It's a light-and-tumble journey from the East Side to the park

[austin_dern]

It took some doing but I did it, and published in my mathematics blog this past week. Here's what I did.

• Reading the Comics, May 8, 2019: Strips With Art I Like Edition covering half a week's worth of strips in one go.
• Are These Numbers A Thing? inspired by a tease of a puzzle chefmongoose set out.
• Reading the Comics, May 11, 2019: I Concede I Am Late Edition as a couple comics I meant to discuss on Thursday didn't get published until Saturday.
• Reading the Comics, May 16, 2019: Two and Two Edition, where I cover a whole week's worth of comics at once and now have to think of something else to write about for the vast gap until next Sunday.

The story strip recap went halfway in rerun. What's Going On In The Amazing Spider-Man? When might Spider-Man come out of reruns? February - May 2019 offers some explanation of what's been happening as well as my best guess about when it might stop.

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Now let's get back to the Potter Park Zoo, where the 2017 Wonderland of Lights display turned out to be in the cold so we went inside one of the buildings to warm up.

Spider monkey hanging out in the winter quarters. We'd duck into pretty much every enclosure to warm back up and then step outside for more lights.

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And some of the mandrills hanging out in winter quarters.

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Ringtailed lemurs hanging out under the heat lamp, keeping warm like French fries waiting to be served.

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Lemur shocked to see what I'm writing about them on the Internet!

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Lemurs huddling up for comfort under the heat lamp.

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The big cats also get brought inside for winter, and here, they just sleep some.

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Isn't that a lot of lion sleeping through the evening crowd?

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So you understand, each of these paws is about the size of a Honda Civic.

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I ... think he's annoyed with me?

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Lemur does not like my chances here.

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Tiger failing to sleep after remembering --- again --- that time in second grade she accidentally said something about going downstairs into the ``be-ice-ment'' in front of the whole class.

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Tiger posed in front of a matte painting from Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush (1925).

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Trivia: In the two years before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Federal Aid put over 20,000 miles of highway under construction. In 1942 it produced 1,869 miles. Source: The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers who Created the American Superhighways, Earl Swift.

Currently Reading: Oz Before The Rainbow: L Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz on Stage and Screen to 1939, Mark Evan Swartz.

Comments

[armiphlage]

"In 1942 it produced 1,869 miles."

I wonder if that includes construction of the Alaskan Highway, which was theoretically completed in 1942 at 1700 miles. If so, it highlights how much road construction halted.

Many Pacific islands still have rusting construction equipment on them, left over from WWII runway construction. Perhaps the lack of that equipment also contributed to the lack of highway construction.

[austin_dern]

The book doesn't say, but it does go some into how the halt of road construction for other than war needs affected the decades-long consensus that the country needed a coherent and organized plan. (For which Eisenhower gets a great deal of deserved credit, but it's not like he proposed a road network and everyone said ``That's what we were missing!'')