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disneydream06armiphlage.
austin_dern Sunday we had the time and chance to visit bunnyhugger's parents. Not for any special occasion, past that we hadn't seen them in a while and the next obvious time to visit, early April, will also have us busy with egg-dyeing. So it was a good chance to visit and talk with them and we were totally ready to bring board games except. You know how I mentioned the weather Friday was extremely windy to the point of being dangerous driving? The weather Sunday as extremely windy to the point of driving being annoying, but not actively hazardous. But they were warning about thunderstorms rolling in over the evening and our choices would be either to leave early enough we missed them or late enough that they passed. Given that I had to be up at 7 am, leaving early seemed the less bad course.
Still, there would be time for some pleasant ordinary stuff, like finding out just what had gone wrong with the iPad bunnyhugger's mother was using to read electronic books. (The system had logged her out and she didn't know how to tell that.) And they have a new induction stove, paid for by some federal program for energy efficiency that also saw them get a heat pump for the house. The heat pump we didn't see so much of except that the house was at 74 degrees which, even granting that the outside was at 70 degrees, seems like a lot. But I'll sometimes set my car that high while driving, if it's cold out, so I'm hardly a thermal innocent.
One side effect of the new stove is that they were very anxious to explain just how it would work should I make tea (which, somehow, it ends up I didn't). It turns out to be that you turn the dial, and use the induction-friendly tea kettle, which isn't really different from the old process. I think they're just anxious; they said they hadn't made anything with it yet, although they'd only got the new stove/oven two days before.
The other side effect is they offered us first dibs on all their old, induction-hostile, cookware, which, sure, we can use some new pots and pans. Also one of those big spaghetti pots with the built-in strainer which is going to change everything. Mostly pasta, and in small ways.
Her father, having sworn off weird impulsive eBay purchasing obsessions, has what are allegedly foghorns. When I got the chance to confirm I heard this right it turned out there was controversy about whether he had a legitimate foghorn. He demonstrated and it sounded, really, more like scooting the stool backwards in shop class, but I guess there are circumstances that might be a useful noise?
We set out so very early, and missed all but light sprinklings of rain getting home, when we discovered bunnyhugger had left her favorite travel mug with her parents. It'll be safe.
So on in to Dutch Wonderland. Hey, remember when I said I was going to be sharing fewer photographs so I could pick the better and more interesting ones instead of sharing five views of the same Tilt-a-Whirl ride sign? Me neither.
You enter the park through the castle building and on the side is this event space, where we saw what looked like the mascot performers doing a pep rally.
Right? You'd only be doing a Simon Says sort of thing to get everyone in synch at the start of a walkaround shift, right?
Duke the Dragon is the mascot we're most interested in, of course, but they have a knight and a princess and royals and all and, most recently, Merlin.
Clock tower as we enter. Note that it had the time correct.
And here's Duke, getting a picture with some kid! This is three parks in a row we've seen the mascots for!
So we got a picture with Duke and learned that actually, he was going in so somehow what we saw in the event room was the end of their shift? But they were taking spot photos while that lasted.
Trivia: Vanguard I had the highest apogee of any International Geophysical Year satellite. Source: Project Vanguard: The NASA History, Constance McLaughlin Green, Milton Lomask. NASA SP-4202.
Currently Reading: The Book on the Bookshelf, Henry Petroski.
PS: What's Going On In Judge Parker? Who arrested Randy Parker and what for? December 2025 - March 2026 in one of the last two comic strip plot recaps still touching the long-ago distant past year of 2025.
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How is it that fairy tales persist? In the Big Idea for The Witch of Prague, author J.M. Sidorova suggests that it might be because they are malleable and can be made to fit more times and places than just their own. To what use has the author put them here? Read on.
J. M. SIDOROVA:
When I think about a Big Idea of a novel, what comes to my mind first is more of a premise, an inceptive sprout from which the novel had grown. In this regard, The Witch of Prague grew out of a common fairy-tale archetype: an old hag gives a magic gift/poison apple to a young girl; think Sleeping beauty, forests, and castles. Except in this case, the archetype was invoked by true stories my Mom had told me about her young adulthood.
Thus, forests became the Cold War era Eastern European bureaucracies, castles became government departments, and the relationship between the hag and the young girl became complicated, as I, in the act of reimagining the fairy tale, subverted the heck out of it.
That said, this novel took a long time to become what it is now; it evolved in fits and starts while a sizeable chunk of my life was going by and the world was changing, and as a result it became a repository of symbolic representations for the ideas that are not new but have been important for me to unpack and highlight.
