austin_dern

For ages now the outdoor water faucet has been leaking. Just a little, but the rate was accelerating. A year or two ago we had someone out to look at it and they said they weren't willing to replace the faucet because there's no shutoff valve to it except the house's main shutoff, and all our plumbing is 50s-grade galvanized steel. It's not showing any signs of being naughty yet, but they warned the effort to cut off the end and replace the faucet might end up breaking the pipes and require an emergency re-plumbing of the whole house. This was more work than we were willing to do for a garden faucet, so we put it off and wondered how we could tell how far our plumbing is from needing a full-body replacement. (As best we can tell, our pipes are in pretty good shape considering their age and that the house has mostly been owned by people who are optimistic about their home repair skills.)

With the faucet getting worse, though, we had to do something and that was: see what the other plumbers we ever use think. They came on Monday and were much more optimistic about things. They needed to replace the faucet, but were confident they could cut off and replace the end of the garden hose pipe --- and install a shutoff valve for it --- with no more risk than any plumbing job presents. It was not the work of a moment. But it was only an hour or so of the water being off and the plumber making a lot of alarmingly loud noises down there. Cutting, I suppose, maybe drilling into the basement to loosen the pipe leading outside.

And what we have now is a proper shutoff valve down there. And a replacement end of the pipe done in modern materials that will surely have no problems which only become apparent twenty years down the line. Also the new end of the hose points downward a little, so it should naturally drain when we turn the water off and maybe prevent some incidental wintering damage.

Also a side benefit: clearing out space in the basement for the guy to get around allowed for a little bit of consolidation and throwing-out that made the basement more navigable, and that sets us up to do a couple more rounds of tidying-up before we have to make it a major project.

Let's now enjoy a little more of the Jackson County Fair and their bunnies.

From behind the bars a little red-eyed white rabbit wants you to ignore that they have like three separate backsides back there. Some rabbit-taur nonsense, I don't know.

And here's a Californian neatly boxed in but enjoying the sun and air.

Another Californian boxed in where they can judge you.

Californian stretched out curious to see if I knew where their legs went.

And here's another rabbit enjoying their outer-row cage.

Turkey! We got to pet this one's head.

Trivia: Harvard College Observatory hired its first female person as computer in 1875. By 1880 the entire computing staff was made of women. They were paid half what their male predecessors were. Source: Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, Keith Houston.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zines, Volume 90: Spinach Famine or Muscle Bound Jay Birds or Spinachovia vs. Creamatonia, Bud Sagendorf. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

Happy Doctorversary, dear bunnyhugger.

Next big thing we did after Pinball At The Zoo was ... Pinball at the VFW. The VFW Ann Arbor Pinball Museum was having one of its occasional open weekends and for the first time since, I think, before the pandemic began we went. We got there at like 11:30 Sunday, when they were going to be open to 5 pm, cheating us of maybe an hour and a half but we weren't up to getting up any earlier.

bunnyhugger tried signing up right away for a tournament. This would be a 'blind Herb' tournament, where you could, I think one time, call a tournament official over to have your score verified, but you could never know what other people's scores were. I didn't sign up for it since I figured the tournament would eat up all the time I might spend playing weird games. As it happens, this ... probably would have happened? Because bunnyhugger was not able to get tournament officials to come when she was ready, no matter what she did with pressing the tournament app's 'Summon Tournament Official' button. I don't know what all was wrong with it, but I suspect inadequate testing, or inadequate testing under load, and I would not be surprised if the whole thing were vibe-coded.

I ended up just going around appreciating pinball art and weird games, many of which I had seen in past VFW shows. I also got surprisingly into this carnival-themed 1989 Gottlieb game named Hot Shots, which seemed at first like your generic late-Gottlieb ``rules? Who knows anything about rules?'' game. But when I started to get the point of it --- there's this V-shaped corridor on the upper middle playfield with drop targets; knock them all down and you can lock for multiball --- I started having a lot more fun. I could stand to play that more.

Also, they had something I don't remember from past shows: a 1947 Gottlieb Humpty Dumpy, the first game with electromechanical flippers. In fact, six flippers, although pointed the 'wrong' way, to the outside of the table. It's a convention we didn't use but could have.

Several Lansing Pinball League folks were at the show, as were people we knew from elsewhere in the pinball world. Didn't get to talk with them as much as we might have, but we got to see them at all. So maybe we'll do it again whenever the next show is, which probably will be Black Friday.

