The Writing Desk of Jakebe Rabbit

It is always dangerous to try going to two amusement parks in a day. It's too easy to shortchange one for the other. We'd made that mistake during the New England Parks Tour a couple years ago, but we didn't know what else to do. We had gotten away with it earlier on our Fifth Anniversary Trip; the hours of Bowcraft and Keansburg meshed well. Saturday, we were planning to try this stunt again. It would get even weirder than that.

Driving south, the hour or so to Atlantic City, we passed signs warning that the state parks were all closed. I had somehow picked up enough local news to know this was likely coming; bunny_hugger hadn't. It was part of the budget standoff between the Legislature and Chris Christie. If you can remember as far back as July you might remember the late night talk shows mocking Chris Christie for lounging on a beach closed to the public, part of the disgraced governor's efforts to establish himself as so toxic and petty and universally hated he could become a Republican health care plan. The shutdown would not hurt us directly, except that it did foreclose some Sunday options. New Jersey has a healthy number of lighthouses, but I'm not sure any are in Federally-owned parklands so they couldn't be added to bunny_hugger's lighthouse count this trip. But we had forgotten to bring her lighthouse passport book. So while we could claim credit for seeing lighthouses we would have had to get stamps on loose sheets of paper and bind them into her passport. Doable, but not ideal. We must, next trip, make sure not to repeat the oversight.

We came up to Story Book Land, established 1955, and were immediately delighted. It was, like Bowcraft, a park that looked like it was just dropped off in a strip mall, although this in a much less densely populated part of the state. (Indeed, across the street from the parking lot is an Office Concepts store and a tattoo parlor.) It started out as one of the kid's fairy-tale-lands, the way many parks in the 50s did. We've been to its spiritual counterparts at Idlewild in Ligonier, Pennsylvania, and to Story Land in Glen, New Hampshire. This one is unlike Idlewild and Story Land in that it's still owned by the originating family. And, apparently, doing pretty well for itself. It's a small park, and one only open to 5 pm the early-summer Saturday we were visiting, which is what made attempting two parks seem like a plausible idea. We also figured the place would be swarmed with packs of kids running out ahead of an exhausted parent shouting at Brandon to get back here. But we trusted we could handle that.

Its entrance is a white castle, flanked by nutcracker guards. Also temporary red traffic barriers so people walking in from the parking lot have something like safety from cars driving in off the street. The entrance is a narrow hallway by the cashier's booth, with a gate featuring some of the birds and mice from Cinderella on signs that warn to only push the gate open when the music plays. The music is ``Hail to the Chief''. We don't know what exactly the link is between Story Book Land and Disney, but they've got a bunch of Disney Depictions of characters in the park. There must be some arrangement there or else an extremely bad day once someone at Disney Master Command hears about the place.

Just past the entrance is a large circular flower 'fountain', and a signboard with a clown welcoming you to Story Book Land. To the left is a 30-foot state of Mother Goose, goose beside her, and a couple of fake books to sit on for photographs. Apparently the Mother Goose had (has?) a loudspeaker and a camera inside, for a staffer to look out on and talk to nearby kids. To the left of that is a three-layer birthday-cake-shaped pavilion, which would make bunny_hugger long to have her own birthday party at an amusement park. The cake had a sign commemorating the park's 62 years of operation. The cake used to be only a single layer; the kids of the park's owners had it expanded on their parents' anniversary. Across the path from Mother Goose is the main snack bar, the Gingerbread House, which has a couple of figures from the A & W restaurant chain on the roof for some reason. Also, off to the side of Mother Goose, they have a Big Boy state, checkered overalls and everything. This goes unexplained.

So after about ten minutes at the park we were having a great day.

Trivia: The British Military Government allowed the formation of political parties in its zone of Germany on the 15th of September, 1945, about a month after the United States allowed district-level parties in its zone, and three months before the French military government did. Source: Germany 195: From War To Peace, Richard Bessel.

Currently Reading: The Global Transformation of Time, 1870 - 1950, Vanessa Ogle.

PS: Halloweekends Friday some more!

Performers for some of the haunted houses and walkthrough attractions rallied around symbols of the various venues.

