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austin_dern

June 2025

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In the early evening we took the miniature train ride. It putters along the perimeter of Lake Rhonda. Wikipedia says its locomotives ``Puffing Billy'' and ``Whistling Tom'' were from the 1904 St Louis World's Fair, which would be quite the historic touch to enjoy about the park. It also speaks of the park having the ``world's first miniature gauge diesel locomotive'', leaving completely unclear just what was pulling our train. I have a picture with an engine labelled ``Silver Speed'' and that's got a shiny metallic covering. With a name like that it's got to be the miniature diesel, which Wikipedia says was inspired by the California Zephyr.

The park looks grand from across the lake. Across the lake looks less grand from the park; it's mostly a Walmart. Apparently Ben Krasner, father of the current owner, sold the land on that side. It became a shopping mall for decades, and then a deserted mall, and then was reborn as box stores. So there isn't the deserted wilderness or campgrounds that might be nice to see from afar. But then this is a city park, and that city nature gives it much of its identity. And we could see the whole of the park huddled up, it seemed, beside the expanse of water on the far side of the loop.

To our regret, we failed to take another ride on the train when it was night. The park may not have all the lights it should. But it has many of them, and our failure to see that fully spread is one of our handful of outright mistakes that come from oversights, rather than from things turning out other than how we planned.

They've got a fine Matterhorn, upstaged by the beauty of its sign. And a Flying Dutchman swing ride that was weird. Its cars were shaped like Dutch privateers. And the swing drops low enough that the boats actually rest on the concrete base, without the threat of skidding or rocking as you load or unload. Haven't seen its like before, and the ride gives off the air of being relatively new. This was among the things that encouraged us to think the park was doing well, and that it was even expanding.

While exploring this side of the park we found greenhouses, filled with plants. It's a reminder that the park, for all that it might be poor, is not badly decorated. It's got good flowers and shrubs and bushes, and well-kept lawns. It's got statues and fountains that look plausibly a century old, and if they seem worn out, that's all right. A century-old fountain should look like it's had a lot of water pass through it. The park's also got odder little bits of decor, like statues of an elephant stretched out on a tree trunk or things like that.

As night settled in the park started to light up. And maybe the park has only half the illumination it should. It had illumination to spare. All amusement parks are beautiful at night, I suppose, but such a gorgeous park --- the 1930s buildings were designed by architect Richard L Crowther, later renowned for building the first Cinerama theaters and pioneering residential solar technology. Add the emotion-heightening powers of night and a playful crowd, and decorate it with neon and LED, and you have a powerfully beautiful thing. Much of what we would do was to just delight in being where we were, seeing what we saw, and we almost barely needed to ride anything.

And still, riding what we could while the park stayed open. Which started to be mysterious. Apparently the park has no set closing time; like Kennywood or Idlewild, it closes when the night has gone on long enough. I had fully expected the day to be done by 9 pm, and it wasn't. Well, or then 10 pm. But the park was still quite crowded then and showed no signs of closing. We would go back to the Wild Chipmunk and to the baffling carousel, and we came over to rides like the Satellite aware that anything might be the final moments of the park's night.

And they kept not being. We thought for sure, given how the crowd was thinning out and redemption games were closing down, that the park might close at 11 pm, and that still wasn't happening. A couple of the rides shut down after that, and the restaurant --- featuring, Wikipedia says, a backbar salvaged from the Denver Union Station --- closed. But we didn't see any sign that the biggest stuff was done, or about done, for the night.

Well, the park outlasted us. We were tired enough after two days of heavy park-going that finding the last minute of the park that night wasn't interesting us. Not as long as the Cyclone was closed and showed no signs of opening. (I thought, once, that I saw a test train running on it. But if it did, the test didn't pass, or they decided the night was too advanced to reopen the ride.) So after a last circuit of all the beauty of the park, and attempt to understand the carousel, we said our goodbyes to the park. But with the plan in mind that we might just pop in the next day and get some more Cyclone time in. We wouldn't, but we could not know that when we did exit.

The Tower of Jewels may have few of its blanket of lights working. But those which make up its 'REDIT' commanding invite are among those that work.

It's a good thought to have for a sweet and lovely place like this.

Trivia: Something like ten to twelve calves would need to be skinned to produce enough vellum for a 150-page book, before the widespread use of paper. Source: Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud, Peter Watson.

Currently Reading: The Complete Peanuts, 1950 - 2000, Charles Schulz. Editor Gary Groth. Miscellaneous side things from the whole run of the strip, like the comic book stories that Schulz actually wrote and drew, or advertising material, or little books that're long out of print.


PS: And now the last pictures of Storybook Land, great as the place was; it closed at 5 pm, a family-friendly hour. (I was surprised to have a last-minutes-of-the-park main essay and photo auxiliary. How often does that happen? At least as how I had got stuff prepared before everything went wrong.)

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Birdception! Sparrow we caught sitting up on the Mother Goose with Goose statue out near the front of the park.


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Pair of sparrows nesting within the 'clothing' of Mother Goose.


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And, to close: a panoramic shot, because I just do not learn, of Storybook Land as seen from the front. Mother Goose and her sparrows are center-left; the Lil Red Schoolhouse is center-right. Gingerbread House Snack Bar on the way left.


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 [profile] 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.

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


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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.


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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?


Well. Where were we. Lakeside Park. Great place to be. Cyclone is the biggest roller coaster there and, thanks to it going down early, our biggest disappointment. Unless you consider Zyklon, not yet opened, as a disappointment. And yes, there is that curious linguistic coincidence between the park's oldest standing coaster and newest standing coaster both being ``cyclone'' in different languages. Zyklon's the name of the model of the new ride; no idea what the new one will be named, if and when it opens.

The other major coaster and the one we rode the most is the Wild Chipmunk. This is a wild mouse roller coaster. Also one of the original generation of wild mouse roller coasters; it dates to 1955. These are rides with small cars that can, in principle, fit two people. They make tight, hairpin turns and then have sudden drops for the end of the ride. Run for maximum capacity, these cars barely even stop; you just get into or out of them as they roll slowly through the station. They're always popular; they're thrilling rides without ever looking frightening. (And they have low capacity, since the trains are usually single cars.) The Wild Chipmunk has three cars. Each car has a name. With that established you now know the three cars' names.

