Next year will mark a quarter century since I began posting trip reports of our excursions to amusement parks. Every month, that section is one of the most viewed areas of our entire website. I used to write trip reports for the now-gone World of Coasters and Rollercoaster Talk forums as well, dating back to the 1990s. But unfortunately those are lost to time (unless the Wayback Machine happens to have them stored somewhere).

In recent years I've noticed that I don't have much left to say. I've tended to visit the same parks year after year and it seems silly to continually rehash identical experiences. So this year will be the last one in which I post regular reports. If in the future I venture to someplace new that I feel is worth writing about, then I might add to the collection. Or if a familiar park drastically changes, then I might post an update. The reports take me several days or sometimes a week to write and I think my ever-shrinking time could best be used on other projects. I'll still post video walk-thrus when I feel a park deserves one. But from now on I'll consider my trip reports as documents frozen in time. I'll leave them up in case readers want to track how the parks changed over the decades.

I just wanted to give a heads-up in case people who follow this website think I dropped off the face of the earth or have completely lost interest in amusement parks. I still love parks, but with recent mergers it's getting more difficult to find unique experiences. I do have a few reports that will be coming later this year up to the end of summer. And after that, readers can amuse themselves with the dozens upon dozens of reports that already exist.

Thank you to all the faithful readers who have followed us around the country! Maybe we'll run into each other at some little park in the future.

September 10, 2025

It's taken me this long to finally see one of life's purported truisms as nothing more than a myth. Ever since I was a child, I had repeatedly heard that to succeed in life, even against seemingly impossible odds, all one had to do was work hard. I believed it. In the media, there were countless interviews with people who had "made it", people who were apparently very successful in their field. And all of them perpetuated the myth that they simply worked really hard to get where they were.

So I spent my life working hard. I wrote volumes of prose and poetry. I composed hours and hours of music. I ceaselessly promoted myself. I made as many connections with other artists as I could. And since I wasn't as successful as others, I assumed I simply wasn't working hard enough. When I became a professor, I spent countless hours meticulously planning classes. I practically lived at the college, building up and maintaining the Media Art Center there. I never sought recognition and never got any. In the end, the administration killed the entire Electronic Media program and mothballed the Media Art Center for no clear reason. Thankfully they couldn't kill off the students we had trained and influence.

My father pretty much worked himself to death. He spent most of his life at the thankless task of grinding tools in a steel mill. Before he retired, the company declared bankruptcy and his pension evaporated. So what did he have to show for decades of hard work? I've come to the realization that hard work is meaningless in and of itself. If a person enjoys hard work, then fine. But they shouldn't expect it to amount to anything other than being able to say that they worked hard. No one else cares how hard you work except you.

I had an inkling of where life's power truly lies from an early age, but I failed to acknowledge it. In fact, I vigorously fought against it. When I was in high school, I took theater classes and joined the drama club. I took the craft seriously and tried to do things as professionally as I could. But no one else seemed to care about that. What they wanted was just to have fun. The drama class put on a cabaret show featuring one of the school's most popular party girls. All she did was jump around the stage and tell stupid jokes, but the other students whooped and hollered approvingly. She wasn't talented, but she was popular. When I was in college practicing theater, I immersed myself in the subject and learned everything I could about it. In my first year alone I was involved in seven separate productions. I acted in dozens of plays. I wrote, produced and directed numerous shows. But that didn't seem to matter to the other students. I remember a play that I saw the "advanced" students do which featured -- surprise, surprise -- a popular party girl with very little talent. The audience reaction was the same. Her talent didn't matter. The audience didn't care about that; they were just there to have fun.

This scenario played out time and time again over the course of my life. The most-loved people were those who threw the biggest parties. I hated parties. I considered them a waste of time. There was so much I could be creating during that wasted time. The irony was that very few people cared to see the art I created. I may have been talented, but I wasn't popular. I had a few close friends over the years who were supportive, but that was it. To me during that time, being popular was the equivalent of selling out, somehow compromising my talent and producing not art but drivel. That held true even through my time performing with The Dots. Other area bands that we felt had far less talent were filling the clubs with patrons, while every one of our performances cleared the places out. I worked over eight hours a day on the band material, month after month, practicing and writing. But it didn't matter.