The Kiddie Carousel, sparkling as a jewel in the night.

Glimpse of the Millenium Force roller coaster past the exit of the loading station. You can also see, through the door, the illuminated tower of the roller coaster's lift hill.

PPS: The Summer 2017 Mathematics A To Z: X, perhaps the last possible 'X' glossary term.

There's a lot of parking lots in Seaside Heights. Just, you know, a plot of land such as you might put a house on, only it's gravel or dirt and there's a guy out front offering to let you leave the car there until 2 am for five or ten or twenty bucks, depending on how busy it was. We saw one, a block north and west of the Casino Pier main building. He was standing in front of a metal music stand and playing the saxophone in-between (rare) customer visits. No bucket for tips or anything, and he wasn't playing any particular song. Just practicing his music while overseeing a Jersey Shore parking lot.

This lovely vignette is something we watched from the miniature golf course. Not the one atop the buildings on Casino Pier. We were tempted by that, but went instead to play the new miniature golf course that's adjacent to the water park, opposite the shore from the Casino. It's got a Privateer theme, much like the miniature golf course bunny_hugger and I went to with my father back in January. This one had some of the things you'd expect, props of buried treasure and all that. It also put up a bunch of signs about the pirate-or-privateers and their action around Toms River during the Revolutionary War. The pirate-or-privateer action along the Jersey Shore doesn't get a lot of attention, even in New Jersey histories because, you know, we've got the Battles of Trenton and Princeton and Monmouth Junction and the horrible winters at Morristown to talk about. But they were present and vicious in the sort of thing that horrified people about pre-20th-century warfare. So it was fun and I guess educational, if you pretend the signs knew the difference between it's and its.

We went back around the pier, and the Casino, and looking over merchandise and toys and looking for amusing sidelines. I spotted at an employee's door the printout of the benefits Casino Pier employees could claim, such as discount tickets to Great Adventure or to Legoland. We also stopped in another candy shop, not Berkeley's, where there was a bounty of old-time candies like liquorice pipes and Necco wafers and all. I forget if we picked up something to eat there.

We did return to Berkeley Candy, as promised, and brought that back to the car where we found we were no longer alone in the parking lot. There was one other car, parked next to ours, in the enormity of the municipal parking lot.

Candy safely stowed in the back we went back to the pier, admiring the beauty of the pier at night finally. And we bought a night ride on Hydrus, even more gorgeous in color-shifting light against the night sky, as well as the carousel again. Just magnificent.

After a lot of pondering we figured what we wanted for dinner: pizza on the shore. One of the pizza places had ricotta cheese pizza. I don't think I've had that before, because if I did, I would never have been able to eat anything else. I'm still licking my lips hoping to get a few molecules of that back again. Just magnificent.

We saw out the close of the pier, with all the lights turning off and the rides shutting down, and even the boardwalk games shuttered themselves. The day was over, and we said our goodbyes to Seaside Heights, to go back to our temporary Toms River home.

In the municipal parking lot there were two other cars.

Trivia: By the end of 1866 Dr S S Law's Gold Indicator Company had fifty subscribers to telegraphic reports of market prices in the New York Gold Exchange. Source: The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's Oline Pioneers, Tom Standage. (Standage doesn't say when the Company started, but from context it was apparently after the Civil War concluded.)

Currently Reading: The Global Transformation of Time, 1870 - 1950, Vanessa Ogle.

PS: What's looking good at Cedar Point?

Evening light making Raptor (the green roller coaster) and the Casino in the distance look really, really good. Taken from the ValRavn queue.

More of Raptor and the Casino looking so very good in the evening, autumn light. GateKeeper is the tiny blue pair of arches on the far right, above the horizon line.

Turkeys who are very busy with their projects in the petting zoo and do not have time for your issues, thank you.

PPS: The Summer 2017 Mathematics A To Z: Well-Ordering Principle, which lets me do about my favorite thing in the world: start with a joke and use it to prove all numbers have prime factorizations. So I guess I understand why everyone treated me like that in middle school.