There is the Hunt of a Unicorn that, historically, fronts a host of contradictory ideas about power asymmetries between women and men; and then there is a Stag Hunt, which, as an example of a game of trust (or, more broadly, public goods game theory, like it’s better known cousin, the prisoner’s dilemma), stands for a balance of trust/cooperation vs. predation/competition in a given society.
There is also the Orwellian idea that authoritarian regimes not just restrict speech and writing, but, far more insidiously, they warp the very meaning, usage, and purpose of words, of the language itself. My main character, Alica, who’s grown up with mild dyslexia, is primed against such shenanigans because she’s always thought words were treacherous and out to get her, and one of her ways of fighting back was to invent an imaginary friend, a live typewriter with spider legs and word-swatting pincers.
So many different symbols, in other words, that at some point even I, their compulsive collector, felt that it was too much. And my awesome editors, Rachel Sobel and Huw Evans of Homeward Books, were of the same opinion: wait, is the Stag the same as the Unicorn or not? Author, explain thyself! So I went on an editing rampage, and I think I fixed things, and now all symbols are there to serve the story.
But the big — or at any rate the permeating — idea that I would like to foreground since we are talking speculative fiction here, is what constitutes magic in this book. I think if one creates an alternative, fully magic-enabled reality for one’s tales, one can give a reader an escape, a full-on suspension of disbelief and all that, and that is fine. But if one instead injects bits of fantastical or magical into our viscerally recognizable reality, one gives a yearning, gives flickering moments of disassociation, of belief, “what if it were real?” It’s like magic comes to you, instead of you taking a vacation to go see magic.
And of course, so many works of speculative fiction do one approach or the other or anything in between. I personally, prefer the latter end of the spectrum over the former. So, what I was trying to do in The Witch of Prague was to have seemingly small, tenuous even amounts of magic within a historically accurate reality, and I was interested to work with this premise: what if magic was generated from scratch under certain unique constellations of circumstances and human lived experiences and emotional states, for instance, extreme trauma or enduring hope or devotion?
It wouldn’t be by anyone’s design, and it would be hard to predict what or who would become the magic’s “carrier” once it was produced. It would be a sort of undomesticated, involuntary magic for which no one really knows the rules or capabilities, though one could make assumptions or jump to conclusions according to one’s beliefs or character, in trying to harness it to one’s own benefit.
If we agree that as humanity, we have always been “producing” magic in our stories, histories, and self-narratives (“it was a miracle that I survived!”) as a matter of belief or metaphor, to help us parse reality or even just to communicate it — then my premise in this novel simply takes this fact and implements it. Literally and physically.
The Witch of Prague: Asterism|Homeward Books
thewaynethewaynedisneydream06beauty_forashes, passed away three years ago.
austin_dernThis past Friday we planned to go again to Grand Rapids and another RLM tournament. Also coming in? Severe winds, with warnings that they were going to cause fallen branches and power outages and that travel would be very difficult. With the Active Advisory warning to not drive unless absolutely necessary I decided, you know, I don't need to drive an hour-plus to play the Pokemon pinball game again that much. We may have missed an exciting night; apparently, RLM Amusement had a partial power loss and could only operate about half the normal roster of games. As fans of things that carry on under adverse conditions we're sorry to have missed that.
But with an evening suddenly free bunnyhugger had a great idea. MSU's Wharton Center has had the touring company of Kimberly Akimbo all week, and we couldn't find a time to attend; why not this? Yes, it's still driving that's not absolutely necessary, but three miles is manageable where sixty would not be. Kimberly Akimbo had got our attention for the show's logo, derived from the logo Six Flags Great Adventure used in the 70s-80s, and I've heard a couple songs from it in the normal rotation on the Broadway channel. With the added information that part of it is a teen's wish to get to the Great Adventure drive-through safari? How could we resist?
Also it turns out you can just buy tickets to a show day-of. I mean, we wouldn't try this with The Lion King (coming in a couple months) or Wicked (which we forgot to ever get to last year) but for a show about the nostalgia of growing up in North Jersey to the point that her birthday cake is a Fudgie the Whale? That you can just roll up to.
We liked the show, in the main. The first act introducing all the characters and their particular weirdness was the strongest part. The piece not obvious from the show title or credits is that Kimberly has that rapid-aging disease so while she's turning 16 she has the body of a 72-year-old and the one strangest thing? Nobody mentions or compares it to that Robin Williams movie where he plays the 10-year-old-with-a-40-year-old's-body. You maybe forgot that, but the movie (Jack) came out in 1996 and the musical's set in 1999. I'd still think it'd be an inevitable reference.
