After Heidi and all that we did get back around to K3 Roller Skater, a cute little roller coaster with the theme of ... well, I guess you're in a train of roller skates going through the clutter of a teenager's room. I don't know why ``train of roller skates'' is a model of roller coaster but it is and it's cute if odd. The high point of this particular instance is that it dives through a giant stereo speaker prop. Anything where you get nice and close to props like that does well. It's apparently themed to the Flemish girl band K3 and a tv series K3 Roller Disco so you see how this all makes sense.

Anubis: The Ride is another of their launch coasters, ones that accelerate horizontally rather than using a chain-driven lift hill for energy. It's got a pretty fancy station, one made to look like an English stately home, to fit its theme of 1910s-or-so Anglo Egyptologist who's brought back something he maybe shouldn't. Pleasant ride. What sticks out in my mind is that I made a mistake going into it dumb enough you could be forgiven for thinking it was a bit, although I think bunnyhugger just took me for saying something weirdly wrong in a way not worth challenging.

Outside the building was a ride sign with information about it and I pointed to one of the little squares and said this was a seven-minute ride. Which is extraordinarily long; your average roller coaster ride is two minutes, with the longest ones you'll encounter about three minutes. A seven minute ride would be something with a weird circumstance, like for some reason they have to put all the track two miles over from the station. Or they stop partway through for a show. Well, what happened is I saw the square reading '7+ min' and took it for seven minutes. If I'd paid attention to the text underneath, 'jaar/ans', I'd have correctly understood it as the minimum age requirement. But bunnyhugger didn't correct me, or even acknowledge this, and when I looked at other ride signs I figured out my mistake, and I confess to it here just to be honest about it.

Any attempt to count roller coasters will encounter things you're not sure should count. One that we kept looking at and ultimately rode was SuperSplash, which looked like a water roller coaster, something that starts out on a track and then splashes down to sail the rest of the way. We've ridden some like that, notably at d'Efteling. This one, we decided after seeing other people weren't getting very wet, we'd ride.

It proved to be less of a roller coaster than we imagined. We got on the train on a segment of track that proved to be on an elevator, and that rose up to the top of a tower and rode a hill down, into the water. It's gravity-driven and on a track and all, but it feels a little like a Freefall ride in terms of not quite being roller-coaster-y. The Roller Coaster Database doesn't list it, although Coaster-Count.com does. Who's correct? You have to make your decision and hope nobody demands you give a rigorous defense.

Would you like to see pictures of things at Michigan's Adventure that inspire no disagreement about whether they're roller coasters? Look on, friends.

The Corkscrew station. We invariably head for the back as the most comfortable ride; the over-the-shoulder restraints will bonk your head and from the back you get warning about which way to lean.

The station had this penant. What the Battle Royale 2024 was we have no idea but they achieved something for it.

Giant skeletons being prepped for their Halloween work season.

Person on the left: 'So which way is Zach's Zoomer?'

Ordinary picture looking up the Zach's Zoomer queue, but I like how dramatic it is. If I'd got the roofline of the building perfectly vertical I'd call this an art.

No explanation for why those two seats were unavailable, although almost always the issue is that the restraints aren't opening right. Since Zach's Zoomer has only the one train they can't swap the train out and you wouldn't want to take the ride out of operation if you don't have to.

Trivia: The Lumière brothers' films were first shown to American audiences at the Eden Musée theater in Manhattan, located on 23rd street between Fifth and Sixth avenues. Source: The Encyclopedia of Vaudeville, Anthony Slide. The theater closed in summer 1915.

Currently Reading: American Scientist, May - June 2025, Editor Fenella Saunders.

I mentioned not riding the log flume despite its dinosaurs. There were some other things we didn't ride or didn't get to do. The roller coaster miss was Draconis, formerly named Draak. Unfortunately, hanging across the ride's entrance sign was a plaque with this note:

Deze attractie is even in onderhound maar zal snel weer blinken als goud.

The message is repeated in French so as to not sound so much like someone making fun of Dutch. But you get the gist: the ride is closed for maintenance but will soon be back, shining good as gold. (We only got that precisely translated with machine help.)

The change of name from something meaning ``dragon'' to something else meaning ``dragon'' may seem unmotivated. Its motivation: this year they re-themed the ride to the series Nachtwacht. There were statues of what we surmised (correctly) to be the main characters: a vampire, a werewolf, and a girl. (She's an elf.) According to Wikipedia and the Internet Movie Database they're a trio of supernatural teens who protect the city from monsters of the week. I believe the dragon appears in one episode. I don't know if the extended downtime of the ride is part of the retheming or if the ride is just having issues.