Our first time riding [profile] bunny_hugger and I took separate cars, which seemed wise enough as they were pretty tight fits. Our second time we looked at the cars and the bobsled-style seating and wondered if we might fit together. We asked the ride operator who looked us over and shrugged and was fine if we gave it a try. ``I dunno, give it a try'' is a Pennsylvania Parks-level weird reaction to roller coaster seating. If we were small enough we could fit, one in front of the other. We sit this way on log flumes (of course) and have fit on, for example, Flitzer rides where that's normal.

Here, though? We didn't quite fit. Not well. [profile] bunny_hugger sat more on my legs than on the seat. There's no seat belt. There's no lap bar. For an ordinary wild mouse that's fine. Their track layout doesn't need seat belts or lap bars except as a psychological benefit. But this ... is ... kind of outside the bounds of normal seat riding. We felt we had made a horrible mistake as we ratcheted up the lift hill. There wasn't anything we could do except, of course, hold on.

[profile] bunny_hugger was probably not in real danger of falling out of the car. The ride motions just do not have the negative-gee that would make that plausible. What she was in danger of doing was slamming down hard on her seat, which is to say, my legs. And by so doing to smash my knees into the sides of the car. She did not have a comfortable ride; she was sitting on bone instead of cushioned chair. I did not have a comfortable ride; I had a lovely adult bun smashing into my legs and smashing my legs into metal with every sharp turn or sudden drop. And yes, we both were grabbing hold of the sides as hard as we could, in case an errant hop somehow raised [profile] bunny_hugger's center of gravity the eighteen inches needed to fly out of the car. This was of course impossible, which is not to say the fear of it was not imminent.

This was a crazy thing for us to do. We are glad to have done it; it is the sort of thing that becomes a roller-coaster tall tale. It is surely the most wild and honestly dangerous thing since [profile] bunny_hugger's and my first roller coaster together, the Wild Mouse at Casino Pier, when my then-obese frame meant the lap bar was a good foot or so away from restraining her in any way. But we got out of the ride feeling thankful that nothing worse had come of it than temporary agony to our poor legs.

We would ride again, of course, and in separate cars thereafter. In the queue for one wait we happened to be in front of a park employee enjoying some off time with a favorite ride. And we got to talking about roller coasters and ones all of us had been on. Roller coaster fandom is a common fate in amusement park workers; hard to guess if workers are naturally fans or if fans get jobs in amusement parks. He let us know that the new roller coaster was not likely to operate in June. But they hoped very much to get it ready for inspection with the rest of the park's rides in July.

Apparently local lore has it that Lakeside Park's rides aren't inspected. The next day the daughter of the couple hosting us asked if we weren't afraid riding un-inspected rides like that. But no, of course not. No state is yet run by Republicans so insane they won't inspect amusement park rides. And it happens we did notice the inspection stickers on many of the attractions, and that they were issued in early July of 2017. Given how few amusement parks Colorado has we wondered how it took them that late in the year to get to them. But there's likely many county and local fairgrounds with rides, and family amusement centers, and all that, each needing their turn.

Other local lore --- according to [profile] bunny_hugger's brother, who went to college in Colorado --- has it that one of the Wild Chipmunk's cars had fallen off the track and into the lake. Roller coasters falling off tracks is a common legend. It basically can't happen; the wheels are designed to hug the track above, below, and often sideways. (Yes, if the wheel box collapses or the track breaks the train can derail, but you're not going to call that flying off the track, except figuratively.) Falling into the lake --- well, that's an interesting variant. But that also couldn't possibly be; the Wild Chipmunk is nowhere near Lake Rhoda, not even if you imagine a roller coaster car at maximum speed acting like a Dukes of Hazzard cliffhanger. We told [profile] bunny_hugger's brother, who saw but never actually visited the park when he had the chance, this. And he clarified the legend: that by ``the lake'' people meant the puddle that would form in the ground when there was abundant rain, or snow melt. This one can imagine having a base for. Take one of the cars off the track for extensive maintenance and then let spring melt rise around it? And consider that you can see into the park and see this ride from the Interstate running beside it? Okay, that legend makes sense, but is still nonsense.

Wild Chipmunk has two signs. One is just the ride's name, in blocky-letter lights, at the top of the ride. Another is the queue's ride sign. The no-longer-needed ticket booth is (of course) a beauty, this box with a curvy check mark that strives for Googie architecture. The sign by that, partly obscured by trees, is a pink dot with 'wild chipmunk' in neon lights in the style of a UPA cartoon's opening title. Gorgeous, throughout.

In one of our nighttime rides, as we walked toward the Wild Chipmunk, I saw something and cried out ``jackrabbit''! I was wrong, but in my defence, I was thinking roller coasters and Jackrabbit is a once-common name for roller coasters. It was a rabbit, though, a cottontail who apparently lives in the area and is sufficiently calm around crowds of people to go about its business in the evening. And calm enough to let me get several flash photographs before deciding that it had enough of this attention and was going off --- somewhere. We love to find wildlife at parks. Rabbits are a special delight.

Trivia: The Joseph-Louis Lagrange map projection, invented by Johann Heinrich Lambert, is conformal except at the poles; all the meridians and parallels are circular arcs, except for the equator and prime meridian. Source: Maps and Civilization: Cartography in Culture and Society, Norman J W Thrower.

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


PS: More of Storybook Land.

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A lucky discovery, in that pavilion near the carousel: this coin-operated dancing marionette machine. It's a complicated and pretty long song, considering.


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Marionette witch who flies over some of the dancers in a scene I really couldn't tell you much about in the coin-op machine above.


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Mouse caught running down a clock that's just struck one despite it being either 12 or 1:40.


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

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

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


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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.


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


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


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


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


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


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


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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.

