From the Horse's Mouth

So, Motor City Furry Con '026. It is not one we were happy during, and so far as one can tell only a week out, it's not likely to be one that ages into a beloved experience. Sorry to give you a downer report.

The most important thing first. Somewhere, most likely in checking in, bunnyhugger lost her hat. The white one with earflaps and pink trim that she could tie under her chin to ride roller coasters while wearing. The one her mother made for her. The one she'd lost before, but been able to find thanks to the heroic work of friends watching out for her.

Sometime during our getting out of the car in the parking garage, getting into the hotel --- the Renaissance Center in Detroit --- and getting to our room --- on the 53rd floor, the highest off the ground we've been together outside of an airplane --- the hat disappeared, most likely falling out of her coat pocket. We discovered this Friday evening and the search for it consumed everything else we might have done that day. bunnyhugger and I retraced our steps out to the car and back without finding it. I went to the con operations and discovered the lost-and-found guy was on break. The hotel check-in booth said they hadn't heard anything but checked in back and advised checking again in the morning when Security might have turned over things.

We both, separately, went to both Con Ops and to the Hotel lost-and-founds Saturday, without success. Sunday too. Saturday I spent a good hour or so retracing my steps completely, including pressing the elevator buttons in the parking garage trying to ensure I inspected both cars. In that I failed; one of them just would not come, but bunnyhugger reasonably concluded that if only one door was operating all day Saturday and Sunday it was probably also the one working Friday when we got there.

The mysterious thing to us is that when we checked in we were, for the most part, around other people. Certainly once we were in the Ren Cen building, and even while we were walking around the edge of the building. If the hat had fallen out, why didn't anyone holler at us? If it fell when nobody happened to see, why didn't someone take it to lost-and-found? If they didn't want to take it to lost-and-found, what did happen to it? We can imagine someone who needed a hat figuring a used, probably ill-fitting one found on the street beats having nothing. But we were never on the sidewalks or streets when we checked in. Who goes to the second or third floor of a parking garage just in the hopes that something useful might be abandoned there?

The story of how the hat went missing itself has missing parts that keep it from making sense.

We were devastated, as you'd think, and there was no hope of the rest of Friday or Saturday being any good unless we recovered it, which we didn't. Sunday was a little better, up to the moments we remembered about the hat, at which point our moods crashed again, and we finally had to leave the convention and with it any hope of running across it.

bunnyhugger's mother says that she can make a replacement hat, she found the pattern and it doesn't seem too complicated. But it won't be the same; literally, the yarn originally used isn't available, and a replacement might not be sold until the winter-hat-knitting season opens in summer. And even a remade hat can't be the original, and will be all the more awful to risk losing by using it as a hat.

Apart from that, though, how was the con? That I hope to tell you over the coming week.

But first, a normal dose of pictures from Six Flags America, grammar not included.

The slightly stoned-looking elephant on the outside of the carousel.

And a black panther or similar medium-size cat.

Ostriches turn up on classic antiques more than you might imagine. This is a very 80s effort and making a modern ostrich.

And here's a camel, which you don't see on many carousels. bunnyhugger got a ride on one of these, I believe.

That same cougar-or-jaguar-or-whatever cat but in different paint.

The chariot is a somehow under-decorated part of the ride. The particular color choice feels like a cake with decorative icing to me.

Trivia: Janis Kipurs and Zintis Ekmanis, Latvian bobsledders for the 1992 Albertville and Savoie Winter Games, and former medal-winners for the Soviet Union, manned barricades in the May 1990 independence movement. Source: Encyclopedia of the Modern Olympic Movement, Editors John E Findling, Kimberly D Pelle.

Currently Reading: The Red Planet: A Natural History of Mars, Simon Morden.

I'll probably start on Motor City Furry Con come Friday. Today, busy but also TCM was showing My Fair Lady, which is the best sort of musical to watch because there's enough earwormy songs that they overload you and cancel each other out and leave your head clear.

Anyway it's got me thinking about Henry Higgins's entire deal. He's big on the idea that the English should speak English correctly. He's familiar with all the many varieties of dialect and accent and word choice but the whole plot kicks off with the idea that he can teach anyone to crush their distinctiveness out. But he's also motivated by the idea that this puts all English speakers on an even footing, that speaking Movie Received Pronunciation is a way to demolish the classicism that divides people.

And that's the dichotomy of a standard, isn't it? A standard is freedom; it will work equally for everyone. But a standard is imprisonment; everyone must fit themselves to it. Why can't a thing only have the good parts?

Let me continue the parade of Six Flags America's Grammatically Almost Right historical posters.

So after a spot of trouble the park closed and reopened and got its fourth wrong it's out of five.

Yes, Mind Eraser was the name of Professor Screamore's SkyWinder and the wild thing is it had that name before Six Flags bought the place. I assume the Crazy Horse Saloon is what became the SteamPub. And six panels in they still have only four wrong-it'ses. The -'s are a little dubious but I think we can allow that for the purpose of this text.

Then in 1998 their owners bought Six Flags and we get two error-free panels in a row!

Pausing for a moment here of a map of the park from the days of Coyote Creek. Sometime in the 90s.

And then the totally different look the park had in 1997 as seen in a reproduction of the park guide for the year.

There were a couple little bits of ride pieces; I imagine this was taken off the Pirates Flight.

