Had an admirably full week on my humor blog, kind of like each of the weeks the last five(?) years or so. What have you missed by not reading it? If you don't have it on your RSS feed? This:
- Everything There Is To Say About Keeping Your Hands Warm, last week's big piece, all about just what it says.
- While I Check The Weather, Urgently because that parade that got monsooned out came back last week.
- Statistics Saturday: Questions Raised By Learning Kings Dominion Amusement Park Had A Wayne's-World-Theme Area and yes, one of them is ``Way?''
- What’s Going On In The Amazing Spider-Man? Who's Now Writing Spider-Man? September – November 2018. It's Roy Thomas, who's been ghost-writing it for Stan Lee for ages and ages now.
- A Further Update On The Non-Despairing Auto Car Place Sign which still is not Internet Famous but could be someday, I bet you.
- The Stan Freberg Show: the eleventh show, after a fence has been cut in which Stan Freberg parodies a radio Western by pretty much getting its sound and style exactly correct.
- In Which I Want To Know The Deal, Tropical Storms Edition and you may say a piece about tropical storms can't possibly be timely in November and my piece may just surprise you because it's kind of built on that premise!
- In Which I Am Extremely Helpful Making Food For Thanksgiving which is this week's big piece and casually mentions the name for
chefmongoose's candy'sona.
So now let's get back to a happy day at Kennywood, which is to say a day at Kennywood.
Main entrance! The gates to Kennywood, open and ready for us.
Well, the admission gates are on the opposite side of the road from the park, so here's the tunnel to go in, making this one of the many parks we've visited that you go under the road to get to.
Phantom's Revenge: Kennywood's tallest roller coaster and one of its many photogenic rides.
Entrance to the Exterminator, Kennywood's indoor spinning wild mouse coaster with a great many props and animatronics that normally about two-thirds work.
Indoor queue for the Exterminator. This is about as short as the wait ever gets; the ride is very popular and wild mouse coasters only take four people at a time.
Yeah so it turns out in this mock control room (which looks like it's salvaged from a Westinghouse power plant of some kind) there's a button that can set off a siren, which we discovered this trip.
The launch! People pulling down the safety bars on the wild mouse car.
And outside. The Whip is from the 1920s and is part of the Lost Kennywood area, which has a theme of old-time amusement parks.
Close-up of one of The Whip's cars, showing how it's connected and what makes it whip: as it goes around the curve on either end of the track the car spins not-quite-freely.
Trivia: Ten joint-stock companies were organized in England between 1553 (when the first one was) and 1606 when the Virginia Company organized. Three of these were organized to plant colonies in the Americas. Source: 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, Charles C Mann. (Mann explains in the endnotes he's not counting some mining partnerships, on what grounds I don't know.)
Currently Reading: A Concise History of British Radio, 1922 - 2002, Seán Street.
PS: Reading the Comics, November 16, 2018: The Rest Of The Week Edition, in which I make an excuse to refer people to one of Robert Benchley's most oddly useful essays.