This past summer, my distributor posted that my music had been streamed over 300,000 times, which seemed incomprehensible to me. I recalled my early years when I was duplicating cassette tapes and mailing them to radio stations and magazines, hoping for recognition. Now my music had a worldwide reach and people were actually listening to it -- and I had put no work into that at all besides simply uploading my music. Perhaps it could be that I had "paid it forward", had done all the work decades before and now it was finally paying off (though certainly not monetarily). But I don't think so.

What shifted my thinking? Our current world order. I've been watching people rise to power who have no qualifications for their positions. They certainly didn't work hard. Their only common thread has been priviledge. They were either popular (like the party girls) or already famous or extremely wealthy. And they had connections; they or their parents knew people in power. Talent at their job wasn't a consideration (and in fact probably would have been a hindrance). It's become a world dominated by enormous egos and loud voices. I was just watching a video about the Dunning-Krueger Effect which dovetailed nicely with these thoughts. Basically, the dumber the person, the louder they are and the more attention they attract. The media loves focusing on them and shuns more introspective (and often more intelligent) people. Sometimes you get a Neil deGrasse Tyson, who's both intelligent and media-savvy. But most of the time the media's obsession with style over substance, as if they're continually feeding people dessert instead of the main course, creates an eventual distaste for substance. Less thoughtful people often have just a single point of view and stick to it against all odds. Intellectuals on the other hand consider most things to be relative and are open to varying interpretations. Since all drama (and the current media) is driven by conflict, intellectuals are far less interesting subjects. Pit two single-minded people against each other and you have good drama (and shallow discussions).

So I'm no longer going to worry over whether I'm working hard enough since it has absolutely no bearing on my eventual success or lack thereof. I'm going to work on the projects I enjoy at a pace that I enjoy and let others sort out everything else. I've once again drastically reduced my news consumption, since the media is interested only in inundating me with problems I have no ability to solve. Instead, I'll focus on smaller local problems that I know I can solve. That will give me a sense of accomplishment, even when I don't have to work hard.

October 5, 2025

All the world's current ills can be summed up in one word: selfishness.

It used to be for a time that people were more concerned about the welfare of others than with themselves. This was especially during World War II, when the survival of nearly every society depended upon concern for others. It was the case that, as Spock once said, "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few". And all nations were able to benefit from that point of view after the war, helping each other to rebuild. As a bonus, when you look after your neighbor, your own troubles seem to disappear. And you yourself are held in esteem by your neighbors. But that ethos didn't last very long.

Very few drivers use signal lights anymore. Signal lights are not really necessary for the driver, who presumably knows their own direction of travel. They're a safety convenience for cars around the driver, so that there's advance notice of a direction change. Quite often when driving around town, the car in front of me will suddenly put on its brakes and stop for apparently no reason -- until it turns down a side street. If the driver used a signal light, that would have given me advance notice and reduced the possibility of an accident.

Driving on highways has become a terrifying experience over the past few decades. It doesn't matter what speed limit is posted, most drivers far exceed it. I use cruise control to keep my car at the speed limit, and other cars on the road regularly blast past me going at least 20 mph faster. And then there's the issue of drivers who think they're in a real life game of GTA, weaving through multiple lanes of traffic, dodging one way and another, trying to rush past everyone else while endangering everyone's lives. This even happens in work zones where a lane is closed; there's suppsosed to be a reduced speed in those areas but drivers zoom past in that closed lane and try to force their way back into traffic further ahead. There's no regard for anyone else on the road.

When I'm walking in a busy area, whether it's in a store, on the street or at a fairground, people will cross right in front of me, as if I don't exist. Or they'll be walking in front of me and suddenly stop dead in their tracks, as if they're the only people on the street. There's a surprising lack of awareness about their environment. I've grown used to being a defensive driver, but it's strange to have to be a defensive walker as well.

