And I bet you’ll have a great time, too! If I were at all into whiskey, racehorses, or Corvettes, I might spring for the trip. As it is, I can get the fried chicken locally.
Aw, it ain’t so bad. Disneyland’s Space Mountain complex (including the Starcade, the Space Stage, and the Space Place restaurant) cost $20 million in 1977, and that would be over $78 million in today’s dollars. I don’t mean to say that there’s necessarily any more educational value in Noah’s Ark than in a space-themed rollercoaster, but as an afternoon’s waste of time they’re both relatively harmless, I guess. Space Mountain kinda hurts my neck.
I used to have to go there on business. I liked visiting Fort Knox, and were I still going there I would visit this exhibition. But for completely different reasons.
It would be interesting to have a real museum of Genesis, with the results of the latest research. Literal translations of all those names. Exhibits of archeological records suggesting that Eve was a Phoenician fertility goddess. A nice family tree of myths and maps showing where the cults of Adonai and Yah originated and how they came to be conflated. A kind of three dimensional Golden Bough for the 21st century.
Genesis is fascinating if you have a guide to what lies behind all these rewritten stories and can see how different societies take the same origin myths and adapt them to their own purposes.
It might even cause schoolchildren of above average intelligence to wonder how accurate their own myths are - the War of Independence, the conquest of parts of Spanish America, the colonisation of the West. (All nations do it - the Irish, the Serbs and the Germans have had particularly poisonous national myths but the English are little better.)
If it gives the Amish business it serves a useful purpose. They have social ideas which need to be kept alive until society has an urge to rediscover them.
I can’t wait. That wave pool will be truly awesome. As riders fight to stay on their boogie boards, the loudspeakers will boom, “Do you not fear Me!? Do you not tremble in My presence!?” And at the end a sullen teenager in a John the Baptist costume will ride in on a zip line and spray everyone with a fire hose.
I think that self-navigating torpedo with an 11 000km range and a nuclear warhead actually falls into the category of “let’s trolley NATO” rather than a particularly likely development. Like the Ekranoplan.
Its all forced perspective–the Ark is only about the size of a Datsun, but the AIGineers have designed it in a way that it looks like 40 cubits from the other side of the lake (you can wait for it to part or just walk across).
Savvy visitors will be on the lookout for all the Hidden Hams (a circle with two dollar signs for nostril slits) sprinkled throughout the park.
Oh, that scent? Fresh baked bullshit, pumped out from a vent near the Answers in Genesis reading room.
As an almost completely unrelated aside, I would love to hear your thoughts on this story, @Mindysan33:
I have no real dog in that particular fight, as my kids didn’t go to that preschool, and in fact no longer attend the public school across the street this year. But I’ll tell ya right now that it’s SO Silver Lake that this particular tempest in a teapot was splashed on the front page of Jezebel. My family had a somewhat similar experience at a formerly-highly-regarded preschool in Pasadena, and I’m simultaneously alarmed and amused by these battles between the owners/administrators of progressive preschools and the highly-involved (not to say helicopter) parents who start choosing up sides in these battles.
There’s some big ol’ 21st-century Harper Valley PTA shit going on in my circles, and I never saw it coming.
Wow, that’s some crazy stuff. It’s shame, too, because all these kids are actually learning is to just perpetuate this kind of behavior. I’d say this is what happens when we commodify education to such an extent. I’ve heard similar stories from tonier in town private schools here in the ATL.
But yeah, it’s a weird back and forth between elite parents and the people running these schools and it gets so personal.
What really upsets me is that these are elite folks who are more parentier than thou, and look down on the rest of us, especially those with lesser means than us, who can afford to make these same choices.
But yeah. Yuck all around there. Hopefully, you guys have a less poisonous atmosphere for your spawn! I love my daughter’s school and she’s rather happy there. It’s not as swank as some of the other private schools around the ATL, but I think my kids doing excellent where she is.
[ETA] Can I also say that I’m not sure that the people who ran this school understand the spirit of Montessori, which is sort of invoked. I think someone without any experience with the method would walk into a Montessori class and see no structure, but there is a structure there. It’s just that it acknowledges that kids are often more comfortable moving about a classroom. It also understands that kids will rise to the occasion if you hold them to expectations.
It’s to open next summer and close down five to ten summers thereafter, if previous Christian theme parks provide useful precedents. I recollect they put together some local bonds to help fund this thing.
Oh, that would be totally fascinating. And sadly no one is ever going to build it.
Okay, so I’m totally opposed to the religious indoctrination part, the waste of money, and the general stupidity of the whole thing. But, damn! It’s pretty big! It look like a great playhouse to run around in with my son, having a lot of fun! I just might have to go!