And now, believe it or not, I've finally reached August of last year in pictures and you know what that means: it's county fair season! First up, Jackson County.

Banner out front explaining the themes of each of the days. Note that Superhero Day declares that first responders get free admission, so they're using Higglytown Heroes rules.

One of the first-prize winners: a Holiday Inn ``Sing Along With Lenore'' book. I don't know what this means and I'm glad I'm not the person who has to rate it as blue-ribbon-worthy in whatever the heck its category was.

And a third-place winner in, I imagine, the same category (and from the same collector): a simple guide to filling out your income tax, provided by W Burr Thorne's hardware and groceries store on something 25 Main Street, phone 22.

Over now to photos. In 2024 the big theme had been the Eclipse; for 2025, the Aurora.

You don't suppose the picture of the wedding(?) couple got first place specifically so it would make the cross-looking person in bottom center look funnier when they got not-first, do you?

And here's some pictures and memorabilia from past Jackson County Fairs. From this we learned the fair has a Thing for petunias thanks to a longtime groundskeeper who was into them.

Trivia: Before the SL-7 class container cargo ships entered service in 1972 the US Army Corps of Engineers in Vicksburg, Mississippi, built a large hydrostatic likeness of the approach to Newark Bay, and the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken built a nine-foot model of an SL-7 that officers could use to test (remote-control) navigating the port in the new craft. Source: Box Boats: How Container Ships Changed The World, Brian J Cudahy. Apparently the SL-7 ships turned out more maneuverable at low speed than anyone anticipated.

Currently Reading: This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong (And Why It Matters), Mark Cooper-Jones, Jay Foreman.

I was busy with a trivia day and then baking ziti with farmer's cheese rather than mozzarella (it came out okay, a bit stringy is all) and you know, it's late and I don't feel up to writing more narrative stuff. Please enjoy pictures instead.

So the next interesting thing we did last summer was head to Downtown East Lansing for their 80s Night, one of a string of evenings where a couple blocks were closed off and used for fun. Here's some pictures.

The basic layout. The park you see past was carved out from what used to be an interurban turnaround point.

And here's Pinball Pete's, the Lansing-and-Ann-Arbor pinball and video game magnate. We didn't happen to go downstairs for this, though.

They set out tape for things like a running long jump track (bottom of picture) and hopscotch board.

Pinball Pete's set up a tent with a couple pinball and one video game. They lacked any true 80s pinball games so brought out Aerosmith and the 90s Guns N' Roses. The game I think was a Marvel vs Capcom fighting game.

Here's bunny_hugger in her 80s gear urging me to play Guns N'Roses. (I would have a crazy good game.)

And performing on stage, Starfarm, a local band that specializes in 80s covers.

Here's the sound booth guy working the treble or something on a CVS.

They had a real-life Tetris game; you'd roll the big die (in the woman's hand) to see what your next piece was and have to add it to the tower without the whole thing falling over. Kids often ignored the die-rolling bit and just made their own stacks.

And there it falls!

Some kids thought outside the box for Tetris block placement.

There were also various activities, including here, painting vinyl records. I'm torn on that as an activity; on the one hand, it destroys a record as a record and on the other, they're not records that were being used as records.

I meant this to be an album cover but this might be my County Fair picture submission instead.

Trivia: Atari manufactured twelve million copies of its Pac-Man cartridge though the company's research showed under ten million people owned and used a 2600 system. Source: The Ultimate History of Video Games: The Story of the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World, Steven L Kent.

Currently Reading: This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong (And Why It Matters), Mark Cooper-Jones, Jay Foreman.

This week in my increasingly popular humor blog, I get mildly obsessed with tic-tac-toe and I begin, but I promise you do not stop, talking about Automan. Here's the rundown:

• MiSTed: FX Down To Mobius, Part 14: Sonic Panics!
• The Possibilities Are Endless Until We Reach a Tie
• Statistics Saturday: Some Fairy Tales That Kind of Sound Like You Ever Heard of Them
• Still Thinking About the Tic-Tac-Toe Inventor
• In Which I Retain My Dignity, I Claim
• What’s Going On In Gasoline Alley? How many times is Walt going to the pharmacy? February – April 2026
• Casper, Like the Friendly Ghost, for Some Reason
• MiSTed: FX Down To Mobius, Part 15: Don’t Hurt GPC’s Feelings

Now here I'll wrap up the Michigan's Adventure July trip photos. I told you I didn't take so many on a short visiting day.