Public service is called that for a specific reason: it's about serving people. But most people who I've encountered in public service are there mainly for self-preservation. During my years in higher education, administrators were the highest paid employees. And yet time and time again they demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of their job, and often delegated all of their duties to other employees who were paid far less. Their job was merely an empty title. And if they failed at their job, the hammer was always dropped onto those who were co-opted into doing the administrator's bidding. The administrators remained untouched. They kept their job, and that's all that mattered. That's now the common scenario in politics, with "elected" officials beholden not to their supposed constituents but to their wealthy donors who actually got them into office. The number one priority for politicians now is to keep their job (and sizeable pension and health care), and to create legislation that benefits their donors. The only well-being many of them care about is their own.

I've been to many restaurants and stores where I've felt that my presence was an inconvenience to the employees. They show hardly any interest in assisting me, even though that's their job. I've been in choirs where the singers at the last minute will message the choir director to say that they don't feel like showing up. Once when I was in the market for a new car, I visited a local dealership and told them the make and model I wanted. The three salesmen standing around, appearing completely uninterested, flatly responded, "We don't have any." I asked if they could get one from another dealer and they just as flatly responded no. I guess business was really good for them and I was an inconvenience.

I don't know how this attitude developed. We went from having a caring and considerate society to one that borders on being overtly hostile. Perhaps the attitude developed from the top down. We've watched for decades as those in power, whether celebrities or world leaders, commit obvious crimes and yet never have to face any serious consequences while average citizens face drastic consequences for far less serious infractions.

Maybe it has to do with the incessant messaging in the media, its focus on tragedy and disaster in order to retain viewership. Eventually viewers begin to believe that all there is in the world is misery, so what's the point of kind and generous? It does no good. This has been intensified by social media, which groups together people with the same viewpoint who then reinforce this misinformation and create a sense of hopelessness.

There's also no reason to follow laws if there's no enforcement. That's certainly the case with most of the problems on the road. It's supposedly a violation to use your mobile phone while driving, but I see people doing it all the time without suffering any consequences. It's the same for reckless drivers and speeders. I frequently see drivers run red lights yet I rarely see any police around to rein them in. THe more the drivers get away with it, the more frequently they'll do it.

All of this can imbue people with a sense of apathy. They're not thinking about how their actions affect others, only about how their actions affect themselves. If they don't have to face consequences for their actions, tacitly that means their behavior is fine. People have a remarkable ability to assign blame to others for situations they themselves caused. That's a behavior that begins as children. What is needed is to train children in the benefits of accepting responsiblity, in knowing that you're the cause of your own life's mistakes, even -- and especially -- when you think it's someone else's fault. Because the only way to solve problems is to take charge of fixing them. And no one but you is able to fix your own life. The trick is to fix your life without ruining the lives of others. Better yet, can you fix your life by making the lives of others better? With that perspective, perhaps the current epidemic of selfishness will wane.

November 27, 2025

By the spring of 1978, when I was in my last semester as a theater student at Holyoke Community College, I had been involved in dozens of productions. I began as an actor, then a stage manager and then I directed a one-act play I had written. I also created music for numerous productions. I had acquired a copy of the famous first folio collection of Shakespeare's works. It was a massive tome and was reprinted in the original now-difficult-to-read old English script. But I read it cover-to-cover. Before I left HCC, I wanted to mount a production of something written by Shakespeare, and I wanted to do it the way that Shakespeare's troupe, the King's Men, were thought to have done it. Supposedly, Shakespeare wrote the play and handed out scripts to the players. The players would figure out which scenes they were in and then independently rehearse them. So for instance, Hamlet and Ophelia would work out their scene together. Or Falstaff, the Prince and Poins would work out their scene together. What I failed to realize was that the King's Men was a professional troupe, yet I would be working with first and second year college students who had numerous other commitments. An extra-curricular play would not be their top priority.

I chose to tackle Macbeth. It had a reasonably sized cast. Most of the students who acted in plays at HCC weren't actually part of the theater department; they were law students, biology students, English majors ... students all across the campus participated. I had made friends with many in the freshman class that started in the fall of 1977, so I figured I could count on them to be involved. We had also just finished a production of Madwoman of Chaillot, which had a large cast. So I reached out to many of them as well. Rather than hold auditions, I talked with each student individually and asked if there was a particular part they'd like. Many of them weren't familiar with Macbeth, so in those cases I described some of the characters for which I thought they'd be a good fit. Within a few weeks, the entire show was cast. No one was interested in taking the role of Macbeth, so it fell to me. This was in mid-February. I checked with Leslie Phillips and Roy Faudree who ran the theater program to make sure this was something they'd support. They were completely fine with it. So I scheduled the show to be performed on the main stage (the "Forum") at the beginning of May, after the last department show of the season had wrapped.

