austin_dern

Got my ballot in today. I received it about a month ago --- I'm on the Permanent Absentee Ballot so I always have the chance to vote at my convenience --- but this past month was so many things in succession, and it's not done yet, that I didn't have the chance to open it up and look. In rushing to do this before heading to work I discovered that besides the partisan races, and the notionally-nonpartisan-but-parties-give-endorsements (Supreme Court judges) all that were left were some uncontested elections and some school board races where I was willing to accept I didn't have the chance to make an informed vote. So, now, I've done what I can directly do and now have to trust that the Republican desire to crush the Enlightenment's legacy will lose to the Republican desire to crush out competence in favor of yes-man posturing.

So I think once more of the fears of a Tuesday in 1944 turning out awfully.

Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and ^I have withdrawn the troops. have been withdrawn. This particular operation My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available and. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that [crossed out] Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.

--- General Dwight David Eisenhower, June 5, 1944, undelivered.

Let me close with the end of pictures from the Mall of America's amusement park.

It wouldn't be a modern replica carousel without a rabbit and here's a lovely example of the breed.

And another rabbit, one that's not next to the caramel rabbit if I'm not remembering this wrongly.

You don't expect that bunnies and goats will socialize so nicely but look at that smile on the rabbit.

Control panel for the carousel which also shows the camera footage of the far side.

This is a common enough model hippocampus but the vibrant purple color stands out.

And alas, it was time to head out, but not before walking past the Lego shop.

Trivia: The standard lock on the original Erie Canal design was eight foot four inches high. Source: Wedding of the Waters: The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation, Peter L Bernstein.

Currently Reading: Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, Matthew G Kirschenbaum.

Doing another photo dump today and almost certainly tomorrow, sorry. So when you think of Minneapolis, and you've put aside The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Valleyfair[!], and Mystery Science Theater, what comes next to mind?

So this ... is the Mall of America. And one of the parking garages attached to it.

And here in the center(?) is the Nickelodeon Universe indoor amusement park. It may look busy and overstimulating.

I just assumed this was one of the roller coasters and no, it was some other thrill ride altogether. I want to say it was a small Gravitron but could be wrong.

Over top there is the Orange Streak, I think, a roller coaster with hilariously long train that goes along a long and fully elevated track.

Some Spongebob Squarepants thing. We got surprisingly into the place because the tight confines gave it a real boardwalk feel, everything on top of everything else.

Oh hey, I've sometimes had people send me fan art of Swiper and tell me ``no swiping''.

Here's the Spongebob Squarepants Rock Bottom Plunge, a Euro-Fighter like Hydrus at Casino Pier or Mystery Mine at Dollywood or Untamed at Canobie Lake Park. It's intense and satisfying.

Orange Streak's train in the station.

And here's the Back at the Barnyard Hayride coaster, a small coaster with restraints that didn't fully close for me.

But they would let me ride anyway because what the heck, it's only The Barnyard. (Also the coaster has like a three foot drop, it's very non-threatening.)

Rock Bottom Plunge making its vertical ascent before plunging.

We didn't get time to ride this claw ride but were very interested in it. Looks fun and like it must be intense riding so near the walls.

Trivia: Ulugh Bed, 1394 - 1449, grandson of Timur (Tamberlane), built a 180-foot quadrant in Samarkand for astronomical observation, before he was murdered by his son. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards. One presumes the construction of astronomical equipment was not the primary motivation.

The second week of my humor blog not committing to posting every day has gone ... decently, I think. It was again just about every day, but lower stress on my part, as I had mostly comic strip stuff to write about:

• MiSTed: All The King's Horses, Part 20: FLASHBACK, Enterprized Edition
• What's Going On In Flash Gordon? Why is this week all maps of Mongo? August - October 2026
• Statistics Saturday: This Week's Major Computer Problems
• What's Going On In Mary Worth? What is this cranky woman's deal? August - October 2026
• Vixen Park, S1 E9: Fox Around The Clock
• MiSTed: All The King's Horses, Part 21: What I Did On My Summer Vacation

Now for pictures, more photos of flat rides from our second visit to Valleyfair:

Is this a Vengabus I see before me? No, but it was a portable live band rolling through the park, playing, and that's great to see.

