Matt McIrvin's Freaky Alternate Reality

Don't have much to report on. We were planning to get to a pinball thing tonight but the weather looked too annoying to drive the hour-plus to, so instead we went to the touring company of Kimberly Akimbo. Anyway, here, enjoy more pictures from last July and our big road trip:

Returning to Six Flags America for the final time. In this picture, you will of course note, five flags.

Our main objective was taking a last chance at riding the Batwing coaster, and as you see, it was closed again. But we learned later that it was reported running at some point this day! No knowing if it was before we arrived, or after we left, but apparently we were within a whisker of getting the credit and did not.

I took the chance to ride the Wonder Woman Lasso of Truth elevated swings ride and oh hey, there's boards explaining Wonder Woman's deal. Let's read!

Well, they got to the second panel and while they didn't use the wrong it's, they somehow misspelled ``Is''.

And there's the third panel and they get the wrong it's again.

Photograph through the ride that makes it look a little bit like the Wonder Woman statue is doing the ride check.

Going around the park now; here's a section fenced off that looked like the queue for some removed ride.

Picture taken over a construction fence of the removed ride. No guessing what that would have been from this.

And now to The Wild One for out last rides.

There was again no wait to speak of.

The sign, which looks hand-painted to my eye, warns of what happens if you don't behave on the ride. I wondered if it might have been moved from the coaster's original home in Massachusetts.

Sign dangling from the station explaining how to sit down, and also giving some ride statistics.

Trivia: Medieval manuscripts and early printed books used abbreviations of Latin words such as (but not consistently) gradus, minutae, and secundae (Gr, Min, Sec), for the degree, minute, and second symbols. Source: A History of Mathematical Notations, Florian Cajori. The degree symbol seems to first appear in print around Gemma Frisius's 1569 edition of his book on arithmetic, using a 1558 appendix from Jacques Peletier, and the degree and minute, second, thirds, and fourths appear in a 1571 book by Johann Caramuel.

Currently Reading: The Book on the Bookshelf, Henry Petroski.

So on my humor blog I restart one of my most humor blog things. Plus, I talk about three comic strips! You were looking for these, I bet:

• MiSTed: FX Down To Mobius, Part 7: The Gathering Storm
• And Now _Vintage Beetle Bailey_ Raises the Fox Question Again
• Statistics Saturday: Some Saved Daylight
• March Pairwise Brackety Contest Thing: Changing your Light Bulbs vs The Time Change
• March Pairwise Brackety Contest Thing: The New Work Laptop vs _Desk Set_ (1957)
• What's Going On In Gil Thorp? Why is _Dennis the Menace_ in reruns? December 2025 - March 2026
• March Pairwise Brackety Contest Thing: Pre-Approval vs Adventures
• MiSTed: FX Down To Mobius, Part 8: A Call To Arms

Now, as foretold, I bring you my last pictures of Glen Echo Park, and then some pictures of a park with a surprise for us ...

The Dentzel ostrich. I think ostriches and roosters may have been the only birds routinely carved in the classic era, and I think of roosters as more a British thing. Maybe it seems too absurd to ride other birds since we don't tend to think of others as running.

A deer with ... I don't really know what in their mouth, sorry.

Although the carousel has the mechanism for the grab-the-brass-ring game, and has the pay-per-ride status that would make a ring game make sense, they only have it for show.

Here's a view down the business end of the brass ring dispenser; think you could grab one from that? With a ride that's at speed?

And to close out, a last view of the ride and one of the interpretative plaques and a stand with all kinds of flyers about the park and the ride, some of which we picked up and might someday read. What's next?

We went to Watkins Regional Park, not far from Six Flags America, which has among other things this whole Wizard of Oz-themed section and it turns out to be not the only county park in Maryland with a Wizard of Oz-themed section, who knew?

The Tin Man, the Wizard's escape balloon, and on the left you can see one of the apple trees. In the distance, there's the Emerald City.

We were interested in this but we figured to get to it after we'd seen the main attraction, an antique Gutsav Dentzel carousel dating to sometime early 20th century and having --- can you believe this --- a kangaroo. A Kangaroo! With articulated legs and everything!

They also have a miniature train ride, although it wasn't running when we visited. Lot of information about the ride, though, on that plaque, I assume, since we didn't read it and I didn't take a photograph to read later.

They even had miniature golf, as if this weren't already a park we would beat people up to have anywhere near the Lansing area.