Let me get back to things. Pictures that would've run the last two days if life had gone better. Storybook Land and some of the stuff to see and eat at, and one of its oldest attractions, something we didn't appreciate when we visited.

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Pinnochio, beside a water fountain, which is an arrangement that makes sense? I don't know. We have to put stuff somewhere.


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Inside the Gingerbread House Snack Bar, looking out. Most of the framed pictures are magazine or newspaper articles about the park. One of them is about the derecho that hit the 1st of July, 2012 --- exactly five years before our visit --- and that gave us such a weird sense of time-binding. I mean, how often do you hear about something eventful in one place while knowing quite well where you were and what you were doing for reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with it?


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I promised you more repurposed fast-food statues and here he is: A [Bob's?] Big Boy. I assume Bob's because that's just the Big Boy franchise owner I always assumed was there all the time.


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One of Storybook Land's original attractions, the Lil Red Schoolhouse. Mary went to school there. Note her lamb off on the right.


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Mary's Lamb is interested in getting attention from [profile] bunny_hugger. Also while we visited the lamb picked up its food dish and walked most of the outside of the enclosure, banging the dish against the iron bars, like it was in a prison movie.


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Anti-forest-fire propaganda poster inside the Lil Red Schoolhouse. It's got a pretty large bunny count, considering.


Also: Reading the Comics, July 21, 2018: Infinite Hotels Edition.

Trivia: John Couch Adams, who had calculated a projected position for the trans-Uranian planet, was able to visit Astronomer Royal George Biddell Airy twice on the 21st of October, 1845. The first time Airy was out. The second time Airy was in, but at dinner, and his butler had not communicated that Adams would be calling again. Source: In Search of Planet Vulcan: The Ghost in Newton's Clockwork Universe, Richard Baum, William Sheehan.

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.

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.

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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.


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


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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.


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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.


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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.


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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.


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


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


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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.

Lakeside Park's biggest and oldest roller coaster, and the one we most wanted to ride, is the Cyclone. It was built in 1940, a strange year to build roller coasters. It's wooden. Its station made us think of Conneaut Lake Park's Blue Streak. And kept making us think of it. The station still has manually operated levers. There's one train running and one, clearly older-style train, shunted off to the side track. There's a painting of the ride's long, twisty path, with lights meant to indicate where the ride is, though the bulbs are burned out. You launch by going into an S-shaped covered tunnel, with a couple cracks in the ceiling breaking the darkness.

It's not a straightforward out-and-back roller coaster like Blue Streak is. It goes out, and then arches to the left as it drops, and rises again for a tight turn, rattles out along several loops toward the lake, twists back around and comes buonding up and down back to the launch station. It's a twisty, dizzying ride; it quite fits the Cyclone name. The station hasn't got individual seat queues; you just get onto the platform and have to take your chances for a seat. It's very like Blue Streak at Conneaut Lake Park this way; also like Kennywood's Jackrabbit. The ride sign outside, warning how tall you need to be to ride, is a Dorothy Gale with Toto; it'd be hard to fit the theme better.

We loved our ride on it. And other people clearly love the ride. It had a modest queue, spilling out onto the midway; these old-style parks were not designed for 45-minute waits. That's all right. We figured to walk around the park and take in some more, and then come back to ride Cyclone again. This was a sad mistake.

When we came back to the roller coaster, after having gotten to most of the other major rides, we saw that most ominous of things. It was the queue of people turning and walking away, saddened. A train, eventually, finally pulled in and let out exhausted passengers. Some of the maintenance people walked around inside. Two started walking the track, along the direction the train came from. The ride was closed.

It would stay closed the rest of the night. We saw a lot of discussion about it. We saw an older woman whom we supposed to be Rhoda Krasner consulting with management-looking people and maintenance-looking people. And talking more; it went on a good fifteen minutes or so, as we sat opposite the ride hoping for signs of the ride opening. It would not. We were heartbroken. Bad enough to not get to ride this at night. Surely the park, however rough time it might have replacing light bulbs, would be spectacular at night, and this would be the tallest and most nearly park-circumnavigating ride to see it. But to not even get a second ride? We cursed ourselves for choosing to see the rest of the park instead of repeating Cyclone until we got tired of it.

We had a consoling thought. It was only Saturday. We had another full day in town. We had plans for Sunday, but not ones that should take all day. We could get back to Lakeside the next day. With admission just $4.00 each, why not come back? We could even drop in an hour before the park closed and buy a couple rides just on Cyclone. If it were running then, something unpredictable. But the cost of being wrong would be negligible, considering. We could console ourselves with the thought that, well, if all else failed, we had another day, and the ride might be open then.

Sunday was cold and rainy. Intermittent rain, yes, but ever-less-intermittent as the day wore on. By the time we were back in Denver it was raining basically continuously. We did go out to Lakeside Park, just in case they were somehow staying open on a cold, rainy, muddy Sunday night. They weren't, of course. The park stood there dark and empty and closed. We had nothing to do but accept the sad state of affairs. [profile] bunny_hugger declared it was worse that we had gotten one ride on Cyclone and no more; if we hadn't got any, it would be emotionally easy to decide the trip had failed and we must try again. But now, that we had at least had one ride on the most important roller coaster of the area?

It's still tempting. Yes, we had reached all the major amusement park spots in Denver. But we would also find the city much more varied, more interesting, richer in stuff than we had expected. We regretted, not just for this, that we didn't schedule a longer trip to Denver.

It would be daft to go all the way back to Denver for one roller coaster, even one as great as this. Especially when there are spectacular parks and great roller coasters we have yet to get to. But what is a life that doesn't do some daft things?

Trivia: Early 19th-century Australian convicts, walking the penal treadmill for about twelve hours per day, would produce something like 70 watts of power and so would need about three thousand food-calories per day just to walk the treads. Source: Prime Mover: A Natural History of Muscle, Steven Vogel.

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


PS: And some more of the last hours of Storybook Land for us that day.

