But I couldn’t write about the show we saw, because (as of now) it’s only a temporary attraction, and Tripadvisor won’t list those. But, hey, I have my own blog, so I’ll review it here!

Magician Criss Angel was playing at the Luxor, and we thought it might be fun to see him live. To see if we could get half-price tickets for the show, we went out to the Strip to see what might be available. But before we got there, we were drawn in to the Houdini Magic Shop at the MGM Grand. One of the staff magician showed us a few tricks, and we asked him what he might have heard about the Criss Angel show. As politely as he could, he let us know word was out that it really sucks. For one thing, a large portion of the show is simply videos of Criss Angel performing, rather than him actually doing it. If we wanted to see him on TV, we can do that at home for free! (As it turns out, the Yelp reviews of the show are humorously scathing.)

So we asked what magic shows are out there which are good. Penn & Teller are great, but we’ve seen them once already, and were looking for something new. David Copperfield was getting mixed reviews, and he’s reported also making the audience watch old videos instead of putting on a live show. The Houdini Magic magician asked if we like close-up magic. Do we ever! He suggested we see the Vegas Magic Theatre at the Gold Coast Casino, where he’d be doing close-up magic for an hour before the show itself started, and tickets were only $15 at the door. It was an easy choice: for the price of a single ticket to one of the shows we had considered, the whole family could see the show together.

We arrived a little late, because as it’s easy to do, we underestimated the distance between casinos. But we were still in time to see some of the close-up magic, which was awesome. Our magician twisted a fork into odd positions, while audience members couldn’t bend it at all. Another magician encased Peter’s cell phone into an inflated balloon, and we never quite figured out how he did it.

The stage performance featured 3 acts with an encore. The first act was a whimsical, fun, and original performance by Trigg Watson, the same magician who’d given Peter a balloon case for his phone. Next we saw Matt Marcy, who was big on audience participation which resulted in Peter having his first time on stage with a magician. Marcy had a funny fake tech support call in the middle of his act, and magically made sure we all knew his website, which has its own jingle I can’t forget. After that, we saw juggler Michael Goudeau who opened by juggling…bean bags. Having seen his juggling club attempt similar stunts, Neil knew how hard it is. Goudeau had the, um, most exciting act of all. As he weebled and wobbled on  the edge of the tiny stage atop at 6-foot-unicycle, he juggled flaming pins close to the fabric curtains above. I desperately, desperately hoped he wouldn’t lose his balance or veer off the lip of the stage and flame the theatre. He didn’t, but I think we were all holding our collective breath. Then he did something which made me really glad we hadn’t gotten seats in the front. The show ended with an encore performance by Matt Marcy.

The whole thing was MC’d by the Ben Stone, who is the only regular part of the show, since the performers change each week. Here is a picture of him from Vegas News:

In between the acts, Stone belted out two songs, and did a magic trick himself. He was charming enough, but I can’t quite figure out what bugged me about him. I think it’s that he wore too much make-up for such an intimate venue, so he looked more like an elf than a human. It may have been deliberate to bring up the sense of a cabaret, but this wasn’t that kind of a show. The context here, at least to my American mind, was more like vaudeville or a classic variety show. After all, besides the billed magic, the show included Stone’s singing, the juggler, and an actor portraying an exasperated stage hand.

Well, I’m really glad we caught this show rather than one of the big acts. The close up magic was a real treat, and there wasn’t a single boring or dull moment the entire time. If I lived in Las Vegas, I might even go back and see the new acts another week. Unfortunately, the show is scheduled to end its run in March.

So how did we get to this situation? I love entertainment, and it wasn’t all that long ago that I spent the summer of 2005 trying to take my kids out to a movie each week, only to find that there weren’t enough G and PG movies for each week of the summer! That may be part of the problem, but I could still see edgier movies on my own, and I did.

The article I linked to says “Hollywood always has insisted it offers inexpensive entertainment compared to concerts, sports events and other costlier options” but that’s no longer as much the case as it used to be.

