It's Friday morning, how about a little more Chessington in photographs?
Entering the Transylvania area of Chessington World of Adventures. The Vampire roller coaster is the elevated track on the right.
And there's the Vampire roller coaster. Depending on whether you count powered coasters this was either the only one, or else one of the two roller coasters operating that day.
The Dragon's Fury roller coaster, closed for unspecified reasons. Also, the dragon animatronic to the side of the queue was apparently taken out for repairs, even though its claws and tail remain. The sign apologizes that the dragon's off having an adventure of his own.
S'truth! The gift shop inside is mostly tied in to the Wild Asia/Land of the Dragons attractions around it. But tucked within is a snake cage, one of those odd little islets of zoo embedded in the main park.
The Monkey Swinger is remarkably good-looking for being all greys and browns; it's a matter of looking like you mean to be nearly monochromatic. Not obvious here, and something that would've kept us from riding it had we realized it: water jets that spray up and soak the riders. If it were about twenty degrees Fahrenheit warmer and not so windy we'd have slightly less resented the water --- there was a lot of it --- but as it was, yeesh.
It's Friday morning, how about a review of my humor blog and stuff you missed from it since the last week?
- From The Dawn Of Beeps, and my discovery of some early writings about beeps from the Iowa State Horticultural Society.
- Obscene Writing At Silver Beach, Michigan, a place I somehow started calling Silver Lake Beach until
bunny_hugger pointed it out to me.
- Robert Benchley: When Not In Rome, Why Do As The Romans Did?, a surprisingly strong anti-Roman-numerals piece.
- Meanwhile, On Usenet it's Subject Line Roulette! You've heard of that, right? Well, you'll get it.
- A Comics Relief, about this weird 1910 experiment in doing newspaper comics in clay.
- Statistics Saturday: 2015 Saturdays versus Other Days, To Date, just about how fast they're coming is all.
- Rube and Mandy at Coney Island, a surprisingly plotless thing from the guy who brought you The Great Train Robbery. But hey, amusement park footage from 1903!
- How I Overcame The Face In My Room, a shockingly true tale about my teenaged years.
Trivia: The normal staircase for the Santa Clara County (California) house built by Sarah Winchester (widow of the Winchester Repeating Arms factory founder) had 42 steps. Each step was two inches high. Source: A Splintered History of Wood: Belt-Sander Races, Blind Woodworkers, and Baseball Bats, Spike Carlsen. (It's not clear to me how much of that remains in the house; it's apparently managed to partially collapse at least once even in her lifetime, a century ago.)
Currently Reading: After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation, Giles MacDonogh.