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This one took me, like, forever to get. Are you faster than I am? ... Meanwhile, behind it is a Merry Miller house that refers to ... something. I think we saw one of these at Idlewild, in Ligonier, Pennsylvania, too, but didn't get it then either. They really need nursery rhyme reminders on some of these.


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And here's one of the park's most beloved nursery rhymes: Moby Dick. Which ... uh ... yeah, but look, it's been there forever and the park wouldn't be recognizable without it, all right?


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Sneaking into the Crooked House, which has all sorts of crooked residents and furniture and all.


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. [profile] 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.

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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.


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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.


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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.


So looking back over my humor blog for the week. Really expected more of a response to my Imaginary Eras in French History piece but you know? Some of these things I write for myself, and I have to be content with that. And I totally am and am not at all insecure about it, I tell you.

So here's some more at Storybook Land and I hope you're enjoying the view since it's so gorgeous.

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Storybook Land's rock-a-bye-baby. If I understand right, they used to change the doll out fairly regularly, perhaps every year. Yes, I see the chicken wire keeping the baby safe despite it all.


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Little Red Riding Hood, and the Big Bad Wolf, animatronics that put on a pretty long show as I remember. Might do the whole why-grandmother-what-big-eyes-you-have routine, but I'm not sure.


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Snow White and some of the seven Dwarves in their home. Yes, they do all this certain aesthetic to it and hey isn't that a raccoon on the piano? (Or possibly certain breeds of cat.)


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Another view of the Dwarves. Feel like I know these characters from somewhere, you know?


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[profile] bunny_hugger at the standee in front of the Alice in Wonderland tunnel, which leads into the card maze shown a couple days back.


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White Rabbit statue posed just outside the Alice in Wonderland cave. And so now I really want to know: what was it painted like when the attraction first opened? Has it always looked like this? You can see evidence this thing is pretty old, from how the paint's worn down. So ... you know?


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Fluorescent paint and narration in the tunnel leading down into the Alice in Wonderland exhibit. It's a walk-through attraction with a lot of black-light stuff; you can see some of the key scenes painted in the distance on the right.


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Alice falling, as she pursues the White Rabbit. Also, [profile] bunny_hugger taking some snaps of all this.


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Statue scene of the Caterpillar giving his advice to, I'm pretty sure, one of The Shining twins.


Trivia: Scottish King James VI's 1603 ban on the MacGregor clan was not stricken from the statutes until 1774. Source: How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of how Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created our World and Everything In It, Arthur Herman.

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

PS: Reading the Comics, July 14, 2018: County Fair Edition and you can see how distracted I am by our rabbit concerns that this is as much as I wrote about the comics all week.

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 [profile] 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.

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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.


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


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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.


A small casualty of our day at Elitch Gardens: [profile] bunny_hugger's sunglasses. They came from a dollar store and now we had to find a new dollar store to replace them. This took more maneuvering than we figured because I drove right past the strip mall with the Dollar Tree in it, and traffic was too heavy to just turn around in any sensible fashion. But she found a nice pair tolerably close to the ones she liked. I got a pair of sunglasses too, since it had been really quite right that week. My trouble with sunglasses is they come in models that make me look like a cop, or that make me look like a member of Devo. Of course I went for the Devo one. (I jest. I look closer to Thomas Dolby.)

After we made the drive a modest bit away from our AirBnB hosts, there to ... no, not Lakeside Park. Lakeside Park turns out to be in walking distance of the place we stayed. We went to Casa Bonita.

If that name sounds faintly familiar you likely remember it from this episode of South Park. In it, Cartman obsesses with going to this crazypants-sounding Mexican restaurant that has, like, a fake cliff with divers and comedy gorilla acts and a haunted house and little flags you raise to get sopapillas brought right to you and all that, and to get there he plots some plot and ends up with like two minutes to take in the whole thing before federal, state, county, city, and local police carry him off to Punchline Jail. So it turns out the place is real and basically like you see in the cartoon.

The cartoon makes Casa Bonita out to be this shining castle in the midst of pawn shop squalor. Not so, really. It's in a strip mall, in a block of strip malls, mostly surrounded by fast-food and fast-casual dining. Next to the Casa Bonita is Adventure Dental Vision and Orthodontics, the place for parents to bring kids to the whiniest dental appointments of all the Rocky Mountain states. The experience has to be like going down to the Joann Fabric next to the Chuck-E-Cheese, only maybe four orders of magnitude higher, since Casa Bonita is so much bigger and weirder. Next to the dental place is another Dollar Tree. We had no idea. We were expecting Flash-animated pawn shops.

The frontage of the place is kind of a Mission-style tower, fair enough. The interior is somehow large enough to fit about fourteen baseball stadiums inside. The hype material says the place has a staff of three hundred and I find that entirely believable. Maybe even short-staffed. You enter through a long switchback of queues, implying just how crazy the place must get when every kids' birthday party in the county is going on at once. And place your order at the cashier. There's no getting in without ordering an entree, which runs about US$15. You can get cheaper and, probably, better Mexican food (this was about as good as we expect in [profile] bunny_hugger's parents' small mid-Michigan town). But, jeez, you're supporting the hiring of like three hundred employees here. It's cheap for that. The food's prepared right away and set to you on cafeteria trays. This is probably helped by the menu being pretty streamlined and simple. There's three vegetarian options, if they take the meat out of the prep of one of them.

The interior of the restaurant is this twisty maze of passages. Some lead to event rooms and we started out following one of those to some kind of family affair. Our mistake corrected we wandered around trying to figure out if we just seated ourselves or what, when a maitre d' came over and promised to lead us to the right table. I think we got into the main floor by the exit path or something like that.

The seating area is about eight hundred thousand different levels, some of them small enough to seat just two tables, some of them big enough to seat an elementary school class party. There's many different levels and paths and corners and inlets, some of them secluded inside gazebos or tucked behind half-walls or even features designed to look like caves. This place must take forever to check that everybody's cleared out at the end of the work day. There must be so many teens who figure a great stunt is to stay in after-hours.