We explored some of the arcades along Seaside Heights and Seaside Park. Mostly we were looking for pinball, which we didn't find. I had a faint recollection of some Seaside Heights location being on the Pinside map, but was dumb and didn't write down where, so we instead had to spend time wandering around amusing places without any particular goal in mind looking at what was interesting. Don't know how we were supposed to survive that. One thing we did discover and like was this ``Grand Piano Keys'' game, which we thought was a piano-themed rhythm game. It's actually just hitting the right sequence of lit keys in order, with rhythm irrelevant, and once we realized that our scores went way up. Still, twice was about enough times to play that.

We also located the new Berkeley Sweet Shop. Or Berkeley Candy, as it's named now. We're not sure what connection it has to the older shop. It's a much smaller storefront, without the taffy-making machinery on display. And with far fewer candies overall. We figured to get a box for ourselves, and another for bunny_hugger's parents as gift for watching Columbo. But we also realized it was barely into the afternoon, and salt water taffy would melt into an unpleasant goo left in the car. We left, promising to come back, and the clerks nodded, probably suspecting we were lying. We did come back, in the cool of evening, before leaving for home and got what we hoped for. We were eating taffy from the box we got as recently as this week.

We prowled around the pier, looking for rides we had been on, or decorations we knew. The Mighty Mouse figure that had been next to our Wild Mouse coaster was there again, standing next to the Pirate's Hideaway roller coaster. The Yogi Bear statue was there too, as were some other, less-copyright-infringey statues like the giant chicken holding a can of Coke. They had a bench with a clown statue sitting on it, and I got some pictures of bunny_hugger beside that. This would help further an ongoing joke with some of our friends, who've taken our furriness to be a cover story for our being Juggalos. (See, bunny_hugger had let slip how the soft drink of Further Connection North/Motor City Furry Con was Faygo, and MWS combined that and the whole dressing-up and acting-strangely aspects of our behavior to draw the obvious conclusion.)

And we circled the Floyd Moreland Carousel, which we'd so feared we would never see again, and later supposed we would never see again in that spot. It barely seemed different; the only real change has been that the pier switched from tickets and tokens for rides over to swipe cards.

And the roller coaster. Hydrus. Brand-new. Beautiful, really, with bright green track and blue supports and a three-dimensional dragon head peering over the sign. A vertical lift hill and first drop, too, reminiscent of the Untamed roller coaster at Canobie Lake Park. It had only been open a few weeks. bunny_hugger and I would enjoy, briefly, tenure on the front page of Coaster-Count.com's ``Rare Coasters'' riders for being on it. More people have had in on the fun since then, so it's not nearly as rare anymore.

One disappointment, and something we couldn't resolve without giving up on our anniversary as the day for our trip there. They had pay-one-price rides for other days of the week. For evenings, some days of the week. Not for our day, Friday. They did have a wristband to purchase, but for only two hours' unlimited riding time. After that it'd have to be buying a new wristband, or buying a swipe card for a la carte rides. Best deal we could find was to get the wristband, and two hours' of power-riding in, and then see what made sense afterwards.

Sunday, I think, we would notice coupons at the Wawa for discounts on Casino Pier ride wristbands. Nothing that would make them, like, all-evening or even four-hour wristbands, but things that would have made them a bit cheaper. We should've thought to check. All I can say is I was out of practice for this sort of attraction.

Trivia: Technicians at the University of North Carolina's Morehead Planetarium constructed a wooden mockup of the Gemini spacecraft, mounted on a barber's chair, to train astronauts in star-sighting techniques in 1964. Source: Moon Bound: Choosing and Preparing NASA's Lunar Astronauts, Colin Burgess.

Currently Reading: Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America, Josh Lauer.

PS: Let's step up the photo-clearing backlog with stuff from Cedar Point at the end of last year.

Halloweekends! The parking lot of the Breakers Hotel, at Cedar Point, with the Top Thrill Dragster the only prominent roller coaster. Almost washed out in the afternoon sun on the left there is Magnum XL-200, which from the name you'd never have guessed opened in the early May of 1989.

Cleared grounds! This used to be a miniature golf course that we always figured we'd play sometime when we had a couple free hours during a Cedar Point visit. But they were expanding the Breakers hotel --- a couple years after demolishing a wing they had renovated two years before --- and this was one of the casualties.

