austin_dern

Yesterday, as Mother's Day, we spent with the nearest available mother, bunnyhugger's. Not to worry, I did call my mother in some spare time and learn that the church she volunteers for and kind of runs has only got temporary pictures of the new Pope up. They hope to have the official pictures soon. Also she's making progress in her bridge ranking and needs only a few more Masters Points and Silver Points to reach the next level, with the twist being that Silver Points are only available at a couple select events, which fortunately are coming up this month.

But to the parents we were with. bunnyhugger's mother insisted on making dinner, grilled cheese, and while I'd rather she didn't go to that work on a day in principle celebrating her, I also like the grilled cheeses she makes. She's good at getting the cheese melted in a way I'm not. And her father, after interrogating me about whether I'd ever read Modesty Blaise --- having forgotten that he gave me two collections of Modesty Blaise books --- disappeared into the other room a minute and then gave me a third.

He also, on hearing again that we have a spring-based kitchen scale that can measure in either grams or ounces, offered a counter-balance scale that he took out and explained he had just found it recently while looking for something else. He also discovered, from looking at pictures of eBay sellers, that the scale was missing a leg, so while we were out walking the dog, he constructed a replacement out of popsicle sticks or something. And then, after that, decided he didn't like that and made a new set. I reflected how we were probably fortunate that he didn't have a 3D printer.

After dinner bunnyhugger got out the new campaign roleplaying game, from the designer of Mice and Mystics. This is Aftermath, animals working on a colony and their own side projects in a world where all humans have mysteriously vanished, within the lifetime of a guinea pig. The catch is that the designer of Mice and Mystics has not the slightest idea how to explain his rules. The always slow parts of playing your first couple rounds were even slower and more confusing than should have been. Not helping matters is that, for example, some of the cards you're dealt have a little shield on them, and the more defensive characters have a symbol on their character card with a little shield on them. So how do you defend against an attack? Is it based on what shields you have and can put together? No, it is not! And there's other little ``do you know how to communicate with people?'' design issues, for example that the symbol for ``range'' for ranged weapons means different things for players and enemies.

After a couple go-rounds and some false starts we were getting the bugs worked out and almost had our first encounter done. But also by that time bunnyhugger's mother was anxious that we get going lest I get to bed too late for work in the morning (I got to bed on time) and her father was anxious lest we not eat overly large slices of key lime pie. So we ended up ditching the session, I'm confident one round of play before beating at least the first page. Hopefully we'll get it together for next time we play.

And that was our Mother's Day.

New event on the photo roll. What's the next thing we did? You'll get a strong hint from the establishing shot here ...

As the picture of bunnyhugger putting on sunscreen tells you, it's an amusement park trip! But what amusement park is there even in frame, much less one that has an escalator at the parking lot?

There it is, well down the valley: Kennywood! Phantom's Revenge is the tall coaster on the left; Steel Curtain, the non-operational roller coaster on the right.

And yes, I tried doing a panorama of the valley from our position in the second level of parking lot.

We didn't remember the escalator to the parking lot. Turns out no, they replaced the ski lift --- which we never saw operating but which was, in principle, a Kennywood ride you didn't need to enter the park to take --- after 2019.

Did I mention it was a Saturday and those are always busy days at amusement parks? Because it was a Saturday and that's always a busy day at amusement parks.

There's the carousel sculpture that's been the signature element of the entrance of Kennywood's chain's amusement parks --- as of when this photo was taken. Since then, the Kennywood chain was bought up by Dollywood's owners, so who knows how things have changed?

Trivia: Jack Pepper (1902 - 1979) was a juvenile comedian who worked vaudeville as a fresh-faced college boy singing a falsetto ``St Louis Blues''. He worked in movies starting in 1929 (Metro Movietone Ruvue #4) and continuing through the 1970s in minor parts. He also had bit roles in seven of the Hope-Crosby-Lamour ``Road'' pictures. Source: The Encyclopedia of Vaudeville, Anthony Slide.

Currently Reading: The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts, Silvia Ferrara.

So here's just the sort of thing we needed. After having got back to eating pellets reliably and with good appetite Athena went back off pellets today. She's still eating vegetables well, and hay well as far as we can determine. It's hard to be sure given how disorganized hay always is, at least not without doing an awful lot of cleaning first. But she's eating it. She's also chewing up cardboard like that was candy so ...

We are stumped and annoyed. Being off her food after a gastrointestinal episode makes sense, and even having a relapse sort of seems to make sense. But we've now had her examined a couple times and found she seems to be in fine health; the only physical thing that might have been wrong, her molars growing out, we've dealt with by having them ground down. It's like she just decides sometimes she's not going to eat pellets period.

This would be a mild annoyance except we're hoping to leave Athena with bunnyhugger's parents soon and they will not be happy with a rabbit who's not eating pellets. Or worse who's sometimes eating pellets and sometimes refusing them.

If I didn't know better I'd think she was being stubborn because I set up barricades that kept her out from underneath the sofa last night. But she couldn't be planning a revenge that complicated, right? ... Right?

Thursday we had to drive home. But, disappointed that we hadn't ridden Bat or Backlot Stunt Coaster, or Banshee but understanding it would probably still be closed for excellent reasons, and thinking we hadn't really got anything from the gift shop, we stopped in for what we swore would be just a few hours and, to our surprise, was. Pictures so you know it happened:

We got a good parking spot, fairly near the big sign! I don't know what the trouble somene was having that got the cops on them.

But you can see from where we were down to the Eiffel Tower and, to the left of it, Orion. Note you can see we're packed for home since my dirty laundry is in the trunk.

The stately Kings Island Theater, which we never did get around to seeing anything in. I like the 70s typeface (Friz Quadrata) used for the lettering on the building.

Sol Spin, seen here spinning. It's the same kind of ride Kennywood has, although with different colors.

Here's Banshee, still closed for the investigation and possibly cleanup of the death the night before.

Station and lift hill for Banshee. It has that nice trick of doing a loop around the lift hill.

Trivia: In 1661 England's King Charles II ordered Massachusetts to hang no more Quakers merely for their religious dissent. Source: Rhode Island: A History, William G McLoughlin. (Four had been hung since 1658, when the colony ordered the death penalty for Quakers who entered the colony a third time. More were given lesser punishments.)

Currently Reading: Seriously Curious: The Facts and Figures That Turn Our World Upside-Down, Editor Tom Standage.

PS: What's Going On In The Phantom (Sundays)? Who's writing The Phantom now? December 2024 - March 2025 is my comics recap for this week.

Let me see if I can say anything about Halloweekends.

So, Thursday. The park only opened at 5 pm or so, and only select rides would be open. The opening day of a Halloweekends weekend is like that, and it's usually good riding for what is open. But counterbalancing this: it was a beautiful, warm day, the kind of warm, sunny day that feels great for early-to-mid September. Six weeks late. It's fine to have the occasional stretch of unseasonably pleasant weather, but we haven't had any seasonal weather yet.

This has been great for the amusement parks; Cedar Point has been packed every weekend as you might expect. It also implied that it might be packed this weekend, as coming the closest to Halloween while the weather was still great. And yeah, the park was fairly busy right when things started up. (Well, when they opened for the general public. We got in at early admission, a Platinum Pass perk, and were able to get three rides in on Wild Mouse. Two of them were on the cheese-themed car which, this day, was not more spinny than the mouse-themed cars.) Aided by many roller coasters being down, either for the day (like Corkscrew and Gemini, as scheduled, but they are ones that reliably entertain a lot of people) or for the weekend (Iron Dragon was undergoing maintenance, though that likely would have been closed anyway), or were Top Thrill 2.