From most of the seating areas on the main floor you can see the stage. And there, every 15 minutes, there's some kind of show. It might be a comic gunfight. It might be (at least when we were there) this comedy bit between a host, an ``animal trainer'', and his gorilla that oh sure he's got in control. It might be a show of trick diving, as there is indeed a thirty-foot waterfall and small pool built into the center of the place. Other times of day there's parades and pirate shows. Advice we got was that Casa Bonita takes about three hours to quite fully see, and yeah, that's about right. Just the shows alone are maybe an hour and a half until you've seen the day's routine.

The comedy shows are not subtle, dense, fast-paced wordplay. They're designed to be appreciated by semi-feral packs of kids watching from 75 feet away and partly obstructed by palm trees. So, you know, we loved it. But we were also going in to see a crazypants Mexican-based restaurant/theme-park hybrid. Just want to manage expectations for what you see. The diving is stunning, since it's diving but it's also into what looks like a terribly enclosed space. I suppose it's not really any more enclosed than the diving show at any amusement park. That there's cave wall settings and tables of people eating all around it makes it look more perilous, is all.

The tables have little flags on foot-tall wooden masts, to raise if you need a server for anything. Refills on sodas or, for adults, margaritas. Or, for dessert, which can be anything but is going to be sopapillas. In principle, unlimited sopapillas that are, indeed, fresh and hot and incredibly good. We naively thought the moist towelettes brought us with the first pack were to make sure we had clean hands before diving into the finger food. The sopapillas are served with squeeze-tubes of honey. You see where our horrible mistake comes in now, I trust.

While the dining floor is vast and labyrinthine it is not the whole of Casa Bonita, somehow. There's a wealth of attractions beside that. I've riffed on it growing into a theme park and while that's overstating it, it has got a lot of the things you might see in a theme park's midway. A caricature artist. A snack stand. A puppet theater that put on a weirdly plotless show about how of course one dinosaur didn't forget the other's birthday: he was going to Casa Bonita with him! A pinata, for kids to play around. A walk-through haunted house (well, haunted cave) attraction that was not quite too small for me. And that does end with you walking into a dragon's mouth.

An arcade, too. Mostly Skee-Ball, redemption games, and video games. We wondered if there might be pinball. Hoped, really. Then we realized if it had any pinball game it would be the South Park pinball. Casa Bonita has wholeheartedly embraced this one episode of the show, with Cartman dolls stuck in places he was seen on the show, and references to the show all over the place. We had to wonder whether they knew about the episode ahead of time or whether there were some hurried calls between staff the day the episode dropped. ... Anyway, so we realized if they had any pinball at all, it would be the South Park game, which was rushed out when the show first came on and who knew how long this cartoon with the obscene Colorforms would last. And then realized that absolutely under no circumstances would that pinball be here. Casa Bonita is a kids' place. There is not a single thing, including the sound made when you've dropped a quarter into the game, that's kid-friendly about the South Park pinball. And indeed, there's no pinball machines there. Too bad.

There is a lot of place here. We spent nearly three hours and we think we at least laid eyes on it all, but that's hard to be sure about. I mean, we found not just a passage behind the waterfall but that there were multiple booths there, for people who wanted to eat somewhere they couldn't see the shows? Hard to be quite sure. Maybe just space because it sometimes gets that busy. And still more stuff. Penny-smashing machines. Kiddie rides, horses and donkeys and trains and stuff. A ``Treasure Room'' in which you can venture up to the chest full of prizes and withdraw a bulk-mix candy. It's so delightful. Is it ridiculous? Yes. Is it worth getting to? For us, absolutely.

I have no idea how they can fit this floor plan into a strip mall. Nor how they can possibly do enough business to maintain the staff they need. Which is probably why this is the last Casa Bonita of a chain that at one point very nearly reached half a dozen instances. Some of their merchandise still listed them as being at Denver - Kansas City. I don't have any reason to think this one is in any particular danger.

Trivia: The 1933 invention of the filleting machine made redfish worth catching. By 1951 redfish represented about 70 percent of all fish landed in Gloucester, Massachusetts (home of Gorton Foods). Source: Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World, Mark Kurlansky.

Currently Reading: How To Read Nancy: The Elements Of Comics In Three Easy Panels, Paul Karasik, Mark Newgarden. Which I had been looking at even before the new writer made Nancy briefly Internet famous. The writers seem to be coming to the strip from an art-critic background, as opposed to a comics-critic background, so the perspective is a little weird and they just assume I have any idea what Formalism is about (so far; when I get to a second chapter they might explain terms common to the critiquing of art in ways that ignorants like me can understand and that expert readers will know to just skim over).

PS: I Don't Have Any Good Ideas For Finding Cube Roots By Trigonometry, so there's limits to just how brilliantly brilliant and clever I can feel about last week, but I still like what I did.


PPS: On to Storybook Land's thrill ride!

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The house of bricks from which the Three Little Pigs sing about not being afraid of the big-bad-wolf, you know, just like in the iconic Disney cartoon.


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And here's the Three Little Pigs, each holding up a symbol of their house-making ability. It looked like the same model used for the pig at Bowcraft Park.


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A closer view of the watering-can building that as you can see also sells Italian ice.


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 [profile] bunny_hugger's parents for this sort of thing. But [profile] 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, [profile] 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 [profile] 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. [profile] 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 [profile] 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.

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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.


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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.


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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.


Of the stuff run on my mathematics blog the last week it's mostly been Reading the Comics stuff. That's all right. I think my Reading the Comics stuff has been better the last couple months. Also the thing that wasn't includes this great scheme I noticed for calculating square roots and I want people to notice it. So go and notice already, okay? Like right now. Here, I'll help and give you a hint where to notice.

Seriously, though, I think this is a really great square root scheme. Anyway, you know What's Going On In Dick Tracy? Is The Green Hornet Eating Bread? April - July 2018 was kind of a weird couple months. Now here's some more Storybook Land.