Concept art for the entrance, which is pretty close to what the entrance looked like when we were there. They mostly changed the approach to the entrance to add metal detectors.

No it's errors on this eighth panel, but ``rollers coasters'' is an unforced error. I assume some style guide required them to put JOKER and TWO-FACE in all caps but that needless space in TWO- FACE is another flop. So that's a count of five bad panels.

Superman brings us to nine panels, only five of them with problems.

2001 saw the introduction of Batwing, a dangling-participle coaster, that we went to the park three days in a row hoping to see open, without success. But we heard later that the final day we were there it had a rare moment of working, so, shame. We missed it. Also, it's sloppy to talk about the end of the early-2000's coaster wars without mentioning the beginning or their existence or anything. Six problem panels out of ten. (Having written that, I'm not sure this really is dangling. It feels awkward to me, and I don't have any confidence that the author of these knows what they're doing, and resolving a thing without introducing it is a problem, so I'll ding it.)

2005 saw the return of our old friend the wrong it's. Seven problem problems out of eleven.

2012 adds another wrong it's, and whiffs on the spelling of Apocalypse. The recent renaming I suppose explains why it was the only roller coaster with specific merchandise but, really, how did The Wild One not get anything? Eight problem panels out of twelve.

Trivia: Sarajevo's original budget for the 1984 Olympic Games was about $160 million. A referendum for higher taxes to pay for construction was supported by 96 percent of the voters. Source: Encyclopedia of the Modern Olympic Movement, Editors John E Findling, Kimberly D Pelle. The book doesn't say if that was 1984 US dollars or the book-publication-2004 dollars. It notes that about that time Yugoslavia saw inflation of about 50 percent so one imagines any budget figures are really just ``bunches of money''.

Currently Reading: The Red Planet: A Natural History of Mars, Simon Morden.

Still not really up to starting the Motor City story but a little exasperating moment today as we got back to normal.

After several instances of having the mail held and them just ... not ... delivering the held mail at the end, I've started checking the box that I want them to keep the mail at the post office where I will pick it up. So this afternoon after work I drove from the office to the post office, gave them my name and address, and stood back to wait and hear how this went wrong.

The clerk --- the same one I had to ask last week why the post office hates us when they just lost a priority mail envelope bunnyhugger had sent from there (it was delivered two days later without ever being scanned at any point ever) --- disappeared for somewhere between ten minutes and all the time in the world before coming back to say there wasn't any mail for us there. Not a bit.

I pointed out that the Informed Delivery e-mail had pictures of stuff we were supposed to be getting, Friday and Saturday and today. And they had dropped a package off on our doorstep Friday, when they were supposed to be holding letters and packages for me to pick up. He couldn't explain where our mail had gone and I just gave up and went outside and yelled at the building. I figured to go home and print out both the receipt from my mail hold request and every single Informed Delivery e-mail so they could know just what to look for.

Of course, it was all dropped off in our mailbox at home, along with a letter for two houses down that we keep getting mail for because the letter carrier apparently can't tell our numbers apart.

I do not know why the post office wants me angry with them but fine, they've got it.

Venture with me now into Steam Town, at Six Flags America.

What could be more steampunk than carp who're harassed by people tossing coins in the fountain? Yes, carp with top hats and those geared monocles harassed by people tossing farthings in.

The artificial waterfall uses the same technology our backyard pond does, only theirs is bigger. Same problem with the rocks not covering the plastic cover though.

We didn't go in to the Filaments Steampub, but considered it. I kind of like the name.

But here's the roller coaster we went there to ride, Professor Screamore's SkyWinder.

Do you recognize it? ... Because it's another installation of the same track we know as Thunderhawk at Michigan's Adventure, Flight Deck at Canada's Wonderland, Infusion at Blackpool Pleasure Beach, and Mind Eraser and a half-dozen Six Flags parks.

The climb up to the station took you right up to the woods, though.

On the station was this defunct(?) zeppelin prop.

Here's the operator's station and a couple people wondering why I'm photographing them.

The place had a big cafeteria where we got some pop and rested from the sun (and, later, from a shower) and it had a wall with a lot of posters to explain the park's history.

So yes, the park started out as a project of Ross Perot and ABC, and it strikes me as very close to the drive-through safari that made Great Adventure, in New Jersey, which also opened in 1974.

By 1982 and 1983 the park had reached the point they weren't able to tell the difference between ``its'' and ``it's''. But just wait!

Four panels in and three of them have used the wrong it's, which does great things to leave you confident they're giving an accurate history of the park. The coaster's original incarnation at Paragon Park does appear to have been the tallest in the world at its opening, which adds to our tally of coasters that were world's tallest coasters at the time they opened (this, Montaña Rusa, Top Thrill Dragster/Top Thrill 2, Kingda Ka, and in the category of wooden coasters Mean Streak and, for bunnyhugger, American Eagle and Son of Beast) since Wikipedia considers the category established in 1917. (I think records of earlier coasters are too incomplete to say what was the tallest before this.)

Trivia: Italy raised money for building the complex for the 1956 Cortina d'Ampezzo Winter Games in part by the football pool Toto Calcio; a fifth of the revenue from these bets on Italian soccer matches went directly to the Italian Olympic Committee. Source: Encyclopedia of the Modern Olympic Movement, Editors John E Findling, Kimberly D Pelle.

Currently Reading: The Red Planet: A Natural History of Mars, Simon Morden.