I've Gone to Look for America
9 August 2025 12:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
austin_dernAnd a happy 60th, Singapore. There's a lot I miss about those days.
Way down at the remotest end of Gotham City, Six Flags America edition, are Superman: Ride of Steel and Batwing. Superman: Ride of Steel is a 200-foot-tall Intamin coaster, twin to the one we'd ridden at Darien Lake. (We didn't know that going in, but had reason to suspect it.) Batwing is a 115-foot-tall Vekoma flying coaster, one where you lie down on your back, backwards, to ascend the lift hill, worrying all the time that your keys are falling out your pocket. I didn't know that going in, but Batwing is a twin of the Firehawk ride that was at Kings Island for a decade-plus, closed in 2018 to make way for Orion. Unfortunately, when we first approached this area we saw a couple park employees outside Superman, explaining the ride was closed for now. Batwing was also roped off, with a sign that it would open at 12pm. It was already 1:15. We figured to come back later, and would.
Meanwhile the other coaster we hadn't ridden was in the steampunk town, a recent repainting and retheming of the Western area. There wasn't anything punk about it, just a lot of brown gears. The roller coaster there was Professor Screamore's SkyWinder, which has a couple canvas hot-air-bags to tell you what the Prof was up to. Until the steampunk renovation the ride was called Mind Eraser, like 25% of all roller coasters at Six Flags parks, and it's a twin to Michigan's Adventure's Thunderhawk / Six Flags Mexico's Batman The Ride / Canada's Wonderland's Flight Deck / Elitch Gardens's Mind Eraser / Darien Lake's Mind Eraser. My recollection is the restraints were less head-bangy this one, but I don't know how they could manage that given the kind of ride it was. Maybe we were just more in tune with the flow of the ride.
While in the steampunk area we passed SteamWhirler, their new ride and maybe their newest flat ride. It's a NebulaZ, made by Zamperla, cars set on the ends of four pendulums that are themselves arranged at 90 degree angles around the center pole. The pendulums rotate so that they look like they're about to collide, but thanks to them all being on the same gear they always avoid hitting. The center pole also rotates and it's this wonderful, hypnotic, clockwork operation. We did not ride, this time, because it was closed for something or other. But we made a note to check back in case it was working again.
After this, a break, in the big cafeteria with some pop and then some more pop and finding how many things were just a little wrong on their various posters about their history. After that, we'd take the occasional peek in the direction of Superman: Ride of Steel to see if anything was going on the lift hill, and re-ride things we hadn't got enough of. The carousel, for example, or The Wild One, where I think we got both front- and back-seat rides that didn't take any great wait. Much like the evening before the park wasn't too busy and I don't remember that we had any substantial waits.
We finally saw Ride of Steel running again and made our way over. By the time we were there there wasn't much of a line, again, so we took the extra cycle or two to get a front seat ride. I believe it was this ride that, at the top of the lift hill, some guys behind us cried out, ``Death death death to the IDF!'' Didn't expect that.
Expected, although still a not genuinely welcome surprise: the storm. It was around this time that the taller rides started shutting, and then the distant sound of thunder confirmed everything was going down. Rides did go on longer than I'd have expected from Cedar Point experiences, but not much longer; rain was coming in, and pretty heavy at that. We got to the bathroom and then the cafeteria to wait things out in reasonable dryness.
While we waited --- I've mentioned --- I did my best to contact my brother and get a tolerably firm plan in mind for meeting up the next day. I think we made things more complicated by suggesting we meet up somewhere for lunch and then he went looking for a vegetarian- or vegetarian-friendly restaurant where we'd have been fine with, like, meeting up at Jersey Mike's.
Eventually the rain did recede, and we re-emerged into the park. The first thing we saw running was the SkyWinder, although we weren't sure when we did go past it that it was actually operating and not just doing test cycles. Or training cycles: there were a bunch of people in the control booth, compared to the one you'd expect a ride this size to need, and many of them left at once. We didn't quite get a private ride on this --- someone else joined --- although that was reassuring that we weren't putting the staff to trouble just for us. Also, SkyWinder is a much more fun ride than we'd thought. It seems like it would just be a sideways rise and fall, but there's more angles of rotation than you expect, and it's just speedy enough to be delightful without being intense. We kept chuckling all the way through it and agreeing that this was a really solid ride; I believe the stranger on the ride with us also said the same. So that was a nice discovery.
As the weather allowed, more rides started to open, and we hopped onto Roar soon as that was available. We looked at the Flying Carousel --- a swings ride --- but didn't get on. And got back to The Wild One for another ride, on the way to returning to Ride of Steel and to Batwing. Ride of Steel was there and back to working fine. Batwing, however, was not, and given the hour we didn't expect it would come back. This suggested we would need to plan to come back to Six Flags America the next day, for one last try at the last of the park's nine roller coasters.
I don't have my usual photograph log of everything we did to close out the day at the park. Probably included a last ride on The Wild One and another on the carousel, the one with the fiberglass animals of strange paintings. And some time in the gift shop, trying to find if there were shirts or other merchandise that we felt like taking home to remember the park. We were back to our apartment and its nice potent air conditioning, against the heat and humidity of the evening, and we had our plan for Wednesday laid out.
I left you at the Michigan's Adventure Scare-ousel on Closing Day. How's that looking now? Like this.
Here's the ride operator still giving instructions but now it looks like he's scolding the tiger and sea dragon.
Told you this was the Scare-ousel. I think the rat skeleton is new but what am I going to do, look back earlier this week to see?
And there's the foot on the dead-man's switch, plus a good-operations banner that you'd think the ride would have somewhere better to hang.
Someone helping an inflatable chicken costume get together.
And a pack of kids going over to Trunk-or-Treating and looking confused by everything.
Well, here's bunnyhugger getting to be a three-headed dog riding a rabbit.
Trivia: Jim Lovell's A-7L spacesuit for the Apollo 13 moonwalks was the first to have red stripes on the suit to make it possible to distinguish him from Fred Haise in surface photographs. It was noticed after Apollo 11 that it was impossible to tell Armstrong from Aldrin in pictures, and there was not time to add stripes to Pete Conrad's suit for Apollo 12. Source: Lunar Outfitters: Making the Apollo Space Suit, Bill Ayrey. I have never understood how there wasn't time to add a stripe to Apollo 12. You'd think they could tie a bandana around the boot or something.
Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 69: Pappy to the Rescue!, Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.
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We can try to reach intelligent aliens with radio waves or lasers or similar, but the dialogue would still be too slow.
But in the meantime, if humans escaped the confines of the solar system and began to terraform and rearrange the stars in the galaxy ... followed by other galaxies ... would the aliens observe this, and interpret us as some kind of defect in the medium? Mold on the paper? A rare but annoying quality control problem?
It concerned a middle-school girls' basketball team, who had won some kind of vacation in a contest and was going around a tropical island solving a mystery. But in every scene, the entire team took part. Usually the dialogue started with whichever girl arrived in the room first, and continued as other girls streamed into the room until it was almost full. Whoever they were interrogating would always refer to them collectively, as “you girls”, and when they discussed the case amongst themselves they would never use each other’s names, and just pick another girl indiscriminately to have dialogue with.
We’re back!
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