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And the roller-coaster high point of Storybook Land: Bubbles the Coaster. Really the sign won us over, although it does leave us the question: so why is Bubbles blue on the sign but green on the track? Also is the roller coaster named Bubbles The Coaster? Or Bubbles, with The Coaster specifying what it is? But if it's a coaster then why is it also a dragon? We have so many further questions.


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Oh yeah, so, while Bubbles the Coaster rides, you go past a house (Bubbles's house?) and the house shoots out soap bubbles which are a lot of fun and not as menacing to the eyes while you're riding as you might fear.


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Duck! Local waterfowl who hang around the canals. I'm not sure if they're affiliated with the park --- there are duck feeding stations around --- or if they just know a good spot when they see it.


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Alice In Wonderland-themed maze that's mostly fun to walk around, but not that hard because the cards only comes up to my chest.


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Sign outside Sleeping Beauty's Castle. The dot above the 'i' caused me no end of trouble because my eye kept trying to interpret it as some feature in the squirrel's legs or nether regions and that is not a thought that ends well, believe me. As it is it almost looks like a censor bar, so, I think the sign has composition issues.


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And the much more normal interior of Sleeping Beauty's Castle. Note the fairy dolls on the left wall, set up on Christmas ornaments.


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And a side view of Sleeping Beauty's Castle. I imagine but do not know that this is used for live appearances by Sleeping Beauty in her non-sleep phase.


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Skeptical peacock, one of the animals kept in the park. They've got several peacocks, including a white one.


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Fiberglass squirrel having far too much of a reaction. Decoration on the top of a tree-themed swings ride.


Trivia: Michael Faraday's last experiment, conducted in March 1862, was studying the effect of magnetism on the spectrum of light emitted by incandescent substances. Faraday found nothing, but in 1897, Peter Zeeman --- with better tools --- discovered the splitting of light spectrums by magnetism and now named for him. Source: Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics, Nancy Forbes, Basil Mahon.

Currently Reading: Academia Waltz and Other Profound Transgressions, Berkeley Breathed. Ok, so Breathed has always been like 45% a cranky old man, even when he was a 20-year-old college student. And, oh Lord but student newspaper cartoonists do not have a handle on how to address sensitive matter. And, yes, standards for what is even acceptable to say in public about non-white, non-heterosexual characters have changed a lot since 1979. So. When nearly all [*] those failure modes converge, and what is meant to just be a gay halfback tells one of his homophobic teammates, ``Listen you ugly little toad ... I'm more woman than you'll ever have ... and more man than you'll ever be'', it kind of comes out as a weirdly good declaration of confident non-binary life. Like, I'd enjoy having that much self-confidence about myself.

[*] Oh wow but there are so many race fails in this and I'm honestly surprised Breathed published it without a lot more ``yeah, don't leave 20-year-olds chances to be funny without supervision and I hope I've done better since then''.

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 [profile] 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.

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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?


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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.


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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.


Elitch Gardens, the original, had a renowned roller coaster named Mister Twister. When they moved to the new location they didn't figure they could move the roller coaster. Even Knoebels, which managed to move another wooden roller coaster, couldn't work out how to do it. They had to build a near-duplicate (in mirror), which we've ridden and which is a great coaster. New Elitch Gardens built an original coaster, Twister II. A Denver-area friend of mine warned the new coaster was not a patch on the original, and even thought New Elitch Gardens skippable. But a wooden roller coaster is always going to appeal, however much it might not be some better wooden roller coaster.

We would ride it three times over our day there. Our first time the walk up the queue (lined with photographs of Old Elitch Garden's rides) was disrupted by the most unhappy sight of people walking backwards. The ride was going to have to shut down, as most would, for a while due to lighting within three miles. Thunderstorms were always a possibility, given the heat of the early-summer day. But the skies looked fairly clear, and we decided to wait it out a reasonable time in the hopes of a rapid reopening. And cursed ourselves for having dawdled in line, watching earlier trains from the coaster's infield. A roller coaster is always interesting, and Twister II's structure flexes in dramatic and incredibly movie-ready ways.

But the weather cleared soon! With the crowd thinned by the weather delay we felt confident not just getting a ride but waiting for a front-seat ride, and so we enjoyed the ride --- a good, twist-heavy experience --- from the front and congratulated ourselves on playing this almost perfectly. I think we both would rate Twister, Knoebel's mirror-clone of the original ride, as better. Fair enough. But this is a good solid ride, even if a few spots are a bit rough in that mid-90s wooden roller coaster fashion.

The second time we would ride the coaster, a few hours later, we timed things much more perfectly from our point of view. Just after our ride the roller coaster went down again, for another weather-induced pause. We got to wondering if we were some sort of operational jinx for Twister II. Probably not, although technically speaking the roller coaster did go down for the night one train after our third ride. That was because we chose to close the night on Twister II, mind you, and thought we might even have gotten the final ride of the night. So that one isn't our fault. But, yeah, technically all the times we rode Twister II the ride had to shut down for one reason or another. Pretty sure it wasn't our fault.

Elitch Gardens has other roller coasters, of course. All steel. Some of them were relocated from Old Elitch Gardens. One that we didn't get to ride was Blazin' Buckaroo, the kiddie coaster, in one of the more severely Old West-themed areas of the park. We know kiddie coasters sometimes don't allow unaccompanied adults. So we checked the sign for warnings, like, that adults are only allowed with children, or that there's a maximum height, or anything, and found nothing. The ride operator wouldn't let us on, though, and even seemed a little confused we were trying. I'm still not clear whether we'd have been allowed on had we accompanied a child, but, tch. Their park, their rules, of course. Just would like the rules to be clear. No sense our wasting everyone's time with something that could be clarified by a line on the ride sign.

A ride we've ridden elsewhere, and that [profile] bunny_hugger would have been just as happy to skip: Boomerang. It's a shuttle looper coaster, twin to Morey's Piers's Sea Serpent and Six Flags Mexico's Boomerang and Lake Compounce's Zoomerang and Hersheypark's Sidewinder. It pulls you up a long hill, drops you, you spin over and loop up and spiral around and go up a second hill, and then go backwards over the same thing. Between this and Mind Eraser, Elitch Gardens's roller coaster set was giving us thoughts of how head-bangy everything was.