Here's the lift hill of Wolverine Wildcat seen from its station, near the operator's booth (left). And of course the lagoon that's such a feature of the park.

I wonder where Zach's Zoomer is. I've surely made this joke before.

Their Chance carousel, along with as much detail as there really is for the control station.

One of the horses, featuring a sphynx on the saddle blanket.

And then to Corkscrew, with the big chain that works its lift hill. This ride is a good marker for what turned what was then Deer Park Funland into an amusement park.

Here's Corkscrew racing past the launch station. Ah, if only we still sold post cards of amusement parks.

The Scrambler's always popular and every year or two I re-take photos of the wordless safety instructions on the guard rail.

At the Scrambler was this mourning dove that chose to nest on top of the loudspeaker.

Maker's plate for the Thunderbolt ride, complete with the VIN so we can check whether it was stolen.

And here's what the Thunderbolt looks like in late-afternoon sun, as the operator measures a kid's height.

For some reason they took the name off Wagon Pizza and hadn't got it back yet this late in the season.

And a last picture for this, of the control panel for the Trabant ride.

Trivia: By no later than the 13th century the invention of nocturnals made it possible to tell time at night: they would be a stick with a scale to align to the pointer stars of the Big Dipper, as a way of reading time. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.

Currently Reading: This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong (And Why It Matters), Mark Cooper-Jones, Jay Foreman.

Taking a moment from Pinball At The Zoo to update you on the deer mouse situation. We've still got them. bunnyhugger's plan is, since the garage doesn't seem to be far enough away to stop them, catch the mice and relocate them somewhere with more nature and less of a chance to return to us. Which is challenging since apparently two miles is the minimum distance you need to move a deer mouse to be sure it can't find its way back.

The catch is just set a mouse somewhere and it's probably dead. The less bad way is to give it a halfway house, some base it can use until it establishes a new one. Which means getting a space a mouse can find as an acceptable home while exploring its new climes. And, in this case then, one we can set out in a sufficiently wild place without great loss of time or money. It's easy enough get them; Michaels sells tolerably cheap wooden birdhouses meant to be craft projects and you could drop one off in the middle of the woods and not feel the loss.

But to make the birdhouse a place the mouse considers home means giving them time to see it as something theirs. And so bunnyhugger spent some of this weekend carving air ventilation into a couple plastic storage bins, and setting birdhouses in them, and then waiting for the mousetraps to catch deer mice.

She's as of my writing this caught two, the mother we'd seen earlier and what we assume to be one of her children. We think the child is female and so have the two together. If we're wrong, we're hoping that we'll be relocating the pair before this causes a new litter of mice in our home. bunnyhugger has another cage at the ready too, in case we get some definitely-male mice. But we do still have the questions of how many mice we have to relocate, and are they able to get into the house still? All we can know, though, is that we have to take care of these temporary pets and hope we end up not seeing anything suspicious for a while.

And now, let's wrap up pictures of the Fairy Tale Festival. I took more pictures but they turned out to be mostly boring, things like photos of the tents people were selling stuff from, that help me remember being there but just look like any street fair except on the lawn.

Here's the Turner-Dodge House, which this year did not have an inflatable dragon on the balcony upstairs. Maybe there was one in the ballroom; we didn't end up going inside.

They did expand on the fairy-tale festival by adding a couple scenes of other fairy tales, like the Three Little Pigs here.

Some bits of humor for the brick house. In the distance you can see the remains of the straw house, on a bed of straw meant to protect young grass.

Here's the straw house and a curiously unneeded dig against hippies. In the back you can see a pig set up in a dirt mound with a sign labelled 'Happy as a pig in mud'.

A bunch of witch-themed stuff on a Hansel-and-Gretel-themed place.

There's the front, including a prop kid stuck to the wall.

Trivia: Development work on the paraglider system for the Gemini capsule --- instead of landing at sea it would land on a runway, with an inflatable paraglider deployed in the final approach to give maneuverability --- began when North American was authorized to do so in November 1961, ahead of the rest of Gemini. Source: On the Shoulders of Titans: A History of Project Gemini, Barton C Hacker, James M Grimwood. NASA SP-4203.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Sundays Supplement, Volume 21: 1959, Tom Sims, Bill Zaboly, Bud Sagendorf. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

There's two things to do at Pinball At The Zoo, play in the tournaments or wander around the floor show. The tournament is Herb-style, a name of obscure origins, where you play a set of games and your rank is used to rate you against other players. As it's a charity tournament, you buy entries, a dollar per, and put in as many as you want, with the catch that you have to wait for a game to be free. As the qualifying hours close the lines get longer, or feel like they do, and you end up spending the whole day there instead of seeing and playing the games people and companies bring to the show.

