We are the Sherlock Holmes English Speaking Vernacular

So, Jack Rabbit. Seabreeze's 102-year-old roller coaster. We'd ridden it many times on our 2019 visit and hoped to get at least one visit this time. At some point we overheard someone at the park say the line was incredibly long. But we looked at the queue and ... you know, it didn't look bad. Maybe a twenty-minute wait? And so we hopped on and yeah, that's almsot exactly what it was. This shows you something of expectations; at a regional park like Cedar Point a 20-minute wait for a roller coaster isn't anything. But also a big park like Cedar Point will put enormous queues in, so that people can be set to playing with their phones for an hour and still think they spent the day on a roller coaster. A smaller park has less queue space and so has to have enough stuff for the crowd to be doing things.

At the platform, the first time we rode, there was only the one operator. This person did all the work of checking the ride restraints --- a bar that pulls down over your chest and that's all --- and then releasing the manual brake lever that lets the train out. And, then, hopping over the empty track to let twenty more riders into the station and line up for the next dispatch. Then jumping back over the track --- again, with the roller coaster still in motion, somewhere past the lift hill --- to get to the brake levers for the returning train. It's always thrilling to see someone hop across the six(?) foot gap for the train's path like that, as though it weren't anything.

So the question is, is that actually safe? And ... I don't know. In practical terms, I suppose it is. There's no section of the coaster's Wikipedia entry for accidents and injuries. There's a brake point just before the train returns to the station. What I don't know is whether the brake lever for that is set to stop the train so that if the operator slips and falls on the track they won't be in danger unless a second worst thing happens. (Using there the guide of ``if the worst thing that could happen would not cause further injury, it's safe''.) But while we watched the operator manipulating the three levers to let the train back into the station again, we don't remember noticing how they were set when he hopped over the tracks. Realistically it's got to have been set to the reasonably safe configuration, but ... you know, small parks, lone workers, the ever-ongoing press to get stuff done, the recommended Best Practice Procedure always slips. Later in the day, when we revisited the ride, there were two operators, one at the gate and one at the brake, so there wasn't any need to cross the tracks while the train was in motion.

There were new things added to the ride, too. Ancillary to the ride, that is, which was still its wonderful self. Jack Rabbit is (one of?) the first roller coasters with upstop wheels, which lock the train to the track from beneath as well as above, and so it can fly in a way that Leap the Dips or that Virginia Reel coasters could not. This is a ride with air time, and it would have been one of the first rides that could give anyone that sense that you are floating in your car seat. It's so good. On each ride I kept watching the ground, looking for a cottontail rabbit, and never saw one around. There was a spot I could have sworn was a groundhog or something big like that, but I could never get a clear sighting. We were too high up, moving too fast, and turning, to tell.

The new things, though. One was stickers. The ride, as you'd expect, has a minimum height; if you're under 48 inches, you can't ride. So now they had stickers reading Finally 48", to be given to anyone on their first ride. We were a bit jokingly sad that we'd ridden this in 2019, as the signs said you could ask for your free Rabbit Rider's Club sticker if this was your first time. It's a common joke; we overheard adults saying something to that effect, often to the ride operator, every time we visited. This also got us wondering whether there's similar stickers for the other coasters. Well, Bear Trax, their kiddie coaster, demands only 36 inches; Bobsleds, a surprisingly tough competitor for the title of 'best roller coaster at the park', allows you on at 38 inches. The last coaster, Whirlwind, also demands 48 inches, but have to admit, as fun and happy as it is to ride Whirlwind, it doesn't have the power to capture imaginations that Jack Rabbit does. (It's also a standard spinning coaster, with identical twins at Waldameer and Hersheypark and Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk and other places.) Jack Rabbit is a clearly big, important ride, something you can brag about being tall enough to ride. (I imagine the ride operator would have given us stickers if we'd asked, because why waste the energy refusing, but it felt obnoxious to ask. If this were genuinely our first time riding, though, I might have gone for it.)

The ride also has historical markers. One points to the ``Pay As You Leave'' sign, a remnant of the days when the park was pay-per-ride, uncovered during renovations in the late 2000s. The pay booth was on the platform and the sign doesn't explain what happens if you rode without cash on you. But that sign was there before. A new addition was a replica of a US House of Representatives Certificate of Special Recognition, as it's their practice to ``acknowledge those exemplary individuals, organizations, and roller coasters who have attained outstanding success in their respective fields of endeavor''. A centennial award.

Possibly new --- I'm just not sure --- was another historical sign, acknowledging Sue Celentano, who in 1977 became the first known female operator on the Jack Rabbit coaster. The hefty pull needed to work the brake levers was used as an excuse to say only men could do it. It turns out that women are capable of working levers too, though.

One last thing. In front of the station is a cutout panel, for the ``Proud Member of the Rabbit Riders [sic] Club'', a nice frame for people to take a picture of their kid standing inside. I wanted to get a picture of bunny_hugger in there even though, heck, she's over 50 inches tall. This would take a longer time than you'd expect because the platform people are supposed to stand on is also a good spot for parents to stand on and wave to their kids at the ride station, or on the cars. Or just to stand while fiddling with their phones, oblivious that there's a photo people are in the way of. I would waste an embarrassing amount of time waiting for someone to clear the shot and we gave up and came back later, and then again, finally getting a picture shortly before sunset. Was it worth it? Well, I think bunny_hugger's smile in my picture says yes, and I hope my facial expression in the picture she took of me isn't too weird and awkward.

Still, we rode, and in only about twenty minutes. We have now ridden two roller coasters that were a century or more old. And, as we've been on Kennywood's Jackrabbit (though not since 2019), we've ridden three of the eight existing centennial roller coasters. (We've also been on seven of the fifteen roller coasters from the 1920s still operating; bunny_hugger has been on eight of them.) For the record, which is of course what really counts.

Let me finish off the Rocket Robin tournament, in case this pinball tournament looks different from every pinball tournament's pictures.

Mario in some kind of bird costume, a plush that someone brought in as a bonus award for the tournament.

Star Wars is usually a higher-scoring game than this.

Mario Penguin, face down in his egg and chips.

bunny_hugger updating the status of the tournament. Note that the tiebreaker game, The Flip Side, is set up and ready to go in case there are any ties.

``Do I want to win a trophy bad enough to play The Flip Side?''

``So, turns out I do.''

Trivia: Truman K Hunt's initial contract with select Igorrote people, from the Philippines, to show in America for a year specified they would sing, dance, weave, perform mock battles, and do other ``tribal displays'' for a year, and be paid fifteen dollars per month, plus whatever they earned from tips and selling handmade jewelry, pipes, and other souvenirs. Hunt would pay for transportation. Source: The Lost Tribe of Coney Island: Headhunters, Luna Park, and the Man who Pulled Off the Spectacle of the Century, Claire Prentice.

Currently Reading: The Sputniks Crisis and Early United States Space Policy: A Critique of the Historiography Of Space, Rip Bulkeley.