crocodile creek, neverspeak mountain

The ever intrepid team of Atlas Obscura presents an illuminating, nostalgic glimpse at the stellar rise and equally rapid decline of a gargantuan amusement park built in the southern marshes of New York state that opened in June of 1960 and closed after just four seasons, called Freedomland U.S.A. Civil engineer and architect of such ambitious family playgrounds named Cornelius Vanderbilt Wood, recently dismissed from his last project of putting another but more enduring pleasure estate in an orange grove—the successor would again be built in a swamp—and his role ultimately denied and disavowed, designed a huge area in the shape of the continental United States and placed several historical and cultural attractions and rides within those borders.

The park celebrated the cheerier side of manifest destiny, mercantilism and American exceptionalism, including the Great Fire of Chicago, the San Francisco Earthquake, the launch pad and mission-control at Cape Canaveral—plus a New Orleans where it was always Mardi Gras and live music acts for adults to enjoy. In order to attract and retain more, the educational character was quickly supplanted by more conventional rides but its decline was swift—despite the number of guests and a lot of fond memories. Some of the more conspiratorial-minded believe that Freedomland U.S.A. was never meant to be a commercial success but rather an experiment in urban development by real-estate magnates and large landowners in New York and was undertaken to demonstrate that the marshland could safely support large-scale construction projects—and in fact, just after the park was razed, a public housing and a shopping centre went up. I think it is more likely the case that people became much disillusioned with the notion of what their country was becoming with the string of political assassinations of those waning years, not to mention the competition from the nearby venue of the 1964 World’s Fair that was meant to cheer everyone up again. The in depth look at Atlas Obscura furthermore bounces the demise of Freedomland off of the other ruins of theme parks and presents an interesting retrospective on the culture and the times.

zoinks, jinkies and denouement

The Hanna-Barbera cartoon franchise Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? was conceived in response to parental concerns that the particular Saturday morning line-up, which consisted of Space Ghost, the Herculoids and Tom and Jerry, was too violent. Producers were initially infatuated with the idea of doing a spin-off of the Archie syndicate that featured a teen band who happened to slip off fight crime and solve mysteries in between gigs. The whole concept still needed re-working because these bandmates (with a cowardly mascot) were in pursuit of actual ghouls—rather than some villainous human disguised that those meddling kids would unmask at the end of each episode—and came across as rather too scary. The second, familiar version had its cast of characters drawn directly from the old-teenagers portrayed on the series The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis—Norville “Shaggy” Rogers voiced by DJ Casey Kasem and based on the template of beatnik Maynard G Krebs (Bob Denver, later of Gilligan’s Island fame) and Velma Dinkley is lifted from the tomboyish Zelda Gilroy (portrayed by Shelia James Kuehl presently a member of the California State Senate) as a couple examples.

It’s strange to think how all supernatural and superstitious elements were debunked by the show’s finishing scene—excepting the canine sidekick who was retained from the original proposal, of course, and one that could talk (I don’t recall a musical inclination, the Archies’ dog played the bongos)—and I suppose that expectation, moral placated fretful parents. The title character was named reportedly after the scatting verse at the end of Strangers in the Night rather than Detective Chief Inspector Walter Dew, who investigated the Jack the Ripper murders and some other gruesome crimes in turn of the century London, plus cases cat-burglary and forgery. It would not have even occurred to me to connect these two sleuths and wonder, had not I learned that the Inspector, in pursuit of a fugitive, had once travelled under the name Mister Dewhurst. It made me think of some of the reoccurring distant relations (this series was keen on extended families, too, it seemed and everyone had their pedigree) like those who lived on Doo Manor, or cousin Scooby-Dee, Dixie-Doo or Sandy Duncan.

namely: absquatulate

I came across a new, perfectly cromulent word—as it’s not marked up by teacher’s red ink when put out there in the æther, in absquatulate. Although the term to abscond is more classical and synonymous to a degree, to absquatulate—suggestive of not only fleeing or to decamp, taking the money and run, it also implies abdication, shirking one’s duties, like some tinpot dictator—came into colloquial use in American English around the 1830s, as part of a larger, slightly baffling wave of pseudo-Latin vocabulary that lasted for a few decades. Other examples from this trend include perambulate (to have a stroll), discombobulate (to confuse), bloviate (to speak boastfully) and infamously sockdologising (an ambiguous word for something rude or to make a back-handed compliment, a corruption of doxology) which made the audience at Ford’s Theatre burst into laughter and was the cue for John Wilkes-Booth to assassinate president Abraham Lincoln. No wonder some vocabulary has gone the way of hornswoggle and skedaddle.