This year the main, Open, tournament was 16 games, standing based on your ten best ranks of whatever you submit. In past years I've gone and put in a game on all these and gone back to see what I could shore up. But that's also a lot of games. Classics was a mere six games (best four counting), all games from at latest the mid-80s. The mid-80s are a Wallace line of pinball evolution; on this side, multiball really dominates game design and the table speeds up. On the pre-mid-80s side of things you can have two or three balls in play (1981's Centaur can get up to five balls going!) but all you really get for that is double or triple scoring as the computer tries to keep up.

I decided to buy $20 of tickets and play only Classics. This put me under the tightest deadline; to avoid a marathon of playoffs running forever on Saturday, Classics's starts Friday evening. These were all games that I knew well, either in simulation or from playing at past Pinballs Ats Thes Zoos or at the venues that donated the games, and I did ... not really well at any of them. Still, a mediocre start can always be improved on, and so I did. My secondary goal every year at Pinball At The Zoo is to never have to void an entry --- have the new score not count because it's worse than I already did --- and this year, well, I got until my third game of Barracora before failing. I would end up voiding six of my 21 total entries, which sounds respectable until you hear that last year I only had to void two entries of like thirty submitted. (But last year I put in games in both Open and Classics, and so replayed fewer games.)

Perseverance paid off, though. By around dinnertime I had a top-ten finish on Xenon, a space(?) robot woman game from about 1980; and top-twenty finishes on Mystic and Blackjack. I was out of contention for finals, though, since my next-best finish was a top-forty finish on Knockout. And after some incidents yet to be revealed, I looked at what it would take to get a top-twenty finish on Knockout (like bunnyhugger already had) and knew it was something I could realistically do. Knockout, a boxing-theme mid-70s game, is wonderfully meditative and can be played forever, at least when this one-way gate on the left orbit is in place, which is why they've taken it off for competitive play. This makes the game harder but not undoable and is why fewer than ten people had broken 100,000 points.

One chance. One last game before qualifying ends. And I have to put up the best game I've done on this all day. (It was only my third time playing it that day.) Could I do it? Yes. Did I? No. I so did not that I put up my worst finish on, again, just three entries on Knockout. But my quest to play in Classics finals ended there, 27th place where the top 16 went on to the first round of playoffs.

There was also another side tournament, the free daily where every participant got one (1) entry each on four tables, and here? Eh. I had a score in the top thirty-to-forty for each of the four games. That consistency --- no appallingly bad finishes --- meant I came in in 19th place, but only the top twelve went to playoffs. Well, the fun is in trying your best, especially against such tight limits.

I've said nothing of the fun bunnyhugger was having. That will come.

And now, I bring you today something I bet you thought you'd never see: the last of my pictures of Idlewild and with it the Most Extreme Mid-Atlantic Parks Tour, bringing the photo side of my journaling up to ... July of last year! I'm totally going to catch up if we can just have another pandemic that keeps us from going anywhere or doing anything for a year.

As the show went on and different potential summer vacations were turned away they got to going into the audience and handing out rattlers and such, and some kids and some parents and some embarrassed kids joined in the music-making and the dancing and all. Also, yes, just like Dutch Wonderland they had a Daniel Tiger and Friends show but we missed it.

In what I'm sure is the most shocking twist ending ever, they ended up deciding the perfect summer vacation was going to Idlewild, as seen with a poster showing ... not quite things they have there. Did I mention the connecting music for their show was (of course) Lindsey Buckingham's Holiday Road, which we were still kind of shellshocked about?

And oh, a detail easy to miss in the other stuff but we were just a little late to see the world's largest rubber duck! That's a shame.

We'd overlooked the Skooter ride, the bumper cars, which we kind of regretted but not enough to wait through the line.

Little creek running through the park that's part of the built-into-the-woods charm of the place.

And a parting view of some of the Hootin' Holler area and the afternoon light. Our last destination of the trip (we wouldn't stop at Cedar Point on the drive home). Pretty happy vacation.