The Antique Autos ride looks a great deal like the Cadillac Cars station at Cedar Point.

The Antique Autos goes underneath one of the rides, whatever they call the Pipe Scream here.

The path doesn't go through a lot of interesting scenery, but you do get to see the far end of Wild Thing here.

This section of Wild Thing's supports folded over each other was great.

Here we drive past a metal bar to knock me senseless.

Knocking senseless wasn't all that fun, so here's the gas station playset.

They had this flower planter set up too far from anything for it to quite succeed as decoration.

Further down the way we see Pipe Scream Or Whatever in motion while the billboards encourage riding the carousel.

Off the ride, I noticed the clock tower at the park's entrance only has limited clock service.

Peeking from afar at Corkscrew going up its lift hill.

And a view of Power Tower at its peak, showing off the old-fashioned logo that the ride still sports.

Trivia: The first Holiday Inn was built outside Memphis in 1952. Source: The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways, Earl Swift.

Currently Reading: Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, Matthew G Kirschenbaum.

I apologize that I do not have more writing done today, but it was quite busy last night, and today, and I was in-office and, well, here, read about What's Going On In Mary Worth? What is this cranky woman's deal? and then let's finish off pictures from the day we spent at Valleyfair[!].

Manufacturer's plaque for Excalibur. As far as I can tell the capacity-by-weight figures are blank, as are the model number, the D-O-T and whatever number was stored to the left of D-O-T.

We went back to Renegade for another ride and spotted this ``ride requirement form'' dropped on the ground, in a staff-only area.

These are some gates to backstage areas near Mad Mouse (which you can see to the right). What I don't know is why the gates are so decorative, down to having heraldic figures, and why the building is done up with such detail. It suggests that the building on the left might have at one point been something guests could access and they've left it looking like that.

Here's the park's Trabant, which is done up in the roulette-wheel livery that we've only seen otherwise as Delgrosso's Park in Tipton, Pennsylvania.

The gates to the water park behind the bushes there and, say, that's a lot of pretty dark clouds rolling in fast there, aren't they?

So yeah, it was pretty quickly raining. Here, we wait for a train to pass while looking for somewhere we can get under cover.

The train passed and we, along with this mob of people, were walking toward the front of the park where there were more things we could shelter under or, if the rest of the night (less than an hour to park close) was a wash, just leave.

And here's the rain pouring in. We were underneath the overhang of some midway games.

And then just like that, the rain was gone and we had clear skies and wet sidewalks.

But it was also closing time for the park, so, here's the back of that Snoopy fountain.

A peek at the elevated swings ride from near the front entrance.

And here's the remainder of cars in the lot, with Steel Venom and the Ring Of Fire ride behind. Good night, Valleyfair!.

Trivia: Before his 1837 voyage to London, Joseph Henry arranged to complete what was normally his yearlong course in natural philosophy into three months, meeting in evening lectures that, by mid-winter, produced the occasional problem of --- one Princeton senior complained --- being ``too dark to take notes''. Source: Joseph Henry: The Rise of an American Scientist, Albert E Moyer.

Currently Reading: Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, Matthew G Kirschenbaum.

We did not see the Wii Bowling tournament through to the end. It ran over its allotted time and we went a couple rooms over to the Disco InFurNo. This was not the final dance of the con but rather sort of an advanced panel event: a couple people put together a DJ setlist of disco and disco-like dance numbers and, away from Main Events (which was being used for the charity auction) put on a disco. We enjoyed this a lot as full of the music we couldn't avoid hearing growing up; what kids these days think of it I don't know, but many came. The room ended up overcrowded --- people were being allowed in only as others left --- and finally, I think after the room next to it was cleared, they opened up the partition walls and the dance expanded naturally to fill twice the volume.

And after that mere hourlong experience we didn't have time to sit down because that was already Closing Ceremonies. We had missed Opening Ceremonies for the sake of waiting in line for a badge, about the only big misstep of the first-time convention's operations we observed; we didn't mean to also miss Closing Ceremonies.