So that didn't start out well. But we made the best of it, getting the daily exercise walk in, and getting to whatever huge restaurant they built to take the place of the Antique Cars ride near the Town Hall Museum. Turns out that while the place gets lines out the door and down to Town Hall, it serves people pretty quick --- there's a straightforward menu and they can just send people right on through --- and there is also the vegetarian option of getting three sides instead of an entree and a side. Also they have some good potato and brussels sprouts stuff that's better food than you expect at an amusement park. Good chance we'll go back to that in future visits, if we aren't intimidated by the lines.

We also used the chance to take farewell photographs of Snake River Falls, the Shoot-the-Chutes ride that Cedar Point put in and that never really got popular, even on the hot days. It was already closed for good --- the last ride was around Labor Day weekend and was apparently a bit of a scrum as there was some reward promised to the last riders and this lead to queuing incidents --- and we don't know that it'll be removed next year, but why would they close it if they didn't have plans for the space it takes up? So we got pictures of that and of other areas we thought likely to be renovated out of existence.

After all this farewell-tourism and eating and exercise and all, though, and the arrival of sunset? The park did clear out (or the population drained into the haunted houses/walkthroughs that we don't visit) and suddenly the riding became great. We endured something like a half-hour wait for Raptor, a ride which never has a wait, but after that it was five- and ten-minute waits for most everything. By the end of the night, we estimated, we'd ridden the majority of the park's roller coasters, as well as two of the carousels (we missed the Kiddy Kingdom Carousel), the Cadillac Cars, and some other flat rides. I believe that's the night we closed out on Steel Vengeance, taking advantage of a fifteen-minute wait for a ride that still gets three-hour queues, and if we had gone in a little bit sooner we might have been able to snag a second ride. No matter; it was well after midnight before we got off the ride and we were exhausted, after the drive and seven hours of park-visiting. We'd had a really good day at the park.

The next thing on my photo roll: Pinball At The Zoo. I spent a couple hours there Friday night and all of Saturday, not getting anywhere near competitive range. But other people? ... Read on.

Saturday morning. bunnyhugger enters, to shore up her standing in the women's tournament and maybe, what the heck, take a shot at main.

The main floor, outside the tournament, is about people showing off (and buying/selling/outfitting) their tables. I got fascinated with this mid-60s Williams Eager Beaver, for the outsider-furry art and the shout-out to the University of Wisconsin For Some Reason. Note the squirrel sign-painter at the bottom of the glass there.

Playfield art. At least two squirrels are aware of what the beavers working on the tree means for home.

Lower playfield of Eager Beaver, with a couple ... uh ... I guess they're beavers, to either side of the flipper? Or maybe on the left is that bear who seemed to be the timekeeper in the backglass art?

Upper playfield, with more beavers and a chipmunk and rabbit watching the action.

Someone had the Weird Al's pinball machine, an oddity from a boutique manufacturer that has all sorts of dubiously wise design choices to it. You'll see.

Trivia: German General Hans Krebs, sent the early hours of the 1st of May, 1945, to seek a truce with Soviet negotiators, told Colonel Vasili Ivanovich Chuikov ``I want you to know that you are the first foreigner to learn that on 30 April Hitler committed suicide.'' Chuikov answered, ``We know that.'' Krebs was dumbfounded. Chuikov was bluffing. Source: 1945: The War That Never Ended, Gregor Dallas.

We got up early Saturday for Kennykon. Not as early as we'd need to be there at the official starting hour of 8 am; bunnyhugger, reading the schedule carefully, determined that there was a good hour or so set aside just for getting people registered and in, and we should be okay coming in the later quarter of that. I showered and remembered to not rest the arm not blow-drying my hair on the towel rack when I felt it give. bunnyhugger found that housekeeping had left four packets of coffee, all decaf. I hid the decaf coffee in the back of one of the drawers, hoping this would inspire housekeeping to restock with actual coffee. Housekeeping never came, it turned out, but we left the coffee hidden in hopes that some future guest will benefit.

bunnyhugger's phone gave us directions this time, the first time we'd made the Red Roof-to-Kennywood drive without my satellite navigator doing the hard work. Turns out that I remembered the path more or less okay, which is freaky for a drive we've never made more than once a year and haven't made at all since 2016 or 2017. We pulled up to the all-but-empty parking lot and I had to restrain myself from parking in the very first spot I saw, in this little corner of pavement, that's often a good spot when you've arrived and found the parking lot full. No, we could go, still within the free parking zones, to something as close as possible to the park's entrance, alongside the other roller coaster enthusiasts.

We noticed something odd at the parking lot: an escalator, leading to the even-higher-up parking lots farther up the hillside. We didn't remember an escalator being there. The necessity was obvious, though. The Kennywood parking lot is already uphill from the entire park, but the remote parking lot is, like, a roller coaster's height above even that.

Something was missing that we didn't register until leaving for the day, too. This was the ski lift, the alternative method for getting from the remotest parking lot down to the gate. (And, therefore, the only Kennywood ride you could go on without ever entering the park.) It turns out the ski lift was removed between our last visit in 2019 and this year, its function more than replaced by the escalator. The ski lift only ever operated on the busiest of days, ones it's not clear the park ever experienced. The last time we're aware of it running was later in the week of our visit in 2013. I'm not sure anyone even knows the last time it operated.

So, in that light, something that doesn't require staffing, and can run all the time --- the escalator was even going then, first thing in the morning, at a time when the parking lot was 99% empty. Also that isn't a terrifying way to get up and down a hill. I'm sorry never to have ridden the ski lift. bunnyhugger I suspect is a little regretful but she would not have ridden it anyway.

And now in my photo roll: Gilroy Gardens! This was a heck of a beautiful place so get ready for a couple hundred thousand pictures of trees. These are from our first trip, the 4th of July.

Our second rental car, the one that took forever to get, but that had working air conditioning. In the background, that rolling hill background we don't get at amusement parks in driving range.

And the trees lining the edge of the park. Somewhere behind there is a roller coaster; can you see supports for it?

Following the edge of the trees to the park entrance. This, too, is a tree height we just don't get at, say, Michigan's Adventure.

The entrance, a cozy little one for a low-key park.

Here, at the entrance, I took pictures of some of the topiary, completely failing to notice the circus trees nearby that are actually wild and not just a $10 1x1 scenery item in Roller Coaster Tycoon 3.

The pond underneath is something you walk on a bridge over, getting from the entrance to the main body of the park. Note the water fall on the right, and that there's a building underneath, and (on the left, distant) walkway to some attractions down there, including (if I've got the location right) the smaller kiddie carousel.

Trivia: Most of the homes on the French territory of St Pierre (off the coast of Newfoundland) built during the United States's Prohibition era were made with empty whiskey cases. Source: Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America, Peter Andreas.

Currently Reading: Cuba: An American History, Ada Ferrer.

Getting to California, particularly the Bay Area, we could only really do by plane. bunnyhugger found a decent flight from Detroit to San Jose airport, with a stop in Saint Louis. Not even a change of planes; people who boarded in Detroit who were going on to Saint Louis were allowed --- nay, encouraged --- to just stay on the plane. So while our poor boarding number meant that we were separated for the first leg of the flight, we were able to sit together and in our preferred seats for the other half. Also who knew this ever happened? Also we got to enjoy that strange median time where nearly everyone is off the plane and nothing particularly much is happening, and you're just ... somewhere you never are. That was great.