Also missed: Nachtwacht-Flyer, an elevated swings ride. There was no chance bunnyhugger would ride it, but I was up for it. Unfortunately, by the time we felt ourselves free to mess around with optional attractions like that, the ride was closed for weather. High winds, you know, which only reinforced my nicknaming of it as a WindSeeker. We thought to get back to it later, but never found the time.

And the big thing we missed? Shows. We had seen some characters doing happy dances at the park entrance when the day started. But they had events along the way. The most important of those --- a parade --- we caught. But there was some kind of show at the stage up front, a couple of times during the day, and we managed to miss it every time. While stumbling from one attraction to another we saw a bit of it from afar, across the field of water sprays from the concrete, and maybe it might have given us some idea what the intellectual properties we were watching were about. Maybe not. We don't know. We'll only ever know any of these characters and shows from YouTube or people making comments here.

There were other things we didn't get to at the park --- it has way more attractions than we could have got to in one day --- but those were the ones we were most interested in.

Putting aside now Plopsaland De Panne, let's enjoy pictures of Michigan's Adventure from last Labor Day.

The Dock, est 2024, is what they ended up doing with that weird wooden structure they were building at the end of 2023. It's more of a boardwalk than a dock, leading from where the bumper boats used to be to the beer garden. It's no kind of shortcut to anything and it doesn't support any water features we know so it seems like that thing where you have a little spare money in Roller Coaster Tycoon but no idea of anything to do with it.

But here's what The Dock looks like, with a tiny bit of cute bunting where it changes direction.

It's a nice spot to pause and look at the water, at least.

There's this spot where the boardwalk Dock changes direction and that has some space but it's hard to imagine setting up an event here, at least not anything supposed to keep a crowd.

Oh hey, this is nice, they're trying to help prop up a tree using the corpses of other trees!

And here's Corkscrew, the ride that started the deer-petting-zoo's transformation into a modest but respectable amusement park. Note the train is mid-cork.

Trivia: In February 1946 mob boss Charles ``Lucky'' Luciano was released from state prison, given a reprieve in exchange for his support of the war effort (from inside jail) through his Italian contacts and ensuring of no New York City dockworker strikes, on condition that he remain in Italy the rest of his life. He arrived in Cuba the 29th of October, 1946, to reside in Havana. Source: Cuba: An American History, Ada Ferrer. (Cuba would expel him in 1947, under United States government pressure.)

Currently Reading: Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, Keith Houston.

Finally let's resume talking Plopsaland De Panne.

The Ride to Happiness is the roller coaster that has a reputation, to the point it might be something an American roller coaster enthusiast might have heard of. That reputation is of an unbelievably intense ride, something unlike what you might have experienced otherwise. The station, and the ride, has this steampunk vibe, all gears and clockwork mechanisms and, like, a forge's furnace in part of the queue building. You also might get some of the vibe of the place by the sign put out front, delivered in three languages --- English as the first and largest text, the only place in the park where that happens, and French and Dutch translations beneath that:

Dear people of Tomorrow, welcome to The Ride To Happiness.

After many wonderful years of writing history, Tomorrowland has been searching to expand its horizons. This spectacular ride has found its course, created to stimulate all senses in a way that hasn't been done before --- as a true symbol of uniting the People of Tomorrow community around the world.

The 4 elements of nature work together to power this extraordinary machine. Kicking off with the first element Air --- known to blow harshly at the Belgian coast --- of which the force is collected for the next element Fire. The scorching fires are then controlled in the oven to be used in the next element Earth. The incredible temperatures can shape Earth's surface any way it desires, ensuring its path to flow perfectly for the last element Water. Finally, the 4 elements unite to fully power The Ride To Happiness.

Prepare for an unforgettable journey of a lifetime.

Tomorrowland, by the way --- designers or something of the ride --- is a big electronic dance music festival in Belgium, scheduled for a couple weekends later this month in Boom, Belgium. So despite all that text, and the huge monitor of a cybernetic woman introducing you to the ride when you get to the station, it's not some prog rock thing. Actually the music is more ... I'm not sure how to describe it. Softer, though, and enveloping and seeming out of line with a thrill ride. But the cybernetic woman congratulates you on being guided through the energy maze to this place and that you will have nature embrace your inner being so live today, love tomorrow, unite forever. The ride is full up to the brim with vibes, is what I'm saying.