The event was running late, since the Charity Auction using the same space was late. And everybody for the con was there. At some point one of the con staff announced they were going to let people in, in lines, and pointed to the weave of painter's tape on the carpet. The staffer explained that, as they had for the Dealers Den (they had?) they'd be letting people in from the line, with Sponsors getting priority admission. So they should stand on the first two lines, and mere Attendees (like me and bunny_hugger) on the next four. The mild ambiguity here is that there was a big space between the third and fourth lines; the visuals begged for the separation between Sponsor and Attendee to be the big gap. We got into the third line, as near the Sponsors as we could while in the Attendee lines.

And --- bunny_hugger is still, nearly a month after this, upset --- someone came over and started interrogating whether we were Sponsors or not. I didn't see where it was his business but said, not. The guy then started saying how, well, you know, he can understand why someone might get in this line but it was really for the Sponsors, when the Attendees were really supposed to be in the other lines on the far side of the gap. I said something like ``okay'' and shrugged and figured if someone who was actually with the con cared I'd go wherever but if it's just some noodge ...

Well, said noodge went to one of the con staffers, someone trying to watch inside Main Events as that got re-set from the end of the auction, and --- bunny_hugger was listening, she observed --- got told that nah, we were fine. Said noodge came over and then explained that while they were not going to kick us out of the line now they could not guarantee that we'd be let into Main Events when that opened up and we might have to wait for all the Sponsors to be let in first. I shrugged and said yeah, fine, whatever, since you could not pay me to care whether I got into Closing Ceremonies ten people later. bunny_hugger fumed at being scolded by someone for doing the thing we were told to do and that that someone was told was fine. And, of course, when they started seating for Closing Ceremonies we were let in with no further fuss.

So, onward.

We left off, in pictures, looking at Valleyfair's Corkscrew. You can't imagine that was the end of things, though.

Valleyfair's Corkscrew bears many resemblances to Cedar Point's, though instead of going over the midway as Cedar Point's does, Valleyfair's goes over a lake in the center of the park, which is thrilling.

And over in Planet Snoopy, Lucy was out and doing photos. Note that Lucy here is wearing the model of puffed-sleeve dress that the character stopped wearing around 1980. (She switched to sweatshirt and pants, most often, although must be admitted she never fully gave up dresses.)

So here was our greatest disappointment of the whole trip and the reason we're going to have to get all the way back here someday: High Roller, their half-century-old wooden roller coaster, was closed, and it would not open that we saw at all. Besides having a great name, this particular coaster was one of bunnyhugger's first aspiration coasters and one she figured she'd never get to ride and here we are, with her not having ridden it yet.

More Charles Schulz explanations here at his childhood home metro area.

Valleyfair's Mad Mouse, twin to that at Michigan's Adventure and California's Great Adventure, which means that we have now ridden all three of the still-operating examples of this model roller coaster.

Exit of the Mad Mouse, showing its wordmark logo that suggests the arch of a mouse's back without being explicit about it.

Trivia: HMS Challenger, for its 1872 - 1875 exploratory voyage (a joint venture of the Royal Society and the Royal Navy), was a 2,306-ton corvette with 400 HP auxiliary engine. Source: How the World Was One: Beyond the Global Village, Arthur C Clarke.

Currently Reading: Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, Matthew G Kirschenbaum.

Our idea for Saturday evening at Michigan Anthro Weekend was loose but simple. They had a karaoke session that I would be happy to see and hear, and bunnyhugger might bear. bunnyhugger doing some suiting. There was a dance, 8 pm to midnight, that promised to be an explicitly adult space inviting more kink-friendly gear. That should take us through to bedtime.

And until then, there was hanging out at the outdoor pool area. This was actually in an enclosed courtyard, and while the pool was closed there were still benches and tables and seats and the not-open tiki bar. All weekend people were setting up DJ equipment and playing music and attracting modest crowds to hang out. This was a magnificent, just wonderful bonus activity and while the convention was just plain lucky that the weather was good for it, it still counts to take advantage of good luck. I'm pretty sure I'm going to keep thinking of MAW, at least as long as it's at this hotel, as the tiki bar hangout place.