Also obliterated over winter last season: this version of the hotel entrance, convenient for Breakers guests to get into the back of the park. The line is caused by the x-ray scanners operated by teams from what they named ``Tenable Security Systems'', just as if a hipster novelist was trying a little too hard to give them a name that sounded off.

PPS: The Summer 2017 Mathematics A To Z: Volume Forms, an interesting dynamical systems thing.

The next day was Friday. The 30th. Our fifth anniversary.

We had brought presents for each other, hidden away by being put on completely different ends of the suitcase. It's a big suitcase. bunny_hugger gave to me a small wooden keepsake box, the sort that could hold a small treasured item. She was respecting the traditional fifth-anniversary gift material. I somehow had the idea the fifth-anniversary gift was silverware; possibly we were looking at different lists. But I was true to my list: I'd found commemorative spoons, one for Michigan's Adventure and one for Sandusky, Ohio. It was the closest I could get to Cedar Point, and it does feature the Breakers Hotel from Cedar Point on it. It also features some of the notable architecture of early-20th-century Sandusky. They're small things, naturally, since we wanted things we could easily carry to New Jersey and back again. But things meaningful to each other.

We eventually set out for the day. I don't think we missed housekeeping another day in a row, but it's possible. This was the really the only day we had specific plans to be a specific place for.

Something I discovered before we quite got on the road: if I had the key fob in my pocket I could unlock the rental car just by tugging on the door handle. I knew this was a strange, wondrous property of new cars that bunny_hugger would hate. She objected, on definition grounds if nothing else, to the `key' being something that just had to be in the car somewhere for the ignition to work. For the key to not even need to be touched to unlock the door would be too far. I would keep it, for a couple days, a weird little magic touch that I knew about.

For lunch we went to a Jersey Mike's. We always used to go to one at least once every one of her visits. Jersey Mike's sub sandwich shops have reached into Lansing; there's two in our area. We never eat there. I think I've picked up sandwiches from them to bring to our home two or three times, and I've eaten there sometimes when I was out for the afternoon. But we've never made it part of our regular life back home, and so it remains something special for trips like this.

One disappointment about the place: the Coffee News thing. It's this one-page kind-of placemat with human-interest stories of dubious reality and trivia of dubious plausibility and all that. It's supposed to get a new issue Wednesdays, but they had the same issue we'd read at the Crystal Diner our first night in town. On leaving I discovered they had some more issues, including the most current. The place just leaves old issues around because I guess it's not like a document talking about weird-news from Ukraine a year ago is timely or anything.

From lunch we drove east, for the destination closest to our hotel, and the site of our first real, important, perfect date: Casino Pier. Or, more generally, to Seaside Heights.

I chose to park at this public municipal lot just at the western border of the town. It's a good, easy-to-find spot, the kind that would keep us from losing where the car was. The unsettling thing is that the lot was empty. I wasn't sure it was still open to the public. But they had a pay station, and that accepted my credit card, so we just accepted the weirdness that it was a lovely, warm, sunny Friday afternoon at the Jersey Shore, just before the fourth of July, and here were hundreds of parking spots that nobody wanted. Unsettling. Bizarre.

Trivia: In 1866 Joseph Dixon patented a wood-planing machine which could process enough wood for 132 pencils per minute; his Dixon Crucible Company of Jersey City would become one of the first mass-producers of pencils. Source: The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance, Henry Petroski.

Currently Reading: Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America, Josh Lauer.

PS: Some miscellaneous Halloween-era stuff before I get into Halloweekends pictures.

From about Halloween last year: Blind Squirrel Tavern decorated for the horrors of the season with, like, Road Show one of the games to play. The alcove for the majority of the games isn't very large and arguably isn't the entrance to the tavern, but it's enough space for the league nights and they did dress it up for the season.

So here's what a selfie-type-league pinball league looks like. Write down your scores on the slips of paper provided and drop them in the box. bunny_hugger also won a gift card from one of the raffles, just a couple months ago. The creepy demonic head guy left after Halloween.

PPS: The Summer 2017 Mathematics A To Z: Ulam's Spiral, with something tossed in to make sure chefmongoose reads.