At the time, I was the department's Technical Assistant, working for Faudree. I managed the small scene shop and worked in the lighting and sound booths. So I knew what we had to work with for equipment and supplies. I didn't have a budget, so I'd have to use whatever we had lying around. Although I wasn't really directing the show (that was supposed to be done by the actors themselves), someone had to manage the technical aspects of the production -- sets, props and costumes. So I took that on. I wanted to have a sort of primitive and avant garde look to the piece. I decided to have all the actors wear black pants and shirts. That would be overlaid with costume accessories to help identify the characters. The department had a large roll of Celastic, a sort of thick canvas that when soaked in acetone could be molded like paper mache. It would then harden into whatever shape was needed. I decided to use that for armor, a simple strip of it with a hole cut in the center for a head to poke through. I tested out my idea, folding a strip in half, cutting the head hole then soaking it in acetone (which was really nasty stuff), molding it into shape and then letting it harden overnight. Then I gave it a light coat of bronze spray paint. I poked holes in the bottom corners and threaded some lace through them. And it worked! I needed to make about 11 more, but that didn't take too long. I found other costume items in the props closets, like crowns and sashes.

The one prop we didn't have in stock was a sword, and we needed four of them. Fortunately the actor playing Duncan, Mark Fuller, was a weapons enthusiast. He said he knew exactly where to get the swords we needed. A few days later he returned with four beautiful examples. He bought them for five dollars each. They were about four feet long and had gold cross handles with fake jewels in them. I originally envisioned broadswords, but these would work fine. They were heavy and they would look great on stage.

For the stage design, I went minimalist. I stacked some platforms at the center of the stage, making a block about five feet high by six feet long. I put stock stair units on either side. This would be an all-purpose setting. The witches would appear on top of it. Fights would take place on it and up and down the stairs. I also covered the front of it with white muslin. I really wanted to find an eerie way to have the ghosts appear. I figured I could do it by filming actors against a black background and then projecting the footage on the muslin screen. I also exposed part of the giant white cyclorama at the back of the stage for the same reason.

Another technical detail I wanted to tackle was the dagger that Macbeth hallucinates. Something I had become fascinated by was holography, which was still in its early stages. There were different types. The ones most people were familiar with were reflection holograms, usually etched onto a shiny surface. Unlike photographs, holograms preserved dimensional information, creating the illusion of looking through a window and seeing a 3-dimensional physical object beyond it. Those type of holograms were cool, but useless for my purposes. What I needed was a transmission hologram that I could project into 3-dimensional space. Not realizing how insanely complicated and unrealistic my idea was, I reached out to my physics professor to see if I could use the lab to create a transmission hologram. To my surprise, he gave me carte blanche to do whatever I wanted. So I read up on the scant information available for creating transmission holograms. This of course was in the pre-Internet era, so all my research was done using the library card catalogue.

The first thing I needed was to build an isolation table in order to dampen any vibrations. I found a book that described the process: four automobile tires sandwiched between two sheets of 3/4 inch plywood and slathered with liquid asphalt. I got four tires from a junkyard. I bought a small can of asphalt. The plywood came from the scene shop. I put it all together and it was insanely heavy. I let the asphalt dry and then moved it up to the physics lab. (Thankfully, all of the HCC buildings had elevators.) I then sketched out on the top of the plywood where the equipment would be laid out. IFrom the lab I was able to use a 500 mw laser (since all holograms were monochromatic), several mirrors and a two-way mirror. I created a holder for a sheet of holographic film. I bought the special Kodak holographic film at a local photo store and it was the most expensive item in the entire show. It came in small sheets that were about 3x4 inches. The laser was positioned at one end of the table and aimed at the two-way mirror, which would split the light into two beams. One beam would continue straight through the mirror, bounce off two other mirrors and then a diffuser would spread the beam across the film. The other beam was angled off at 90 degrees and would shine onto the small dagger model that I had made, affixed to the table in front of the film. That was supposed to create an interference pattern on the film. When the film was developed and laser light was shined onto it, you'd see a recreation of the dagger. Going one step further and projecting that film into thin air was an intellectual leap I hadn't made at that point. I just wanted to see if I could first create the hologram. Unknown to me at the time, I could have used an age-old visual trick of a Pepper's Ghost illusion which could have accomplished a similar effect but in a much simpler way.