Eventually the sun started setting, at like 3:35 pm like it does anymore, and we moved in to rest up, get bunnyhugger suited, and see what our evening turned into. This is when we discovered the dress she uses --- and has modified to go with the fursuit --- for Velveteen was missing. We searched the room, of course, and even my car, and could not square her clear and distinct memory of picking through all the fursuit things and bringing only the most essential, which of course, included the dress. Yes, we found the dress, neatly folded, on the bed when we got home where bunnyhugger presumably prepared it and then did not put it in the luggage.

With the choices of ``don't suit'' or ``find an alternate dress'' the only ones, bunnyhugger chose to find an alternate dress. Fortunately there's a Meijer's almost across the street from the hotel, so she went out on her own and searched. She was able to find a good enough dress, in pattern certainly even if it doesn't quite look old-timey-plush enough. She also realized she could use this chance to find some spooky knicknacks, to put atop the trophies she had to make for the Fear And Trembling pinball tournament set for Tuesday and that she hadn't started yet. This was actually more time-consuming, as the only things suitable for the trophy bases she wanted were some of the rubber rats the store had, and the selection was pretty well picked clean and she found the last three suitable rats in Meijer's.

To console herself and make up for me the time lost --- karaoke was far gone and we were losing time for the dance also --- bunnyhugger also got a couple drink cups, to get something from the freestyle pop machine. It turned out the machine had run out of the sugar-replacement sweetener, though, so all of the no-calorie drinks were out. (The machines work by, inkjet-printer-style, putting the selected mix of flavor agents and sweetener into the carbonated water stream, so if the sweetener goes out all the drinks relying on it go out at once.) She got Regular Coke and came back to the hotel room feeling right lousy.

It was after this and explaining this that she discovered she had forgotten to bring the balaclava that separates her head from the fursuit's head, and keeps her sweat from soaking into the hard-to-clean areas of the fursuit head. The choices would be ``don't suit'' or ``suit but get it sweaty''. We might have used a hotel towel as padding but all ours were damp, the result of there being nowhere to hang them to dry. (We had missed housecleaning services and rumor going around was that the hotel had run out of towels. We didn't interrogate that rumor, though.) Also she had a terrible time getting contact lenses in; I think one took twenty attempts before finally needing to be tossed, and another disappeared rather than go on the eye. Could happen anytime, but why now?

Also it transpired that she had left the rubber rats at the check-out counter in Meijer's, and all the time spent looking for those was lost.

So the remainder of the night --- a slice of the dance, mostly, which was only a little more risque than usual (mostly, more shirtless people) --- had a big climb uphill to overcome. It was all decent enough and bunnyhugger was even able to dance continuously longer than usual. And the Velveteen suit was well-received, everyone liking being looked at judgementally by a disappointed-looking old-timey plush rabbit. Lot of people wanted photographs with her.

We ended up not going out to dinner, as the slightly late buffet lunch, plus a box of bulk candy I'd brought for snacking, proved all we needed, and so we were able to get to bed not terribly late, considering. We'd have until noon, I think it was, to check out.

And now, back to our June amusement park trips; please enjoy more pictures of our big day at Valleyfair!

Just because Valleyfair has spent a half-century as a chain amusement park doesn't mean it can't have the occasional bit of landscaping and scenery and fountain, like this.

And here's the elevated swings ride, which as you can see goes up past the sun.

The antique carousel, which apparently was relocated from the Excelsior Amusement Park formerly here.

It is a Philadelphia Toboggan Company carousel, as you can see from the signs inside.

And here's the ride's control panel, census sheet, and scripts for various ride events.

And a clockface on the inside of the ride. Maybe at one point it was useful, like perhaps for timing rides?

Trivia: The first game of the October 1886 World's Series was the first one to be officiated by two umpires on the field: Honest John Kelly (chosen by lot) working the bases while Joe Quest and John McQuaid officiated behind the plate (Quest while Saint Louis [American Association] batted, McQuaid while Chicago [National League] did). Source: The Beer and Whiskey League: The Illustrated History of the American Association --- Baseball's Renegade Major League, David Nemec.

