But You'll Look Sweet Upon the Seat of a Bicycle Built for Two

[austin_dern]

This week in my humor blog: Jimmy Rabbit kind of gets one over on his Mom, Mary Worth gets in a freak hot air balloon accident and is rescued by superpowers, and we see some Beetle Bailey Squirrel Resolution, who put on a great show at the Common Ground Music Festival back in 2018. Here's what you missed:

• MiSTed: The Tale of Jimmy Rabbit, Part 15: Boy Lost!
• They Were Not Available in Flaming Pop-Tart Strawberry, of Course
• Statistics Saturday: Some Tedious Arguments
• Robert Benchley: Do You Make These Mistakes?
• Speaking as a Person Who Tried to Do ‘The Popeye’ Dance
• What’s Going On In Mary Worth? So is Mary Worth just a fantasy universe now? September – November 2025
• We Know How the Guy Who Created _Beetle Bailey_ Would Draw a Squirrel
• MiSTed: The Tale of Jimmy Rabbit, Part 16: Telling Fortunes

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That done, let's please enjoy a bunch of Musée des Arts Forain pictures, and something you won't see anywhere else! Probably!

So here was an unexpected surprise: a fairground Popeye on a rocket! We can explain nothing more about that.

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And here's the third carousel, something we never imagined we'd see and that I didn't know existed: a velocipede carousel.

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Docent explaining the velocipede carousel. It's got no motor; it's powered by all the people on bicycles pedalling.

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If you aren't up to pedalling you can ride on the chair instead.

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So the bikes are fixed-gear (they're basically 1890s bicycles, on a track), and the pedals move even if you don't pump; you're directed to stop pedalling altogether if your feet slip off because they will be going fast.

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The docent gives instructions about what we're to do.

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Getting onto the ride. It made a tremendous racket. Unfortunately there was a small group and so everyone fit on a single ride cycle, so I don't have video of what it was like in motion.

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You can see how big the room is, compared to the carousel, in this shot.

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I did my best photographing the velocipede carousel's decoration but I didn't know how to get the good low-light pictures.

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One last shot of this remarkable construction.

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And then there's Popeye on his rocket, whatever that means.

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Some more figures that are definitely licensed figures based on PLuto and a Three Little Pig. I love this look.

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Trivia: The United States prohibited the import of lemons from Argentina between 2001 and 2018. Source: Seriously Curious: The Facts and Figures That Turn Our World Upside-Down, Tom Standage. (Argentinian fruit had been quarantined most of the 20th century for fear of spreading pests, and after a trade liberalization American fruit-growers sued on the grounds that this still wasn't protecting American crops enough. After a visit by Obama in 2015 regulators were satisfied that Argentina was keeping export crops pest-free enough.)

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 75: Grand Poobahr of Smoochistan, Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.