The premise is Kimberly and her barely-functional parents are still settling in after having ditched Kimberly's aunt Debra after the trouble in Lodi (a North Jersey township). The aunt, of course, finds them, rampaging through like a felonious Auntie Mame and pressing Kimberly and her friends into an ``only slightly illegal'' scam. Two things there seemed peculiar to me; first, that the song and reprise for it haven't been on heavy rotation on the Broadway channel, and second that it's not either less or more of the story.
Like, the scam is set up in a couple scenes early in act two, and it's carried out off-stage; I'd have expected either more action in the scam or pushing it farther in the background to avoid tying Kimberly too closely to Debra. In the second act we get the revelation of just what happened that the family fled Lodi, and it's zany in a slightly edgey web comic way, and I'm not sure that Debra the character recovers from it. But, then, the whole story is kind of zany and when it does have a heavy emotional beat the contrast does help that beat land. It's gotten a lot of critical acclaim so it's at least registering well with some people.
We enjoyed it despite the ways we'd comment on it for an hour if you gave us the chance. It also reminded us how we really like going to shows and there's a really good venue for them not quite down the street but still, literally in walking distance for us. We should go to them more.
So our next day in the Most Extreme Mid-Atlantic Parks Tour? Dutch Wonderland, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Let's watch.
Big unexpected discovery? That right next door to the park was the Carton Network Hotel. Why? Who knows. My best guess was Cartoon Network trying out the branded-hotel thing at a low-profile park where if it failed nobody would notice. This would be as close as we got to the place; they ended the Cartoon Network Hotel branding of the park with the end of the 2025 season.
Here we approach Dutch Wonderland from the side; the park opened on the Lincoln Highway in 1962 and didn't really figure it would need quite so much parking on the side. The horizontal bar with the 12 FT marker is the monorail track.
And here's the entrance. I had assumed the park started out as a Pennsylvania-Dutch-heritage-themed place that grew into fairy-tale castle by degrees but turns out no, it was always a Pennsylvania-Dutch-and-fairy-tale-castle place.
Here's the front entrance, like a tiny Disneyland you can just drive to from central Jersey.
And the castle has a moat! Totally a moat!
I didn't say it was a lot of moat, but they have a moat!
Trivia: In 1257 England's King Henry III attempted minting a gold coin, which was short-lived; England would not have a viable gold coin until 1344. Source: Gold and Spices: The Rise of Commerce in the Middle Ages, Jean Favier. A ``gold penny'', of face value 20 pence, although it was unpopular and since its bullion value was more than 20 pence all but a few examples have been melted down.
Currently Reading: The Book on the Bookshelf, Henry Petroski.
disneydream06Which Movie Does This Quote Come From?
The Greatest Show On Earth
2 (40.0%)
How Green Was My Valley
1 (20.0%)
McLintock
1 (20.0%)
I Don't Have A Clue...
1 (20.0%)
murakoziadminbearseaivy sidhe_uaine42hoobird christalin80pigshitpoetaustin_dernAnd with today's pictures I close out Six Flags America; tomorrow, pictures start ... oh, let's see if anyone can remember that far back. Got your guesses in for what was next on our tour?
Back on the carousel. Here's some of the exotically-colored fiberglass tigers.
My last ride was on a fairly normal-colored tiger.
bunnyhugger enjoying a camel ride. Notice she's got our souvenir cup.
Horse that's brown and horse of a different color.
And your pink-purple elephant.
Got to The Flying Carousel, which was well-run. Also you can see in the background Ye Olde Clock Tower with two different, incorrect, times on two faces.
Late afternoon picture of ... well, the lockers are off-screen to the left. The big coaster in the background on the left is Roar, and on the right you can see The Wild One and Firebird.
And then hey wait a minute! We didn't know we could see a mascot here! Also that Six Flags America had a mascot besides the Looney Tunes characters! So, we got to see Freedom The Eagle.
Look at that, friendly as c_eagle here!
I would have sworn I got a picture of Freedom hugging bunnyhugger but maybe we were too shy for that.
And, alas, we had to get going. Here's the light streaming out over the reentry gate.
As you exit the park you get one more reminder that they have the Looney Tunes license. And with this, we left Six Flags America, and would not see it again.
Trivia: Gemini VIII's Agena satellite, the goal of the rendezvous and docking mission, was qualified for flight the 4th of March, 1966, after four days of a final test series including 22 firings at simulated altitudes of between 83,800 and 114,300 meters. The same day, the Augmented Target Docking Adaptor satellite --- designed as a backup in case Agena could not get to actually working --- was qualified; it would fly when Gemini IX's Agena blew up on launch. Source: On The Shoulders of Titans: A History of Project Gemini, Barton C Hacker, James M Grimwood. NASA SP-4203.
