austin_dern

A couple weeks ago in the pet store I saw something we never see there: a mouse among the pocket pets. They often have rats, and gerbils, and hamsters, and some of the bigger rodents like chinchillas and guinea pigs. But a plain old mouse? Never, which is what made the cage labelled as having (I thought) a male white mouse of estimated one year age remarkable. The mouse was under observation, not yet ready to go home yet. bunnyhugger was intrigued; we've been thinking about getting a new mouse ever since Fezziwig died, and the only drawback would be that a one-year-old mouse is already halfway through his life. Still, a year is better than none.

Yesterday bunnyhugger finally had a bit of time to go and examine the mouse, see what she thought of them, see if they're ready to go home with anyone. And maybe a quarter-hour later she called home asking if we still had that bag of rat-and-mouse food from a while back. So that spoiled the big surprise.

The little surprise is that this was not a year-old boy mouse. This is a year-old girl mouse and the pet store has no idea where I would have been a boy mouse among their adoptable animals. Someone made a mistake and I bet it was me, to start.

bunnyhugger had somehow gone out not anticipating adopting the mouse and so had to put together the aged old frame of the mouse cage that had warped gently through years in the attic and basement and all. In the meanwhile the mouse somewhat patiently stayed taped up in the cardboard box used to transport her home, scritching and chewing some. When her house was finally ready bunnyhugger picked her up and was distressed that the mouse squeaked, a sound that represents a mouse's desperate cry to please don't hurt me. Well, of course, wouldn't dream of hurting her, and by today afternoon she had settled enough to have built a nest and to be sleeping through my shoving a camera her cage. For example, please consider:

Here she is in the first nest she's built. We know that won't last; we're hoping to make a larger cage for her out of a storage bin, but for now this is a pretty good space and she's comfortable taking daytime naps.

She's smaller than Fezziwig was and given her size and colors it's natural to wonder if she might have been a feeder mouse who got lucky.

She spent all last night getting the contours of her cage understood. This morning as I was leaving for work she was climbing back and forth on the bars. By the time I got home, she was sleeping.

She was more interested in her nap time than in posing, which, fair enough, although she did give me one good lengthy stretch for the camera.

Enough stretch! Back to grooming.

Meanwhile our rabbit does not see why make so much fuss about an animal that could fit in her ear if she wanted. We'll talk about it.

Trivia: The docking ring on Apollo 14's lunar module, as a pure mechanical device, had no instrumentation to check when it would not latch during transposition and docking. Source: Go, Flight! The Unsung Heroes of Mission Control, 1965 - 1992, Rich Houston, Milt Heflin.

Currently Reading: Infinite Cosmos: Visions from the James Webb Space Telescope, Ethan Siegel.

The thing I dreaded in that RLM tournament. I was drawn up, first, against MSS, perennial plausible candidate for champion of the open state tournament. And if that weren't bad enough, we were to play Paragon.

Paragon is an early-solid-state game from about 1979. It's got a lot going for it. Great theme, playfield art of guys with dragon wings slaying beasts, neat gimmicks like an outlane hole guarded by a pop bumper so maybe your doomed ball and be bounced right back in, this neat ``waterfall'' channel the ball can wiggle through, and apparently if you put enough shots together it plays the interlude of The Ohio Players's song ``Funky Worm''. Unfortunately, the game is a drain monster. Every shot on it sends the ball down the center, down the right outlane, or down the left outlane right through the pop bumper guarding it. Even the Pinball Arcade simulated version --- and simulated pinball tweaks physics so that every game plays easier than any real one will --- drains everything fast. I've seen tutorial videos where the expert pinball player can't keep it the ball in play long enough to finish a sentence.

I was looking at a defeat, and not even on a fun table, or one that I might possibly have a chance on. And then RLM threw everything for a loop. He noted that MSS, alone of all the players, hadn't had a loss yet ... so declared a bounty. If anyone beat him this round, that person would get a free pop. MSS immediately congratulated me because, apparently, every time RLM declares a bounty the targeted person loses. Maybe, but that would only happen if MSS won a race-to-the-bottom game.

The bizarre thing is that I did win. And not by losing the race to the bottom. MSS had a lousy game, yes, not quite the three houseballs Paragon loves to deliver but near enough. Meanwhile I had ... just ... like, a really good game. The ball came out of the waterfall curly loop just where if I held the right flipper up the ball landed safely on the left flipper. It never got near the pop bumper guarding the outlane except to be bounced over to the right flipper again. I kept hitting the bonus multiplier targets. I got the bonus up to the levels where it holds your progress for the next ball. I finished, after two balls, at something like 250,000 points which might be the highest score I ever put up on a real physical Paragon and isn't far off the highest I've ever done in simulation (386,540).

RLM's bounty program worked again!

With the curious confidence of having not just played well, but played well on a very hard table, I waited for the last of my fourteen matches. I went on to play SM, a woman who only plays at these Grand Rapids tournaments, on Avengers Infinity Quest, and faceplanted hard against her perfectly decent game.

Well, I made it, although into a ten-way tie for the last eight positions for finals. The ten of us in the tie had to play a set of games on my nemesis of Nitro Ground Shaker, the bottom two getting dropped and the rest moving on to playoffs. I put up a merely mediocre game, getting third in my group, but as some other people somewhere did worse I was through in not too much difficulty and could look forward to playing at least one more round of pinball.

Could the night be going any better? I leave you with that cliffhanger.

(Don't pity MSS. He went on to win the rest of his games, and finished qualifying in undisputed possession of first place. He would go on to take a mere third place after finals were done, but he's not hurting for rank or esteem.)

And now? No cliffhanging in my Dollywood pictures, but we are getting into some serious roller-coaster-riding as it turned out that Sunday evening in June was a great time to be at a major amusement park. Consider:

Some of the queue to Thunderhead, with the misting spray going. This is all switchback space and note that we could just walk up that wooden stair to the launch platform and ride.

In the shadow of Thunderhead is this little knee-banger of a coaster, the Whistle Punk Chaser.

