austin_dern

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Currently Reading: Media Hoaxes, Fred Fedler.

And a bit more of Story Land for this Sunday ...

Figure atop Splash Battle: Pharaoh's Reign. It's a raft ride in which both the rafters and the people standing on the outside have water cannons they can shoot at each other. This is one of the sculptures standing on top of the station, which goes well past the minimum necessary amount of work for an Egyptian themed station.

Sphinx sculpture outside Splash Battle: Pharaoh's Reign. The hieroglyphics caught our minds, though. Are they just replicas of something from Actual Egypt? Could it be that someone's burial inscription stood for thousands of years, and then got duplicated as unread and unknown markings on an amusement park's water-cannon ride for the fun of it? There's something weird about that possibility but I don't see any reason to rule it out either.

From the Slipshod Safari Tour, a ``wilds of Africa'' post office. Some of the set pieces on the tour are animated; most are just sculptures like that. The driver provides the context and jokes for stuff that doesn't explain itself.

The antique German carousel! The horses don't go up and down, but they are mounted on springs so you make them rock at your own pace. If you time it right, you can be temporarily moving backwards at the same rate the whole platform is rotating forward, which is quite a rush.

The swan boat, the Story Land Queen, coming in to dock after its voyage spent saving Butterfly Island from a lack of color.

And then my mathematics blog, busy in its way the past week:

• What People Did Like In My Mathematics Blog In September 2015 even if they didn't read it enough.
• Reading the Comics, October 1, 2015: Big Questions Edition, some infinity stuff, things like that.
• The Set Tour, Part 3: R^n, a nice popular set you may have seen around some.
• Reading the Comics, October 5, 2015: Boxes and Hyperboxes Edition, mathematics comics with hyperspace.
• The Kind Of Book That Makes Me Want To Refocus On Logic, singing the praises of that book I just read.

Trivia: In 1938 New York City elementary school students ate 2,792,881 pounds of bananas in school lunches, versus 1,273,745 pounds of apples. Source: American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA, Nick Taylor.

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

Back to Story Land for pictures!

Gruff alert! So now we've seen this setup at both Story Land and its sister park of Idlewild.

Getting into the international/adventure side of the park: on the left is the Flying Carpet Sandwich Oasis. In the center is the Polar Coaster, the older roller coaster. To the right of that is a clock with a parade of kids to the tune of the Child's World Of Fun song. Past that is a windmill and ice cream shop.

At the Polar Coaster: somebody's out of place here.

The windmill, right by the Dutch Village Ice Cream Shop. Now, not really highlighted but worth mentioning: you see that cow statue on the right? And the kid kneeling down behind it? That's because you are invited to milk the cow statue. This is surely something that kids remember for a long time after they've done it.

An animatronic groundhog, popped up to tell us about a show that's coming up shortly.

And mathematics blog content of the past week? Here's what you missed:

• Reading the Comics, September 24, 2015: Yes, I Do So Edition, talking about Barney Google.
• Making Lots Of Change, which reveals how many different ways to return an arbitrary amount of money in change.
• How Gibbs derived the Phase Rule, reblogging from the Carnot Cycle blog; thermodynamics history.
• How September 2015 Treated My Mathematics Blog, not as well as I wanted.
• What People Did Like In My Mathematics Blog In September 2015, which was mostly Reading the Comics pieces, but had some other stuff.

Something something Friends page etc something else RSS reader available dilute okay.

Trivia: The lead headline for the Milwaukee Sentinel for the 5th of October, 1957, read ``Today, We Make History''. It regarded the first World Series game being held in Wisconsin. Sputnik news was on page three. Source: This New Ocean: The Story Of The First Space Age, William E Burrows. (In this particular segment Burrows is directly quoting a person, so the headline or newspaper might be misremembered. On the 5th, the Braves would lose to the Yankees at Milwaukee County Stadium, 12-3, in a game lasting three hours, eighteen minutes and no extra innings.)

Currently Reading: Moon Bound: Choosing and Preparing NASA's Lunar Astronauts, Colin Burgess.

So back to Story Land. As mentioned one of its attractions is an antique carousel, a Heyn-made model from 1880. It had been in Bavaria originally, then the National Carousel Association has no idea, but it ended up at the Canadian National Expo for a couple of years in the 60s before coming to Story Land. It's got several dozen mounts, although they don't go up and down. They're fixed to the platform --- and I'm embarrassed I don't remember how fast the platform rotates; I want to say five rpm at its maximum.