But then --- the most unpleasant of surprises! The carousel was closed! Was there any hope it might open before we had to leave the area?

No! The sign warned they are closed today ``due to weather conditions'', which were a little cooler and enormously less stormy than the day before. We were robbed!

Trivia: The first Owens Bottle Machine, for automated glass-bottle production, was ready in 1903, after five years and US$500,000 in development. Source: The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization, Vince Beiser.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 86: The Moon Glooph!, Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

Not much going on but a recent episode of PBS's Nature, Parenthood: The Jungle, features coatis, so that's good. Now, back to the carousel at Glen Echo Park for a double dose of picture-sharing, including a surprise bonus guest:

Here's the band organ, which only looks like it's trying to work up the courage to say something unpleasant because of your pareidolia. Just pretend to hear it out.

The carousel, like many classics, has an ``Indian horse'' and the National Park Service neatly solved two problems at once with it: this horse is kept un-restored, so that you can see the paint that it originally had (the sign estimated 90% of the paint was from original), and the sign on it holds a Preservation-In-Action sign on to apologize for the racial stereotype and to keep racist yahoos from getting on and doing war whoops or whatever on it.

Some of the music scrolls for the band organ. See any titles you like?

More music scrolls. I don't know if they're still in use or if the organ has been converted to MIDI play.

And the rest of the music, more or less. ... I guess maybe it is still in use as the leftmost cabinet appears to be unlocked.

Looking outside from within the building. Note the sign spells it ``carrousel''.

Operator's station in the center of the carousel, including a speed crank and ear protection.

Another look at some animals now, like the giraffe with pretty rectangular spots.

And a look at half the animals all together.

The animals from a slight angle now, with the music scrolls visible on the right.

And there's evidence of the music scrolls still doing work!

And then an unexpected, happy visitor! Saw a skink when we went to the bathroom and watched a while as they figured out what they wanted to do (avoid us).

Trivia: Britain's Gramophone Company (established 1898; it would become part of EMI) had factories in France, Spain, Austria, Russia, and India by as early as 1914. Source: The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea, Jon Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 86: The Moon Glooph!, Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

I've reached a milestone at work: they've replaced my laptop. There wasn't anything specifically wrong with the old besides that the 'E' key was getting fussy and so making me look like I nd hlp splling, but that probably could have been fixed with a jet of compressed air in the right spot. Still, their policy is to replace laptops every N years, need it or not, and we reached that point now. We actually reached that point back in January but nobody noticed then. Part of that was caused by the agency reorganization; my laptop was originally registered with my former agency and probably fell through a crack in the responsibility chains.

So the past week has been a bunch of new setup work, in-between my normal work. Mostly, waiting for the software I specifically need to get installed, which led to getting the admin privileges I need to develop installed. And then discovering that the laptop's built-in microphone didn't work, which ultimately needed a call to tech support and their remotely reinstalling drivers and restarting twice to fix. The tech support guy said he liked service calls for programmers like me because we have admin privileges rather than his having to re-enter his password every five seconds.

Mostly it's been an easy change over except that the new camera makes everything look dust-covered. Maybe there's some color correction setting that would make me look still alive but I don't know where it is. That and the new laptop has a single unified trackpad, like it's a Mac or something, instead of the trackpad with specific left, middle, and right buttons, because all those old As The Apple Turns jokes about Michael Dell wanting to be Steve Jobs were so, soooooo very true. This is proving annoying to me to adjust to, I think because the Mac is built around ``yeah, you mostly want to left click but there's some weird cases where a right click makes sense'' while Windows is designed around ``you need left-clicks, right-clicks, sometimes a medium-click, and we wouldn't turn down a top-click, strange-click, and charm-click too''. Plus I keep brushing my fingers in some way that hides everything everywhere. I'll either learn to stop doing that or get used to how sometimes Windows just does that. Don't know.

(Also, I just went to see if As The Apple Turns's web site was still up to link to it, and yeah, it was. And it turns out it's doing a replay of episodes from 25 years ago and the installment for today 25 years ago has a Michael Dell Wants To Be Steve Jobs joke in it.)

And now, let's see something of the front of Glen Echo Park.

Glen Echo Park was, in the oldest days, a trolley park, visited by Washingtonians taking public transportation out there. These tracks are ... probably not from then. The park got a trolley about twenty years ago, and had it out in front of the park a while, but returned it to wherever it is good trolleys come from.