Trivia: The 1850 United States Census, the first to be done counting individuals rather than the number of people within households, was the first to record the ages and other information of enslaved Americans in equal detail to the free. However, enslaved people were identified by their slaver's name and a number, rather than their actual names. Source: The Sum of the People: How the Census Has Shaped Nations, From the Ancient World to the Present Day, Andrew Whitby.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Sundays Supplement, Volume 21: 1959, Tom Sims, Bill Zaboly, Bud Sagendorf. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

Last weekend was the season again for Pinball At The Zoo, in Kalamazoo's Expo Center and not the city zoo. It ran Thursday through Saturday, and while I took Friday off for it, I didn't feel I could comfortably take Thursday off. The other programmer at work was on vacation this whole while and it seemed like a poor choice to leave them completely programmer-free for too very long. But everything work-wise turned out basically all right so maybe I should have tried for it anyway.

bunnyhugger, though, got a hotel in town, one just down the street from the expo center. It was probably walking range. She went down Thursday night, figuring that she would do much better particularly on Saturday when the show started at 9 am. Certainly we'd have a happier time of it not driving back Friday night after 10 pm and then getting up in time to make the 75-minute-drive into town by that hour, if we needed to put in any last-minute games to qualify. I think the logic of that was basically sound though as it turned out we didn't get as much sleep Friday-to-Saturday as we should, and didn't have any last-minute games that helped anything any.

My staying at the hotel with her Friday night was also the cause for a first with Athena, our pet rabbit, and a near-first for any pet rabbit: we left her alone overnight. We left her with a full-to-the-brim bowl of water, and several heaps of hay, and a tremendous pile of vegetables she probably ate right away, and three meals' worth of pellets most of them in her toy ball so she'd have to roll it around over time to get them all. This turned out fine, giving us reason to think future overnight stays without bringing the rabbit down to bunnyhugger's parents will be all right. (The mice we put extra food in their cage, and made sure both water bottles were full, but that's all they needed besides having the cage closed tight.)

While there without me bunnyhugger played, mostly, games for the Women's tournament, getting a spot for herself that wasn't great but at least had promise. She also put in games for the Classics tournament, the Main tournament, and the Daily tournament. She wouldn't qualify for playoffs in the Daily tournament --- only the top eight would, and her play put her in 27th place out of 76 entrants --- but that should be something near three points in the International Flipper Pinball Association ratings, not bad for playing four games of pinball.

Friday, I'd join her, and this time I'd be bringing the big spoiler ...

With that teased, let's enjoy a bit more Idlewild as we braced up to the need to finish the day and start the very long drive home.

Oh yeah so a thing about amusement parks that have been around forever, such as Idlewild, which goes back to the 1870s? They used to keep animals in gobsmackingly inappropriate conditions. Here's the sign, and some of the structure, for what used to be The Bear House. About a half-decade after this was built Rollo Coaster was put in, running right over it; I don't know when they last had bears but I can imagine with dread the captive bears also dealing with a roller coaster going over their home every two minutes.

Here's a picture into the afternoon sun of Rollo returning, approaching the far end of The Bear House.

Happier and less uncomfortable: the carousel's pavilion, in slightly dappled shade.

Some of the horses as we got ready for another ride on the antique.

I tried doing a tracking shot and it came out as well as possible, considering!

I think I aimed the camera wrong for this picture but there's something I like about having the nearest horses' heads falling outside of frame and only the most distant horses making eye contact.

Trivia: In August 1927 Smiles O'Timmons, a onetime circus acrobat who turned to wingwalking after losing a leg, had his wooden leg get stuck in the wing of a Canuck (a Canadian version of the Jenny) flown by Bob Clohecy. After a half-hour of effort O'Timmons got the leg detached, but in the process lost his pants to the wind, so that when Clohecy managed to land the unbalanced, damaged plane it was to an audience seeing a semi-nude one-legged man clinging to the plane wing. Source: Mastering the Sky: A History of Aviation From Ancient Times to the Present, James P Harrison. An event that colorful I assume is drawn from newspaper reports of the incident (which happened over Pennsylvania) and I will suppose there are elements that may have been exaggerated in the reporting.

Currently Reading: Archaeology, May/June 2026, Editor Jarrett A Lobell.

I think I mentioned finding the goldfish pond's pump wasn't working, when we tried turning it on for the season. Doing something about it right away was too annoying, so we put it off to this Sunday, when it was too cold and windy to do anything. Tuesday after work, though, that was warm and sunny and we shouldn't put it off forever.