We did arrive in San Jose a few hours later than we figured on, as the flight was originally delayed a couple hours leaving Detroit, a combination of traffic and storms. And in picking up our luggage discovered that they had lost one of bunnyhugger's vintage luggage tags, ones decades old that she got from her parents in the misty past. It's hard not to feel like we should have retired them, if they were going to hurt to lose, but then if they're not on luggage what are they? I briefly held out hope they'd stuffed it inside my suitcase, the way the Transportation Safety Theater Agency did that time they re-set the combination of my luggage padlock, but no such luck.

For some reason that I will blame on inhaling too much airport/airplane air we had trouble understanding how to get to the car rental desk. Turned out we had to walk outside the terminal and follow the signs across the street that pointed to 'CAR RENTAL'. So that wasn't a big deal. There was barely any line, either, although one of the two people who was there had the most complicated transaction since the Credit Mobilier was established going on.

We got a Vokswagon Something, a pleasant enough car with a dashboard display that showed way too many things for me to understand. However, it was comfortable and it linked up with bunnyhugger's phone in a way that let us get podcasts and driving instructions on it. (It was also linked to the last five renters' phones, contact details I deleted because I'm a kind person like that.) What it lacked was air conditioning.

This took a surprising while for us to be sure about. It hardly seems possible, right? The car was basically new --- maybe 20,000 miles on it --- and surely the previous renter would have complained if the aircon was bad. Our first night we got in so late that we settled for eating at Taco Bell and it wasn't a long enough drive to be sure. The next couple days, though, with longer drives, in the summer heat? It was clear.

So Tuesday morning --- the 4th of July and our third day there --- I took the car back to the rental agency on what I said would not be a big deal. The lot attendant listened to the problem and agreed that wouldn't be a big deal. There was almost no line and the agent agreed oh, yeah, that's no problem. What would I like in a replacement car? And I picked 'Toyota Corolla' because it was right up at the top of the list. Also I figured, I drive a Toyota, there's probably fewer weird things I can't figure out about this. I never did figure out how to turn on cruise control on the Volkswagon Something, for example.

I went back to the promised parking space for the Toyota Corolla. In that spot was not the promised Toyota. There was a Corolla next to it, but with some other license plate than the one we were supposed to get. Our spot number had some ... I forget. Some Urban Assault Vehicle that smelled vaguely of smoke. The gate attendant wouldn't let us out with the car that was not the one in our contract, though, even if it was the right space. So we turned that one back in, and began a fruitless search for the Corolla with the correct licence plate. At some point in wasting away the time we should have spent at an amusement park we could expect to never see again, searching for a car that was not there, because somehow they had given us a car that broke its air conditioning the first year of its life, and because my exhausted declaration to my wife that swapping the car for a working one would not be a big deal had been made a terrible lie, I reached the end of my patience, a state bunnyhugger does not enjoy seeing. I told her to wait here while I went and dealt with the counter. She didn't hear me and continued searching for our car or at least wherever I had gone.

Downstairs I would have waited in the line except now there was a very long line. So I cut the line, going to the counter and slamming my paperwork down. I understand no one else in the line understood the justice of my cutting. The clerk flagged the supervisor to deal with me while she dealt with the not-enraged customers, but the supervisor was dealing with somebody who wanted to ask every question known to humanity before getting their car dealt with.

Anyway I started to tell the supervisor about the Corolla that was not in parking space (whatever), and he started to explain it wasn't there because my paperwork said our car was in space (whatever the Volkswagon Something was in). I explained, without particularly clenching my teeth, that that was for the car we had rented on Saturday that did not have air conditioning and that I just returned. The supervisor understood more of my impatience as the whole of this tale came across.

Finally, we got a new car. And one that existed, and one that had air conditioning. This was a Kia Something, whatever their entry is in the Boxy Subcompact genre. It, too, linked with bunnyhugger's phone for navigation and podcast purposes, although it didn't have so many strange, distracting animations of the car and inscrutable evaluations of my driving when I was done. It did have lane-assist steering, a thing I've never had and which I now can't imagine driving without. Also cruise control that slows when you get too close the car ahead of you. Also, air conditioning, although the heat wave passed at this point and it wasn't so beastly hot again.

I know this sort of story happens to me more than it does to most people but I can't think what the heck I'm doing to cause that.

And something that is my doing? Taking photos at Anthrohio and sharing pictures with you. From our Saturday there:

That's right, they were there setting up a new inflatable.

And it's the How To Train Your Dragon dragon! Great to see. I have some more photos of inflating the whole thing; it's got a lot of parts. Each leg and each wing, particularly.

Meanwhile, folks enjoy resting up against the inflatable robot ... dog or something.

And now to Velveteen's second outing, and a return to the elevator lobby with a different set of eyes on. It's true!

Velveteen considers the message board in Hospitality and wonders what you make of it.

And here you can see that she's picked up ... something? I believe it's the interior of one of those Easter eggs planted about.

Trivia: Frank ``Tish'' Tashlin would draw a syndicated comic strip called Van Boring, after his onetime boss at the Van Beuren Studio. Source: Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons, Leonard Maltin.

Currently Reading: Wooster Proposes, Jeeves Disposes - or - Le Mot Juste: A Fresh Look At The Masterpieces of P G Wodehouse, Kristin Thompson. So it's never been hidden but seeing his name makes me realize the joke in the character of Stilton Cheesewright. Also I had not thought of the parallels between Jeeves-and-Wooster and Holmes-and-Watson but it feels foolish now that it's pointed out to me.

I'm ... employed?

It's just like that. Wednesday I went in, for my first in-person interview since, uh, 2007? This for another job with the State of Michigan and I don't know why they wanted an in-person interview but, fine. I'd gotten my dress shirt dry-cleaned last week, and after bunnyhugger urged it I wore my very good suit, the one I got married in. And found a rubber band to tie my hair back, rather than let it be the glorious halo of hair that it achieves now when it's fully dry. My hair isn't long enough for a real ponytail, but this did give me the look of Senior Computer Guy Who Has Opinions About Endian-ness, or maybe a lesser signer of the Constitution. We're talking your Jonathan Daytons, here. (Don't look up Jonathan Dayton.) She thought I looked sharp and, yeah, I did. It turns out I might be not just a long-hair guy but a tied-long-hair guy.

The interview was at one of the state office buildings that I haven't quite walked to, in the past, but that I could if it weren't cold and for 10 am. And extremely windy; we spent the day with a steady, like, 20 mph wind heading east.

It was much more of a technical interview than I expected, although it was also a generally lower level of difficulty than I would have expected either. As in, the first question was to name the three kinds of list element in HTML. I was taken aback and asked, ``You mean, like, ordered lists and unordered lists?`` And was told that I had nailed it, with my instant reply to that. The third type of list they didn't even know of until they started looking up questions to ask, and it came to me about as they revealed it. (Dictionary lists, used for glossaries in the HTML standards guidelines of 1998 and forgotten about since.) Some of the questions I aced. One --- what the difference is between an SQL 'INNER JOIN' and an 'OUTER JOIN' --- I was prepped for because I'd bombed it at the previous interview. (I warmed up with the joke that ``the INNER JOIN is the one I always start with and then realize I wanted OUTER JOIN instead''.) Some I just went on too long about; the first fifteen minutes or so was me explaining longer than they wanted and being chided for that. I explained that as a former academic it's my compulsion to explain a lot and hard to get me to shut up, and then I remembered that the last thing I should do --- ever, but especially in this setting --- is be self-deprecating. Even when it's funny, it's giving the wrong impression to people who don't know the real you.