For instance, this year, instead of going to movies, I took my son to see plays. Yes, live plays, instead of movies! Many of them were Shakespeare plays: three of them were free, with only the cost of getting there early enough to get a seat, and for two others, the ticket prices were less than movie tickets cost. We’re also blessed in this area with having a lot of small theatres that take advantage of the talent in the area. Typically, $40 will buy tickets for both me and Neil to see a 2- to 3- hour performance. This includes seeing the imaginative way the set designer and director use the space and the set, watching the actors cleverly deal with wardrobe problems and flubbed lines if they happen, and being able to talk to the actors after the show. One year, at the Pear Slices performance, I sat near the playwright for one of the sketches, who let me in on the meaning of an acronym in his speech, and the mother of one of the actors, who could give me a personal run-down of her professional career. You don’t get all that with a movie, even if you paid extra to watch it in 3D.

The same rule applies to concerts and sports events: there’s a lot of concerts and sports events that price out under the $10 movie ticket price. The summer is often full of free concerts, and you can often find free tickets for our minor league baseball team, the San Jose Giants, and if you can’t, the tickets are only $9 each.

But more than anything, what’s killing the movie theatre is the quality of home video. We have a Blu-Ray Disc player, and, frankly, most of the movies I’m interested in going to are gone from the theatres before I can find the time to see them, especially since I know I can watch them at home. If I want to watch an R-rated movie with my husband, we don’t need to hire a babysitter: we can just wait until the kids go to bed and pop it in. And last year, Peter splurged on getting us a TV with 3D, and we could all watch Despicable Me in 3D in our own home, with our own popcorn and drinks. We’d watched it before in 2D in the movie theatre, and the accumulated tickets for all of us cost us more than the DVD set of the movie, which we can now watch in 2- or 3D whenever we want.

I don’t know if movie theatres will become extinct. We did like the sense of occasion in formally going out and see the movie (the most excellent The Muppets, BTW). And the movie theatre where we saw it, Camera Cinema 12, is a fun movie theatre to go to. The manager often dresses up like one of the characters in a currently-showing film, and as I was getting more popcorn, I glimpsed him dressed up as Sherlock Holmes. If you go past the theatre on the opening night for a movie that’s gotten a lot of buzz, you may also find cosplayers dressed up as movie characters. And if you buy your tickets in bulk, it’s only $6 for a seat (but still extra for 3D). But it’s hard to beat having a much wider movie selection (any disc on hand) with the comfort of staying home; and the going-out alternatives have stayed steady in their prices, as movie tickets have gotten costlier, making the latter less of an entertainment deal.

We had just gotten on the road to Reno when Peter suddenly had to brake hard. He’d seen a car in front of him run up the freeway divider, then speed up to pass and cut off a bunch of vehicles. When the car stopped on the side of the freeway, he (as a good Samaritan) pulled over in front of it to see if the driver was ok.

She and her elementary-school-aged daughter were fine, but there were clearly more than a few marbles missing. When Peter pointed out to her that the front right tire was flat, and that she needed to call AAA or a tow truck service to get towed and to get it fixed, she seemed unable to comprehend the statement or its consequences. She was going to be late meeting a friend, she said, who was “just a few miles” away, and that she intended to just drive the car there, as is, and deal with the problem there. Peter pointed out that doing so was not only dangerous, but it would also almost certainly destroy the tire rim and possibly the axle as well, causing repair costs in the hundreds or thousands, while a tow and tire repair would be about $50. Hmm, a $1000 repair, or a $50 one. Hmmmmmm….

Of course she didn’t have AAA: that would be the responsible thing to do. She told Peter the car wasn’t really hers, but that she’d borrowed it from a friend. You could almost see the implied message that she didn’t want to pay for a tow truck, because she’d have to actually pay that; but if she managed to get the car to lurch and wobble to her next destination, she’d be there, whereupon she could call the poor friend who’d loaned her the car and complain that it wasn’t working right, and he’d be stuck with the repair.