And there's the Whistle! The name apparently derives from logging terminology about what trains should be doing, with the whistle punk chaser keeping track of log traffic and warning people when to get out of the way or stop sending things into the way.

This is a small coaster really targeted at kids, which is why it's not very high, and it bashes your knees relentlessly, and they send you around it ... I think they might have done three times.

They do explain the whistle punk thing in signs here that, turns out, I didn't get in clear focus. Sorry.

And here's a nice conveniently nearby drop tower. I did not drop on it.

Trivia: After the surrender of Robert E Lee and the capture of Jefferson Davis, the state of Florida cancelled the elections it had on the schedule, instead sending representatives to Washington to learn what the Union intended to do with the former Confederate states. Source: Look Away! A History of the Confederate State of America, William C Davis.

Currently Reading: Michigan History, January/February 2025, Editor-in-Chief Sarah Hamilton.

After nearly a week of licking her wounds from the Michigan Women's State Pinball Tournament, bunnyhugger was thinking ... what might she do? To get a secure position --- and a good seed --- for the women's tournament next year, certainly. But also to feel better about herself as a player?

The obvious answer? Since the end of pandemic closures RLM Amusements out in Grand Rapids has hosted a weekly tournament that's quickly become the center for pinball ratings point generation. The tournaments attract a lot of top talent and run until the wee small hours of the night, keeping us from going when they were run on Thursdays. But they moved to Fridays recently and, you know, why not go and play?

Apparently everyone had the same feeling, either from disappointment about their performance or from wanting to get in good for next year, because 55 people (!) showed up to compete. So we got not just fourteen rounds of head-to-head matchplay on the schedule but also a 24-person finals, as many people as compete for Pinball At The Zoo finals or, for that matter, the open state championship. (Playoffs would be four-player groups, like Pinball At The Zoo; state championship is head-to-head play.) That turnout must be the pinball equivalent of gyms being packed the first week of January --- the weekly tournament after that drew a mere 39 --- but we'll see.

I hadn't actually played at RLM Amusements competitively except once before. bunnyhugger had more experience, as Grand Rapids's women's league has settled on it as their regular venue. But most of the games were ones I was familiar with because, like, any venue has a Foo Fighters or Jaws or Avengers Infinity Quest. Not so many still have an Iron Maiden but RLM does. And in the short time we had to practice before the tournament I was doing quite nicely on them all.

When the tournament started, my skills dropped precipitously. But it was still good enough to squeak out a win on Foo Fighters, and starting with a win felt good to me. My second game was Fast Draw, an electromechanical, against the formidable MEW, who, yeah, cleaned my clock. I came back with wins on Buck Rogers, Avengers, and Jaws, only to get beaten on Iron Maiden by KT. And I started to wonder, was I going to take all my losses playing women?

No, because I did win Godzilla against a woman. Well, a girl, the daughter of someone. But not because I really outclassed her; she had a poor game but somehow I was doing almost as badly, and only won on the strength of bonus. And that by a squeaker. Learning that I had what was almost as good as a bye round --- and somehow almost but didn't quite manage to blow it --- will make bunnyhugger furious.

Because the next woman --- and the next Women's State Championship competitor I faced --- was bunnyhugger. So that's always fun. And it was on Genesis, which she treats as a game I have special supernatural skills on just because ... all right, I am good on it. And I went and put up something like 800,000 points on two balls, while she was puttering around a hundred thousand. I insisted that wasn't so good a score, and it wasn't --- with how nicely the ramps were behaving she could have started multiball and at 4x playfield beat me --- but that didn't happen, so she was not pleased with things.

After that I was playing a guy again and felt, well, I'm only losing to women so I'm in good here. But, no, I got beat soundly on this Star Trek: The Next Generation game and I'll have more to say about that later unless I forget. But this started my slump for the night. My next game was on Space Shuttle --- the game that saved Williams Pinball back in the 80s --- and playing KXL, a woman who's too new to competitive pinball to have been in women's finals. It's a game I've always found tough, like most solid states of that era are, and it didn't help that I had two pretty-near-house-balls. I mean, I got to flip some, but not much. She had two solid balls, building up a lead of something like half a million points and, gads, that's above my average play when this game's been in a tournament. I figured my only hope was to do the most boring, slowest, but least dangerous play, shooting the ball up this center shot where it hit a spinner good for a thousand points a spin and what do you know but I did it. I took the lead. Unfortunately, KXL had another ball to play, and topped my score without any great effort.

And the news was no better next game, Nitro Ground Shaker --- an early solid-state game --- against some guy. The catch with Nitro Ground Shaker is you'll win if the scoop up top happens to send the ball where it bounces back into the scoop, and he got that a couple of times. I was doing my best to recover from this disadvantage, and then got a bad bounce and the ball went out before I even knew it.

Fine. My next game was on John Wick, a table that everyone seems to have agreed is not as good as they were hoping --- RLM's had a for-sale sign on it --- but has some fun novelties tome, and against the guy who ultimately would win the tournament. Also this time I had a belated realization that changed my strategy and surely gave me the win. John Wick, like most any modern pinball game, has a shot you can hit over and over to start a multiball. It's worth more if you get other stuff going into it, but in a tournament you might be better off just going for any multiball at all. The multiball is started by hitting the car. I had somehow transferred the ``this is the car shot'' from the actual car toy on the playfield to the captive ball next to it, and I'd always been shooting at that ball, meaning I would get this car multiball only by accident, by missing enough of the shots I was aiming for. Going for the car correctly elevated my score considerably. I was back in the wins column.

And now had to face something even more dreadful than going head-to-head against bunnyhugger during her three-match losing streak.

Some more wandering around Dollywood here, enjoying all the Dollywood stuff.

Sculpture of a bunch of kids playing on a tree that wouldn't be out of place at Waldameer with its abundant sculpture work.

And another of the sculptures, of a kid trying to pull a dog back from a cat. We've got to get back to Waldameer to see if these statues are there too.

This is getting over to Jukebox Junction, built around a Cool 50s Car theme. It's also where the Lightning Rod roller coaster is.

Except for the Burgers and Fries stand on the right there's small towns in Michigan I know that look like this, apart from the street paving being all broken up.