And what is the ride itself? ... Well, the roller coaster is a short one --- all the Plopsaland roller coasters are --- but it's a pretty intense, curving, topsy sort of ride. And what elevates it further is that the cars all spin, and are released to spin almost right away. The experience is much like if you put spinning wild mouse cars on an Arrow megalooper of the 1980s. In fact, the ride is pretty close in length and speed and inversion count to Kings Island's Vortex, though it's not so tall as that one had been. I'd call this more intense than Vortex, although just how intense varies, depending on your luck in the spinning. We got several rides on this over the day, and avoided doing a real session on it because it would be just too much for that. Also you start the ride with a low-speed inversion, the track doing a heartline roll before you get to the launch. These are always unsettling.

It is a really good ride. And the theme and presentation is so very different from any American roller coasters. It's amazing.

And now, getting into the photo reel, since we're done with the Fairy Ball what comes next? ... Go on, guess.

Establishing shot. Exterior, my car, outside the Mad Mouse ride. Labor Day. So, looking like maybe not too heavy a day at the park? We'll see.

Here's the park's tree, and Ferris wheel, against the cloudiest sky we ever thought we'd see at Michigan's Adventure.

Maker's plate for the Scrambler, a ride we don't get to nearly enough considering it's pretty hard to have a bad ride on one.

bunnyhugger here was snagging a picture of the charming cartoony figure of the safety warning figures, cartoon stick figures who are smiling when they're letting the restraint bar keep them safe during the ride and unhappy when they unlatch it and stand up. Note the Big Eli logo on back of the cars.

There's Thunder Bolt, the Himalaya ride, which for 2024 lost its roof. Now it's protected from the elements only by the elements themselves.

Trees outside the Scrambler and Thunder Bolt already starting to change colors for fall.

Trivia: The British Naval Intelligence Office cracked German naval ciphers at the start of World War I, thanks in great part to the accidental capture of three German cipher books, one from a merchant ship in Australia, one from the light cruiser Magdeburg wrecked on the Russian coast, and the third from a torpedo boat salvaged from the English Channel. Source: To Rule The Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World, Arthur Herman.

Currently Reading: Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, Keith Houston.

I must once more beg off writing up the European Vacation in order to tend other matters of great importance. Please enjoy more pictures from the Fairy Ball, though.

We poked back around the woodland trail in full darkness.

Here's the sort of path we were following by night.

And here we emerged onto the Court of the Fae, illuminated only by the overhead lights.

The Moon Grove looks even more remote in portrait mode.

They had something or other going nearly all the time, with the drawback being you couldn't avoid missing a lot of stuff.

Fairy lights in the darkness doing a very good job of being the trail.

Moon Grove as the wedding dancing was going on and, you can see, they were bringing out the light sabers!

Meanwhile here's a woman demonstrating fire dancing moves.

That's an exciting event!

Swinging the flames around some.

Yes, there's fire-swallowing.

And some dancing with the fire.

Trivia: Two of the final projects of Terry Toons were Saturday morning cartoon pilots: The Ruby Eye of the Monkey God, a jungle-adventure cartoon, and Sally Sargent, about a 16-year-old secret agent girl. Source: Terry Toons: The Story of Paul Terry and his Classic Cartoon Factory, W Gerald Hamonic.

Currently Reading: Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, Keith Houston.

My humor blog has been another week of Robert Benchley and some very slight other stuff. Also a joke based on a thing bunnyhugger has been facing. Want to read all about it? Here we go.

• MiSTed: The 72 Hours Saga, Part 46
• Robert Benchley: Isn’t It Remarkable?
• Statistics Saturday: MacBook Computer Case Colors
• Robert Benchley: Do Dreams Go By Opposites?
• Robert Benchley: My White Suit
• What’s Going On In Gil Thorp? What’s the problem with Clambake? April – June 2025
• Robert Benchley: Wear-Out-A-Shoe Week
• MiSTed: The 72 Hours Saga, Part 47

And now let me share a normal amount of pictures from the Fairy Ball last year.

Swordfighting at the Moon Grove! I don't know if this was merely a demonstration or if it was actually for some prize.

Much like a small convention they set up things like palm-reading booths and some vendor stations.

Some of the many signs made and not yet put up even as the event was under way.

This was a small circle very useful for navigating. The bike stand is on the right, with the Moon Grove below.

bunnyhugger examines the entry arch. Note the Christmas lights --- the fairy lights --- to line the path inside.

bunnyhugger composing an ode to the entryway.