Peter saw no reasonable option but to put on a spare for her. He asked her to pull out the spare tire, and she seemed surprised that there was such a thing, but to her credit, found it in the trunk underneath a pile of junk. As Peter jacked up the flat tire, she exclaimed “it doesn’t look flat now!” No shit, Sherlock! Peter pulled off the flat tire and the wheel, and she took it and threw it into the bushes on the side of the freeway. Peter yelled at her to put it in the trunk. Not only was it littering, but the rim itself is worth quite a bit. Reluctantly she picked it up and put it in the trunk. Meanwhile, we watched her daughter scratch her butt in public and try to walk up the the roadway above us.

The job was done, and we pulled away, leaving her behind us, as Peter had to stop in at the office to wash his now-greasy hands and mop off grease from his pants. I complained that it was no good helping people like that, and that we just should have called the CHP, but Peter pointed out that had we done that, she probably would have driven off and caused an accident before the CHP arrived. But, really, how do you get into the mindset that destroying a borrowed car and/or throwing parts of it like trash onto the side of the road is acceptable behavior? I later speculated that the car may have been stolen, but given that the daughter’s toys were all over the back seat, Peter thought our original opinion of extraordinary stupidity and irresponsibility were more like the case.

It seemed like we drove past a myriad of accidents on the way to Reno that day, but we didn’t stop for any more of them.

One of the highlights for us was making candy skulls, because while I’d heard about them, I’d never seen one. When we managed to find free seats at one of the tables, the docent brought us solid sugar skulls, which we were welcome to decorate as we wished with colored frosting, beads, and buttons. Here are ours:

After we’d explored some of the other events (which included making paper flowers, getting stickers from catrinas, and seeing a mariachi band), we went out to coffee. As we passed the basilica which is next to the museum, I noticed they advertised a Day of the Dead exhibit of their own. Peter and Neil weren’t into it, but Kelly and I were curious.

Inside a small hall of the basilica were 5 or 6 big shrines, each with photographs of (presumably) dead people. They were surrounded by colorful skulls, which weren’t only sugar skulls, but also ceramic or plastic. There were plates of fruit or cookies, and in one case, a bottle of tequila, set out, as well as pots of marigolds. In one case, a jaunty skeleton in a suit and hat stood next to a shrine. And all of it was an explosion of color: there were crosses, candles, shiny beads, and scattered flowers, so dense and profuse that you couldn’t focus on any one thing.

Helpfully, the basilica had also set up a plaque explaining the Day of the Dead from the Catholic perspective. It goes back to indigenous pre-Catholic traditions, when the Mexican natives believed the dead would come back to visit during a month between July and August. The Catholic church moved the festival to All Souls’ Day (November 2), and the basilica lets people set up shrines like the ones we saw, and some of the local Catholic churches will hold a special All Soul’s Day mass at a cemetery.

Not surprisingly, Kelly was inspired. I asked one of the docents at the art museum where I could get sugar skulls. He said the museum had made all the skulls for the event themselves with a special mold, but perhaps I could find them at one of our local Mexican grocery stores.

Today, I went to the Mexican grocery store closest to me, which I had nervously been avoiding on the fearful (and wrong) assumption that I needed to speak Spanish to shop there. It was great store, with otherwise hard-to-find groceries at great prices (whole Tilapia for $2/lb.; tamarind sherbert; fresh oxtail; Oaxacan cheese!) But the Day of the Dead was not what this store was about. I asked one of the grocers about them, who said they didn’t sell them, but maybe I could find them at Lucky’s (a local American grocery chain.) Hmm. I did find some pastries behind a dancing skeleton sticker which I presumed to be pastries meant to be placed on a Day of the Dead shrine, but I could be wrong:

And in the households section, among all the veladora candles, I found 3 different designs, each in honor of of “Saint Death.”

As it would happen, just on Friday, Neil and I had watched Engineering an Empire: the Aztecs, and I couldn’t help but notice the similarities. While the program reported how the Aztecs had managed to build not only large temples, but also cement causeways in a lake and on swampy land, as well as how they developed an ingenious aqueduct, it couldn’t help but note that the Aztecs were into blood. They were really, really into death and blood. And from what I know of modern Mexico, the conquistadors (who weren’t really the most pacifistic people themselves) didn’t quite manage to stamp it out.

