As sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti

Only one real official event left for the con, then: Closing Ceremonies. This saw the normal rituals, talking about how exhausted everyone was, counting how many people had been at the con (1,291) or in the fursuit parade (239) if you take the official numbers as that exact. And they announced next year's con theme: I forget. I like, I guess, that cons all have themes, but they never seem to affect the goings on much. This year's had ``90s Toons'' as the theme, a promising topic but one mostly reflected in the Main Events having an image of Johnny Bravo as a furry (if that's not redundant) on the overhead projector and the T-shirt having some nice animalized Powerpuff Girls on it. I'd hate to lose con themes but they don't seem well-integrated into the programming at the cons I attend. Maybe they didn't announce the theme yet. Oh, they also had the wonderful tear-dropping scene of the charity, Pets for Vets, not yet Internet famous.

After that, some wandering around, making circuits of the convention to see clusters of people while they were all there, and seeing who we might catch. It hung together pretty well, perhaps from the promise of karaoke and the dead dog dance, a mere couple hours in the future. We took the chance to go across the street and get another round of Indian food from that place in the gas station convenience store. (Should say, it's quite a large convenience store, the sort that could be a freestanding store in its own right, even if it has a bunch of odd-stock deals like shelves full of the sorts of novelty drink glasses you get to take home from the bar.) This we took back to con suite to eat, and spread the good word about, and saw that the Kings game going on had enough people and no room for bunny_hugger to join. We watched some, anyway.

When we got around to karaoke nothing was happening and we feared it'd been cancelled. After another circuit or so of the hotel we caught the thing starting. I think the designated host wasn't able to do it so they roped in someone at the last minute. Someone who was just brilliant, mind you. He did a great bit of warm-up and hype for every single performer. He also declared that besides the karaoke they had, in the abundant empty space, the world's largest collection of air instruments. It took a little time for people to come up and pick up air guitar, or air drums, or keyboards, or the like. But he didn't stop until they did, and many songs had not just the singer but at least a partial band playing along. The high point was of course bunny_hugger. As she sung Gerry Rafferty's ``Baker Street'' someone took a belt-attached otter tail and played that as the killer saxophone. It's as giddily delightful as you can imagine.

For the close the emcee told everyone to come up so they could play, of course, Bohemian Rhapsody. I obeyed, and had my guinea pig puppet, Latham Shoales, sing. bunny_hugger did the same with her squirrel puppet, Chitter. This delighted people who saw it. Someone ran around taking video of that and did close-ups of our puppets singing. In that moment, my guinea pig mouthing ``Bismillah! We will not let you go!'' to someone filming at close range I started to retroactively feel legitimate in running a puppeteering panel. This was one of those experiences so good it creates its own sadness, from the knowledge there won't be another karaoke night this good. Well, only not this good in this way.

The Dead Dog Dance came next, naturally. bunny_hugger considered suiting up, but didn't, as it's just too much hassle to put her fursuit on especially when the Headless Lounge had been taken down already. We similarly chose not to put on our kigurumis. We just went out as we were. And we enjoyed it, though not so much as Saturday's dance. The music wasn't as 80s. Still ... it kept bringing us back in, and we kept listening and dancing and if we went out for circuits of the floor some, we also came back to it.

But it did finally end, sometime after midnight, with the lights all coming on and the music crew playing Toto's ``Africa'', and our protesting that this wouldn't drive us out. Traditions, although this was a new one in that for once we had stayed to the end of Motor City Fur[ry] Con, and seen it to the end of its last event.

We drove home, not using the GPS to get back for the first time. We've been in the area often enough for Marvin's Marvellous Mechanical Museum pinball league enough times not to definitely need it. (I had thought I'd done the road trip to Morphicon/AnthrOhio enough times not to need that last week, too, but missed one of the three turns needed the whole expedition and sent us on a diversion through all rural Ohio.)

Trivia: A 1990s pigeon census in Milan, Italy, found the birds more likely to cluster in areas with pre-1936 buildings; prewar construction makes a better environment for them. Source: Superdove: How The Pigeon Took Manhattan ... And The World, Courtney Humphries.

Currently Reading: The Mighty Music Box: The Golden Age Of Musical Radio, Thomas A DeLong.

PS: How May 2017 Treated My Mathematics Blog, when I had a meager 12 posts in the month, and one of them was about how April 2017 treated it.