Wrapped up another week on my humor blog. If you aren't reading this on your favorite RSS reader or already, here's a helpful reminder:

• How To Connect To The Hotel Wi-Fi, last week's big piece, an instructional item.
• Right After Chatting With The Little King, I Have To Imagine as I get bothered by a Henry comic strip.
• Statistics Saturday: Some Chemical Elements Whose Names Sound Fake
• What’s Going On In The Phantom (Sundays)? May – September 2017 (villains get punched)
• Do I Know Too Much About The XFL? (Yes.)
• Mind You, I Still Haven’t Seen The Original Face/Off So Who Am I To Talk? as I notice a gap in pop culture.
• In Which I Just Have To Suppose Someone’s Being Naughty as I looked up Dennis the Menace and couldn't believe what I learned.
• How To Clean A Thing, this week's big instructional piece.

Some more puttering around from the reunion weekend last year:

The main fountain in the Richmond (Indiana) rose garden. Just a really splendid example of making water fall, I thought.

And a detail of the water fountain: that art deco-y eagle(?) perched on the inside of the fountain. I like the style.

And then here's a bit of chainsaw sculpture by the Richmond rose garden.

At the Glen Miller park on US 40 --- the former National Road --- is one of a dozen Madonnas of the Trail, monuments to ``the spirit of pioneer women'' erected in the 1920s by the Daughters of the American Revolution. It also happens to be near the spot of the first toll gate in Indiana, marked on the base of the statue as well as on a historical marker nearby. No, it's not named for the missing bandleader. It's a glen named for original owner John Miller.

bunny_hugger spots someone as she tries taking a photograph of the Madonna of the Trail.

Really interesting pile of late-Victorian house that's seen better days but maybe is being renovated? It's across the street, to the west of the Madonna of the Trail, right where she can glower at it.

Trivia: In 1842 London had eighteen public gasworks and twelve public gas companies, burning about 180,000 tons of coal annually to supply gas to about 134,300 private burners and 30,000 public or street customers. Source: The Age of Paradox: A Biography of England, 1841 - 1851, John W Dodds.

Currently Reading: Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America, Josh Lauer.

Besides the Crazy Mouse, Playland has a must-ride roller coaster. And besides that it has two other roller coasters, although those aren't anything terribly special. It also has a kiddy coaster that's of actual historical interest; it dates to 1928 and is one of the oldest wooden coasters out there. But that's not open to adults, which, based on what similar sized rides are, is probably a mercy to our knees. Certainly my knees.

But the must-ride adult coaster is the Dragon Coaster, which is what you'll see in any of the movies to have been filmed at Playland. (This includes Big and Fatal Attraction in case you need an 80s Amusement Park Movie Night.) Dragon Coaster is, remarkably, not the oldest ride in the park. It opened in 1929, two years after the park opened and a year after the Kiddy Coaster did. Anyway, it's a great roller coaster, complete with several things of particular delight to me: manual, lever-operated brakes, for example, and a curved loading platform, and a queue that doesn't let you pick your seats; you just get in line and hope you get to the seat you want first. Also a surprisingly recent addition of a big dragon facade to its tunnel, so that your train leaps into a dragon's mouth and twists around and comes out let's not think too hard about that because there's no really tasteful answers there. (You can get some glimpses of it, as well as some ride video and general pictures of the park, in the official video for Mariah Carey's ``Fantasy'' by the way.)

Another must-ride, at least by my lights, is underneath the Dragon Coaster. That's the Old Mill ride, another 1920s-vintage ride and one of the last tunnel-of-love style rides in North America that isn't in an old Popeye cartoon or something. It's one of only two in North America that I've ridden, and the other is in Kennywood where it's been re-themed to Garfield and left terribly boring. Playland's Old Mill was renovated in the 80s and yet looks strikingly modern. It's got a theme of gnomes mining, not necessarily safely, and has a number of really good pranks threatening riders with getting soaked or stuff tossed into them or the like. Also at least one quick shot of a dragon getting ready to eat you, so, great work all around.