Drum circle that was going on as we went to walk the path through the woods.

There's the drummers on the right; I can't tell what's going on in the background. Hidden behind the trees was a crepes truck, though.

And here's the walkway. Those probably aren't actual ghosts draped up in the woods.

This seems like an unproductive bridge until you remember it's probably a lot of fun to ride a bike over.

Following the fairy lights through the woods here.

And we came out the path near the Moon Grove where, it happens, the wedding ceremony was going on, with the exit right behind, like, everybody. So, we stayed back rather than intrude, and maybe appeared as blurry visions in the background of other people's pictures.

Trivia: Greenland ice core studies indicate that between atmospheric lead levels rose from 0.5 parts per trillion to 2 parts per trillion in the first century AD, reflecting Rome conquering Britain and mining the island's lead. Source: Molecules at an Exhibition: The Science of Everyday Life, John Emsley.

Currently Reading: Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, Keith Houston.

Getting back now to Plopsaland De Panne. Though we were about an hour into the park's day when we finally entered they still had an opening celebration dance thing going with costumed characters --- a mime, a couple humans in marching-band-style outfits, a chef, bees --- dancing, some on elevated podiums, some just out in the open square. Some posing for pictures. They also gave us a park map that we didn't use as much as might have been maximally efficient, but we're trying to not hyper-optimize our parkgoing. Makes for better trips. Also the maps they gave out were nice things, decent quality paper with a thicker stock for the cover. If that weren't good enough we also found they had them in the gift shop at the end of the day so we were able to bring home both the map we actually used and a pristine map as souvenir.

In wandering around looking for roller coasters we found scenes to baffle us, a statue of a T-shirt-clad clown holding out his hand. Or a blue rabbit in cargo jeans folding his arms but looking way too friendly to be pulling an attitude. We assume this means something to the locals.

One of the first things we found past this was a plaque about Meli Park, the place which Plopsaland kind of overwrote. The historical plaque was in Dutch and French, neither of which either of us reads with any confidence but we could make out some pieces that seemed to make sense. In this area they had a couple pieces from the Meli Park existence, most notably a sleeping giant statue, but also a couple smaller figures of a queen bee, some statues of characters fishing or stuff like that, souvenirs of the former park, things like that. Having seen this bit of the past preserved we wanted more, of course, and we would take the rest of the day looking to see if we could find hints of the old park under the current one.

Also an early discovery: a coffee vending machine. Turns out the reason we never see coffee vending machines at any other amusement park is that Plopsaland has them all, spaced as much as one minute's walk from the next one over. Yes, it does tea and cocoa too. I can't swear that soup is not offered. Having finally found an amusement park that had the abundance of coffee she's always wanted, bunnyhugger went on to not actually get any, pretty much because it was never the right moment for it.

We were a little annoyed at the start of the day because rain came in, and while the forecast was correct that it wouldn't last, we also didn't have any kind of rain gear and the park didn't seem to have a lot to do that was under cover. We huddled near some midway games until the rain let up enough we could make it to their grand carousel. This is a double-decker, the sort of carousel we know from Freehold Raceway Mall and Morey's Piers and that La Feria Chapultepec had, all nice enough but your basic thing. Surrounding the carousel was art and sculptures of characters from, again, we don't know. One of them seems to be a chef named Albert. One that we saw a bunch was a tall skinny guy with a dog that had kind of a Dagwood Bumstead-and-Daisy thing going. Don't know.

But this brought us to the first roller coaster we found, the aptly named ``#LikeMe Coaster''. If I understand right it's a teens-and-schoolteachers show that also features some kind of karaoke-TV-show component. The queue is through a high school-themed set, labelled 'SAS School Aan De Stroom', and it has got pretty good-looking School Hallways and lockers and even doors that, thanks to wide-screen TVs set up inside, have stuff going on through the 'windows'. The #LikeMe Coaster itself is a small thing, one of those kiddie coasters that never gets too far off the ground and that confounded expectations by never bashing our knees worth mentioning.

We figured to get next to Roller Skater, the closest roller coaster to this one. But the line was weirdly long, and bunnyhugger nominated that we pass it up in favor of the park's most renowned roller coaster. So we did. We went looking for The Ride To Happiness, By Tomorrowland.

While you wait to learn what the heck that's all about please enjoy more of the fairy ball.

Signs at a crossroads. The Apothecary was the first-aid station and probably where you'd get any administrative-type care needed.