The area seems mostly to be places to sit and eat, to me, but you can see the Lightning Rod roller coaster in the background there.

And from up in the roller coaster queue we get a look down and see the cars ride. Fitting it to a car-dealer theme is a cute one, that works well.

Trivia: As the Red Cross distributed government-provided wheat to unemployed Americans, the national organization received reports that in the South white people were given food no questions asked while Black people were required to work on road repair projects to prove their worthiness. The Red Cross chose not to investigate. Source: A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression, Jane Ziegelman, Andrew Coe.

Currently Reading: Unconventional, Contrary, and Ugly: The Lunar Landing Research Vessel, Gene J Matranga, C Wayne Ottinger, Calvin R Jarvis, with D Christian Gelzer. Oh, there we go, they do mention the ``dangle a cockpit from a crane'' system and there was one, the Lunar Landing Research Facility at Langley Of Course. It was capable of a much more modest flight regime, basically only good for simulating about 150 feet of descent, and was the one that the Lunar Module Pilot (who was only to pilot the Lunar Module if the Commander dropped dead) trained on. Commander trained on too, but the Commander also got the free-flying vehicles to train on.

So, as said Monday, bunnyhugger lost in the first round of playoffs. Of course, half of all the competitors did. The most surprising loss was MEW, who'd gone into the tournament top-seeded --- and who was the first woman since bunnyhugger to make it to the open state championship series --- and whom bunnyhugger had spent much of the drive into Bay City telling me was the unstoppable force who would rule Michigan Women's Pinball until she decided to stop competing. She was knocked out of the open tournament in the first round, which wasn't too surprising, since there were literally three people among the world's top 100-ranked players competing against her. But the women's scene in Michigan is a smaller scene, and she wasn't just playing the sixteenth seed, but the seventeenth, someone who moved into the tournament when YAO had to bow out. That's not to say MEW was beaten by a poor player; often people are undervalued if they play only at one or two venues. But this was a big upset, and MEW was.

Well, I can't really say she was upset. But she did say she was not going to play out the ties to figure out who finished 9th versus who finished 16th, and just wanted her payout and to go home. The prize pool for the 9th through 16th players is divided equally --- the International Flipper Pinball Association takes no interest in whether the eight-way tie is broken or not, and issues payout accordingly --- and so bunnyhugger would have had to dig out the twenty six dollars forty cents or whatever it was (it was somewhere around $25 and how close doesn't matter). Except she didn't actually do that. The IFPA had sent her a check with the year's bounty from women's tournaments, and a couple of sponsors had raised the payout, and bunnyhugger did not want to be walking around with all that in cash. Instead she wrote out sixteen checks, for the appropriate amounts, and figured to fill out the name and sign the check on the scene.

Also taking their winnings and leaving: the Traverse City crew, all of whom lost first round. Given it's like a three hour drive over I was surprised they didn't hang around longer, but the story was they had some event in the evening to get back for. Which sounds reasonable until you wonder what their plan was in case someone had a hot hand and made it to the second round, or third, or even to finals. (This would be improbable, but not unthinkable.) Well, hazards of carpooling.

A hazard of a bunch of people all leaving, in a seeded backet tournament: what happens if, in the tie-breaking bracket, two of these forfeiting players play each other? As did in fact happen. Lacking direction I went with the tiebreaker that the higher seed 'won' and went on to the next round of tie-breaking play. This did mean that MEW 'won' a match that neither she nor her opponent were there for, and that left her finishing in twelfth place, ahead of KT who actually did play all her rounds. Several people asked if that made sense and it ... eh. You can follow the logic but it feels wrong. Had I internalized that four people of the eight doing playoffs were leaving early, and that two of them were playing each other, I'd probably have asked bunnyhugger for permission to rearrange that, so the four still-playing people played each other and settled 9th through 12th that way.

This is of almost no practical consequence. The difference in women's competition rating points between 12th and 13th place is barely there and it almost certainly won't be the divide between someone making playoffs and someone staying home next year. It would've been easier on everyone if they'd just played it out. But I guess there are people who don't want to stick around after they've lost. It's just different from how I default to thinking, is all.

Sure, given my choice, I'll stick around a pinball tournament until they shut the place on me. You know what else I'll stick around until they close it on me? An amusement park. For example, Dollywood:

The station for the railroad. Also look at how great the shading and light is there.

The Country Fair section is a little loop down one of the many hills of the park.

Part of the Country Fair space is these picnic tables atop astroturf. There's a lot to eat there although we didn't end up having dinner at this spot. (I think we actually failed to eat anything substantial and just got Burger King on the way back to the hotel.)

Some of the Country Fair area here. They have a Scrambler like you'd hope for from a fair. The biplane prop is spraying a cold-water mist that's a rather good idea for hot days like that.

And here's another of the Roadside Attractions, the Bubble Foam Zone. Most of the bubble machines had been turned off but you could see how it had been ... well, like it says there, a couple foam pits to go make a clean mess in.

And a flying elephants ride! It's wild that parks just have these, isn't it?

Trivia: The average height and weight of Japanese elementary school children decreased from World War II until 1948. Source: A Modern History of Japan, Andrew Gordon.

Currently Reading: Unconventional, Contrary, and Ugly: The Lunar Landing Research Vessel, Gene J Matranga, C Wayne Ottinger, Calvin R Jarvis, with D Christian Gelzer.

First round! After the delays of getting started and the false start of having to tell people that they were entitled to practice time on the games, eight pairs of women went off to play games and, after two groups came back to ask how the game-picking routine worked again (bunnyhugger had just explained it) they were off. I settled in at bunnyhugger's computer to wait for results of the best-of-seven head-to-head matches.