mall rats

In an age of abandoned ghost malls, empty main streets and the gutted department store victim to shingles that are not brick-and-mortar, BLDGBlog turns to look at the pioneer of the original venue that offered an embarrassment of choices in architect, marketer and very much an agoraphile (not under the open skies but rather a lover of the Agora, the bustling, gossipy marketplace of Antiquity) by the name of Victor Gruen. Psychologically-speaking, Gruen lends his name to a phenomenon called the Gruen Transfer, when one’s hunter-gatherer instinct is saturated to a point where one’s original objective is, under a type of manipulation if not duress, diverted and expanded. Even though we may no longer physically congregate in the commons to be subjected to such an experience—which may not be confined to shopping but rather may extended to all of our divisive, distracted decisions—the Gruen Transfer easily translates to the online environment, of bargain-hunting, sharing and haranguing that tend to take place concurrently and with one fell-swoop.

significant digits or wholly unscientific post-script

By way of an update and smattering of reflection, I found that the brilliant Jason Kottke shared in the absolute stupefaction and wonder when it came to the Fibonacci sequence revealed in a rather tame division problem. I also really appreciated how Kottke channelled Carl Sagan—namely his novel Contact—and pondered if this sort of coincidence wasn’t something akin to the code buried in the number ∏ that showed that the intelligence behind the design of the Universe was intentional and knowable. Also an explanation was offered that was by no means disenchanting—as if it was just a numerical sleight of hand, like the pictured recursive mathmagic, brain-teasing trick I was surprised to find reproduced in Hocus Pocus. I had come across a variant of this one before, which is I think something quite different, and aside from fact-checking, can you see where the delusion that cancels everything out lies?  Do you think the Fibonacci numbers will also be shown to be some kind of misapprehension too?

5x5

gom jabbar: The Guardian features a tribute to the Aquarian coming of Age science fiction masterpiece Dune, fifty years on and examines its legacy, via Super Punch

our castle and our keep: exquisite off-the-grid motor home converts to an enchanted castle at rest, via the enchanting Nag on the Lake

all work and no play: free to download 1998 board game based on Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining

o double-good: a look into the recent incorporation of milk as a staple food, via Neatorama

mathmagic land: dividing one by nine-hundred-ninety-nine quattuodecillion—nearly infinity—spits out the Fibonacci sequence

taxa or nomina dubia

Harking back to a time when humour was considered both an indemnifying and heuristic tool even in academic circles, stuffy, impenetrable old Michel Foucault deferred to the classification of the animal kingdom not down Linnaean lines but rather thus, alluding to the comprehensive Jorge Luis Borges having himself been influenced by the oriental method:

• A: Those that belong to the emperor
• B: Embalmed ones 
• C: Those that are trained 
• D: Suckling pigs 
• E: Sirens 
• F: Fabulous ones 
• G: Stray dogs 
• H: Those that are included in this classification 
• I: Those that tremble as if they are mad 
• J: Innumerable ones 
• K: Those finely drawn with a camel hair brush 
• L: Et cetera 
• M: Those who’ve just broken the flower vase 
• N: Those which from a distance resemble flies 

Of course, funny, quirky examples and illustrative scenarios are the staple of educational programming nowadays, but aside from embedding riddles or marriage proposals in research abstracts, it’s just done done to be provocatively jokey in serious scholarly discourse. The unlikely comic trio of Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche and Søren Kierkegaard were meant to be attended to with a slight smirk in order to get to the respective punchlines, rallying a tradition that goes back all the way to the deportment of Socrates but oversaw the end of that light-hearted tradition. Respectable, peer-reviewed academics, however, took a very dour and austere turn once we were able to give to everything a precise and interrelated place. Gilbert and Sullivan’s Major General’s Song is probably the best lampoon of this new science and new learning. Information animal, vegetable and mineral. I hope we can better balance going forward not hamming it up with engaging an audience that’s not restricted to the Ivory Tower.