And some I just bombed, including failing to define ``polymorphism'', a basic piece of programming, although I was able to get enough of a chat going that I think they remembered me as having answered it? And I bobbled explaining what a ``foreign key'' is in a database, although if I'd just started talking I probably would have worked it out before the end of a sentence. (It's when one table contains the unique identifier --- the key --- for another table. So, like, if you have a table of user's names, it might have as a foreign key their ID number, used in other tables.) Near the end we came to a section on Angular, a technology I don't know anything about, and when I said I'd only ever studied it without deploying an example they asked if I'd rather skip those questions. I would be so grateful if they did.

If anything did clinch it for me, it might have been the last topic, about Americans with Disability Act compliance. Or as I see it, just simple accessibility. I've been trying to make accessible web sites since I first read about the issue in like 1997, so I was able to quickly rattle off things that make web sites more accessible. Like, not fixing type fonts or sizes. Using only high-contrast color pairings. Never using color as the lone signifier of meaning; you need color, shape, and texture at a minimum (texture being more a real-world matter, but you can style things so as to reinforce color). That for any audio you need a transcript; for any video you need a transcript and a descriptive audio. One question was what are some HTML tags necessary for ADA-compliant web sites and the obvious answer was image alt text, to explain the point of an image to people who don't see it. None of this was very deep, to my way of thinking, but I suppose I tend to think anything I know isn't very deep. I started to write ``anything I know outside my academic specialty'' but I also deep down feel I don't know my specialty very deeply either.

The oddest thing came at the end when the guy who'll be my supervisor asked, as a PhD, would I have trouble dealing with less intelligent folks like him, who has a bachelor's and an associate's, or one of the other interviewers (also a bachelor's). (The third interviewer had a master's.) And, well, no, of course not, and I tried to emphasize that a doctorate just reflects having a certain kind of persistance and diligence, and that intelligence doesn't have much to do with it. And, I pointed out, he knows things with a depth and thoroughness that I never will. I regretted not pointing out also that even if I were more intelligent than someone else, that doesn't make them less worth respect, or me worth more, but it didn't occur to me at the time, because I'm not that smart. (And at some point saying too much works against you.)

While walking me out my future supervisor talked about my Singapore teaching experience and whether I was looking to jump back to academia. And I admitted while I loved the life, it's over for me; the schools can get better mathematicians than me. And then I remembered about not deprecating myself but, well, what can I say? Maybe something that doesn't make it sound like I'm settling for programming because I can't get a job I really want. Mm.

I got home and wrote up my impressions for my recruiter, which amounted to thinking that while it went pretty well --- we ran long, always a good sign --- they're going to go for someone who didn't bobble simple questions like defining polymorphism.

And then Thursday, I slept in; it was the rare day that bunnyhugger was up and showered and downstairs before me. She said there was a message just left on the machine for me. The recruiter I was working with started out by saying she had an update for me about the job I'd interviewed for and I was ready to tell bunnyhugger they'd rejected me already, but the recruiter went on to say ``Congratulations, you have been selected'' and I stood, jaw dropped, at this. bunnyhugger saw me and asked what was wrong; despite hearing the message as it was recorded and again as it was replayed, she hadn't listened, which is how she failed to learn before I did that the longest unemployment of my life had its end.

I'm finally up in the photo roll to, uh, Halloweekends, like I just finished writing about in plain text here. Well, here, enjoy some pictures of the Merry-Go-Round Museum to start.

The entrance to the Merry-Go-Round Museum! The booth there, I believe, is taken from a vintage carousel's (Euclid Beach Park?), and it's where you go to buy admission and to get your wooden nickels, the ride tokens.

To the left (as you enter the building) of the entrance is the first set of displays, including one of the brass ring arms that carousels used to use before parks went to pay-one-price. I couldn't get a good look at the statue up top and I feel like that's new but am not sure.

Joy For Every Generation, as they've long had up front at the Merry-Go-Round Museum. The black-and-white photograph banners in back I believe are new.

Definitely new: this little coin-op carousel that bunnyhugger's examining.

All of the figures are neat stained-glass animals, a great idea for a piece like this.

Can you spot the flirting rabbit? (Actually I'm not sure it is flirting.) Anyway, lot of menagerie figures on this glass merry-go-round.

Trivia: Screen Gems made five cartoon shorts based on Al Capp's comic strip Li'l Abner. Source: Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons, Leonard Maltin.

Currently Reading: Bizarro #10, Dan Piraro.

Conneaut Lake Park: I have given you the setting. And the experience of riding the things in it. And given some sense of the gift shop's offerings, as well as the things people offer the park. And also about the fires that have done so much damage to the poor park. I must finish now, and return to posts that are at least a tolerable length or hidden behind cuts.

So, the park's Trustees are cagey, at least, about whether people should donate money to the people who're spearheading the reconstruction of the fire-ravaged parts of Conneaut Lake Park. This sounds initially odd, particularly for a park that's been so dependent on the support of the community's volunteers to keep going at all. That then goes to suggest that there's tension between factions trying to control the park. But that's also simple and understandable, so, that doesn't seem to quite fit what's happened with the management of Conneaut Lake Park. I'm attempting to understand the whole structure myself, and bunny_hugger probably has a better idea of it (if nothing else she better understands the way parks are usually run), so please accept this as a rough approximation of how the park's gotten to where it is now. The story, of course, features a key role for a man with a shady past and a pile of gold coins.

The generic history of a local park like this runs something like: picnic grounds in the late 19th/early 20th century, putting in some roller coasters and other attractions in the 20's, hard-hit by the Depression and the War, perhaps expanding in the 50s with Baby Boomers needing places to bring their kids that's cheaper than Disneyland, and then a nasty decline in the 60s and 70s when either the family that's owned it for decades runs out of money and shuts it, or when they stagger on until Six Flags can buy the park and then shut it. As best I can tell from Wikipedia and from CLP Junction's fan-created history of the park, Conneaut Lake Park more or less fit that script at least through the 70s, possibly into the 80s when they added the Splash City Waterpark. Conneaut Lake Park sold off 19 of the carousel horses in 1989, replacing them with Carousel Works horses fresh from Mansfield (implying they were probably among the first horse purchasers for that company, incidentally).

But selling off the carousel is typically the three-year warning that a park is going to close. In 1990 the park tried to shift to being gated, with an admission fee (and parking fees; we certainly didn't pay for parking in 2013), which is the sort of thing most of the last free-admission parks were doing around that time, but here, it apparently was badly received. (Also, the summers of 1990 and 1991 were lousy park weather.) Through the early 90s the park kept selling off rides, and by 1995 it was bankrupt. It didn't open that season, and probably any other park would have thrown in the towel at that point, the way Detroit's Boblo Island did.