Another roller coaster we'd ridden before, in other incarnations: Sidewinder. I knew it, at Great Adventure, as the twin Lightnin' Loops coasters. We'd ridden it at Blackpool as Revolution. The thing about the roller coaster is that its path starts out level, drops suddenly, loops, levels out again, and then repeats this backwards. To get to the launch platform you have to walk up, about five storeys' worth of metal gantry-style lift. (Lightnin' Loops was like that too.) This offers a great aerial view of the park. If you aren't afraid of being high up unenclosed and not in the nice comforting safety of a fast-moving roller coaster. Also the weather looked threatening; we worried whether the ride might close while we were waiting. Also while we were waiting we noticed a sign on a building, visible across the railroad yard, for MSU Denver. I knew that Oakland University, outside Detroit, had started as a campus of Michigan State University, but this seemed particularly off-brand. We spent some time trying to figure out what the heck that could even be. It was Metropolitan State University of Denver.

The roller coaster we figured we could not ride: Half Pipe. This is a vast U-shaped coaster that was just closed every time we passed it. It barely looked like a real roller coaster, though I attested I had seen it in Roller Coaster Tycoon 3. It's a shuttle coaster again --- why is everything at Elitch Gardens a shuttle coaster? --- but the car is a single platform, made to look like a skateboard. It has two spindles, free-spinning wheels of cars. As the ``train'' rocks back and forth, the spindles rotate around, sometimes changing direction. It's a fun ride. Also a very weird one. It's clearly a roller coaster, not very different from Wicked Twister at Cedar Point. Ah, but --- how does it really differ from Pipe Scream, also at Cedar Point, and that we just can't buy as a roller coaster? Pipe Scream's got a wider platform that rotates as a single whole, and it goes along a curvy W-shaped track, but, does that make such a difference? No saying, really. Defining real-world things always involves edge cases, and that edge is never perfectly sensible.

And --- yeah, so, clearly, we did ride it. The ride was closed every time we walked past it, and we had reconciled ourselves to not being able to get on it. But at the end of the night, as we were walking to Twister II for a last, night-time ride, we saw it was opening up and went quickly for it. And thus were we able to get a complete set of Elitch Gardens's (adult) roller coasters.

Trivia: Excavation for Hilltop Park, the first ballpark of the New York Yankees, cost about $200,000, about twice the cost of the park's construction. Source: Crazy '08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History, Cait Murphy.

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


PS: Storybook Land and all.

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Oh, yes, there's a small chapel on the amusement park grounds. Apparently sometimes people do get married at it.


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The chapel was built as this tiny house of worship back in the day, and was moved onto the park grounds. It might be folk architecture but, you know, who feels bad for that?


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The C P Huntingdon miniature train ride, puttering across the walkway because it's a small park that doesn't truck in gates to block pedestrians off. (Many smaller parks work like this and I'm fine with that. Most amusement park stuff is not that dangerous.)


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.

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

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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.


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The birthday cake! A fixture of Storybook Land, apparently, for decades. And something to make [profile] 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.


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


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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?


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


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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.


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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.


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


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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.

So as happens life is screwing up my plans. In this case, of getting nearly current on my journal here.

Penelope, our upstairs grumblebunny, whom we became foster-failures for in April, is ill. We noticed the problem when she went from being just fussy about what she ate, to picky, and finally just stopped eating much of anything. We suspected her teeth, at first. She has a problem where her molars don't grind down quite right, and they need intervention every few months. She'd had them ground just in May, so it would be weird and unsettling if she needed them ground already. But it was imaginable, and it would explain much of her habits, particularly that it seemed she ate less and less of the harder stuff first.

But she reached the point she wasn't eating anything robustly and that's a veterinary visit. It ended up being an overnight visit, so she could be examined by the expert in an unhurried manner. And the problem seems to be something in her belly. Her liver, or perhaps her stomach. It might be some odd temporary blockage from something she oughtn't have eaten. It might be cancer.

We knew adopting an elder rabbit meant we'd have not enough time with her. But four months!

The only way to know is surgery. Which would be expensive, but not beyond what we expected. (That said, if you know someone who could give me money to do whatever it is I do, please drop a line.) It's also risky. It's always dangerous to put an animal under anaesthesia, and moreso an ``exotic'' like a rabbit, and moreso an older rabbit; she's about eight years old. And it's possible that they could open her and find that it's an impossible mess and they have to euthanize her on the table. The vet we think of as the pessimistic one --- the first one to suggest we ought to consider putting Stephen down --- warned us about this. The vet we think of as more optimistic says Penelope doesn't seem to be in particular pain, and so we don't need to decide right away.

But we also know the sooner we act the better. Her chances are surely better the stronger she is to start with, and the longer she goes eating poorly the weaker she'll be. Also the sooner the more recovery time she'll enjoy under our direct supervision. We're planning to be off to Pinburgh at the end of the month, and while [profile] bunny_hugger's mother is an excellent caretaker of animals (and a retired nurse, which has left her extremely well-primed to watch sick animals) she is also anxious about caring for an ill rabbit. Fortunately, recovery time would be something like a week to ten days; if we act soon, Penelope might need only a day or two of recovery time under [profile] bunny_hugger's mother's care.

And yet. There's the chance we take her in for surgery and she never comes back. And it's so perilous to think of doing that. ... I mean, yes, ultimately, if she dies on the table then whatever kills her is the thing in her abdomen. But to think that she would die because this day I chose to pick her up and put her in this cage and drive her to this office is to strangle myself under the terrors of choice.


Thank you for all your good thoughts.

Trivia: The lowest salary paid to a performer for a Vitaphone short was to banjo-player Roy Smeck, whose short, recorded 12 July 1926, earned him $350. Source: The Speed of Sound, Scott Eyman.

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

PS: Entering Storbyook Land, where we've got a lot of happy memories.