But the mounts aren't stationary on the platform. They're all set on rocking bases, with swings. You give the ride a push and it bounces forward and back. Forward and back is a rarer motion on carousels than you might guess. It's fun, messing as it does with expectations. Also you can start doing something the moment the ride operator isn't looking, and keep it up until the operator insists people get off the ride. And if you control the speed of your rocking just right, at the start and the end, you can get these moments where you're stationary relative to the ground. There are some rocker-type mounts on modern carousels, especially those kinds that turn up at shopping malls, but I don't remember any being being or speedy enough for that to be fun. We got a couple of rides in on this and that was the day's other triumph, past Roar-O-Saurus time.

We were able to get lunch at the park, in the Friends Around The World Food Fair. They had vegetarian burgers, reinforcing just how much easier it's getting to eat vegetarian these days. We ate in the pavilion, watching what really, really looked like a storm trying to roll in and not making it. Despite plenty of chances the storm never did arrive, dashing our hopes that it would lighten the crowd.

At the pavilion though I did get engrossed by an odd spectacle. A couple of park workers kept going up to and measuring and making pencil marks on a blank piece of wall. And then they came back with what looked like paint, but stopped short of putting any on anything. Then they came up with appliques that again they held up to the wall and brought other people over to consult on, but never did anything with. I kept watching, through lunch, and even lingered just a bit but nothing actually got done besides holding plastic sheets up to the wall. At the day's end we walked over and there was a neat new ``Story Land'' logo on the wall, right there. Watched pots and park grounds crews, I suppose.

The crowds would stay fairly heavy until about 5:00, though. This put us off some attractive-looking rides like the Antique Cars. The Antique Cars were a popular ride, though, so popular that they closed the line to that about 45 minutes before the park closed. Also, !. We were put off Dr Geyser's Remarkable Raft Ride, despite its charming turn-of-the-century Americana/crazed inventor theme because that was way too wet a water ride. The theme is something about Dr Geyser who'd invented a rainmaking device and if it weren't enough of a rapids ride it even went under artificial waterfalls to make sure you came out soaked. Not us, not on a day too likely to rain.

More our speed and moisture level were the Huff Puff & Whistle Railroad, which circles around the park and which according to the announcements even makes one full circuit after the park closing hour. It runs at grade to the park, alongside walkways that don't have any kind of barrier and that felt strikingly dangerous for a miniature railroad ride. It whistles and alarms as it approached a spot, sure, but there's not even a loading station. And we rode the Cuckoo Clockenspiel, a spinning-tubs ride that goes through a giant cuckoo-clock house. That's charming to start with, and it's got a good and busy animatronic clockwork mess going on inside. Nice long ride, too.

As we got to the end of the day we went back to Roar-O-Saurus, figuring we could probably get one more ride in and if we were lucky the crowds would have evaporated enough we might get two in. We were extremely lucky.

The crowds had receded from the dinosaur area of the park, and we had just a short wait for our second ride. And it was no less delightful a ride its second time around. It's not a ride that wears off its thrills quickly. When that was done we walked back around to wait for a front-seat ride. And now the crowd was so light it was a walk-on. Not just a walk-on, but they were letting people re-ride. One kid sitting in the second row tried to move to the front and we had to tell him, no, we really were waiting for the front-seat ride. Well, we were. We'd be happy to swap seats with him the next time around, though.

But when we got back to the station nobody --- nobody! --- was waiting for the ride, and the operators said if anyone wanted to get off the ride that was fine but otherwise stay in your seats and we'd go around again. There's no turning that offer down. Nor was there any turning it down when we got back to the station and again nobody was waiting and they were offering a re-ride. We got back to the station at what was surely 6:00, the closing hour, and with nobody new at the station surely no more rides would go out. Except they released the brake just enough for us to roll forward a bit, moments before the station phone rang, I assume with the official ``day is done'' notice. And so we went out on one last ride, after an incredible string of re-rides on a most thrilling wooden roller coaster.

We did feel sorry for the kid who lost three front-seat rides in a row, although if we'd taken the time to swap around, it would've been only two, I suppose. And even second-row would be a great ride. I'm not sure it's possible to have a bad ride on Roar-O-Saurus.

So from that we made the long walk through the shuttered park, taking the long way around to get a last view of everything. For the third time in two days we were so happy to see a place more wonderful than we'd expected.