The Day of the Dead celebrates death in a way modern Christianity really doesn’t. It ends up being beautiful and colorful and shiny, much like the Aztecs must have seen it. And the Santa Muerte candle had a prayer on it on the back (in English and Spanish) which doesn’t actually make any reference to God or Jesus, and it sounds like a nasty way to punish your enemies. Is Santa Muerte an Aztec goddess revived in faux Catholic guise? In any case, Peter told me she’s popular with the drug smugglers of Mexico, who may themselves be the modern version of the ancient Aztec race.

This gringa will never really know, but I’m glad I got to make sugar skulls this year.

It sounded like a grand adventure! We shot off a few of the smaller “safe and sane” fireworks at home on the fourth of July, but the next weekend, we packed up our car with camping gear, fishing gear, and our new inflatable boat (since there are no boat rentals at the lake) and headed east to the land of the free and the brave, that is, er, of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe. We needed special permits to use their resources, but these were modestly priced: $9 to camp for a night, $10 for each one-day adult fishing permits, $5 for a one-day child fishing permit, and a $10 boating permit, which may not have been necessary for our little floating dingy.

There aren’t really any formal camp sites: you just pick a spot you like, pitch your tent, and if necessary, dig a fire pit. Bathroom facilities consist of a public toilet on the road between beaches, and there are some garbage cans on the trail into each beach. We went to the Indian Head Rock beach, marked by a huge rock. There we were really sorry Peter hadn’t opted for the 4-wheel-drive option on his truck, especially when we got stuck in the sand once or twice. We had to settle for parking on the last stretch of hard-packed sand near some other friendly campers, and carrying our stuff onto a section of the beach that we liked.

Both Peter and Neil tell me they’ve never camped in strong winds, so I must have camping-in-the wind karma. The beach was buffeted with strong gusts whooshing through all day long. It wasn’t like the 40-mph wind bursts my modest Sears tent had to endure atop a canyon wall last June, but I wasn’t looking forward to another night of  gusts blow-drying me all night long. The trick to wind camping is to either have a low-profile tent, which I don’t have, or to remove the rain fly, so the wind can blow through the mesh in the top and encounters less resistance. It still requires double-staking and a strong tent that won’t tear.

As I was setting up our tents (Neil has a smaller one, which was just short enough to work, albeit also without a fly), Peter was inflating our boat by the lake, and figuring how to attach the propeller to the battery. Once he had it ready, we put on our life vests, packed ourselves in the boat with our fishing gear (which was a tight fit together with the cooler I’d optimistically added in case of catching fish. As it turned out, the waters on the lake were so choppy due to the wind, that it was nearly impossible to tie on a lure, much less the sinkers we needed in the middle of the day. The waves sloshed on to me and Kelly in the front of the boat, which was fun enough for us. About half way towards the other shore (where Peter had heard the best fishing was to be had), Peter read the battery, which said it needed recharging. Suddenly, Indian Head Rock seemed very, very far away. He turned the boat around and we returned to our campsite, where the winds, despite the fact that I’d weighed my tent down as much as possible inside, and staked it solidly, had blown over.

So instead, we lounged in our camp chairs, splashed in the water, and made a half-hearted attempt to fish from the shore until the sun set. Thereupon, we pulled out all our dangerous, banned-in-California-and-Nevada fireworks, and proceeded to set them off. It was a lot of fun, but it’s still hard to understand why officials consider these so dangerous. Most of our fireworks were fountains, just slightly larger than the “safe-and-sane” kind, and sadly, not particularly impressive. The best show came from mortar fireworks, which shot high into the sky. These seemed like less of a fire hazard, since from their high distance, the sparks are cold by the time they land. They have long fuses, so all you have to do is set the in a tube, light them, and stand back. In any case, our fellow campers enjoyed the show, and some of the ones further down the beach set off a firework which was still available in the Smokeshops called “Yellowjacket.”