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Giant Mother Goose statue that greets people. Also it used to literally greet people, as a speaker and closed-circuit TV let some staff member talk to people who were nearby. That wasn't in operation when we visited and I don't know when it last was.


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The Gingerbread House Snack bar, with a pretty nice outside decor that's nice and inviting and suggests the place would have more candies than it actually does. (It's more, like, burgers and pizza and stuff.)


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Oh hey, yeah, so on top of the Gingerbread House Snack Bar is this girl that's repurposed from an A&W Restaurant somewhere. This is not the only repurposed fast-food figure we would encounter, either.


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 [profile] 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 [profile] 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 [profile] 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.

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


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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''.


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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.


What brought us to Denver way too early on a Thursday morning for a frightfully brief trip was the fear Lakeside Amusement Park might close. We had heard dire things about the ancient and, to all reports, gorgeous park, ones that made it sound closer to Conneaut Lake Park than anything healthy. It seemed wise not to put it off any longer. Also bringing us there: Frontier Airlines, which despite its participation in Flightmare was also offering direct flights.

Trouble is the flight was so early in the day that we had to spend some time puttering around Denver Airport. The alternative was to have our rental car for four days and a couple hours, or as the rental agency considers it, five days. Fortunately Denver Airport has stuff to do even outside security, as it was built during that 90s era when they figured airports could also be really expensive shopping malls. Mostly we ate at a pretty good burrito place. Also waited for our luggage. Our ``luggage coming up on the carousel that the flight attendants announce and that the baggage-carousel signboard says it's coming up on'' streak, going back to December of 2016, went unbroken.

Finally we could go get our rental car! At the same time that everyone in the world was getting a rental car, apparently. Also in the middle of Denver's worst heat wave since the last time the Sun went nova. We had rented a compact car, because that's the kind of people we are. So did everyone else arriving in Denver. So we stayed there, waiting, in the sun, until the rental people said if there weren't a compact ready in two minutes we could take anything else on the lot. Like, say, this Dodge Challenger muscle car whose hood came up to my chest and that had the front grill that says, ``come over here where I can punch you''. Well, no cars came, and the rental car people were very enthusiastic that we take the Challenger. Also some bottled water. We finally gave in, and spent like ten minutes trying to get the side windows to stop pointing down. (It turned out they just fold manually down for some reason, and this wasn't something that could be adjusted by any control on the dashboard.)

This was possibly the most ridiculous car I could ever drive. My Scion tC is about four times too sporty a car for my personality; the Challenger just made me look puny inside. But it got a lot of attention, and mystified our AirBnB hosts. Also it lacked a satellite navigator, validating my decision that we should bring one of ours. But it did have satellite radio. We tried out the Beatles Station for what was meant to be a few minutes and turned into the whole weekend. We hear advertisements for it on DishTV's music stations, but they don't carry the actual station.

And it turned out driving to our AirBnB home wasn't bad. Mostly interstates, including a stretch where [profile] bunny_hugger could see Lakeside Park and I couldn't because I was trying to work out the road paths. The rental car threatened to capside the house's driveway, and our hosts somehow got the idea we had driven here and wondered where we drove from that we arrived at 1 pm. They didn't imagine we'd have flown in that early, I guess. I can sympathize. I'm a bit mystified by it myself.

Our AirBnB hosts had their whole basement floor set up, as a bedroom, library, secondary lounge area with a mini-fridge, Keurig coffee maker, and plate of like 800 giant muffins, and bathroom. Their daughter used to reside there; now, they're retired, so, why not do this? The husband we saw repeatedly working in the garden (with this plant-overhung corner that inspired envy and landscaping ideas from us) or on some kind of carpentry project.

After getting settled in we took a short nap that turned into a huge nap, carrying us into the early evening. Long enough that it spoiled our dinner plans, which were to go to Casa Bonita. Which name you might have heard of, as it was the guest star of an episode of South Park. It's this crazypants Mexican-themed ... show ... experience ... spectacle, and getting to it was one of the minor goals for our Denver expedition. By reports we'd need like three hours to see it fairly; we had maybe one, if we hurried. So we instead walked to a neighborhood Mexican restaurant and ate there while being very distracted by the crazy computer-animated movie on the TV. (It turned out to be The Croods, which we had seen for some reason and remembered liking.)

And on that almost-anticlimax we brought our first Denver day to an end: we had arrived, slept comfortably in a bedroom apartment despite the heat wave (it never felt hot at all), and had eaten more burritos than average for a single day. Still, a pretty good start to things.

In hindsight. Had we known how things would develop. We probably should have tried going to Lakeside Amusement Park, to get in a couple of hours of visiting it at night. It's only about four dollars to get in, and you can buy individual rides after that. The food might be the usual basic amusement park ``vegetarian food? Uh, you can have cheese pizza, cheese fries, or pretzels'' fare, but we could have coped. But we didn't realize, among other things, that Lakeside Park was about 25 feet away from where we were staying. But, hindsight, as I say. Getting a full night's sleep was worth doing too.

Trivia: The first Farrell Line container ship, the Austral Envoy, reportedly set a transpacific speed record for the Panama Canal-to-Sydney route in the early 1970s, steaming 7,928 miles in thirteen days and seven hours, an average speed of 24.85 knots. Source: Box Boats: How Container Ships Changed The World, Brian J Cudahy.

Currently Reading: A Short History of Machine Tools, L T C Rolt.


PS: Now we're into July 2017, photographically, and a dive into South Jersey that would see us visit three amusement parks in one day. Yes, this was madness.

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The entrance to Storybook Land, deep in South Jersey, near Egg Harbor. It's another amusement park set right alongside the highway and while there's a deeper parking lot in back, yeah, there's strip mall parking out front.


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Fairy-tale castle entrance to Storybook Land, here from the part that isn't really an entrance to anything except the bathrooms.


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And now here's the real entrance, except that's more of the exit from the gift shop. The entrance is way the heck off on the end. Still, yes, by the time we got to here we were already thoroughly charmed by the park and everything about it.


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 [profile] porsupah!

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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.


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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.


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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.