However ... then came in a new owner, a convicted felon named Gary Harris who despite convictions for rape, receiving stolen property, trafficking in forged money orders, and being called ``Doctor Death'' by a grand jury witness, bought the park. According to the Washington (PA) Observer-Recorder of 3 July 1996, he ``put up $100,000 in gold coins as a good faith deposit'', which is exactly the way to prove your good intentions while you're appealing your sentence of 27 months in prison and $155,000 in fines and back taxes, which were then under appeal, and are facing new charges of attempted tax evasion, falsifying corporate tax returns, obstruction of justice, bank and bankruptcy fraud, and racketeering. The Observer-Recorder goes on to quote Michelle Ott, then running the Sunset View Motel, as saying, ``It kind of raises your eyebrows a little bit. But look at the casinos in New Jersey. They're run as successful businesses, but who are they owned by?'', which to me proves that whatever it is that makes Conneaut Lake Park so, was already evident by then. And tu quoque to you too, Ms Ott. (The article also states that Conneaut Lake Park opened in 1892 as a Pennsylvanian version of the Chautauqua Institute, and that the park boasted of launching the career of Perry Como. This delights me almost as much as the gold coins do.)

Come 1997, Harris, on his way to jail, donated the park to the people of northwestern Pennsylvania, creating a trust which would, if Conneaut Lake Park existed in a fully sane world, have put it into a happy if staid senescence, becoming something like Rye Playland, a park that could exist indefinitely and stably except for those moments when sufficiently many people get outraged that the county collects taxes even though it owns an amusement park. It didn't turn out that way. Possibly there are unwise aspects to hitching your cash-strapped amusement park to a four-time felon convicted of money fraud. On the other hand, what rational process would have kept the park going, then?

Harris would, according to Wikipedia, go on to state that while he gave the land to the people of northwestern Pennsylvania, he kept for himself a 99-year lease on the rides and attractions, which makes for a bit of a problem. An article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette of 16 February 2003, warning that Conneaut Lake Park might be out of comebacks, reports that after serving his 27-month sentence, Harris denied the had donated the park to the people anyway.

According to the Post-Gazette of 21 July 2004, among other things, Harris diverted about $400,000 of park revenues to himself, and failed to pay taxes; the tax bill would keep growing and staggering on, and it's probably the biggest non-fire-based threat Conneaut Lake Park faces right now: it's got a debt of about $900,000, between the unpaid taxes and interest. I don't know that this is all traceable back to Harris's involvement, but according to the February 2003 article at that point it owed $280,000 in back taxes and it's difficult to suppose they're not connected.

But the park carried on, reopening in 1997 with five rides purchased from the Old Indiana Fun Park. I mention this because somehow the Conneaut Lake Park weirdness stretched out to Old Indiana Fun Park: it had opened in 1983 as the ``Middle Country Renaissance Festival'' and grew into a picnic area and family amusement center. The park closed in 1997, after the killing of one and paralyzing of another passenger on the miniature train ride, a ride which had passed two state inspections in the previous three months although the safety inspector admitted he wasn't qualified to inspect amusement rides. The train had derailed at least 79 times in the two months before the fatal accident and managed as many as fifteen derailments in a single day. Old Indiana Fun Park owners admitted negligence but denied knowing about the ride's condition.

The rest of the park was purchased by, who else, Six Flags. (Well, Premier Parks, as the corporate overlords were known.) Six Flags used the park for years as a kind of resting site for rides they were planning to move from one park to another, without ever actually opening it. So if you just looked at the list of roller coasters in the park for, say, 2002, it looks like a thrill park; it just didn't have any patrons or operators or anything.

But Conneaut Lake Park took away some of the rides of this weird little park, and this would seem to coincide with the most recent little era of new rides and attractions. Still, the existing heavy debt load and the burden of lawsuits in Harris's wake would be challenging for any park to manage. As best I can tell, the trustees for the park weren't up to it. As late as 2005, according to the Beaver County Times, the whole board hoped to resign after concluding there was no way for the park to operate; a judge refused to let them quit in favor of a three-to-five member board. The article quotes the trustee's attorney as saying the park had `no computerized program to prepare financial reports'', which seems bizarre, considering that among other things it was 2005, a time when computers were almost able to manage the work of tracking finances for multimillion-dollar enterprises.

At this point I feel myself lost in a swamp of financial matters. As best I can make out the current situation, there are several parties each with their pieces of Conneaut Lake Park: the trustees who own the park and owe quite some debt on it; Adams Amusements which runs the attractions; the Conneaut Lake Hotel, which hasn't burned in an important way since 1943; Park Restoration LLC, which held a lease --- and which had insured --- the beach club and dockside which burned in August; and there's also another group which runs the Halloween ``Ghost Lake'' feature.

As best I can make out the squabbling, too, it's all parties who have a real desire to see the park continue and thrive. It'd have to; you couldn't have stuck with this park for the quarter-century it's just had if you didn't want it to thrive. But it's also gotten divided up in ways that almost ensure people work at cross-purposes: Adams, for example, appears (appears! I don't know enough of this at first hand) to put all the revenues it gets into keeping the rides functioning, which, you can certainly understand. The Hotel, meanwhile, appears (again, as best I understand it) to want the park to spend more money on repairing the facades and pavement and getting the whole burned-out postapocalyptic feel taken care of. Park Restoration, I believe, was responsible for things like the Journey/John Mellencamp tribute bands which bring flocks of bikers to the park on Sundays; but, the Hotel (if I have this right) feels that flocks of bikers coming to the park on Sundays also scares off families and kids and all that. You can see how this problem starts intractable and gets only worse from there. Park Restoration had insurance on its structures, possibly a half million dollars in payout, but they want the land of their complex and the hotel separated into new parcels independent of the main park. This would allow them, presumably, to survive if the park went under entirely; but by subdividing the land, it also makes further partition thinkable. No matter; the county, with a big unpaid tax bill, might demand the money first.

It's hard to say exactly how bad the finances of the park are; as the local press points out --- with a vehemence and determination that reminds me of nothing quite so much as the determination with which golden-age-of-pulp stories had the newspaper editors determined to bring down the Lone Wolf because sure he's been cracking all Inspector Farraday's toughest cases for fifteen years now but he still used to be a jewel thief and he'll surely show his true self again --- that the trustees don't make very lavish financial reports. Actually, the claim tends to run more like ``they don't publish any financial information'', which seems like a much sterner claim. Fan forums, such as at clpjunction.com, are only a little enlightening, as so much of the discussion of park finances turns into squabbling over what exactly is meant by a ``corporation'' and other such fights between people who aren't actually experts in finance law arguing about what finance law means. As best I can tell, the park's total debts seem on the order of three to five million, while (per the 2005 Beaver County Times article above) annual revenues are on the order of two million. It seems like with some lucky breaks and some forgiveness this ought to be manageable, if tough.

Crawford County has slapped the park with what would seem like a death blow: a tax sale, if the outstanding $900,000 debt isn't settled or renegotiated. The deadline is about a year off, and, well. It's obvious that this would kill any normal park. But so would the at least three bankruptcies I've been able to find out about, so would the fiasco over the lease, so would the shut-down years or the years when they had to borrow money from local car dealerships to open at all. In 2013, if the clpjunction.com forum commenters are right, they managed to open without needing a loan.

I don't see a rational way out of this doom. But it's not a park that lives by rational ways. It's had a quarter-century of living some sort of financial or managerial opera. It gets discovered by people who go in not knowing what they might see, and come away still not knowing what they had seen but knowing that they loved it, as just this past week Susan Glaser of the Cleveland Plain Dealer did. Maybe there's some millionaire looking for a way to be kind to a community who'll read this and be inspired. Maybe it'll become a Kickstarter amusement park. Maybe the laws of probability will contort yet again and find the park some way to stay afloat.