Our neighbors brought us watermelon, and we sat around and snacked and told each other campfire stories until 10:30, when the winds seemed to have died down enough for me to put the rain fly back on my tent. As the more experienced wind camper, I bunked down on the floor, because low resistance is everything when it comes to surviving the wind. Peter took the cot I’d set up mostly to support the tent, and ended up having a hard night as the wind pushed into him all night long.

In the morning, Peter took Neil and Kelly back out on the lake for one more attempt at fishing. Kelly caught something with her Disney Princess fishing rod, but it snapped the line before she could pull it in. I suspect it was one of the lake’s renowned cutthroat trout, which were out of season, so we would have had to let it go anyway.

Instead of cooking eggs and bacon on our new propane stove, we decided to pack up and have breakfast at a restaurant near Reno. It was a beautiful vacation though, and I love Native territory. So maybe we’ll be back when trout is back in season, or when we want to enjoy fireworks. And hopefully, the winds won’t blow as hard.

We started with Knott’s Berry Farm, a place I hadn’t been to since the early 80s, then in the prime of my So-Cal living, teen-amusement-park-loving years. I remember it as a low key amusement park with some great rollercoasters (not as many as Magic Mountain, but also having much shorter lines.) A lot can change in 25 years, but Knott’s Berry Farm has remained true to its character–though it added an entire Camp Snoopy section which we all loved.

Since she was a baby, Kelly has had a beloved Snoopy blanket, and we love getting her Snoopy themed things (such as the two Snoopy dolls she already owns, and a Snoopy shirt Shiaw-Ling gave her.) Many of the rides had a Peanuts tie-in such as a huge Snoopy bounce house, or the kiddie car ride Kelly and Neil went on together.

Neil’s favorite was the sidewinder rollercoaster, an unusual design which spun us around while we were rocketing down the curves. And in the older kids’ section of the park, the coasters were still awesome. Peter got me to go on the Rip Curl ride, which mostly just shook and spun us upside down. I was the only member of my family brave enough to go on the Accelerator, which was like being shot out of a cannon onto a track going straight up–but was just a regular coaster afterwards. Kelly was just an inch too short to go on the Pony Express, so Neil got to ride twice. And my past favorite, the Ghost Rider, a gargantuan wooden rollercoaster, is still my favorite ride today. It’s long enough with plenty of curves and adventure that you feel you got a good ride in exchange for your waiting time.

Neil is currently obsessed with puzzles, so he actually enjoyed the strip-mall like stores part of the park, especially a puzzles and games store, where he bought himself an optical puzzle.

Peter’s camera card gave out, so after our day at the park, we went to the nearest Fry’s, which had a Roman theme, though the red canopy entrance and somewhat cheesy decor has Peter calling it the “Italian restaurant Fry’s.”

The next day, we walked over to Disneyland. I have to confess, from my So Cal years, I can often be jaded about Disneyland, even with young children in tow, who show it to you in a new way. I’m the tedious person who can still remember having tickets, and the difference between E-, D-, C-, B-, and A- ticket rides. In fact, I can still tell you which letters most rides had. And I loathe the long lines, even with the Fast Pass system, which is terrific. The last time we went to Disneyland, it was so crowded, the park closed, and there were even lines for the rest rooms.

But Disneyland more than made up for it this year. Our timing couldn’t have been better. We’d barely waited for any ride at Knott’s Berry Farm, but it was almost as good as Disneyland. Get this: we only waited for 20 minutes to get onto Space Mountain. That’s a miracle, and a fraction of the time I have ever had to wait for it, ever. We waited even less for other rides in the park, and Peter finally got to go on the Matterhorn ride, which he’s never done in his life. And even I was dazzled and impressed by the update to the Haunted Mansion. As the crotchedly old-timer, I have to hate updates. What’s up with the Johnny Depp dolls in the Pirates of the Carribbean? Did you have to push the movie tie-in so hard? How come the Swiss Family Treehouse, one thing I remember from my first trip to Disneyland when I was 5, is now the Tarzan house? Well, the new haunted mansion is really cool, cartoony and clever.