Here I am following bunnyhugger; I'd hoped to get a nice tracking shot of her in the woods and it doesn't quite work.

The Court of the Fae! And a bunch of mysterious mounds whose purpose we failed to guess on our own.

Giant chess set laid out as a trap for mortals. Behind it, and above, is the throne that the fairy court would sit at.

They made several convincing-enough giant mushrooms out of beanbag chairs and wooden spool tables.

Here's the Court entering, ready for opening ceremonies.

Trivia: In May 1931 Proctor & Gamble's Neil McElroy broke the in-house prohibition on memos exceeding one page to write a three-page suggestion that the company appoint a specific team to manage each particular brand, what are now regarded as brand managers. Source: The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge.

Currently Reading: Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, Keith Houston.

PS: What’s Going On In Gil Thorp? What’s the problem with Clambake? April – June 2025 as I went back and did research and learned I completely misunderstood a character's behavior and then was left with new questions about well why did that happen that way, then?

Happy anniversary, dear bunnyhugger.

Plopsaland De Panne opened originally something close to a century ago, as a park named Miel. Or it opened around 1951 with that name. Our best understanding based on looking at the signs is that it was a Knotts Berry Farm-like situation where they had a working farm, or bee gleanery anyway, that started putting in amusements until the amusements took over. And then in 2000 Plopsa took over. They're a media company, making a bunch of children's entertainment, so that the park became something like a Nickelodeon Studios park except we know even less about the intellectual property the rides deploy. Well, we know about Heidi, the basis for Heidi: The Ride, which had Nigloland not been closed was the roller coaster I hoped to be my 300th.

Anyway our Saturday opened, after filling up with a lot of continental breakfast, trying to figure out how to get the tram back to the park. We could certainly have walked to the park --- we'd done it yesterday --- but we figured it would be quicker and save energy to let the interurban do the hard work. The catch is there wasn't a ticket vending machine at the tram stop by the hotel, something that seemed to catch the desk clerk by surprise. He suggested an alternate stop that did have tickets, and that we'd been by the previous night looking for the Automat. We bought, I think it was, ten rides, figuring we'd use some that day and then some riding up and down the coast Sunday.

Then we waited for a tram that didn't come. It slowly dawned on us, after a tram going the other way crossed over the tracks and went past without stopping, that this station was out of service, something we could only have guessed if we thought about the implications of the track under construction just beside the station and why there were signs posted all over the next-train time monitors. Or if we had read those signs, which we finally did.

So! Back to the hotel and then a right angle to walk to the hotel's tram stop, meaning that overall we maybe didn't actually save time or energy over just walking to the park in the first place. Also maybe we should have walked along the tram line instead of going to the hotel and back as a way point but I haven't looked up what the track is like so who can say.

The park charmed us with the statues outside of various characters in I imagine character-appropriate poses, and the huge banner celebrating the 25th anniversary of the park's becoming Plopsaland, and we could see the tunnel on Heidi The Ride from out there. As we went to buy tickets from the automated booth a woman came up and, we believe, was offering to sell us spare tickets she had for €20. Which is a pretty good saving from the gate price of €50, if the tickets were legitimate, which we had no reason to think they were, so we feigned not knowing what she was talking about and she went on to someone else. It did remind us both, though, of the time we went to Chessington World of Adventure (London) and someone gave us a couple of tickets surplus from some newspaper promotion. But those were given to us free so there was no way we could have been cheated there; this, we just weren't sure about.

Between starting late and the trouble with the tram we were getting into the park about an hour after its opening, but we didn't think we would need to do an open-to-close day, most likely. And, all going well, you'll learn how that forecast came out over the coming days. (Just fine, pretty much.)

You know what I have to share with you now? If you said pictures of 2024's Calhoun County Fair you would be right, but also, this is the last day you would be right to say that! Unless for some reason I go back and re-share a bunch of pictures or maybe ones I omitted this time around, which I swear to you I did do. But the plan is this is the last batch of them, and they should share the surprise twist of how our night there ended.

Hope the riders have their seat belts on though this.

And here's the Ferris wheel at some speed.

See, we like this ride when it's doing warp five.

And then came rain! A sudden cloudburst came out and down very heavy.

It shut the fair down about a half-hour before it otherwise would have.

And it created ponds and rivers all over the park as we tried to find our way back to the car.