Maybe someone will pop in who happens to have $950,000 in gold coins and, I hope, a pure spirit.

Trivia: For the Tennessee Centennial Exposition, Fred Thompson produced the Giant Seesaw, a sort of dual crane, with a 75-foot-high fulcrum, which lifted alternating viewing cars up 150 feet in the air. Source: The Kid Of Coney Island: Fred Thompson and the Rise of American Amusements, Woody Register.

Currently Reading: Weeds: In Defence of Nature's Most Unloved Plants, Richard Mabey.

So returning to the Conneaut Lake Park, and what might be called the after-trip report. You've seen what the grounds are like, and then what the ride experience was like, and what I think the gift shop reveals about the park and how it can carry on. Now, some bigger context, some things we discovered afterwards, after we left the park and tried to quite understand what we had seen.

The day after our visit, a group of volunteers working with a TV production team --- creating a pilot a new show they hope to sell to the Travel Channel, in which they go to distressed amusement parks and fix up what they can --- started work. The objective was to fix up as much as they could, including the Devil's Den, as well as to build a new attraction. The park's official web site was vague about what the attraction would be, because it was to be revealed only at the end of the repair and renovation week, but, obviously, it couldn't be something big and the terming of it as an attraction suggested that it wasn't a ride, or at least not exactly that.

One target of the work was the Devil's Den, which we learned had been renamed in 1992 as Dr. Moriarity's Wild Ride. Now we had an explanation for the ghost appearance of ``Dr.'s'' in the sign which read ``Featuring the      Infamous GUM WALL!!''; the ride was changed back from Dr Moriarity's in 2001. This also suggests things about how long the park goes without fully repainting rides, given its late challenges.

This did mean, though, that we might have been on this dark ride in its last operating day before getting new livery. If we'd not had the lucky accidents that brought us to the park, we'd have missed it obviously; but if the accidents bringing us there had been even a little different --- say, starting the next week --- we'd have had a very different experience. (In either direction, before or after, really; for example, apparently the Tumble Bug had only been put back into service three weeks before we visited.)

Volunteers and donated time contribute a lot to keeping Conneaut Lake Park intact. The park has almost become a volunteer project, really: the Blue Streak, for example, was standing but not operating for a couple of years, until the American Coaster Enthusiasts, and local park fans, and the help of a Pepsi Refresh Grant (which bunny_hugger had voted for back a couple years ago when there was public voting for what should get the grants, without ever quite knowing whether they had gotten it) put it into working shape. A couple years ago a volunteer project restored the railway to functioning (and the Tumble Bug too), and let the park have a partial season. The start of this month, volunteers --- with the support of a local contractor --- were to go about fixing some of the many fences in need of repair, and there's work under way to repaint the Blue Streak roller coaster. The 14th and 15th was a ``Bring Your Own Mulch'' landscaping event.

I'm not sure that the Blue Streak needs significant structural repair, though. Apparently, at one point in its volunteer-restoration project, considerable woodworking repair was done by local groups of Amish carpenters. You can likely hear the Internet giggling over that one. It'd left me with a grin at how wonderfully quirkily odd was the chain of events that would bring the park to that. And, really, giggling people on the Internet, if I had to choose a group purely on stereotype grounds, ``Amish carpenters'' is about the best group I could think of to complete the task of ``fix a huge wooden structure so it stays fixed on its own''.

Oh, that MetamorphoSign contest I mentioned the other day, along with talking about the sign put together for Blue Streak's 75th anniversary? That turns out to have been (according to Conneaut Lake Park Junction, one of the park's fan sites) the result of winning an online vote scheme. The park got a $10,000 sign makeover thanks to its online fanbase.

I can't think of any park that draws such determined and ongoing support from its community. Oh, everyone rallied to Casino Pier and to FunTown Pier after they were smashed in Superstorm Sandy, but that could be sated by buying ``Restore the Shore'' bumper sticker magnets, and it hasn't been a lingering mess. (Also, last November, everyone in the area had their own problems to consider.) Pittsburgh would probably riot if Kennywood announced it couldn't open for the year, and there's wide swaths of northern Ohio and southern Michigan that would have a reaction if Cedar Point were to tear down its Blue Streak. But to put out, with a straight face, a call for fifty volunteers each bringing their own bag of mulch and a roll of landscaping fabric, maybe get a truckload of dirt if they could, and have a reasonable expectation of people turning out? That's an incredible act of community.

They hope to do more, as ever. For the Halloween events --- and I have to admit it's not hard to imagine the park being its own Halloween makeover without changing anything --- they're hoping, between the actual management and the Halloween event (called Ghost Lake) management and the volunteers, to put together what they hope will be the longest (and scariest) Halloween attraction in the world --- more than 160 live creatures, and a (somehow) 13-level park, according to its Ghost Lake web site, something projected to take two hours to walk through. bunny_hugger and I thought it might be something as simple as letting people work up their courage to walk over the scary abandoned bridge that seems to lead to the jungle primeval. That bridge does appear in the photo montage for Ghost Lake.

The new attraction, by the way, that the folks making that show on spec for the Travel Channel unveiled? It's called the Hostile Hostel, a walk-through haunted house (based apparently on a Romanian hotel), and it opened with great fanfare on the 3rd of August, alongside the other improvements made by the show's swirling of activity. I have to expect Travel Channel to pick up, if not the series, at the very least this particular episode, because of the astounding feat of taking the park as it was, and summoning its reserves of volunteers to do something incredible, and their installing the new attraction.

Oh, and also because of the major and catastrophic fire. There's more to say about that.

Trivia: George Tilyou's Steeplechase Park had the ``Blow-hole Theater'', in which a lecherous dwarf would tease and direct women into a room where still jets of air shot up from the floor, exposing their legs and undergarments. Source: The Kid Of Coney Island: Fred Thompson and the Rise of American Amusements, Woody Register. (Register notes this ``verged on the indecent end'' of middle-class behavior.

Currently Reading: The Magazine Of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September/October 2013, Editor Gordon van Geller.

To continue the report on Conneaut Lake Park:

When we arrived the park was quiet, which maybe sensibly would be ominous. But it was quiet because the park had just opened, and rides were coming into service as ride operators arrived and as patrons came in and as there was need for them to run. Conneaut Lake Park would never, never, be a packed and busy place bustling like Kennywood, but it would get a pleasant group attending, people who went in expecting to enjoy themselves --- I think the type case for this was a woman telling her grandkid that she used to go to this park when her grandkid's mother was a girl --- and this would be the impression we took from the place. It looks like an abandoned amusement park that someone has snuck into and turned on, but, it is a platform for those attending it. If you wish to have a good time, you will. This is how we did. This is what makes visiting Conneaut Lake Park not another exercise in disaster tourism.

Conneaut Lake Park had an antique carousel. It kind of still does. The park has been wracked for --- for ages now --- by shortages of money, and an antique carousel is a cash reserve. They've been selling off the animals, or so we hope as the idea they've been lost to vandalism is too heart-crushing to believe. Apparently there are only five of the original animals left, with the rest replaced by fiberglass or modern replicas, ones familiar to use from Carousel Works rides. Some of them are out of service, including at least one horse turned around and with a purple plush rabbit draped across its seat so no one is tempted to ride it. We guessed about which ones were originals, and I believe guessed wrong.