Peter and I were trapped inside and almost eaten by a huge toothy wreath. Hey, even the Nemo update to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was neat, though I recognized the Captain Nemo story frame beneath it.

We still have a picture of Neil hugging Pooh at his first trip to Disneyland when he was three, so I insisted the kids pose with Pooh this time, too:

At some point, I’ll locate that old picture and probably get all weepy about how my children are growing up so fast. Neil bought himself a Disney Rubik’s cube.

If the Pooh moment hadn’t been a clear enough point to highlight the fact that my children are getting older, Legoland really drove it home. We’ve been going there every year since Neil was 3. He’s 13 now, and too big and old to go on some of the rides he used to be too small to go on way back when. Miniland, a marvel when we first saw it, is now aging, with some of the buildings showing heavy UV aging, and some down to be rebuilt. This time, Neil took Kelly in hand, almost showing her his park, as if he were passing it on to her. He insisted she drive correctly so she could deserve her Legoland driver’s license. And he bought a Hello Kitty rubik’s cube, less for the design, than for its size and smooth sliding action.

And guess who hangs out at Legoland before the Christmas season gets completely underway and he’s swamped?

Santa! I wanted to ask if I was on his nice list, but I didn’t want to be like one of those creepy celebrity stalkers, you know.

While we were at the ancient Rome/Italian restaurant Fry’s, I found out there was an Alice in Wonderland Fry’s which we could visit on our way up, and you know we had to see it:

It was one of the best-themed stores I’ve seen, complete with a hidden Cheshire cat you need to hunt a little to find, but the management asked me not to take any more pictures, so if you want to see it, you’ll have to go to Woodland Hills yourself.

All in all, the best amusement park weekend I’ve had, though I realize the time I have to do this with my children is rapidly fleeting away.

One of the exhibits which has come and stayed are the Kapla bricks, which are little more than short flat pieces of wood, which the museum visitors use to make the most creative constructions. We saw them as a new exhibit in 2006, when Neil’s imaginative friend Ryan joined us and created a castle with a bridge. Since then, the Kapla bricks have moved next a small maze in a room with the Planetarium, and they’re always a hit with my children:

Neil was also eager to see the choice of puzzles in the museum store, and he ended up buying himself a quite inscrutable Chinese puzzle box.

I am always in awe of the view from the museum, which never fails to amaze:

A few days later, I set the children up with an art lesson about Joan Miro. We all came up with impressive Miro-inspired art, all in our own styles. As a conjunct to it, I planned to show the children two Miro paintings I’d seen at the Stanford art museum.

Unfortunately, when we got there, the Miro paintings had been rotated out of the 20th-century art exhibit. Alas! However, I had had the children do another lesson on Alexander Calder the day before (and we have two stabiles and a mobile to show for it). And as it turned out, the museum had an Alexander Calder mobile on display: you can see “The Chariot” here behind the children:

Kelly was very exited to see an authentic art piece based on what she’d learned. She wasn’t as thrilled with the Robert Arneson heads, though I always find them whimsical.

The downstairs special exhibit often includes an activity, so I took the children there to see if there was one with the current exhibit. But the exhibit was very very delicate calligraphy, with no activity (and honestly, a note which seemed to imply breathing near the calligraphy was seriously discouraged). So we had the most fun in the museum store, which had samples you could play with, and with the soft pink upside down Q in the courtyard. The soft pink Q, by the way, is by the very same artist who created one of our family’s favorite pieces of art, the giant diaper pin.

So this museum visit didn’t have all I expected, but it was good, and the Stanford art museum is always worthwhile, even if it doesn’t always have its Miro on display.

I wondered whether they’d relate as middle schoolers or math geeks. By putting them together in the back of my car on the way to San Francisco, would I be subject to an hour of fart jokes, or power calculation? I very quickly learned middle schooler and math geek are not mutually exclusive. Almost as soon as he got into the car, Julian rolled down his window and the boys proceeded to do wind experiments half way up the peninsula. It wound down to an explanation on the science of kitty litter, at which point I saw my chance to insert a geeky fact, and informed the boys that the Middle Ages really stank. That seemed to calm the boys down for a while. Where’s the math in medieval aromatics? After a few minutes, they changed the subject to theories of what you could do with a really long conveyor belt and RC vehicles.