Trivia: Including the price of development, each of the approximately 56 miles driven by rovers on the lunar surface during Apollo 15, 16, and 17 cost something like US$680,000 (in early 70s money). Source: Across the Airless Wilds: The Lunar Rover and the Triumph of the Final Moon Landings, Earl Swift.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Sundays Supplement Volume 16: 1954, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

Thursday was the second and last day of the conference, and the course of events was pretty much what I described already. The most noteworthy thing besides the meals being set up better was a neat address about how the animal rights movement had changed in the past fifty years, conveniently broken into two phases, roughly 1975-2000 and 2000-present. The first half was dominated by the idea being introduced to public debate and, it seemed to me noteworthily, a focus on the importance of stopping animal suffering. The second half has seen a shift in focus to topics like how animals can experience joy and we should value that. bunnyhugger's presentation got a mention here, although just as an example of the sort of work done on this line of thinking.)

The finale of the conference was supposed to come a little past 4 pm, and we hurried thinking we might be late, only to sit through the last ten minutes or so of a presentation --- in French --- that was itself running long. At least we had good seats for when the closing remarks, including a good bit of hope that Peter Singer would be able to visit Rennes 2 for the 60 Years On conference, came on. (He must have heard that from everybody.) And then there was a little more hanging around, some desserts, the conference staff collecting all the name badges for some reason. Peter Singer walking around with his orange backpack like he was just another student taking a gap year. We didn't stick around to the very end of the gathering, but we were probably on the latter side of things.

Annoyingly we had more time Thursday night but less to do, since Le Grand Huit was doing exclusively some private event. We also were not quite hungry exactly but also not quite not. bunnyhugger found we were close to a franchise of a Belgian fast-food place named Quick and I thought I might get cheese fries or something like that, maybe a pop.

We were indeed close to it, although I managed to make the walk a needlessly longer one by going way too far north to start and getting us closer to Minimarche than we needed to be. Attempting to compensate by going over a block or two and then back down a road that wasn't precisely parallel succeeded, though, as well as letting us see a couple of nice bookstores and gaming shops and all that were closed but looked like fun places to hang out.

The policy of having giant touch-screen ordering menus has reached Rennes, France, and in this case it was actually not that bad since it meant we could look over the menu at ease, and use the [EN] button to read it and order in English. The only mistake made was that I touched the button to 'pay at register' --- I swear I thought I was going to pay at the screen --- and so I had some fumbling with the cashier, including not being completely sure they were even going to start making our food until we paid. Anyway, decent enough cheese fries. We saw they had some stuff that looked good, mozzarella sticks and something else (maybe a vegetarian burger?) that were unavailable, with the menu screens covering the pictures of the items with 'Victim Of Their Own Success', I guess indicating they were sold out.

So we had a slow night, a chance to get to bed a little early, make sure we were ready for tomorrow and the trip back to Paris and then on to Belgium. We'd could do that.

And now, some more Calhoun County Fair pictures for you.

Just checking that it's not a carved wooden horse. (I kid, although she might have been checking what kind of plastic or fiberglass it was made from.)

And just like that we have a dark sky and rides by night!

Here's much of the midway, including the drop tower and the Ferris wheel.

And here's that junior caterpillar ride.

Caterpillar looks a bit horrified at being ridden. Hope they get over that.

The balloons ride looks nice here.

Trivia: UPA cartoon studios' first television productions were a series of eight 60-second commercials for Ford Motors with Doctor Seuss. Source: Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons, Leonard Maltin.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 64: Olive Oyl's Dilemma!!, Ralph Stein, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

My friend with the search for Parisian pinball arcades did get me to look at Pinball Map, just in case there were any in Rennes. It turned out there was a venue, Le Grand Huit, with a half-dozen pinball games and just on the other side of the train station from us! And in what they listed as a barcade. As far as I could tell from the web site it was a bunch of converted warehouses or something with a variety of amusement and arcade attractions put around. They even had a couple vintage fairground rides, although the hours when they were operating were vague. Pinball map suggested the pinballs here were new, or at least were first noticed just a couple weeks before we were in town. This would be a great place to spend the long evening after the conference ended Thursday! Except that the venue was closed for a special event Thursday. We had to go Wednesday evening, when we'd only have a couple hours, or else not go at all.

So and with rather too few coins in our pocket we set out and I led us confidently through roads that seemed a lot closer together in online maps. I was just getting worried we'd gotten lost, thanks to some construction on the south side of the Gare, when we reached a new corner and saw the big sign pointing to the new entrance! Perfect!