Minor mistake on my part: I was just sitting there waiting for people to come back and give me results, like, game-by-game, which the computer could track. Nobody had any idea they should do that, and it took me a long while to realize I could go around and check scoresheets and enter what people had. (Though more than once people protested they weren't done yet.) This wasn't all that significant a delay except for how it frustrated Ypsi Pinball, who were livestreaming and trying to commentate on the tournament, and had no results to talk about except what they could see on the one livestreaming rig they had. (Pinball tournaments have taken to having a streaming rig, a sort of inverted U-shaped clip with cameras pointing at the score screen, the playfield, and the player. Everyone uses the same design that one guy, somewhere, figured out, because it fits most any venue and can be set up and disassembled for travel in a few minutes.) Things got better during the day, both in my peeping on tournament results and my passing notes to the streamers so they could provide reports.

The most important games were those bunnyhugger played, against HLC. HLC got the first pick of the games, the Metallica Remastered that took a table bunnyhugger was familiar with from a decade of it being around our local barcade, and whomped it with modern Stern Pinball video screens and all that to make it seem new. There are a couple changes in the scoring, and the playfield, particularly in the addition of a spinner on the right orbit that I believe juices multiball, and bunnyhugger hasn't got the hang of the new rules yet. HLC, however, has, and she took a huge lead on ball two that bunnyhugger couldn't expect to catch. Even if she hadn't been interrupted by ... I'm not sure. I think this might have been where one of the mid-era games, Whirlwind, suffered its first malfunction and she had to go make rulings on that.

Still. That's just one game, even if it starts with a loss. It was bunnyhugger's turn to get one of her games and she picked Sky Jump. This is one of the two electromechanical games in the venue, a single-player game on which she put up 28,500, suffering two or maybe three house balls in the process. Still, anyone can get house balls a lot on this era of game; it's why they're normally set to five-ball play in tournament settings. And her 28,500 would be a solid score, compared to what other players did during the day; there were, I think, only three or four other people all day who beat that on their game. The tragic thing is HLC was one of those people, putting up 38,360 which I believe was the highest score anyone put on the table. It's not good to take any losses, but to take a loss on your own pick is brutal.

HLC's pick. Embryon, the 1980-era prog-rock-themed game we mostly know from playing at tournaments in Fremont. I didn't see the game at all, because of its position and because I was now prowling and creeping on other scorecards. Also because I started to worry I was jinxing bunnyhugger by watching her progress. Maybe so: bunnyhugger won this game and was back in the running.

Next game, another of bunnyhugger's picks: The Beatles. I had seen a couple groups playing this already and nobody had put up a score more than about 1.1 or 1.4 million. bunnyhugger never falls short of two million on our home table and this was playing close enough to our home table that the win was all but sure. Except this time bunnyhugger has the ball take some bad bounces, first and second balls. And she's able to get one jackpot, I think, in All My Lovin' multiball, but that's not much. She finished at something like 1.2 million. HLC didn't do much the first two balls, but she got a couple of jackpots and took the win, not just on one of bunnyhugger's games, but on the bunnyhugger game.

Now came Creature from the Black Lagoon, another HLC pick. And a heck of a lot of distraction as one of the news crews came in, wanting attention and talk and footage. And if that weren't enough, Whirlwind malfunctioned again, and bunnyhugger had to decide to take the game out and to put Earthshaker in to take its place as a middle-era game. And to inform all the groups that they were allowed to re-pick their middle-era games that round if they wanted, even if they hadn't picked Whirlwind. And yet, despite all this pulling her in every direction, she played a god solid game, shooting up the middle until the points-generated Move Your Car mode started, and ended up winning in a walkoff. She was down three games to two, but that's something you can win from. And this past year bunnyhugger has been --- and has been getting known for being --- a rally player, someone who steps up when it's hard and pulls out a win. She could do this.

Afterwards, bunnyhugger would tell me, she should have changed her own middle-game pick to Earthshaker. While she hadn't touched it all weekend just on general principle she felt stronger on it than she felt on her pick, No Fear. It's a game I like --- it gave me a powerful lucky win at Pinburgh one year, and it plays well in The Pinball Arcade simulation --- but my enthusiasm and vague idea of what the heck I do exactly isn't very transmittable. HLC took a pretty big lead by the end of the second ball, but bunnyhugger --- switching from my advice to play modes to instead play multiball --- did the perfect thing on the third ball, bringing a mode into multiball, with the promise of scoring all the points.

She did not. She finished the ball something like sixty million points ahead of HLC. But sixty million points is not that many in No Fear. HLC could lose if she had a short enough ball and didn't get any modes started. But she did get a mode started, and she played it pretty well, and blew past bunnyhugger's score. Reigning champion bunnyhugger was knocked out in the first round, four games to two.

It was not going to be a merry ride home.

But what is merry, any time? A good day at an amusement park. Such as seen here, pictures from our first, partial, day at Dollywood. See for yourself:

The first thing you see inside the park! One of the multiple theaters --- we didn't get into this one --- and the photo spot for the park's entry. You can see one of the park photographers there. The Summer Celebration was the seasonal special event going on then.

To the left of that is the last thing you see inside the park, the Emporium gift shop that's also the exit. I assume you can exit without going through the gift shop too. I'm not sure what the building on the right there is. Oh, but say, you were wondering how summer is celebrated at Dollywood?

Well, here! They set up a bunch of ``Roadside Attractions'', such as this Kite Sky, with dozens of kites above the midway, just glowing in the brilliant light. It was gorgeous. There's no capturing the subtleties of color and shade this presented.

Another view of the kites, again trying and failing to get at the brilliance of the colors in the afternoon sky. There would be a bunch of ``Roadside Attractions'' along the park and you're going to see every single one of them. (Not really.) (Probably.)

Here's a more nearly attraction-free part of the midway. Note the Smokey Mountains in the background, smoking. (That's actually from the locomotive, the ride that Dollywood was built around.)

Oh, but, just before that next attraction we noticed this charming birdhouse with an outbuilding.