By now we were getting starved, so bunny_hugger's brother asked what we wanted: pizza or French fries? Parks have generally gotten pretty good for vegetarian options, but one of the less-charming ways Playland has stayed retro is it really hasn't got, like, red bean burgers or something. We went with pizza, and lemonade, and walked over to one of the arcades. There had been pinball here before. There might be now.

There was! In the arcade next to the (non-racing) antique carousel was a Whirlwind that played much less brutally than the one at the National Championship/Women's World Championship. Of course, everything would. It also played less brutally than the one at the State Championship in MJS's pole barn although there, again, naturally.

They also had a Twilight Zone with the volume set to ``shake New York City to its foundations''. I am sometimes accused of exaggerating because I turn anything moderately outside average into the biggest or the tiniest thing that has ever existed. But when I say this pinball game was the loudest thing humanity has ever done that did not involve a ship full of picric acid catching on fire, I am understating. But the game absolutely thundered, especially when I managed (by luck) to score the Powerball Jackpot. Jackpots are already the loudest thing in the game, and here it was on a volume level designed to rattle our teeth out of place.

The game was also loud enough, and challenged by few enough other sounds, that bunny_hugger could for the first time recognize its background music. If there's no particular special mode going --- and the game has like fourteen modes, so there's often something else happening --- it plays an early-90s synthesizer rendition of Golden Earring's ``Bullet Hits The Bone'', one of the Dutch band's two songs to have been allowed into American pop culture. (The other is ``Radar Love'', which doesn't sound anything like ``Bullet Hits The Bone''. But they came out like ten years apart, and before 1993 ten years was long enough for popular music to change in sound.) But why ``Bullet Hits The Bone''? Because the lyrics include the words ``Twilight Zone'' is why. See my subject line today. Watch the video for it sometime; it exemplifies that early-80s video aesthetic of ``crazypants yet extremely literal to the verse''.

Also beside these two pinball machines --- and we were disappointed, kind of, that Bugs Bunny's Birthday Bash was no longer there (but wait!) --- was a little baseball game. The sort where you swing at a half-size pinball and try to reach hits and home runs and the like. The Silverball Museum has a couple of them. They hover around the edges of pinball (and probably, historically, gave the idea of the flipper to pinball), but when do we see them in playable shape on location? So it turns out that bunny_hugger's brother is a savant for this sort of thing, and I am not.

This little arcade is next to Playland's antique carousel, and we went there for the next ride. Fortunately, too; a couple weeks after our visit they would have a fire in the cupola of the building. The carousel, last I heard, was not believed to be significantly damaged and they plan to reopen the ride for next season. We were scared when we heard about the fire, though, and glad that we had visited earlier in the summer.

Trivia: Wednesday was attributed, in Rome, to Mercurius, the God of communication (hence its French name of 'mercedi' or Spanish of 'miércoles); in the Babylonian system it was named for Nabu, the god of scribes. Source: The Calendar: The 5000-Year Struggle To Align The Clock and the Heavens --- And What Happened To The Missing Ten Days, David Ewing Duncan.

Currently Reading: Acceptance, Jeff Vandermeer.

Not much of interest was happening at Earlham's reunion on Sunday, so we went looking for a letterbox instead. This is not the letterbox. This is some weird fungus-y mushroom? maybe? thing that we found on the way and that probably isn't an alien pod creature absorbing all of southern Indiana into its botanical biomass, but maybe someone should check on that while wearing an environmental suit and wielding a flamethrower? Hm?

Richmond (Indiana)'s rose garden, near where we found the letterbox and a site of apparently some prominence and historic importance in the rose-cultivating industry. The fountain's charming enough. The two women sitting on its rim were reading some book, possibly books, to each other.

PPS: Reading the Comics, September 9, 2017: First Split Week Edition, Part 2, plus some hard truths about the ÷ sign that I've seen going around Normal Twitter this past week.

Thursday of our trip was the day to get to Rye Playland. We liked the park anyway, and it would be the second-easiest one for bunny_hugger's brother to visit. (Easiest would be Coney Island, which we kept thinking about but which, once again, didn't make our cut.) But their derby racer --- the fastest we know of --- had recently repaired the mechanism that moves the horses in a file forward and backward randomly, the way Cedar Point's does, and we could not miss that. The mechanism is tetchy and hadn't been used in years. Who knows how long it would be that they'd last, and how long it would be before they ran again?

