Though Grown-Ups Might Look at Him With Fright

[austin_dern]

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

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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.

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

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

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

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.