vovat | All Play and No Land

Last Thursday, we went to Playland, an amusement park in Westchester County, New York. It's owned by the county, but it's been under new management for a few years, and they got rid of quite a few rides since the last time we were there. To be fair, they also added some, but it often seemed like a downward trade, and some of the newer ones weren't even running that day. It was already a small park, and now there's even less there. We ended up riding most things twice. One of the recent ones, Catch'n Air, is pretty rough and doesn't really do that much, so while it's new, it doesn't feel like a modern ride. The one with the motorcycles that you can raise into the air is pretty cool, although very small.

And why would they keep the Music Express but get rid of the similar but superior Thunder Bolt? I'm sure they had their reasons, but I don't know what they are. There used to be two different dark rides, Zombie Castle and the Flying Witch, really close to each other, and both were so generic that I couldn't have told you what was in which. Only Zombie Castle is there now, and they blurred out some zombie woman painted on the wall behind where you get on.

I really have no idea why, but fortunately I was able to find a picture I took years ago, so you can see what it looked like before.

The most entertaining thing about this ride is the use of old, scratchy voice samples. Another kind of cheesy ride is Ye Old Mill, where you ride a boat through caverns inhabited by gnomes and trolls.

I do think it used to splash you with water towards the end and now it doesn't, but that's probably for the better.

The Derby Racer is a favorite of mine, although I remember it going faster. Whether that's nostalgia or actually true, I couldn't say for sure; but I have to wonder if someone decided a ride with no harnesses or anything running at that speed was unsafe. It was also the first time we rode the Go-Karts or the Bumper Cars, and some people are weirdly competitive on stuff like that.

I feel I should also mention that one of the horses on the Carousel had lost its tail.

I hope Owl doesn't use it as a doorbell. It rained on and off during the day, and the cool part about that was a very visible rainbow. We actually first saw it from the Dragon Coaster, but couldn't take pictures until afterwards.

Speaking of dragons, it seems like the park is now downplaying Coaster, their dragon mascot. He's still there, as on the one sign I shared here, but not as much as he was before.

The other thing we did that's worth writing about was to see Tim Heidecker at the Bell House on Monday night.

His show had two parts, the first being a stand-up routine that he did in character as an angry but clueless right-winger, yelling at the sound guy, fumbling with props, mispronouncing simple names, and saying Justin Trudeau was worse than Hitler. He also did some pretty clever wordplay. After that came his set with the Very Good Band, and while he still made jokes and some of the songs were on the comical side, most of it was pretty straight country-tinged rock.

Vic Berger, the guy whose video edits will forever make me associate Donald Trump with airhorns, played keyboard and some guitar. Tim also did a solo bit where he covered Bob Dylan's 1981 song about Lenny Bruce, and made fun of how lazy the lyrics were.