Currently Reading: Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, Matthew G Kirschenbaum.

PS: What’s Going On In Flash Gordon? Why is this week all maps of Mongo? August – October 2026, for those who want a preview of next week's Thursday/Friday links.

Saturday at Michigan Anthro Weekend would start not with the fursuit parade. Nor would it lead into one; the convention forewent that tradition possibly for fear of offending the hotel. They did, however, have everyone line up for a fursuiter group photograph and that was a chance for a parade in reverse, everyone walking past taking photographs as they spotted someone in a good outfit. That might be a good replacement, if they're not to have a parade. (I still admire that FurFright had two parades, one on Saturday and one on Sunday afternoon.)

bunnyhugger did not suit for this, and our evening would have gone differently if she had. But she had got up an hour before me to go to the Sketchbook Swap and came out having drawn some things she was kind-of happy with and collecting sketches that she was and is happy to see. We reunited at noon for the Lansing Furs Meet, our big chance to get to know what the local scene is like, as we have never really known where anyone is.

This was not a tightly-organized event. It was more an overpacked room --- one of the two rooms for panels would be overloaded at every event --- and trying to join the Lansing Furries Telegram Group. This should have been straightforward but I've been suffering some stupid problem where Telegram decided I'm a spammer so I can't actually post to most groups or talk to people who aren't mutual contacts. Ironically, this has forced me to spam their spambot-appeal, volunteer-services, and starting this week their media contact people because they refuse to answer or respond to my appeals.

No matter. The Lansing Furs Meet broke up into smaller blocks of people chatting after everyone joined the Telegram group. From this we learned where the main meetup is --- it's once every three weeks, at the Zap Zone that we keep thinking of seeing sometime and never do --- and also, incidentally, that Charlie Kirk is responsible for spoiling furry karaoke at our local hipster bar. The bar where we play pinball had been hosting a string of furry karaoke events, but shortly after Charlie Kirk died doing what he loved (seeing gun violence in schools), some creep came in and made threatening, weird comments trying to pick a fight at the bar. Since then they've had security screening at the evenings and in bigger events, and while that's relaxed somewhat in the year since, it added a layer of bother that got the furry karaoke people deciding it wasn't worth it. Good one, Chuck.

We figured to get lunch after this, and since bunnyhugger had spotted a good-looking Indian place across the highway we figured we could just walk there. This took us through the Car Meet in the ample parking lot outside, which was a fun event to walk through, us not being car people. Also we got to see a guy with a couple of remote-control cars, one of which was (I think) just a wolf(?) head on wheels, zipping around and attracting great acclaim. This was a fun scene to walk through; maybe we should do more car events just to be around that.

The Indian place turned out to be a buffet restaurant, and while we had got there less than an hour before they closed their lunch service (they took a couple hours off before dinner, as if they were a college dining hall or something) this was exactly what we needed for lunch. A lot of decent food, clearly marked vegetarian, for not much more than we'd have spent at Taco Bell or something. We would end up full enough we wouldn't even go out for dinner.

As we had dessert the place suddenly emptied out. We feared we had overstayed the lunch closing hour by an embarrassing margin. Turns out no, we were actually done, paid, and out before the closing hour. I guess the custom is just to give this place a margin. We set the place on our priority list for places to eat the rest of the weekend and then never got back there again.

Is this all there is to the House on the Rock? No. But this is all there is to my pictures of it, which I hope you have all enjoyed.

Even more carousel animals, or things purporting to be carousel animals. Bet you haven't seen many jaguars on carousels before, have you?

And another photograph of some of the animals on the wall, including a cowboy centaur(?) and a mermaid.

We're back to The Biggest Carousel in The World but this time from a higher level where we can look down on the angels!

The carousel is no less dizzying from up here. It just looks more like a toy.

And outside! We walked past but not into the Japanese garden because while it was no longer raining thunderously loud as earlier, it was still raining.

A last view before the gift shop, of, why not, Civil War-era cannon.