The carousel had a brass ring dispenser. It wasn't running; it wasn't even extended. I couldn't say whether this is because the dispenser was broken, or because they didn't have staff to operate it --- they'd need someone else to push the ring out --- or whether they just don't have enough brass and steel rings to run it anymore. But in the northwest of Pennsylvania and this looking-glass Knoebels, there we might have grabbed at a brass ring again. It'd be selfish to ask for that; we had a wondrous enough time and couldn't demand more.

They had a band organ, too, a 1924 Artizan ``XA'' model called Artie, and which we'd learn was a rare --- almost unique --- example of its kind. (If I understand comments correctly, most of the survivors of this type were converted to Wurlitzer rolls; Conneaut Lake Park's, of course, has been preserved in its original configuration, possibly by there not being the money to improve it out of its historic identity.) It wasn't running, and we didn't much expect that it would because, after all, this is a park that can't replace its light bulbs. To fix a tetchy, near-unique band organ? Impossible!

And yet Conneaut Lake Park is an impossible land. As we rode the carousel our first time, an engineer (if they specialize) and the ride operator started to fiddle with the organ. They took it off and did something or other --- well, we were in the midst of the ride, how could we tell what they were doing? --- and as our carousel ride came to a stop, the ancient organ came to life and played a few untuned notes. We applauded. The band organ stayed working, the rest of the day that we were there.

This impossible, impoverished, postapocalyptic park in the midst of nowhere has people who care enough, who are determined enough, who find themselves able, to keep their band organ working, and to repair it when it fails. No amusement park in existence in the real world has any excuse to not have its band organ working. Cedar Fair? Six Flags? You are plutocrats, with more money and ability and resources falling through the holes in your pockets --- which you don't have --- than this park has ever had, and they have shown you up. In a few precious moments of tinkering we learned something of the incredible nature of Conneaut Lake Park, and we were made lovers of this poor little park. It is cushioned from the real world by people who will keep ``Artie'' working.

This is one of the secrets of the park, we would learn. They have put their resources, such as they are, into keeping working what they possibly can. The park may be shabby, but, good heavens, it works. The people caring for Conneaut Lake Park work magic, the kind you see in mawkish Christmas specials of mediocre sitcoms, where that gruff old chap down the street leaves a few hints that he might actually be Santa Claus, having once again given up his duties at the North Pole so he could putter around western Pennsylvania and show the cynical youth of today there are so enchanted places.

The thing which brought us to the park was the Blue Streak, unrelated to Cedar Point's much younger park. This wooden roller coaster, 75 years old (officially, as of the week before), was an American Coaster Enthusiasts Landmark, of historic importance, one of the couple survivors of roller coaster designer Edward Vettel's work, with historic trains and operating in the traditional manner, without seatbelts or seat dividers, with a single-position lap bar. You can ride it and touch its construction in 1938. ACE helped restore the roller coaster, saving it from decrepitude in the late 90s, and did so again within the past decade. ACE may be something of a fanboy organization, with the social problems that implies in many of its members, but its dedication to the preservation and restoration of antiques earns it considerable good karma.

bunny_hugger is an ACE member, of course --- she was even showing that off to people in the traditional way, by wearing a coaster T-shirt, Casino Pier's ``Rebuilding Family Memories'' one celebrating that stricken pier's determination to recover from catastrophe --- and I might as well be. We also saw two more on the Blue Streak, in the back seat. They're obvious, in that they just look like they might be roller coaster fanboys. One was wearing an ACE t-shirt, which admittedly makes it easier. The other was wearing a shirt for Adams Entertainment, the company which runs the rides at Conneaut Lake Park.

The guy in the ACE t-shirt, we'd learn, was ``Backseat Bill'', a famous in-the-right-circles coaster enthusiast who, as the name suggests, insists on riding on the back seat of everything. The ride operator told us who he was; he was spending the day riding and re-riding and re-re-riding this classic coaster. (The week before, for its birthday, was a celebration with people having free ride time for hours on the thing.) bunny_hugger and I were tempted to talk to them --- after all, how often do you get to talk with a fellow enthusiast, especially over a hidden treasure like this? --- but we also worried, you know, fanboys can be dangerous to strike up conversations with, and fears of a conversation we'd spend hours trying to escape scared us away from talking further. Perhaps we missed an incredible conversation. It would've been lost in the wonder of the day anyway.

The station is hand-operated, with the big levers to brake and release trains as roller coasters had in the good old days before electronic controls. We were delighted watching the ride operator handle these levers, some of them far enough apart they were clearly meant to be run by two people at once. The operator handled that by stretching, hard, and pushing with his foot and his arms at separate levers. Isn't that wonderful? The station also has, at its exit --- where the ride starts, and the train passes into the initial tunnel that takes it to the lift hill --- a painting of the whole ride. We would learn that in days gone by the ride had lights which would show the position of the train as it went up and down, out and back. The lights, of course, don't function, but wow, what a great idea.

We got the front seat --- we actually asked if it was all right to wait for the front seat, as if the park were that rulebound, and the operator didn't actually laugh at us for our naïveté --- and ... well. The ride starts with a passage through a tunnel, meant to make the gap between the launch station and the lift hill more interesting than the simple S turn it actually is. An intact tunnel is an easy way to make a stretch like this a bit more interesting. This is not an intact tunnel.

The tunnel's just a wooden shed, and the park hasn't been able to maintain things that aren't strictly functional like sheds for ages. The boards look rotted, paint peeling --- or peeled --- with holes worn out or punched out, casting shafts of light that made the tunnel darker than true darkness would be. This pleasantly creepy effect is spoiled by the holes in the roof, patched over by garbage bags, some bulging from rainwater past. We would wonder what the Halloween haunted-house version of the ride would be, and whether it could be any different from this.

Roller coasters beside trees aren't new, not to us --- Idlewild has its Rollo Coaster built into the treescape, after all --- but here again, Conneaut Lake was exceptional. The trees had grown with only little tending and trimming away from the ride, with branches that reach so much closer to the track than we'd seen on any other ride. The ride operator teased folks going out that they weren't allowed to grab the tree branches, and sure, rationally, we weren't ever near enough to actually grab them. But it's a very close thing. The effect is like riding an abandoned roller coaster, half-reclaimed by the woods, but it keeps going.

The roller coaster doesn't feel decrepit, and actually it was surprisingly smooth. Later research would tell us that the Blue Streak is running smoother this year than it has in ages, the result of all these attempts by its lovers to heal it. Six Flags, which disgraced itself this season by tearing down the Rolling Thunder roller coaster --- not even 35 years old --- on the pretext that it was too old and rough to be maintainable or enjoyable, has further reason to be ashamed. The ride, again, may be shabby, but it is neat shabby.

It's also a great roller coaster, at least the front half, if you ride in the front seat. It feels ready to fly out of control, something that the poor condition of the tunnel and the scary looks of what's behind probably reinforce, at least on the way out; I have to admit the return leg, a couple of hills bouncing about, isn't very exciting, at least from the front seat. We wouldn't have it changed, though.

From the roller coaster you can get good views of the miniature golf course, and of the miniature railroad. That wasn't working the day we visited, and we'd learn that it's (again) an antique, and (again) one the park takes great pride in, and we're sorry to have missed it and can only dream of being able to visit again a day that it is running.

The most unexpected treasure in the park was the Tumble Bug, the sibling of Kennywood's Turtle ride. These were once, in the 1920s, fairly common rides, and we liked the one we rode at Kennywood. Conneaut Lake Park's is its much poorer relation. The cars don't have the turtle shells that decorate Kennywood's, and they also don't have the insect shells that were the other major decorative option. They don't have any shells, in fact, just the bare metal cups of the cars, sitting like ugly UFO's on the oscillating track.