I would go to the lab several nights a week, when the campus had quieted down. I spent hour upon hour making sure everything was set up correctly. I would expose the film for the required amount of time, then seal off the film and take it to the dark room in the photography department, develop it, bring it back to the lab and shine the laser on it. Nothing. I couldn't get anything to appear. I wondered if my isolation table wasn't good enough. I tried tweaking the alignment of the mirrors. During one attempt I slipped and the the laser shot straight into my eye. To this day I still have a black spot in my vision. I spent way too much time on it and just days from the show's opening, I finally gave up and dismantled my setup. There were other problems with the production that I probably should have spent my time on.

Another technical challenge was the end of the play when Macduff holds up the severed head of Macbeth. But I knew that fake heads in Hollywood were made out of latex. The scene shop had a whole bottle of latex, so I figured that would be pretty easy. I had someone (I can't remember who) help me make a plaster cast of my face. Then I poured latex into the cast. This type of latex I didn't have to bake; it dried overnight. The next day I peeled out the latex form. It was pretty rough, but I figured the audience was going to get just a brief look at it. I glued the form to a styrofoam mannequin head from the costume shop. I stapled on a wig from the costume shop to try and match my hair. Then I glued on black fur I snipped off of some scrap fur fabric to simulate my beard. I painted on some eyes and added copious amounts of red paint for blood.

To create the floating ghosts, I asked the actors playing the ghosts to come to my apartment. I hung black felt across one of the doorways and wrapped each actor in black felt except for their heads. Then using my Super-8 camera, I filmed them by moving the camera downward. When replayed, it would look like their heads were floating upward. I also filmed Duncan and had him look from one side to another, so his gaze could follow me as I paced the stage. I processed the film and then edited the sequences into two rolls: one for Duncan and one for the ghosts. I had a Super 8 projector that I would put in the lighting booth. The light board operator would turn on the projector on cue. My projector was a simple Bell & Howell home model; I didn't consider that in the theater it had to project the images over 100 feet.

Another part of the production I was trying to manage was the sound design. I originally was going to create a soundtrack for the whole production but abandoned that. Instead I scored the witches song and recorded the accompaniment on piano. For both the beginning and end of the production, I wanted a really disorienting sound. I knew exactly what it was but I had no idea how to create it. It was a sound I had heard on the TV series Hawaii Five-O in an underwater scene. It sounded like a warped bell that suddenly slowed down in pitch. It was exactly the haunting feeling I wanted. So I approached a student in the music department who was working with synthesizers. He was sure he could create the sound I wanted.

An afterthought for me in all this was acting. I was so caught up in the production that I hadn't given much thought to the fact that I was playing the lead. I had memorized my lines. Many of my scenes were with Lady Macbeth, played by Audrey Jacques, and we had rehearsed a few times. I had also worked with Macduff, played with gusto by Ray Suprenant. We needed to carefully choreograph our big sword fight. So we spent several days working through it. We began to notice a problem with the swords. There was a reason they were only five dollars. The blades weren't made of tempered steel. Every time the swords would clash, the blades would bend a bit. My only suggestion was to not hit them too hard. But in the heat of battle, that wasn't the best solution. I talked to Mark about it, but he didn't have an answer.

Two weeks before our opening, Tony came to see me. He was playing multiple characters in the show and was a sweet likable guy. He asked if he could talk with me privately. He seemed a bit nervous and said, "This show isn't really happening, is it?" I asked him what he meant. He told me that most of the cast assumed that the show was just an interesting concept and wasn't actually going to be performed. No one had rehearsed because they didn't know how to direct each other. So no one learned their lines and no one knew what they were doing. I felt a cold sweat. I told Tony that, yes, the show was happening and that I was going to call an emergency meeting and we'd figure out what to do then.