Trivia: Something like 930,000 Korean refugees were repatriated from Japan to Korea over the course of 1946, joining 630,000 who had been returned the year before. Source: Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, John W Dower.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 14: 1952, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

Back in the park and fed we would have a couple hours left in Dollywood. We used a good part of an hour on the park's original ride, a narrow-gauge train ride up and down the mountain at the center of the park. This is on a coal-fired train, once part of the building of the Alcan Highway, they take the coal seriously. Particularly, the emergency cable running the center of the ceiling of the cars is intended not to stop the train but to call for medical attention when you get off the train. That attention is for getting fire in your eyes, because the engine is pouring out ash and some of it is still on fire and you would rather not have lasting agony there. The safety spiel explains what to do in case of this and also that it is not a cable-pull-worthy medical situation if you just get some soot in your eye. Let your tears wash that out.

bunnyhugger and I --- forced to sit in separate rows because of the crowding of the cars --- put our sunglasses on. This wouldn't block every angle of eye attack but it at least reduces them.

As it chugs up the hill you get views from behind of a lot of the park, which is as we like it. We also saw a field where a couple park people were examining each of maybe two hundred gizmos laid out in rows and columns. I thought this was preparation for the firework show, and I get partial credit. They were prepping the drones that make up half the firework/lights show. The park has a pretty nice nightly firework show, in part because the middle half of the programming is drones taking on configurations that are getting more interesting but are, I assume, cheaper long-term than fireworks which are, after all, consumable goods. The fireworks and the drones coordinate so they appear at roughly the same spot in the sky, taking turns with the airspace. I couldn't figure where the launch site for the fireworks was.

Besides seeing wonderful angles of Big Bear Mountain, and smoke rolling in on the Smokey Mountains, we also saw this one lodge perched atop the mountain. The ride operator on the PA asked if we knew who owned that lodge, overlooking the whole valley and Dollywood particularly. Dolly Parton, everyone's natural guess. Nope; she doesn't own it. It's a rental.

After that we had been on, and enjoyed, all the must-see rides at the park and could spend the last couple hours taking things as they caught our eye. Or looking for the ``Roadside Attraction'' art-type exhibits. Or looking for the Coke Freestyle machine that I swore I had seen the day before, which we only found after the park had closed and the restaurant it was in probably was closed. Maybe not. By that point we figured we could just go home anyway.

But before that we got re-rides on several roller coasters and we did our level best to head for the Wildwood Grove so we could get a night ride on Big Bear Mountain and, if our calculations about how the park behaved were right, get there close enough to closing hour that we could spend most of the wait after the park was closed. And here, sad to say, after a day and a third of guiding us around the park as if I had ever been there before, my navigation sense failed me. I would have sworn that the branch leading to Wildwood Grove was before the Mystery Mine and when we reached that and saw no sign of the turnoff I thought we'd missed it. So I led us back downhill and got provably beyond the limit of where the branch could possibly have been. And without enough time, we figured, to get the whole way to the back of Wildwood Grove where Big Bear Mountain was.

To try salvaging anything we went back to Lightning Rod, which might not have been much closer but was all downhill at least. And there, I managed to start walking up the fast-lane line-cutters queue just like I had the day before, and didn't understand what bunnyhugger was talking about when she tried to explain what I was doing wrong to me. Eventually we got there, anyway. And --- after some waiting around for stragglers to get on --- did get to the ride, for the last ride of the night, enjoying the thrill of a quite good coaster roaring out into the night sky in the woods on a hill, with much of the ride spent hidden from the lights of the park. It was like blending the great parts of Cedar Point's Steel Vengeance with those of Kings Island's The Beast. It was a consolation finish for the night, but a pretty good one at that.

What did we get to after the Merry-Go-Round Museum? And before going back to Cedar Point for the evening that Halloweekends Saturday? Why, to the most curious structure in Sandusky that's not the pyramid without its building. You ready? Really ready? All right, then ...

So here it is: the U building. Once a thriving part of Sandusky's Something Industry, it's been sitting empty a long while and its big powerful U logo fascinates us every time we see or think of it.

Here's that U logo in the chimney in back. We do like a building with logos in bricks; you dont' see that anymore. After observing that, though, it's hard not to quip that we looked it up and they put this pattern in in 2007.

And here's the sign atop the building. Imagine what that looks like in neon by night.

Whatever the heck it's about there's at least this old hand-painted sign to ask us not to park around where we parked.

See, that's where we parked. Figured it was probably safe enough. And it gives you the basic layout of a place that looks like it should be a SimCity 2000 construct.

It's old enough to have that awful flimsy window old factories used to have, but hasn't been abandoned long enough for every window to get smashed in.

Trivia: A Reo Motor Car Company airmail shipment in August 1928 --- about a month after the Lansing airport was dedicated --- established that air travel time between Lansing and Chicago was slightly over two hours. It carried ten tons of mail, roughly 350,000 letters. Source: The Bicentennial History of Ingham County, Michigan, Ford Stevens Caesar.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Sundays Supplement Volume 10: 1948, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

After the rain and food and eagle delays we finally --- and seriously, this was something like 3:30 by my camera --- got to Blazing Fury. This was one of the two roller coasters we hadn't gotten to the day before. It's also the oldest roller coaster at Dollywood; it opened in June 1978 and the Roller Coaster Database knows of only one coaster, a wooden coaster relocated(!) from Cedar Point(!) they had before that. It is one of the park's two fire-fighter-themed coasters, which probably makes sense if you know more Dolly Parton lore than I do. It's got many charming touches, like posters extolling the heroism of old-timey (fictional) firefighters, and a hand-painted sign explaining it ``is an indoor roller coaster consisting of special effects in a dark environment''. That is, it's got dark-ride elements, much like Mystery Mine.

Arguably it's a dark ride that has a couple of roller coaster elements; the Roller Coaster Database says it's mostly a powered incline, but the three drops make it roller coaster enough for them. There was a modest line for this, and there would be when we came back later. It is fun, though, just what we're looking for in dark rides --- moving props, gags (I think this is the one where a spinster-y woman chases after a man who calls her [ something ] hit in the head), fake-outs about where you're going to fall beneath something. Apparently until 2011 there was a water splashdown, but that was removed to reduce wear on the ride. It didn't feel like there was an obvious lack in the ride, although knowing what had been there makes some more sense of the end of the ride. (Though, oddly, its duplicate at Silver Dollar City in Branson, Missouri, kept its splashdown, I'm told.)