Finally, we arrived at the Exploratorium. Julian set me up as the straight man for a really geeky math joke involving infinity, but I got him back by telling him I love infinity, because no matter how much you add to it, it’s always the same. And, hey, kid, here’s a quarter-shaped Exploratorium sticker, now go play with the science exhibits, why dontcha?

The place was created for kids like Neil and Julian, by slightly older kids like Neil and Julian, so the boys were content. Kelly, happily enough, has matured so she can enjoy playing with the exhibits, too. Here are all three children checking out the sand disc:

Kelly and I drifted to different exhibits, in no small part because neither Kelly (nor I) were up to trying to figure out the equations for sand drawings.

The Exploratorium has a new (to us, at least) section about circuits, which had a table for making circuits. This was like a more advanced version of Snap Circuits, a toy Neil loved at an early age. When I checked in on the boys, they were creating some sort of ueber-battery, having done troubleshooting work to sort of the defective circuits from the working ones:

I was hungry for lunch, but both the boys were still riding on Exploratorium excitement, so I took Kelly over to the cafe to have a bite to eat, since I wouldn’t be able to eat on the way back home. I opened the lunch I’d packed for myself, (which involved the remnants of an ongoing field trip lunch), and discovered a biology experiment. Biology was last year for us, though, so I threw it away, and ate some of Neil’s lunch instead.

Alas, we had to leave at 3, so I could get the boys to Cupertino in time for Julian’s math club. Neil had accepted an invitation to join him, which is like accepting an invitation for a nightcap from a Russian friend. Here’s an example of one of the problems they do for fun in the math club:

You leave the Exploratorium at 3 pm, and need to be at the Cupertino library at 4 pm. Inexplicable construction requires you to reroute your way home through the Presidio, but through some wonder of space, time, and political perversion, you still end up going down 19th Avenue and have to stop at infinity red lights. There is a 10% probability that any one of the car’s 3 passengers (with a 5% probability for the driver) will throw up, a probability that increases exponentially every 10 minutes, but which will delay your trip by 5 minutes for each incident, assuming you can pull over to the side of the road fast enough (if not, add another 10 minutes). Calculate how late you will be, and which passenger gets sick.

Oh, wait, I did that problem. Neil and Julian obviously did it, too, and faster than I did, because as soon as I pulled up in front of the library, they exploded out of the car and dashed away, whereupon Kelly threw up.

After the clean up, Kelly and I stuck around in the library, until closing time, when the math club had to close down, too. I got Neil to admit to being mathed out for the day, so we just went home and watched an old Star Trek episode in which Kirk, once again, destroys a computer.

So when Star Trek came to the Tech, I was interested, especially when Neil, even with his very limited knowledge of Star Trek, told me he was interested to go as well.

I thought admittance was pricey. I’ve gotten used to taking my children to museums, and while there’s usually a surcharge for (optional) special exhibits, it’s rare to have to pay more than $10 or $15 for an afternoon’s worth of education and fun. A regular visit at the Tech fits well within this scope, but after having at least two major (and pricey) exhibits which trucked in crowds of paying patrons (Bodyworlds and the Da Vinci Experience), the Tech has learned its special exhibits may be a good way to help fund the regular museum programs. But, still, $25 for me, and another $19 for Neil seemed an awful lot.

That said, Neil and I liked the show. It started with a big room mostly featuring costumes from the different series, and some props from the show. With these was one of the most interesting aspects of the show: how Star Trek inspired modern technology. For instance, cell phones were very much inspired by Star Trek communicators–something that’s not hard to miss, especially when you think of flip phones. Tasers may be thought of as being like the stun setting on Star Trek phasers, since in either real life, or fiction, they work by temporarily paralyzing the muscles with an electronic force. There was a window which mixed real life and fiction by showing historical ships (like Navy cruisers and space shuttles) as somehow evolving into the Star Trek Enterprise space ships.