Trivia: Archaeologists have found locally-made tobacco pipes in Guangxi, in southern China, that date back to 1549. The plant would be grown in southeastern China within two more decades. Source: 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, Charles C Mann.

Currently Reading: The Chinese Typewriter: A History, Thomas S Mullaney. Oh hey, it tossed in a reference to The Straight Dope by Cecil Adams, and an essay writing (flippantly, as was the mode) about how you do type in Chinese.

Finally back to Michigan Anthro Weekend. I believe that at some point Friday we tried to get into the Dealers Den, but weren't able to because there was a heck of a line outside the room. We would get in eventually, although bunnyhugger would not a commission in her sketchbook from anyone there. (There wasn't a separate Artists Alley.) She did get some sketches, though, from a sketchbook-swap event that she went to sometime awful, I think early Saturday morning. So not all was lost.

Sometime in the afternoon we split up, with me having a loose idea of getting to ``A Guide To Grand Rapids'', a spoof informative panel. I ended up diverted to the ``Postfurry Party'' thanks to running into MYC and boyfriend and we joined the group that was talking about what the heck postfurry is and what it was about. Happens that I'm in a Discord with some of the original postfurry icons so was able to report that they were not forgotten, just held up as foundational figures of the movement. This also included doing an activity where people folded a paper into thirds and on one third drew the head of a character, on the next the middle, and on the last the legs and tail, without ever looking at what was on the other, passing pages around in a sort of Exquisite Corpse-style game and, yeah, that generated some plausible postfurry characters, figures with seven-eyed heads and appliance chests and an asymmetric set of legs, that kind of thing.

After that bunnyhugger and I found each other again and we went to the My Hoard Is Bigger Than Yours panel. We assumed this to be your basic dragons meet-and-greet, and there was a good concentration of dragons here. But it was more a matter of showcasing collections of easily portable things you might feel willing to trade or give away or pick up more of. That sort of thing. Tragically we didn't know about this or we'd have figured something --- bunnyhugger keeps meaning to bring some of her excess stickers to one of these --- but at least it gave us the chance to see this suiter who'd worked out how to do a (some kind of) trout. This with a head and gloves and a long, vertical fish tail strapped to their back. And a meme-ready hat, ``Fish Love Me - Men Fear Me''. Great outfit.

The dance came much earlier in the night than we expected; it ran 9 pm to midnight, and it went pretty nicely. Good crowd compared to the space available, and the music was more to my-and-bunnyhugger's liking than the usual, and bunnyhugger's Cerberus kigurumi, the only one she'd decided worth the trouble of bringing, was well-liked and even correctly identified by several people.

So, we got out of the dance around midnight, and had time to walk around the hotel and see a good number of people gathering in good, lively bunches, and we had a pretty good feeling. The convention was in surprisingly good order for its first performance, and we had not yet had a serious disappointment.

I know you think you've seen a lot of The House On The Rock but we're not done yet!

We couldn't test this out, but it's a whole coin-op symphony; look at all those instruments. If it works it has to be something unbelievable.

Pretty sure this is one of the Fleischer-era Superman cartoons.

And now we're on to scrimshaw, possibly even the real thing. It's stunning and a little unsettling to look at in any case.

And now to another doll carousel, this one, I think it was, seven layers tall.

Some of the dolls on this second carousel. Yes, I kept checking whether I was accidentally looking at the same one from a second angle.

More of the second carousel dolls, only one of which has passed out head-first in its egg and chips.

Trivia: In 1901, two-thirds of all American businesses with $10 million or more in capital were incorporated in New Jersey. Source: The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. The state had very loose incorporation laws and convenient ferry access to Manhattan. When Progressives took over the statehouse in Trenton and tightened things up so companies had to obey the occasional rule, the companies decamped to Delaware (and other loose states, but mostly Delaware).

Currently Reading: The Chinese Typewriter: A History, Thomas S Mullaney.

Another day without time to write so please enjoy far more pictures of The House On The Rock, a very much of a place:

So you may ask where the House on the Rock got a sabretooth-tiger-taur figure, like, what carver ever made such a thing for them to possibly acquire. Yeah.

