up themselves. We were delighted by the goats' good understanding of just what the pulleys were and how to work them. Also by what a charming, personable face the goat we spent the most time near had.

We went onward, worried that we'd find in other pens that there animals a park like this couldn't possibly keep reasonably well. No reason for concern, though. In the other pens they had some more turkeys and some deer, animals that they ought to be able to handle and in pens that looked about the size and kind of terrain that I'd see at the Popcorn Park Zoo. It was a palpable relief that we didn't have to worry about, like, their having a polar bear or something crazy like that. (I did worry that they might have, in the past, kept something like a tiger. But if they had then they must have completely ripped out the old enclosure. Or they kept it dangerously vulnerable.)

A statue that only makes sense in South Jersey or Eastern Pennsylvania: Phillis and Phil, statues of Phillies fans that used to be outside Veterans Stadium, back before that place was torn down. They're now standing, or sitting, beside some seats saved from the park, and holding a Phillies 2008 World Champs penant.

The park has one other tour-around-the-park ride, the Candy Cane Express. It's a long motorized car ride and I thought that'd be good for maybe seeing the park from an angle you can't get to on foot. Not so much, it turns out; the Express didn't go on any paths that we couldn't have walked on. But it made for a good review of the park's terrain and probably it'd be a good way for someone to get acquainted with the place if they didn't have time to walk it themselves. On the other hand, it's not like it's so big a place that walking it would take unreasonably long.

We went for another ride at the carousel, and then I noticed something curious at a picnic pavilion. I thought it might be a vending machine, but it looked weird. It was weirder than that. It was a little automated puppet show, the kind we might see at Marvin's Marvellous Mechanical Museum. It ... had something to do with a witch and Santa Claus and elves and ... I don't know, but the whole thing was put inside a cartoon-styled castle. One more bit of curious charm for the park.

And so we went to our last look around, getting pictures of the backup electrical generator building which I know sounds like a dull thing. But understand, they had a statue of Benjamin Franklin out in front of it. And we admired the Mother Goose statue, and a swarm of kids coming up to take their photos there and then to flee, and we watched sparrows duck into the ``folds'' of the Mother Goose statue's dress.

Somewhere after this, the time passed 5:00, and the park was officially closed. We left, slowly as we could, after the first wonderful park of our day.

Trivia: In 1956 the United States Merchant Marine had 3,083 deepwater vessels of 1,000 or more Gross Register Tonnage capacity. By 2005 there were 412, about a quarter of which were used for Jones Act-protected trades. (There were another thirty or so technically US-flagged as part of the Maritime Security Program.) Source: Box Boats: How Container Ships Changed The World, Brian J Cudahy.

Currently Reading: Binary Fusion and the Millennium Bug, Beth Bridgman. Oh yeah, gimme those hermaphroditic Christ-clones rewriting all humanity's DNA so the worldwide network of Oprah Winfrey fans can make her show tapings appear, live and unedited, on every station ever. That's what I was reading this for!

PS: It wouldn't be an amusement park without a little something for porsupah!

More skeptical animals: two of the rabbits have had enough company, thanks, and would like their distance and to let their heads melt into their dewlaps.

The third rabbit has had so much of even that she wants a layer of rabbits between her and the space between those rabbits and any people.

Rabbit very worried that someone will ask what she's doing in the chicken enclosure.

PPS: The Summer 2017 Mathematics A To Z: Zeta Function, attempting the greatest of all challenges: to say something about the Riemann-Zeta Function, core of the Riemann Hypothesis, that hasn't been said already on every mathematics blog ever.