I thought, in passing, whether it was worth tweeting at rapidtrabbit to see if he might want to join us. But I had the idea that he was out of the New York City area, and if he weren't, supposed there'd be time to meet up sometime with more planning. Like if we were to go to Lake Compounce and need help exorcising the sour taste of that day. So I shelved the thought, and I'm sorry not to have tried since, who knows, something good might have happened.

We set out at what the Google Maps directions told us would be enough time to get to Playland about 2 pm. This would be off by something like an hour as we sat, mostly, waiting to get through the slice of Manhattan and the Bronx that we need to get to Rye from central New Jersey. The alternative route would have taken us more miles, but not much more time; the risk there would be that it would take us over the Tappan Zee Bridge. It happens the bridge didn't collapse then, and hasn't yet, but do you want to risk that? Anyway, it worked out all right since bunny_hugger's brother would be caught in traffic too --- a little bit later on some of the same traffic that caught us, if I'm not misunderstanding --- so that we got to the parking lot about the same time. He was also having some serious trouble with his car, to the point he was fairly sure that if he drove it 35 miles per hour or under on the way back it probably wouldn't freeze up in any way that he couldn't handle, which he took to be normal. He's still living at that point in life where you have a bunch of cars with malfunctions you figure you probably can compensate for most of the time if nothing else goes wrong.

We got to the parking lot at so close to the same time that bunny_hugger had that always-disturbing moment of talking to him on the cell phone, and trying to work out where in the parking lot he was, and realizing that she was hearing his voice twice over. He was about one row of cars over from us to start.

Our first priority was the Derby Racer, naturally, and we got there to worry that the forward-and-back mechanism wasn't actually running. There had been rumors that it only ran for a few seconds, when the ride was at its maximum speed (which, to be fair, is quite a maximum speed). The rumors were mistaken, at least in this case; the horses moved forward and back just as at Cedar Point's. bunny_hugger and I worried when we noticed the ride operators not doing the dramatic, daring leaping onto and off of the rotating turntable at speed. They just stayed on, or off, warning riders to lean to the left. But this was idiosyncratic to that hour: they did some leaping on and off when we checked back in later.

That was the highest-priority ride, naturally. But we went on a tour of the other key things right after that. First would be the Whip, which is among Rye's original block of rides and marked with the historical plaque as such. There's a lot that's appealing about Playland, including how its crowd feels like a more democratically driven blend of New York City-area populations than other pay-one-price parks do. That it has much of its original 1920s architecture and rides, though, and that it showcases this history in a way no other park but Kennywood and Idlewild do, is a big part of that charm.

And next to the Whip is the Crazy Mouse roller coaster --- not actually that exciting, except that it used to have a height limit that kept me and bunny_hugger's brother from riding it. In an earlier visit he had gone up to the ride, been asked his height, and answered honestly to be told he was too tall to ride. ``What if I had said I was (maximum allowed height)?'' he asked. The ride operator shrugged. So later in the day he went back, saying he was the maximum allowed height, and rode. Me, my first time, I was bumped for being too tall, and obviously past the height. But, now, things have changed; the Crazy Mouse doesn't have a height limit anymore, even without anything about the ride changing. So after that roundup I have to tell you we just got on, had a fine ride at the roller coaster that's parallel to the north end of the park and I suppose maybe goes past the gate on that side, and all was normal.

Trivia: The author Robert Louis Stevenson's grandfather constructed the Bell Rock lighthouse off the coast of Arbroath (near Angus, Scotland), completed in 1810. His map named treacherous offshore rocks after lawyers. Source: On The Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way The World Looks, Simon Garfield.

Currently Reading: Acceptance, Jeff Vandermeer.

PS: The reunion dinner wasn't quite done yet. Let's watch.

The class dinner was in the warehouse district downtown. We were on the fourth floor. This is peering down the elevator shaft through the very open wood-slat door. (See the shadow on the wall there.) bunny_hugger was nervous just watching me poke my camera through the slats.

Mysterious artefact outside the class dinner's venue, by the former railroad station. I have no explanation for this phenomenon.