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                             Not everyone is real

The International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions Exhibition.
[1] Spring [2] and I had finally arrived, registered, eaten lunch, and were
now wandering the huge convention hall.

The convention itself wasn't really populated with booths from amusement
parks like Disney [3] or Six Flags [4] but of companies that provide
materials to amusement parks and attractions. Lots of engineering firms; what
with roller coasters and animatronics, concessions with their free samples,
artisans, costumers, scenery, just about everything you need to run an
amusement park or an attraction.

Everything interesting and distracting as hell. We had found the booth to one
of the companies we went up there to talk to, and just as Spring started
talking to them I got distracted with an architectural model in a nearby
booth and wandered over there, fascinated with the display. That, in turn,
distracted and disturbed Spring enough that we ended up walking through the
exhibits for nearly two hours, just to get it out of my system.

And it's a shame that pictures were not allowed. There was something at
nearly every booth to take a picture of. The human statues—two people all in
white standing so still that you had to watch for quite a while to make sure
they weren't real statues. The Robocoaster (I think I have the name right)—a
huge articulated robot arm (oh, 20′ high easy) with roller coaster seats
where the hand would normally be. Two people can fit inside and the arm will
then gyrate around in time to music. There was quite a line for that one. The
one booth with the huge laser system, shooting beams of light across the
entire exhibit floor. The Beast—a 150′ long, 40′ high inflatable monster [5]
you enter through the mouth and wander inside of (only to be expelled where
in most animals most solid waste is expelled, with a most convincing sound
effect). Animatronic dinosaurs, people, ghosts, zombies and monsters (Spring
found the electric chair animatronic most disturbing).

We eventually ended up talking the companies we went up there to talk to and
both meetings went quite well.

And then it was time to head back to South Florida.

[1] http://iaapaorlando.com/
[2] http://www.springdew.com/
[3] http://www.disney.com/
[4] http://www.sixflags.com/
[5] http://brainchilddesignlab.com/beast.asp

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