The collection of stuff at Le Grand Huit feels a little like What If Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum ran a barcade? It's not so crowded as a Marvin's thing would be, but it's also got more space than Marvin's old holdout-of-the-mall-food-court space would have allowed. They had some stuff that it sure looked, in the photographs, that adults might get to ride, including a swings and maybe a carousel that looks like a solid mutt of different mounts put together, but we were there by like 9 pm and they had long since stopped running rides for the day. The place has a couple salon carousel gondolas as dining booths, and has one carousel elevated, rotating eternally, passenger-less, fifteen feet above the dining floor. It's a pity to have a carousel be unusable for riding but it is also a heck of a thing to see it from that angle, without the platform always underneath. They also have a robot bartender, a coin-operated mechanical arm that the web site claims once did industrial manufacture stuff and that now will make a drink for you, but only on the weekends, which we were as far away from as it was possible to get.

And then, yes, pinball, two tables put next to each other beside the robot bartender, almost a normal arrangement, and four tables put way off (but near the actual bartender), radial spokes around a center pole beneath a canopy. It's an unusual but attractive arrangement. And the choice of games was ... wow. Weird. They were all old games, and not as some venues might have representing pinball's diversity of eras (electromechanical, early solid state, late solid state, dot matrix, LCD screens). No, they were all games from about 1989 to 1992, a range so tiny it seems like it must have been an aesthetic choice, but what was the aesthetic? It kind of smells of ``someone was given €15,000 and told to make it weird''.

The most normal games they had were Lethal Weapon 3 --- a slightly annoying game but one you can still find in tournaments --- and The Party Zone --- I've never seen this in tournament play, but it's a fun one. Also Riverboat Gambler, which you never see places. Gilligan's Island, which has some of the best integration of the theme into a game ever but that doesn't have much depth of gameplay, and has a little pranking move where you can give all your opponents points that makes it a courageous choice for tournament play. Surf N Safari, a water-park-themed 90s Gottlieb game so it's kind of fun but also not well-balanced a table. And ... Class of 1812.

Class of 1812 is another early-90s Gottlieb game so it's a little ramshackle in its design and rules. Its theme is that you're at the graveyard, digging up a comical-horror family, each of the major areas corresponding to one of the family you're recovering. Yes, there is a rapping granny. The most delightful piece, though, is that when you start multiball, which the game gives you eight billion chances to do, it starts playing The 1812 Overture. And after one round of the famous theme it goes back and starts over, only this time with chickens clucking the tune out. This is why people love the game, even though like nobody has it (The Pinball Arcade has it in simulation, though, and it's worth it). We had to play that.

So we did. I had an okay game; bunnyhugger nearly broke ten million, a great score. We played again and while I did better, she did better yet. She got a replay score at least once; I got a match, and we got to play another round. For only about three games each we were doing very well. For a time on our last game I started thinking one of us might reach the high score table but it turns out it started somewhere north of 35 million points, well beyond us. But for only a handful of games in a completely new venue? We had little to complain about.

But we had less change, our euros now exhausted. We thought a bit about getting a drink from the bar, and more change, and playing on ... but ... it was also getting closer to a time when we should be responsible and get to bed. So, regretting that the venue was closed for a private event Thursday when that would have been perfect for our needs, we made the sad way back to our cozy hotel.

Had enough rabbits yet? Of course not, but we will run out of Calhoun County Fair rabbits soon. In fact ...

Another Californian loaf looking suspiciously at me.

Rabbit conference threatening to get out of hand when one rabbit has the insight: you can just step on the others!

Rabbit wondering if anyone else knows about this ``just step on them'' move because it will change everything!

Here's a chicken stunned by the stepping-on action.

This kid was proud of his chicken and wanted us to take pictures of him with them and did not care that neither of us knew the other and we'd never get pictures to him. So, here, in case you have a google face alert going. I think it's a pretty good picture at that.

Here's one of those rare chickens that can lay an egg through their own bars, which is what gets you best-of-class.

Trivia: New York City radio station WEAF (later WNBC, now WFAN) aired its first paid advertisement in August 1922; by late 1923, the National Carbon Company sponsored the Eveready Hour, promoting its batteries. Source: Wih Amusement For All: A History of American Popular Culture since 1830, LeRoy Ashby.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 64: Olive Oyl's Dilemma!!, Ralph Stein, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

Now to Wednesday of our trip, the midpoint, and the start of the conference. We needed a moment to re-acquire our bearings, but it's pretty easy to get from our hotel to the University of Rennes 2 campus --- it's right on one of the metro lines --- and from there, while I set off in a wrong direction, bunny_hugger figured out where to go, and we acquired a companion who was also going to the same conference, which was in the same building it'd been in a decade ago.