Trivia: Suggested recipes offered by United Fruit's home economics department around 1930 included ``bananas and bacon'' (banana chunks wrapped and served on a cocktail stick, ``guaranteed to start a conversation''). Source: Bananas: How The United Fruit Company Shaped The World, Peter Chapman.

Currently Reading: Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change From Hawaii To Iraq, Stephen Kinzer.

One of the animatronics in Story Land is a groundhog, who pops out from a box and looks around and tells people of the show starting in however many minutes this is. Then it burrows back down. It's adorable. bunny_hugger and I have gotten to appreciate having shows in amusement parks, and it's a bit sad that we weren't able to make the groundhog's show or most of the other shows. They'd had some kind of Paddington Bear-starring pro-reading event going on in the early afternoon, for example. Towards the end of the day they also had a whole mass of characters, Tinkerbell and fairy-tale princesses and Humpty Dumpty and oh yeah Duke, the dragon from Dutch Wonderland. (That park's moved from Hersheypark to the Kennywood/Parques Reunidos chain, and so Duke has been showing up at all their parks, unsettling us.) They're well-stocked with characters to meet.

They also have Character Dinners. This softens the early closing hour, I suppose. Folks presumably with kids could ``join Cinderella, Duke the Dragon, Humpty Dumpty and our newest friend `Rory' for a memorable Buffet Dinner'' (as their web site puts it). We were a little tempted by this, must say, though it can be terribly uncertain what's at a meal like that which a vegetarian, or someone trying to be vegetarian, can safely eat.

But two things we did get to, which blur the line between rides and shows, were the boat rides. Story Land has a good-sized and irregularly shaped lake and two separate boat tours. One is the Story Land Queen, on a boat with a large swan front end. The dock for this, at least when we went there, seemed to be unattended. The gate for getting on the boat was closed and locked, yes, but it was easy to imagine how the equivalent at (say) Cedar Point would have at least two ride operators watching every moment until the boat arrived.

The Story Land Queen brings folks on a tour to Butterfly Island, while the ship's master tells a story of how something-or-other scared the color out of the butterflies. So we have to go past the scenic drawbridge --- ordinarily closed so the pirate ship can't follow --- and bring color back to the butterflies if our cheering and applause and such are enough. On our expedition they were and color returned to Butterfly Island in time to putter back past the drawbridge. Also we got to see there was a crane of some kind hanging about the lagoon and occasionally jabbing at, we trust, the fish. It's always wonderful encountering this sort of wildlife in a park. At Cinderella's Castle we spotted a chipmunk who'd worked out what parts of the castle he could get to without being annoyed by humans.

The other lagoon ride is the Buccaneer Pirate Ship where, just as the lady running the Story Land Queen warned, kids are sat down beside oars and ordered to paddle. This takes a different path and doesn't even try to get to Butterfly Island, raising the implication that the Story Land Queen is spreading falsehoods about the pirates. It does go past prop pirate fortresses and cannons and wrecked ships and the like, while the ride operator talks in that joking comic pirate fashion. There's less narrative than the Story Land Queen offers, but it makes up for that with more animate shoreline stuff.

Also crossing the line between ride and show is the Slipshod Safari Tour. This is a ``trek through the wilds of Africa in a wagon train'', per their web site, and that's fair enough to say. The truck carries everyone along past a mixture of fixed statues and animatronic props which represent gorillas and rhinoceroses, snakes and turtles, elephants and zebras, while the driver describes what's seen and jokes about them. Corny? Yes, but if you don't like corny why go to an amusement park? Why go with me?

We noticed by the way that season passes for 2016 were already on sale, and they were good for the rest of 2015, and you could apply that day's ticket purchase to the season ticket price. It would be a bit crazy to buy season passes to Parques Reunidos parks, except ... well, we had two Parques Reunidos parks we were certainly visiting on the New England Parks Tour alone. We could easily imagine getting to Kennywood and/or Idlewild a weekend this year. And if not then, next year surely, maybe more than once. Sad to say, they don't have chain-wide season passes; the most we would get is a discount on buying tickets at sister parks. How big a discount? The customer service guy grimaced as he told us. It was something like four dollars. Well, it would've been nice.

Trivia: The first telegraph cable across the English Channel, laid in August 1850 by the General Oceanic and Subterranean Electric Printing Telegraph Company, was so light that the wire would not sink. Weights had to be affixed to it to make it drop to the bottom. Source: The Victorian Internet, Tom Standage.

Currently Reading: Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change From Hawaii To Iraq, Stephen Kinzer.