The next room was a recreation of the ship’s deck, and both Neil and I made sure to have our pictures taken in the captain’s chair. We also got to see ourselves “teleported” in another room which had a teleporter recreation, and see the captain’s quarters as they looked in Star Trek II.

The last and biggest room had more models and an entire wall placing all the major events from all the Star Trek series and movies into a single timeline. I’m not sure I was hard-core enough to appreciate that, since I think of each Star Trek series as something that stands on its own, not as interlocking in a strict sequence. I mean, Star Trek: The Next Generation was a great show, and made rare references to its predecessor, but it was really a different show based on same premise, not a strict sequel. The timeline did remind me how long its been since I watched anything Star Trek. Most of the movies I’d seen when they were in the theater, and that (gasp) goes back almost 30 years. I watched the first two television shows as reruns when I was still in school, but never really got into any of the later iterations, not even Enterprise, even though I really really wanted to like it because it starred Quantum Leap guy Scott Bakula. So, honestly, I don’t really know, or particularly care, about when Captain Jane Away (?) lived, since I can’t name the series she came from either.

Otherwise, we had more costumes, more props, more models, and a quiz game Neil enjoyed and did well at, even given his limited exposure to Star Trek. I vowed to educate my son with the original Star Trek episodes and the good Star Trek movies (II, IV, and maybe VI), but to my surprise, those can’t be gotten at the library, and I have to Netflix them.

I was looking forward to buying a souvenir of our mother-son Star Trek experience, but if I’d thought the show itself was verging on the edge of being overpriced, the pictures certainly were. The only way I could buy any picture of us was to buy a $28 package of 2 or 3 pictures, with an option to add pictures to that at $6 each. I asked if I could just buy a picture of Neil in the captain’s chair for $6, but it wasn’t an option: it was the full package or nothing. Having already spent $42, I couldn’t justify $70 for an hour’s worth of Star Trek fun (even though we were able to add in some fun at the Tech as part of our attendance before we had to go pick up Kelly).

We were the only people attending the exhibit, but to be fair, it we were there on a Monday, the week before Christmas break began. The Da Vinci show cost as much as this exhibit, and that was consistently packed, even though I didn’t consider it that impressive, and it was certainly less fun than Star Trek. So maybe there are more Trekkies/Trekkers out there with more money than I’m willing to part with. As it was, Neil and I had a good time, but I’m glad Peter and Kelly didn’t join us, because it wouldn’t have been worthwile for them.

Fairyland is all I could want; and it makes me miss the old Happy Hollow (which is destined to become some twee environmentalism-preaching mess now) ever the more. It was the park Happy Hollow was based on, and I love it for its old-fashioned kiddie-appealing charm. It was built back in the day when children weren’t jaded before their time, and it has no qualms about having a little chapel, or having to acknowledge whatever the new hot licensed phenomenon is.

It has all of four low-key rides, a lot of play areas where children can climb and slide, or look at animals. Like the old Happy Hollow, it had a puppet show which took a folk/fairytale and gave it a little twist (in this case, the evil queen from Snow White remains an old hag). The animals aren’t off in their own zoo area, but put into a fairytale setting, i.e. ducks under Rapunzel’s castle.

Kelly especially loved two unique features of the park. You can get a key for $2, and which it, you can turn on a storybox which will tell or sing you a nursery rhyme or fairytale. Kelly wanted to make sure she got to activate all the storyboxes, and even their stories are told in a sweet old fashioned way. (Though as a nod to multiculturalism, Spanish is offered as a language choice as well as English.)

Also, there was a little house completely filled with children’s books to read. Books! Kelly loves books.

Neil recently reread and introduced Kelly to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and I was having a very Alice in Wonderland week, so I particularly enjoyed the park’s related attractions, like the Wonderland carousel

and an Alice in Wonderland tunnel

which includes a funhouse mirror and Cheshire cat oddities and jokes and ends in a card maze.

It’s just a shame Fairyland is so far away in downtown Oakland, or we would want to go there more often.