Overgrown stone stairs that lead from the highway outside to ... the grass opposite the trolley in front of the park. There was probably a time this was very useful for people being dropped off at the park.

And here's the entrance, a streamline moderne beauty. I'm sorry not to have seen this by night, or evening beauty.

Here's my panoramic photograph showing the gorgeous sign and the new trolley tracks and the stone castle --- what had once been the chatauqua tower before the place got all amusement park-y.

And here's what the park looks like from the old entrance. The candy shop's on the right.

And then down this way we get a flying saucer on the right and the Crystal Pool to the left.

Trivia: The word ``cop'', as in the verb for ``to get ahold of, to catch'' first appears in English around 1700 as a slang word, possibly from Dutch. The word has curiously remained slang through to the present, neither becoming respectable nor fading to obscurity. Source: Webster's Dictionary of Word Origins, Editor Frederick C Mish. The word expanded to ``copper'' as a noun for the guys who catch you in the 19th century and shortly after that the noun shortened to ``cop''.

Currently Reading: The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe, Matthew Gabriele, David M Perry.

I mentioned the Pokemon game as one of the not entirely coincidental reasons we went to the RLM tournament in Grand Rapids on Friday. There was another tournament going on, at the Sparks In The Mall location in whichever exactly Detroit suburb it is, the one with all the Pee-Wee Hermans hidden around. We might have gone there instead, and while we couldn't have played Pokemon there it's not like the game won't be around everywhere soon enough.

But a deciding factor was the threats of weather. Eastern Michigan was under a heavy fog advisory, with visibility incredibly low and after a harrowing experience bunny_hugger had a couple weeks back she did not want to face that again. Western Michigan, though, and an hour later the central band where we live, would be facing severe thunderstorms. But the forecasts and radar projections suggested the heavy weather would hit while we were inside buildings, so we picked that as the likely-safer option.

It did not amuse either of us when, approaching Grand Rapids (annoyingly RLM Amusements is on the opposite side of the city), the sky dimmed to a quarter its previous brightness in around sixty seconds. We were driving into a heavy storm, with multiple lightning flashes at once, although fortunately it was at this particularly intense level for only a couple minutes. After that it was steady rain but not heavy enough to be threatening.

While we didn't encounter anything bad on the drive home, home did. There were reports of a hecking lot of flooding including in our area; apparently the gas station two blocks away was under four feet of water until someone got the drain unplugged. And people living downtown by the Grand River got hail smashing their car hoods. Our house, maybe a mile and a half away, got nothing but a full goldfish pond cured of the last bits of the ice cover. And personally faced nothing worse than the Taco Bell we hoped to get a post-pinball dinner from being unexpectedly closed. Wild.

I continue exploring Glen Echo Park here, with a half-dozen pictures going from the bumper cars all the way to almost the front of the park. There is a reason my photos are running like nine months behind ``current''.

The eyebrow roof of the bumper cars building, with pictures of bumper cars ready to bump. I don't know if this is (a restoration of, surely) what the ride had when the park last operated or if it's a modern construction to evoke what the art was like.

Standing by the bumper cars looking at the carousel building, left, and Pop Corn/the arcade, on the right.

Past the Pop Corn building we get a passage to the front, with a candy shop in front and what looks like a small castle out front. Note on the right the National Park Service shield.

Candy Corner there; I don't know when it last operated although the signs in the window suggest that maybe we were just not there on the right day to get something.

Very close to the front here! And I got a picture of someone else taking a dramatic photo looking up the rock wall. I don't know why but I failed to take a similar picture myself.

I swear, we're almost to the front. I just wanted to highlight the style of what would otherwise just be boring supports of the overhang; it really lets you know when they built this in the late 30s/early 40s they wanted to be in fashion. You could almost take this and drop it into the Emerald City sequences and with a coat of paint it'd fit .

Trivia: Between 1917 and 1918 Bridgeport, Connecticut --- with Remington Arms (making rifles, cartridges, and bayonets), the Locomobile Company (making trucks), Lake Torpedo Boat Company (submarines) --- grew from 114,000 people to 166,000. Source: A Call To Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II, Maury Klein.

Currently Reading: The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe, Matthew Gabriele, David M Perry. Sorry, people normally have 20 baby teeth and not the 32 that would match their adult teeth? How have I gone over a half-century without hearing a word of this? (It comes up in a discussion of people's responses to the Black Death, one of them being that allegedly children were being born with more teeth, the change in human bodies matching the fundamental change God had wrought in the world.)