PS: Reading the Comics, September 14, 2015: Back To School Edition, Part II, just what it says on the label.

Our park for Thursday was Story Land, in Glen, New Hampshire. The park was opened in the 1950s as one of the fairy-tale forest kiddielands that were trendy back then. Nearly all of them have shriveled and died in the decades since. Story Land was almost among them. Eight years ago it was bought by Kennywood Entertainment Company, owners of, well, it's right up front there. They also owned Idlewild, about an hour east of Kennywood, and one of the other surviving fairy-tale forest kiddielands. We'd heard dire things about the state of Story Land in previous years, but rumors that things had been getting better. If nothing else they had a new wooden roller coaster that fans were wild about.

We got there just in time. I think this was the only park we were able to be there at the actual opening hour for, even though many of them were fifteen minutes or so from our hotel. Stuff kept happening. Even that early, though, it was looking busy; the parking lot seemed nearly full. It turned out there was another parking lot across the highway, accessible by an underpass, increasing our count of parks an underpass away from the main parking lot. (See also Parc Festyland, Holiday World, and Kennywood.) The entrance gates are behind a series of crooked houses, fairly nicely painted and looking really quite good. The early evidence was of maintenance no longer being deferred, and that's what we'd see throughout the day.

Right by the entrance is a book prop, not so large as the book-gateway into Idlewild's Story Book Land, that warns ``You are now entering a storybook world. Follow this path and it will lead you well''. There's an Old Lady Who Lived In The Shoe house, with Old Lady and sometimes another guy watching. And there's an animatronic tree, with a name badge (``TIM --- CAST MEMBER'') who gives a welcoming spiel to kids and tells them how to get help if they get lost or separated from their group, that sort of thing. And the tree reaches to a set of hooks. You're invited to write your name on leaves and hang them on, to fill up the tree. Of course we hung them. I put my name by the painting of a raccoon; bunny_hugger, by a squirrel holding a chained pen. And that's what the park is like the first four minutes you spend in it. We had all day.

Much of the park, I believe the oldest sections, is displays of fairy tales. Most of them are buildings, and many have animatronics or maybe music to suggest the tale. Some have animals, too. The first we saw were chickens, although not tied to the baffling ``Hickety Pickety, My Fat Hen'' who lays eggs for gentlemen. There's pigs, in front of the houses of straw, sticks, and bricks. They were lying together. They had a Peter Rabbit, although he was tucked inside his house-hutch every time we went past the spot. This is all grand stuff.

The gift store had Images of America books, of course, and some old photographs of the fairy-tale area. The crooked-house entrance dates back decades, and some of the individual displays we could find dated back to the early 60s at least. There used to be a Little Sambo display and I was curious how long that lasted. It turned out there is a Little Sambo sign, although it doesn't depict any human characters, and I'm not sure about its legend. I took a photograph so I know I'm quoting it right:

Sambo wore his fine new clothes and went for a walk in the jungle. He met a big tiger who said, ``You have beautiful shoes and I have none.'' Sambo replied, ``I will give you my fine new shoes.'' The Tiger said, ``Very well, now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!'' The End.

(Actually, Sambo's reply doesn't have close quotes. Amusement park signage is surprisingly poorly copy-edited when you look at it.)

I'm not calling for more racially charged fairy tales, obviously. I just feel like ... well, why have this at all when you could just leave the Sambo stuff in the Hall of Embarrassing Stuff From Before White Guys Discovered Non-Whites Had Feelings, In 1978. It's a curious decision, almost like they tried to step back from ``things we're stunned white folks thought were fine in 1956'' without hitting the many, many tripwires of ``white folks whining about political correctness''.

I'm making more of this this than the park does. What I take to be the older, fairy-tale-themed areas are lovely, nestled in woods, and split well between static displays, animal displays, and animatronic displays. I'd be glad to see just this again, as well as more parks along these lines.

Trivia: According to legend, on his death in 804 AD Lu Yü --- a Taoist poet hired to extol the virtues of tea --- was transfigured into Chazu, the genie of tea. His effigy is still honored by tea dealers in the Orient. Source: The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the World's Most Popular Drug, Bennett Alan Weinberg, Bonnie K Bealer. (I'm not certain I believe this, but I love the idea of a genie of tea. And now that you've heard it, don't you too?)

Currently Reading: Moscow, 1937, Karl Schlögel, Translated by Rodney Livingstone.

PS: One Way We Write Functions, in case you needed any more.