I meanwhile had to buy my admission since I'd failed to do that ahead of time, and they would only take cash, so I'd had my first experience with European ATMs for the trip getting some folding money. This meant I went to the conference without a badge like everyone else had, and I held on to my receipt just in case I was challenged, which I never was. And bunny_hugger didn't even get to keep her badge, which ordinarily becomes one of those conference souvenirs, just like a furry con would do but with even worse art. In this case, no art at all. Nor any hint of academic affiliation, which on the one hand goes to the ideal of all being equal citizens of the Republic of Letters, but on the other hand means you might miss that, say, this person you're talking to is that person, the one with the paper you keep assigning your students.

Peter Singer, of course, gave the keynote address, and he took the historical approach of how the idea of animal rights moved from a fussy thing that Margaret Dumont-esque dowagers fretting over other people's dogs to a thing where everyone agrees we should have chickens that at some point in their lives get to see the sun, though not necessarily to live more than six weeks. So, you know, some cheerful news, some depressing.

Then it was on to the sessions, with two or three tracks most of the time, with each session room giving all their talks either in French or in English. bunny_hugger had the good fortune to be the first speaker in the first session in the first room listed on the schedule, although that does not mean Peter Singer stopped in to review her work.

Her presentation really engaged people, though; she got a healthy number of questions and all from people who were excited to learn about something they'd never considered before. She's the person to describe it in summary, but here's my attempt, and understand that she's got your obvious objection addressed, or will by publication time. It grows out of the question of what, specifically, does someone lose by dying? Yeah, ha-ha, the answer is ``days of life'', but, what is the point of those days of life? If it's just getting up to eat, poop, and sleep again, what's having more of that doing for you? (Not talking here about days of rest; talking here about an unending series of days just like that.)

In the 1920s by Moritz Schlick proposed that the purpose of life was play, by which he means things you do to accomplish them, rather than to carry on existing another day. This covers a wide range of things, including work you enjoy doing even if it supports your eating habit. But at heart, like, why read a book? Because you enjoy reading a book. Why join a softball league? Because you enjoy softball. Why run on a wheel? Because it's fun to run on a wheel.

And here's the insight. Animals play. More, we've been discovering, all kinds of animals play, not just the classically smart ones like apes and crows and dolphins. Bees play, something bunny_hugger had found in the scientific literature and that really fired imaginations. And so, if play gives human life meaning, what does play give animal lives?

The other paper in that session had the charming title ``What Would Miffy Do?'', Miffy here being that cute bunny from Dutch picture books that gets confused for a Hello Kitty character. This was about the challenge of how to justify making decisions on behalf of animals who, after all, can't express their preferences, even if they could understand decisions being made about them. We have models for that which work, more or less, for humans lacking full capacity for judgement. So extending that to animals seems like a reasonable stretch.

Back now to the Calhoun County Fair, which we visited on the last day of that fair.

Yes, these aren't just bales of hay, they're bales of hay so good as to get extra-special complicated ribbons and in one case a plaque. I'm glad I don't have to judge what makes a best-of-show-worthy sheaf of alfalfa.

Which is not to say that I'd have any idea how to judge the prizes for, like, ``old hardware store calendar''. Note the old Polaroid in the middle that apparently didn't get anything.

And here's some arts, including the raccoon watercolor that gets a first place.

Now on to the rabbits! Here's one of the many Californians that look rather like Penelope.

And here a nice old white rabbit invites us into their schemes.

The guinea pigs, meanwhile, don't see why they should have been brought in on any of this.

Trivia: In a meeting on the 4th of March, 1953, about plans to overthrow the government of Iran, US President Dwight Eisenhower wondered why it was impossible ``to get some of the people in these downtrodden countries to like us instead of hating us''. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles conceded that Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was no communist, but, ``if he were to be assassinated or removed from power, a politcal vacuum might occur in Iran and the communists might easily take over'', with dire consequences for world oil production and the world's strategic balance. Source: Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawai'i to Iraq, Stephen Kinzer. Raising the question: has anyone ever tried going back in time to divert the Dulles boys to, like, painting landscapes or something instead of screwing up the world completely? Maybe let's give that a try one we get the Hitler thing resolved?

Currently Reading: Mission to Jupiter: A History of the Galileo Project, Michael Meltzer. NASA SP-2007-4231.