And then it was on to the last coaster we hadn't ridden. This was the Tennessee Tornado and it was weeks since a tornado hit the Lansing area so it's tasteful to ride. And an exciting one: it's among the last roller coasters constructed by Arrow Dynamics, the company that made steel coasters coasters practical. It's not the sort of crazily overdone string of loops like Kings Island's Vortex was; it's a more restrained thing with, I think two loops and a sidewinder. It's also got a nice element of the track going through the center of one of the loops, which feels like more of a novelty than it really, truly is.

With that, though, we'd gotten to all ten of Dollywood's roller coasters, and enjoyed rides, often front-seat rides, on all of them. We would go back to various coasters, starting with Wild Eagle, and get better looks at things such as this sculpture in the Wildwood Grove that looks like a lyre, with ribbons of dripping water as the strings.

Also an attraction in Wildwood Grove? The Black Bear Trail, a long steeplechase-style ride with bear mounts. It looked like the Moose on the Loose that delighted us, and still delights us, from Darien Lake. Also La Chevauchée de Guillaume at Festyland. At Dollywood, the ride figure is a bear, following a level path around scenery. There was some music but not, as we were hoping, an unending monologue from the bear delivering cornball jokes, the way Moose on the Loose did. The ride operator welcoming us back was good for it, though. I forget just what he told bunnyhugger and what he told me, but it differed from what he told the guy behind me, too, so he's got at least three bits of schtick for riders having a bear time. Fun stuff and I hope more parks get this kind of ride in. It's merry.

Had enough of the Merry-Go-Round Museum? Because I haven't, quite yet, and you're going to get to look at the results!

The Wurlitzer band organ that the museum occasionally plays, and that convinces people band organs are hecking loud. Also the huge banner that explains all the parts of the carousel.

Photograph of a miniature (but still, like three-foot-wide) carousel that my recollection is they'd love to get working but it's really hard what with everything being very precise when it's that small.

Sign for Gustav Dentzel's late-19th-century carousel carvers. Also, evidence of how loose people have been with the spelling of ``carousel'' over the years.

One of the penny press machines the Merry-Go-Round museum has. Sadly they have the ones where you just push a button to start things rather than grind them but at least it takes actual change and not a credit card. Note this is not the one that's next to the Wurlitzer, photographed above.

Peeking in the back of a penny-press machine. It's ... about like you might expect, really, but I do appreciate the schematic diagrams so people have a fighting chance of fixing the thing.

Another of the crayon drawover pieces, with a horse's head and carving tools.

Trivia: Neil Armstrong's Model A-7L space suit, for the moon walk, was serial number 056; his backup suit was 057. Buzz Aldrin's was serial number 077; backup, number 076. Mike Collins flew intravehicular model suit, serial number 033. Source: Lunar Outfitters: Making the Apollo Space Suit, Bill Ayrey. It doesn't say what (trusting there was one) Collins's backup suit serial number was. I imagine there was one, from the waste-anything-but-time conditions up through the first landing, but can't confirm it without, like, trying.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Sundays Supplement Volume 9: 1947, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

Our second, and only full, day at Dollywood --- Monday of our expedition, for those keeping track (we'd get home Thursday) --- started with our figuring we'd get to the park and have a loaf of cinnamon bread for breakfast. What it did start with was our having to park a good bit farther away than we had the last night, far enough we had to take the tram to the entrance. We thought we'd have the tram to ourselves for the ride back, but they (reasonably) waited for a couple people to run up to the Lot E station and join. And then a couple people who saw the tram and started running for that. And after they settled in, a couple people who just saw the tram waiting and started running in the heat. You get how this went. We did eventually go, possibly because the next tram had finally caught up so there was somewhere for the next round of stragglers to go.

But! We got to the tram station and walked to security and were raring to go. Nothing could stop us but an enormous, heavy thunderstorm rolling in out of nowhere.

Maybe the early-afternoon torrential downpour wouldn't be a bad thing, we told ourselves, while huddling under the cover of the security station and staying out of range of the kids kicking puddles at each other. Maybe it would clear out the crowd, like that time a 4th of July at Great Adventure became a string of walk-ons thanks to a downpour during which we ate lunch. Maybe the storm would let up at least a tiny bit before we exploded from need for the bathroom. Maybe we'd just run to the bathroom and hope for the best.

As it turned out, the rain let up, finally, enough to make walking to the bathrooms outside the ticket booths reasonable. While huddled up there, as I waited for bunnyhugger, I overheard a couple people talking about the foods the park offered and I attempted to volunteer that everyone had good things to say about the cinnamon bread. Unfortunately I couldn't think of the words ``cinnamon bread'' and came up with ``sweet bread''. Which they took to mean, as I'd hoped, bread that was sweet, but they also wondered if Dollywood had sweetbreads as in the cooked glands. All agreed it was imaginable that there might be a restaurant there serving them, but we have no evidence of that being so.

Happily the bakery with the cinnamon bread --- well, one of them; we'd discover another later in the day and mildly embarrass ourselves there --- is just past the entrance, and while we did get in line behind a mob of people who didn't know how this whole amusement-park-bakery thing worked, we got our breakfast/lunch and our refillable pop bottle and found a table outside that wasn't all that wet, considering. Also we ended up eating the whole loaf of bread in something like twenty seconds, because it is really that good. It's likely around 105,210 calories a loaf, but understand, it's really good. We understand now why so many people swear by it, and why there was a rush at the end of the night of people getting loaves to have for breakfast the next morning. We resolved that we would be among them, getting a loaf at the end of the night and having it for breakfast before we left the hotel. We would not make good the ``end of the night'' part --- we got it in the middle of the day, with other souvenirs, and put it in the car, inside the cooler bag we'd brought for just this sort of contingency --- but the important parts were satisfied.

And now that we knew we could have had this at Kentucky Kingdom too, well, that's sad. Not soooo sad; we had a quite good thin-crust pizza that was satisfying. But we're not going to be bringing it up unsolicited to people asking us about amusement parks either.