Incredibly, we didn't think to try plugging the pond filter in first and see if it was still broken. Instead we went straight to pulling the pump out of the volcanic-rock-filled milk crate that houses it, and discovered the box was a little too far out in the water to grab from shore. What could I do? I put my bathing suit on and waded out into the early spring pond that turned out to not be so horribly cold as we feared.

With the hose taken off we could test and see the pump was working, nice and strong. So, the hose is clogged, right? I was ready to leave it at ``find a new hose'' but bunny_hugger thought we should see whether water was getting through to the filter at the top of the pond. It was hard getting the hose off, but her instincts were right: the water was getting through the pump fine. So, was it getting into the filter?

Only way to know was to open it up, which is how I learned the filter has a Mason-jar-like lid of a ring and a flat top and a hundred million ants crawling over it. Also a bunch of worms and other bugs, some of which bunny_hugger was glad to not see. We got the intake nozzle off and bunny_hugger cleaned out what seemed to not be a particularly clogged up nozzle. But when reconnected for a test run, the water poured right on through.

So what exactly changed? Well, whatever was clogging up the nozzle must have got loose when bunny_hugger started messing with it, and she had exactly the right impulses about what to do next. Also now I've learned just what's inside the pond filter --- I didn't have a particularly clear idea before --- and we've got a nice little waterfall for the several goldfish that chose to winter over inside the pond. They certainly appreciate that.

Now to Idlewild pictures and something always to be appreciated: a roller coaster! Not Rollo.

It's the Wild Mouse, which I don't think had this sign last time we visited.

The sign was a bit ominous in suggesting the ride wouldn't be running, but we could see that it was and, of course, it was already July 2025 by the time we visited. It did mean we were looking forward to the ride in the best state we'd be likely to get.

It's true; this Wild Mouse started in the venerable Wiener Prater, where it was known as (cough) Speeedy Gonzales. Also it was only built there in 1985; the sign always led me to think it was older than that. After two years in Viena it moved to Alton Towers as the Alton Mouse, and five years after that came to Idlewild.

For those looking to build a replica in Roller Coaster Tycoon here's a view of much of the ride.

The sign explains the ride and what to expect. I'm not sure that it is Idlewild's most thrilling ride, since Rollo Coaster is a really good layout hugging the ground and going thrillingly close to the trees. But, you know, de gustibus and all that jazz.

Another view of the coaster, from closer to the launch platform, and do you see what I do in the train car being loaded? Don't worry, there'll be more to reveal the particular delight here.

Trivia: After receiving its colonial Charter (in 1663) Rhode Island established a civil holiday with each newly-inaugurated governor --- responsible for safekeeping the document during his tenure --- bringing the box the Charter had been shipped from England in out to public viewing, then opening the box, showing the Charter to all, and reading it in full to the assembled free voters of the colony. Source: Rhode Island: A History, William G McLoughlin. McLoughlin doesn't say just when this becan the tradition, but notes the parallels to the sacred status later bestowed on the US Constitution. He also doesn't say when the tradition ended but probably 1842, after the Dorr Rebellion when the Charter was finally replaced with a Constitution.

Currently Reading: Archaeology, May/June 2026, Editor Jarrett A Lobell.

The Capital City Film Festival is, well, just what you'd think from the name. It's been running sixteen years now, although for no particular reason we've never gone to one of their showings. We have been in our hipster bar when something for the festival got going, but we were there for our own purposes, understand. This not-particularly-intended skipping ended a week ago Sunday when we went to one of the venues --- a church just north of the Capitol --- for a showing of Animal Farm. Sort of. They'd be doing it with a live soundtrack playing, on jazz instruments, a form we've never seen a movie do before. They did the show by stripping out almost all the soundtrack to the 1954 film --- you know, the CIA one --- a process that left the event's composer with a deeper appreciation than he already had for the music, as he talked about in the question-and-answer session afterward that didn't go too badly.

On the way in we happened to see old pinball friends PHD and RED, although we quickly got separated and didn't catch up with them later. (bunnyhugger even missed seeing RED as the ticket-taker wanted to say something to her.)

It's probably not weird that I hadn't seen the movie before, and only slightly weird that I've never read the book. This is when I learned the movie was animated by Halas and Batchelor, who also animated some of the Gene Deitch Popeye cartoons of the 60s, so I was thrown by recognizing their style only not in ``picture moves like one out of every three seconds''.