The next day I met with the entire cast in the Forum. Tony was right -- no one had rehearsed except those who had scenes with me. So I told them they had two weeks to learn their lines. I would now direct the show and post a rehearsal schedule. We were indeed opening in two weeks. That sobered everyone up. Nothing helps focus people like an impending deadline. Over the next week, we managed to stage the entire show. During that time I also had to work with the lighting operator to tell him how the scenes needed to be lit and what the lighting cues would be. The guy from the music department delivered a tape recording of his bell sound effect, and it was pretty good. I tested out the film projector. The images were really dim, but by lowering the stage lights they did show up. Duncan was projected onto the platform. The ghosts would rise up on the back cyclorama. For those two weeks I did nothing else except Macbeth. And I was completely exhausted.

On opening night, the theater was about half-filled. The show ran pretty well at the beginning. At one point my armor was coming apart and I was offstage in a corridor trying to fix it. After struggling with it for a while, Tony came running up to me. "Jay, are you supposed to be on stage? Lady Macbeth has been standing up there alone for about five minutes!" I looked at him blankly and asked what scene it was. He didn't know. I felt a sudden panic. I had no clue where in the play we were. So I simply bolted up on stage and shouted, "What ho, Lady? What news?" Audrey looked at me oddly and then said her line, which then clicked me back into the scene.

Later in the play, the witches conjure up the ghosts out of their cauldron. The heads began floating upward, which did look really eerie. But what I didn't know is that the light board operator was up there with his girlfriend (who was running the sound system) and they were fooling around. They forgot to turn off the projector. So I (and the audience) watched as a white strip of film appeared on the cyclorama just as the letters K-O-D-A-K flashed by and I uttered, "Filthy hags, why do you show me this?"

During the final fight with Macduff, the swords had become so weak that halfway through the battle both blades had bent 90 degrees. During the fight I had palmed two gel caps filled with fake blood that I had in my pocket. When I had my back to the audience, I shoved them in my mouth. At the end of the fight, Macduff disarmed me and pins me against the platform with his sword (which remember had a comically odd 90 degree blade). At that point, blood was supposed to gush out of my mouth. But the gel caps wouldn't pop. So the audience just watched Macbeth chomping away on something. Maybe the Scottish liked chewing tobacco. I collapsed to the floor, at which point Macduff raised his sword and brought it down with a whack onto the stage floor just as the lights went out, supposedly cutting off my head. With his blade at 90 degrees, I'm not sure how that worked out.

In the final scene, Macduff appeared on the top of the platform holding my latex likeness. He called out, "Behold where stands the usurper's cursed head!"" and then threw it down onto the stage in disgust, as he was supposed to. But being latex and styrofoam, it hit the stage floor and bounced like a basketball, catapulting off the stage and into the audience. The warped bell sounded loud and clear as everyone on stage slowed their movements and froze. The stage was drenched in red lighting before a blackout. Given the number of screw-ups, the audience was remarkably kind with their applause.

The final performance the next night went much better. Mark got us new swords. Ray wasn't so zealous throwing down the latex head. And I stayed alert and didn't miss my cues. Remarkably, I've run into people who remembered that production and told me it was incredible. In my mind it certainly was, but probably not for the reasons they think. I discovered an enormous amount about working with actors. My speech teacher, Jeanne Hatch, was right when she repeatedly said that technical concerns in theater always come second to acting. It's the people on stage that matter, the relationships that are developed. Ignoring the actors for so long was my biggest mistake. But my final production at the college did make me utilize everything I had learned in my two years of theater there. I was grateful (and amazed) that the teachers not only allowed me but encouraged me to do it.

Robert Aller took some photos of the production, and a few have survived. Here's one of me and Lady Macbeth. And here's one of the final battle with Macduff. That was taken when we had the new swords. Note the bright blue piece of linoleum hanging out from my armor. That's what I was trying to fix when Tony ran to find me. The linoleum was supposed to protected me when Macduff stabbed me at the end, but it never stayed in place. It probably was trying to flee the production along with the actors and regretted its decision to seek a life in theater rather than be content as a kitchen floor. In any case, for me Macbeth will remain as the most memorable (if ill-conceived) stage production I ever attempted.