Speaking of amusement parks, here's pictures that are not from one. They're from our big trip to Cedar Point last October, though not at Cedar Point. So here's the Merry-Go-Round Museum instead:

Small horse made as a rocking horse. I believe this was one made for the carving factory's owner's kid but seem not to have taken a picture of the diorama label (just to the right of this) which would make it clear. Any way bunnyhugger remembers, I'm sure.

Do you see all the open, howling mouths in this picture? Is there maybe one more you hadn't noticed? Like ...

Here! The saddle is howling at you too!

Many saddles come with secondary figures carved as decoration, such as this sphinx who's got the hindlegs of a pug.

They're on this M C Illions horse. Note the breastplate letting you know they're from the state of C.I.. (I am interested in that because the post office at least used to let you get away with addressing stuff to Long Island as LI instead of NY; was a similar grace once extended to Coney Island?)

Some more horses with their mouths wide in energy, this one with a dragon on their shield. I don't remember this one from previous trips; the dragon shield should have stood out to me.

Trivia: A March 1954 issue of House and Home magazine with special section promoting air conditioning estimated that the average Dallas household used almost twice as many kilowatt-hours each month for air conditioning as for all other household uses combined. Source: Cool Comfort: America's Romance with Air-Conditioning, Marsha E Ackermann.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Volume 36: Boogerman, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle. Surprisingly fun battle-royale sequence at the end as nine of the champion wrestlers of the world go up against ``Boo Boo'' Boogerman, a meek nothing of a figure and he, following Popeye's very close direction, just waits for them to all knock each other out, done with a sequence in verse.

Dollywood's origins are in a narrow-gauge railroad that went up a mountain and back down. The park has grown around that and so is, in the main, a ring. There are a couple branches hanging off of that ring, like some aromatic hydrocarbon. The Village and the County Fair and Jukebox Junction were one of those side branches. All the roller coasters besides Lightning Rod were elsewhere. And we figured the roller coasters were the thing to target in our four-hour (or whatever it was) day, since the lines were short today and who knew what they'd be like the next day?

So we went, roughly clockwise along the main loop, finding Thunderhead, the big wooden coaster and this is a wooden coaster, no RMC track involved. Who did build this 2004 wooden coaster, you may wonder, if you don't know there's basically one company at any time that builds wooden roller coasters and every decade or two it goes bankrupt and the survivors form a new company? The giveaway was in the big, banked, curving drop after the lift hill. That's so much a Great Coasters International thing it's not even necessary to ride the heavily-banked turns with bunny hops in them to identify the ride. Once more it was a walk-on, although it was harder to be sure we weren't accidentally using the Line Cutters Queue. The signs were designed for a day when any of the queue gates would be opened up and you'd be expected to walk back and forth in the shade of the coaster a while. Instead we'd just walk right up and pick a row.

This was, as the manufacturer's name promises, a great coaster. At 100 feet tall it's about as big as you can make a wooden coaster without the size starting to work against it; it's got the airtime and the sideways moves that make the modern generation of junior wooden coasters so great. It's hard to pick a best coaster of Dollywood, but even if not for the bonus any wooden coaster gets in our esteem, this would be the strong pick.

In the shadow of Thunderhead is a tiny coaster called the Whistle Punk Chaser. This is about as park-generic a ride as the cosaters at Dollywood get; there are coasters of the same model at several Legolands and at Storybook Land in --- no, not that one --- Aberdeen, South Dakota. But the name tells you something about the ride. The Whistle Punk is a lumberjack who runs the logging locomotive, and oversees the movement of logs through the camp. This is explained in a sign at the entrance to the ride, and it even includes a page of whistle signals that might even be legitimate, I don't know. The ride is built around a mock(?) locomotive engine, labelled Willy's Whistles, and the area decorated with crates and logging tools to give that logging-camp look.

I mention this to give an idea what the theming is like at Dollywood. The ride would be an okay thing that kids afraid of the big coasters would ride without anything but the name, or even a generic name like Family Coaster or its Legoland name, Dragon's Apprentice. But it's given a theme, something that plausibly connects to the Great Smokey Mountains of the vicinity, and it commits to that. It's more work put into the presentation than the park strictly needs, but having that makes the experience better, and is part of what makes for good, lasting memories of a park that overwhelms in good ways.

The ride did not chew up our knees and spit them out. So it has that going for it too.

Outside the Mystery Mine --- a ride bunnyhugger had heard exciting things about, and that was renovated heavily enough in the 2020-21 offseason that coaster-count.com considers it a new ride and the Roller Coaster Database despairs of an accurate length figure --- was another delight. This was a vulture animatronic that would every few minutes wake up and do a couple minutes of schtick. The ride itself is fun, a Gerstlauer Euro-Fighter much like Untamed at Canobie Lake Park, Impulse at Knoebels, or Hydrus at Casino Pier, with the most prominent element being the lift hills (plural) that go straight up, riders on their back hoping their keys don't fall out of their pockets. Its advantage on the all-outdoor counterparts is, besides a more complicated path, that it goes partway through the Mystery Mine building, with dark ride-style theming and stunts before it goes outside. We were fortunate to get front-seat rides each time we rode, so we got the even better views of, for example, the tower ``collapsing'' on the TV screen above our heads during a lift hill.

Also outside the Mystery Mine was a gift shop that had something we knew had to be there. This was Dollywood fanny packs. bunnyhugger's preferred choice of fanny pack was this nice rainbow-themed one that she discovered the day we set out on this trip had a weird, large ink stain somehow. She'd reverted to a university fanny pack she didn't like but that was present and un-stained, but was on the lookout for one that would be more fun. And here at a gift stand next to Mystery Mine, was the one that --- she would not take home. But now she knew there were Dollywood-themed fanny packs she'd be on the lookout. And she would find one she did buy, with a Great Smokey Mountains theme, near one of the other coasters. Between this and another fanny pack she had ordered weeks before, but that didn't arrive until after we got home, she's got a well-accessorized place to keep all the stuff that otherwise would be squished into a wristlet or left in my cargo pockets or the car. Short but extremely successful day and it's not over yet.