Currently Reading: The Book on the Bookshelf, Henry Petroski.
austin_dern While I had thoughts about the show, it's a little more convenient for me to get through the rest of the Six Flags America pictures before posting them. Also I want to organize my thoughts some. So, sorry bunny_hugger, but there'll be narrative soon.
A sign for The Wild One declaring that, so far as the park was concerned, they considered it to be the same coaster that opened in 1917.
View from the exit path from the ride, looking back at the station and particularly the operator's booth.
Like many legacy Six Flags parks they have a Looney Tunes section. We rode the Coyote-and-Road-Runner roller coaster in there but this time took a look around with pictures.
Miniature train ride with the Looney Tune you first think of as a train person ... Forghorn Leghorn.
Yosemite Sam's Hollywood Flight School makes sense because ... there was probably some cartoon where Sam was a Red Baron-esque figure? I'm guessing? That sounds like something they might have done in the late 50s or early 60s when the studio was kind of burned out.
Now I know what this looks like, but this isn't all folks, not even of my Looney Tunes section pictures.
Stroller parking's advertised by that one baby from that cartoon. Finster? Something?
Not sure what this building was, but we had the feeling it predated Six Flags's takeover of the park. There's a bunch of signs added to the top that suggest midway fun.
They also had Bugs Bunny's House here and I was curious what might be in there.
Inside there's moulded plastic shelves of canned carrots.
bunny_hugger enters to confirm what I saw in Bugs's home.
And here's the other side of the shelter. You can see the mailbox on top there.
Trivia: After Julius Caesar's murder the Romans, trying to follow the new leap-day-every-fourth-year, would run two common years and then a leap year, bringing the calendar very out of date quickly; however, we do not know with certainty just which years were erroneous leap years. Source: Marking Time: The Epic Quest to Invent the Perfect Calendar, Duncan Steel. See, the Romans counted inclusively, so that, like, ``the fourth year from 2026'' would count 2026 as the first year, and so 2029 would be ``the fourth'' and how did these people conquer Europe? Europe must have been unbelievably easy to conquer is all I can figure.
Currently Reading: The Book on the Bookshelf, Henry Petroski. So I know the past was a different country and all that but for centuries after the creation of books in their modern form factor --- hard covers, identically-sized pages, bound spines --- the spines were kept on the insides of bookshelves? I'm sorry, old timey folks, you were just wrong about this one.
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I didn’t get a shot when I got in — I was busy doing other things and then I was busy taking a nap — but here’s one to make up for the lapse. I’m in toen for the Tucson Book Festival, and if you come to it tomorrow (Sunday) I will have two panels and two signings. Come on down! And wear a hat, they’re having a lot of sun here.
— JS
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dw_maintenanceHappy Saturday!
I'm going to be doing a little maintenance today. It will likely cause a tiny interruption of service (specifically for www.dreamwidth.org) on the order of 2-3 minutes while some settings propagate. If you're on a journal page, that should still work throughout!
If it doesn't work, the rollback plan is pretty quick, I'm just toggling a setting on how traffic gets to the site. I'll update this post if something goes wrong, but don't anticipate any interruption to be longer than 10 minutes even in a rollback situation.
disneydream06austin_dernDon'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.
thewayneaustin_dernSo 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:
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.
disneydream06 - (no subject)austin_dern - The Salad's in the Bowl, the Rice Is on the Stovescalziwhatever_feed - The Big Idea: J. M. Sidorovathewayne - Iranian missile strikes in Israel, Polymarket gamblers threaten reporter's life!thewayne - Pokemon Go players unknowingly trained a delivery robot service with 30 billion imagesdisneydream06 - (no subject)austin_dern - We're on a Great Adventuredisneydream06 - A Day In The Life.....disneydream06 - Monday At The Movies.....disneydream06 - Songs From The Movies.....austin_dern - I Don't Know, Oh No, Oh Noaustin_dern - Maybe the Last Timescalziwhatever_feed - View From a Hotel Window, 3/14/26: Tucson, AZmark in dw_maintenance - Performing some traffic maintenance todaydisneydream06 - Just Saying.....disneydream06 - Isn't It Punny.....austin_dern - This Could Be the Last Timethewayne - The USA had an 88% decline in job growth in 2025disneydream06 - W.T.F. News.....austin_dern - March Up to the Gate and Bid It Openbranchandroot