Anyway, here's a seahorse and a kiddie-size centauress.

I am genuinely impressed with the work on the camel and the painted dome above.

Zebra, tiger, and oh so very many lights. Can you imagine how much of their time has to be spent replacing burned-out bulbs? Or defective LEDs?

There's that double-hippocampus gondola again, plus, an elephant and an armless kiddie-size centauress.

And with a gryphon mid-stride and another small centauress we close out the visit to the carousel ... for now.

In the next room is this frightfully complicated organ that could also be the control room for a 1970s movie spaceship.

Here's some of the pipes that that organ controls (I believe; there's several controls around).

Got the time? I'm not actually sure I can reconstruct just where I was when I saw this.

I hardly need to explain the ... uh ... nude figure with tiger ... uh ... on a chain? Or something?

And obviously, there's no having a giant clock in a room of multiple giant organs if they're not going to have a row of basketballs.

And now, a moment of calm: a snack bar way off ... somewhere ... in the compound. Unfortunately not serving right now, but at least it was a chance to look at a normal amount of things, and dubiously true inspirational quotes, and go to the bathroom.

Trivia: The United States General Land Office, in its annual report of 1943, estimated the total amount of public lands given to railroads in exchange for construction was 131,350,534 acres. Source: The Story of American Railroads, Stewart H Holbrook. An 1884 estimate put it at 155,504,994 acres; among many explanations for the discrepancy is that land would be allocated but not actually granted for railroads that did not complete their lines. Anyway Holbrook's thesis is that this wasn't all that much land, considering how much mileage got tracked and how cheap the land was. The cost of relocating or confining or killing the people already living on the land was, of course, charged to the Army.

It's the first week since my humor blog reached a milestone and retired from guaranteeing a daily presence! How's that feel? ... Only a little smaller, really. Here's what's been published since this time a week ago:

• MiSTed: All The King's Horses, Part 18: Marrissa, The Pope, and The Other
• Statistics 5,000: To September and Beyond
• Statistics Saturday: Some Ominous Signs (Road)
• What's Going On In Gasoline Alley? Who's this Kevin Brogan guy? July - October 2026
• Vixen Park, S1 E7: I Fought The Fox (And The Fox Won)
• MiSTed: All The King's Horses, Part 19: After The Lunch

In The House On The Rock we're now into the maritime exhibit and you know where that has to be going, right? No? No, you just have to kind of experience it all. Here goes:

So here's the mouth of that whale, which you can see is like four flights up from the ground. I don't know how they keep this thing stable.

A copy of the Dayton Daily News about the Titanic sinking. I'm guessing this is one of the Wisconsin Daytons, but who can say for sure? (They also have, deeper into the exhibits, a large replica of the Titanic.)

And then a much less interesting news day: the Cunard lines' on-ship newspaper for October 6, 1961.

I would have expected the Gaymer's Cyder to be lit in much more annoying colors.

View of the whale and kraken from above. I think this is a floor higher than bunnyhugger felt comfortable going; the uppermost floor feels flimsier than the others.

On to a new room! Here's a bunch of marionettes, including one of Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp and ... is that a Sleestack in the center?

A bunch of Burma-Shave limericks. I imagine these are reproductions, although the rust and bullet holes in the second poem are suggestive of authenticity.

And then here were some pillars filled with cameras. THese were all labelled so for a rare moment we knew what the heck it was we were looking at. It was cameras.

More musical instruments. I also really like the music-notation Dalmatian on the left.

But how about a disco-ball Late 50s Car?

With this sign we see a promised return to musical machines.

OK, so they're musical machines and gnomes, but still, musical machines are part of it.

Trivia: In February 1934 Powel Crosley Jr, as part of a syndicate to buy the Cin[...]ti Reds baseball team, paid $240,000 to buy 3,200 of the 6,000 shares in the team, and a two-year option to buy a controlling share. Source: Crosley: Two Brothers and Business empire that Transformed the Nation, Rusty McClure with David Stern and Michael A Banks.

Currently Reading: The Chinese Typewriter: A History, Thomas S Mullaney.