We're now up to Saturday, and the median of our Halloweekends trip last year. And you know what Saturday on Halloweekends means? That's right, it's time for pictures of ...

The Merry-Go-Round Museum! Or maybe the Scary-Go-Round Museum since as you see they went and haunted the place up for this year. Also note the pack of kids in costumes, that I believe were leaving as I don't seem to have any pictures of kids in costumes inside the museum. We'll see.

Entrance hall. Not only have they got packs of chariots but now there's fake gravestones adding pleasant enough puns to things.

Also who isn't going to like this chariot of the two gryphons playing together, or maybe doing what birds do instead of kissing?

More chariot sides, alongside fake gravestones that to some extent blend in to scenes that already had, you know, heraldic and supernatural and paranormal figures depicted alongside the allegories and occasional mermaid angels.

Back into the main room now. You can see the old banner for the C W Parker factory and also the museum's Brass Ring arm. They don't use it, but they have it to show people how the thing worked.

Framed, worn list of carousels still doing the ring game. At the time of this photograph we'd been to three of them. As that lead implies, there's a story to come about one of these rides ...

Trivia: The first all-aluminum beer can was promoted by the Hawaii Brewing Company in 1958 as ``the shiney steiny''. Source: The Total Package: The Evolution and Secret Meanings of Boxes, Bottles, Cans, and Tubes, Thomas Hine.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Volume 36: Boogerman, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle. No, I checked, that's the title. Popeye goes to become a Pro Wrestler manager.

The first thing I noticed getting into Dollywood was the big stand full of pamphlets. The park has real actual physical maps, there for the taking, just like in the long-ago days of 2019 in parks. Also a programming schedule, in case you want to see one or more of the many live shows the park offers. I snagged both, naturally (and wisely; they were cleaned out by the time we left, after park close) and have the delight of a couple park maps with the crunch of actual use in them.

Next thing we noticed, past the photo op where people could photograph --- or have a park photographer take the picture --- themselves in front of the entry Dollywood Summer celebration sign, an array of kite-like banners hung from wires above the midway, a rainbow in green and orange and brown. It was beautiful, a neat simple delight. And we had got there just late enough in the day that it was catching the light spectacularly, refracting gentle hues on the whole world, it seemed.

This, a small sign beside told us, was part of the Summer Celebration: the Roadside Attraction ``Kite Sky''. Apparently the park (always?) has a seasonal celebration going to add temporary decorations to the fixed attractions. And, this time, it was faux Roadside Americana-type attractions, the sorts of things you might be able to coax dad into stopping on a long road trip. There were some of these scattered all over the park, unexpected little extras to an already well-arranged scene. Some were these little expressions of joy, like the Kite Sky or a similar one that was rainbow ribbons over a covered walkway. or pleasantries like the South's Largest Picnic Basket, a sculpture of just that. Some were nice goofy dumb things, like the World's Largest Can Of Beans, just a metal cylinder labelled with the brand of beans they use in restaurants (I assume). Some came close to being the kinds of public art you'd see in any city trying to lure people downtown, like the Water Hose Fountain that's this jumble of candy cane-shaped wires, threatening to sprinkle water on you.

We did not approach the Water Hose Fountain close enough to get wet, but it would not have been a bad idea. It was --- to reiterate something true this whole trip --- incredibly hot and muggy. The first thing we went for at the park was ice cream, at one of the indoor restaurants up front. I think we changed minds at the last moment to milkshakes as we wanted both cold and something to drink, and we expected that an ice cream cone or sundae would turn into a mass of lactic glue faster than we could possibly eat. This was a good compromise, the only flaw of which is that it wasn't endlessly refillable.

I know that the next day --- Monday --- we got a refillable souvenir pop bottle, so we could get as much to drink as we desperately needed. I'm not positive what we did Sunday night, which despite the setting sun was still hot and muggy. I guess just got some regular cups. I know at the end of the day I was thirsty and asked a security guy where there might be a fountain. He seemed baffled by the question (bunnyhugger clarified that we meant a drinking fountain, in case he thought we were trying to meet someone at some decorative fountain) and finally suggested we try the bathrooms just around the corner there. This was a good impulse, by the way, but wrong; there were fewer drinking fountains than you'd expect at the park and none at bathrooms, somehow. I get that when the pandemic started everyone turned off their drinking fountains and they've been left off because the good pre-pandemic things aren't allowed back, but this is a matter of what was built when the park was built. Maybe they figure anyone just wanting water will get a cup from any of the many restaurants or drink stands.

Also a thing we discovered fast about the restaurants, just looking at the menus: they had vegetarian options. Every restaurant or stand we investigated had at least one item that could be called an entree and that vegetarians could eat. Often that vegans could eat. It's quite the contrast to Cedar Point, which figures vegetarians can eat fries or cheese-on-a-stick, and Michigan's Adventure, which figures vegetarians can grab something from the gas station outside the park. Good development, though. We made plans to get vegetarian corn dogs when we were ready to eat.

And now in photos, we're coming near the end of Friday at Halloweekends; what pictures of things in the dark remain to be seen?

Walking past the Cadillac Cars, which seemed to have recovered from the breakdown the previous night, looking at the Power Tower.

ValRavn has a giant throne as part of the decoration outside. This is not that. This is a large bat-winged skull throne set up in a gift shop.

Here's what the bat wings look like from the side, with Halloweekends merch in the distance.

Here we're in the misty far back of the park, looking up at Top Thrill 1 1/2.

Slightly less mist here, and a view from the Magnum XL 200 coaster queue at Top Thrill 1 1/2.

Here I'm just focusing on the empty queues and how nice and geometric it all is, all those lines in perspective.

Trivia: In 1471 when Borso d'Este of Ferrara travelled to Roma to be invested with his dukedom by the Pope, he included in luggage his two-volume, 34-pound lavishly decorated Bible, which had cost 2200 florins and included more than a thousand miniature illustrations. Borso had it re-bound for the triumph of visiting the Vatican. Source: Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance, Lisa Jardine.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Volume 35: Hooray For Ourside, You!! or If They Want Rooters, Why Take the Pig Out of the Pigskin?, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.