So the movie, famously, alters the end of George Orwell's downer of a story, resolving with the Animal Farm animals deciding the time for revolution has come again. I can't say it doesn't fit the logic of the story, though, especially since I got to live through the late 80s where that kinda actually happened, with stunningly less bloodshed than your average revolution.

So it all made for a good experience and I'm more interested in seeing the original movie as it actually appeared. Might even read the book sometime. I certainly felt smart identifying all the allegorical elements in the movie (you can't tell me the pathetic showing of the farmers trying to retake Animal Farm isn't mocking the Allied invasion of Russia in 1918) and given the book is such a favorite choice for high school classes they can't be that much harder to pick out in the actual text.

Now, let's enjoy some pictures of Idlewild.

Comic foreground asking you to picture yourself on the Lincoln Highway, which Idlewild is. You might dimly recall that so is Dutch Wonderland.

And here's Rollo Coaster, one of the few roller coasters built in the 1930s. It's a really good terrain coaster, hugging the landscape for its fun.

Since our last visit the park had (because of an accident) replaced its old cars with these, that have seat dividers, lap restraints, and even side restraints keeping hands away from trees. When we last rode it, the train had nothing, just a bar to grab onto if you felt unsure.

We'll get back to Rollo. Here's the carousel, (one of?) the last Philadelphia Toboggan Company original-build carousels.

There's the rounding board with an eagle icon on top.

Here's the historical landmark plaque and one of the three PTC Shield horses on the ride.

Trivia: In the October 1678 issue of his Le Mercure Galant newspaper editor Donneau de Visé observed that ``in the past two years, two colors have come into existence'' and that ``this is something that happens very rarely''. One of the colors was straw; the other, Prince, some manner of near-black with hints of midnight blue and crimson fire. Source: The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafés, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour, Joan DeJean. The color Prince was consistently written with a capital P. It seems to have faded out of common parlance in the 18th century and fortunately there's no trouble searching the Internet for ``Prince color''. Oh.

Currently Reading: Michigan History, September/October 2025, Editor Kristen Brennan.

Other and sadder mouse news. We've been getting the live traps out to catch the mother deermouse, and what we suppose are children. bunny_hugger has already caught what seems to be the mother and one child, moved outside to the detached garage where they're welcome to hang out.

In getting out the live traps, though, we went to the basement to find one of the tin cats that we had loaned to a friend whose house was, a year or so back, overrun with mice. It was closed, and what we most feared had happened. A mouse had gotten in and, with no food, water, or way to escape, died. This is why we try to leave them open, ideally with some prop inside that makes it impossible to close. We don't know how we failed to notice it was put away unsafe. It's possible our friend gave it back to us closed and unaware a mouse was trapped inside, but that doesn't relieve us of responsibility to open it and make sure it's safe.

You can imagine how we feel, which isn't a patch on how the mouse must have. We buried it near our pet mice, as much kindness as we can offer at this point.

On merrier news, let's get back to Idlewild and fairy tales.

Red Riding Hood pondering whether she dares go into Grandmom's house, which is inducing a delay that's probably just making things worse.

Well, there's the wolf dressed up as Grandmom and in her bed so I suppose things can't get worse than this.

Some more scenes set up but the centerpiece here is an American Elm tree, like you never see anymore. Trust me, that's what the sign on it says.

Here's the Seven Dwarves, of Snow White fame.

And their house. Yes, there's seven little chimneys coming out the top.

And here's Jack B, the nimble one jumping over a candlestick. He doesn't seem to be unscathed quite.

Here's a clock that has both a mouse running up and down it but also one that pokes its head out as the hands rotate.

You can see the other mouse at the base of the pendulum and also see they made their own choice about spelling 'Hickory Dickory Dock'.

Here's a pretty solid Humpty Dumpty. The wall looks like it's ancient, although that probably actually means they rebuilt it from scratch in May.

Here's Old King Cole, with pipe and bowl.

And here's a talking tree; there's a speaker in the mouth there and it reels off, if I remember right, a bunch of tree puns.

The giant keyhole I think is tied to Alice In Wonderland/Through The Looking-Glass.

Trivia: It's estimated that in 1849 Americans ate about 139 pounds of pork per capita. By 1889 this had dropped to 119 pounds. Source: Down To Earth: Nature's Role in American History, Ted Steinberg.

Currently Reading: Michigan History, September/October 2025, Editor Kristen Brennan.