The rearmost of the cars was roped off, and the ride attendant, looking a bit surly, or worn down at least, told us that it wasn't ``working''. The cars on a Tumble Bug are just cars in a train; the whole thing moves or it doesn't. How could one car in it not be working, when all it has to do is be carried along?

The surliness of the ride operator I believe to be part of an act, because he told the riders that ``the object of the game is to ride it with your hands up'', not grabbing the center wheel for stability. We hadn't heard this at Kennywood; there, they recommend holding on to the center wheel. We were game for this. Our ride operator was tricking us.

See, as the Tumble Bug tumbles, if you aren't holding on to the center, then, you'll slide, backward as the car goes up the hill and forward as it goes down, and it can get to going pretty darned quick. And the acceleration will be complicated, too, since (for example) once the majority of the train is over the hill, all the cars will start accelerating, even those in back. This is the sort of ``cracking the whip'' effect that makes the back seat in some roller coasters a better ride than the front seat is, and explains probably why the backmost car was closed off. It's probably too wild a ride, at the Tumble Bug's speed and rough tracking, even for people who'll go along with the puckish ride operator's suggestion and accept being tossed forward and back on the waves of the turtle ride.

And it was a fantastic ride, vastly more than we imagined, much more thrilling than that at Kennywood. Much more dangerous, at least in feeling. When have you ever heard a ride operator tell you to not hold the thing that keeps you from sliding out of control through your car?

Conneaut Lake Park's Tumble Bug and Kennywood's Turtle are the only surviving examples of the (adult) version of this ride known to still exist. bunny_hugger and I have ridden all the world's racing derbies; we've now also ridden all the surviving tumble bugs.

The dark ride that had caught our eye was ``The Devil's Den'', a wonderful old style sort of thing with the little cars that run into a building for various stunts and props, duck back outside for a steep dip --- and this still had it; many of this sort of ride have had the dip replaced with something not quite so steep and thus less prone to breaking down or whiplashing passengers --- and back inside for some more haunted-house mischief. It had a lovely facade, with paintings of bricks and witches in loopholes and flames behind the exterior dip, doors with eyes staring at people caught up in a boa constrictor's coils, that sort of thing. Beneath the sign with the ride's name is another wooden sign, dangling beneath, promising that this is a ride ``Featuring the      Infamous GUM WALL!!''. Within the excessive space between `the' and `Infamous' was a ``Dr.'s'', painted over but not quite invisible. Yet.

bunny_hugger's research would find the ride was apparently installed about 1970, and the interior with fluorescent-painted animals and demons and such looks like it might be from about then. At least the style is strikingly late-60s kids fantasy in form. It might be original paint; it might be just faithful retouching of the original. Neither seems perfectly satisfactory an explanation, considering how worn the building is, how the letters in ``The Devil's Den'' were chipped and flaking off to show older layers of paint.

Ah, but the Gum Wall. It was alluded to at the lone ticket booth, the one offering gumballs for its use. What it was, bunny_hugger expected would disgust me. It doesn't quite do that. Actually, I kind of admire it because I suspect it's a brilliant bit of social engineering. As the ride starts, the car goes past a wall that's quite easily in arm's reach on the left. The signs ask people to stick their gum on the wall. Many have, and the wall is littered with the dried remains of past chewing. Since the ride is in better shape than any sense suggests, perhaps this Gum Wall, encouraging people to ``vandalize'' the ride right away, diverts the impulse bored kids might have to damage the heart of the ride. If so, it's brilliant. It certainly suggests a ride that's more intimately bound to the community.

We didn't have explained what the Dr.'s might mean, or why it might be painted out. We would learn.

These were the different rides we went on, the things that we couldn't ride at least as well at other parks --- Tilt-a-Whirls are great, but how different could they be at another park? Well, in hindsight, perhaps very different; almost surely the Conneaut Lake Park version would be more wild, less constrained, closer to feeling out of control. We would get information that their bumper car ride --- down to seven functioning cars --- is an incredible power ride, with cars that really can smash one another. For any other park we would think this was just hyperbole. Here, perhaps it's literally so. But we couldn't spend all our time here.

But we did go for second rides on a few things, on the carousel --- with the music playing throughout, in the tinny, poorly tuned notes of ``Arty'', and wonderful so. It's not a fast carousel --- few are --- but it works, and it has the band organ to accompany it.

This brings to mind, though, that the Kiddieland carousel is a smaller affair, two little horses abreast, which nevertheless manages to be pretty decently decorated, with leaf-and-vine patterns and lights that, mostly, light. That one turns slowly, as the ride operator walks around the outside and pushes the Kiddieland carousel by one pole. We don't know whether this was a temporary expedient because the people who could fix the motors were fixing the band organs and other things, or whether that's just the normal state because kids small enough to fit these animals could be content with a carousel moving at walking speed.

And we returned to the Blue Streak for another ride. ``Backseat Bill'' was good enough to yield his seat so that we might try it from the back, a position the ride operator said was the best. (He took a more front-seat ride.) The operator told us --- and everyone --- that for the best ride we should try holding our hands up as long as possible. bunny_hugger and I aren't in the habit of riding with our arms up, but, we could give it a try. If we were wise, we'd remember the prank the Tumble Bug operator played.

Blue Streak, it turns out, is a backseat roller coaster, with the ride from the back much better than the front at giving the illusion of being out of control, especially on the return leg with its many little hops. Also, that first hill feels wildly out of control as the back seat of the train drops. Frighteningly so. Stunningly so. bunny_hugger's hands grabbed the lap bar partway through the first drop. I was more resolute, but still grabbed onto the bar just after the end of the drop, as the car started barrelling up again, and I clung to it as if I feared gravity was going to suddenly switch off on me.

We staggered off, hooting and giddy from just how much wonder there was in these rides.

As we exited the park --- we hated to go, but we did have to get to Waldameer; we had souvenirs, and the trip to the gift shop is its own entry no less wondrous as you might expect --- we passed something I thought a bit curious: a couple of television production-type people, women making notes on clipboards and scribbling on tablets, guys walking around in camera harnesses, bunches of people standing around test cycles of the Paratrooper ride, that sort of thing. I speculated that maybe they were putting together a commercial, and that maybe we'd be barely visible in the background. I now know the story is more complicated than that.

And, as we walked back to the car, we saw someone taking the letters off the sign out front, the one that read on one side the park's hours (it's closed Tuesdays, but during this summer was open the rest of the week, 1 to 9). As whoever it was made off with letters describing the wristband sales, I quipped that I hoped he worked for the park, and a bit of me wonders if we can be sure he did.

We were awestruck with all of this; we felt like we were swimming, after our few little hours there.

There is more. This park's story is not exhausted yet. Not nearly.

Trivia: The ``Witching Waves'' amusement ride, opened in Coney Island's Luna Park in 1908 --- a flexible metal floor with reciprocating levers making it wave, propelling a car --- was invented by Theophilus Van Kannel, who also invented the revolving door. Source: The Kid Of Coney Island: Fred Thompson and the Rise of American Amusements, Woody Register.

Currently Reading: The Visioneers: How A Group Of Elite Scientists Pursued Space Colonies, Nanotechnology, and a Limitless Future, W Patrick McCray.