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austin_dern

July 2025

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If I'm not mistaken, as of a couple hours ago it has been 25 years since I first logged in to a muck (Brazilian Dreams II) as Austin Dern. That's a heck of a time to spend at anything. Thanks to all of you for being part of that journey.


So, the Switch. We did not have time to open it Friday or Saturday. [personal profile] bunnyhugger was hard at work until the evening on Sunday too, when she finally dared open it. Would the joycons work, once taken off the base unit? Would the Wi-Fi work? The letter from United Radio said that we had a replacement unit, and that our user data had been transferred over. Also that they investigated and were unable to duplicate the problems. This is a lie, unless the know some way of ``take the joycons off the base unit'' that we don't know. Still ... so, would it work?

At least Sunday night, yes. The joycons worked when taken off the base unit, at least until they complained that they didn't have enough power. Given some time on the Switch to charge, they seem to behave all right. The Wi-Fi, too, seems to be working. It connected to our home network promptly and loaded the big fall update to Animal Crossing. When she started the game up, [personal profile] bunnyhugger had the game's e-mails, and it reported friends being online, and it just ... played, like it should. Also all her residents talked about how she had vanished and they missed her so, which is an unwelcome guilt trip considering it's not like we chose to leave the game abandoned on a shelf in East Syracuse for a month.

I am not calling this fixed. Not until we have a track record of good behavior from what does appear to be a new Switch. But it's a hopeful start.


Meanwhile today, my iPod Touch crashed and died so hard during my walk that it would not come back at all. It's been doing this a lot the last two months. This weekend I tried a factory-reset wipe-and-reinstall, and that did nothing. I also tried taking it out of the protective Otter Box in case that was setting off issues and, no, apparently not. The Capitol Mac people had recommended using Sketchy iPhone Fixers out in Okemos and I think I'm going to go check to make sure I know the name of the place right and see what they'll do. But, like, replacing this with a brand-new iPod Touch would only be $200; there's a limit to how much repairing would make sense. Also a limit to how much energy I have for repair shenanigans, although I suppose if it's a place in town there's a natural upper bound to that.


The day after Knoebels we drove west, hoping to get to two parks in one day. The first park was DelGrosso's, in Tipton. Yes, as seen in the famous syndicated newspaper comic strip Take It From The Tinkersons.

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The new-to-us entrance to DelGrosso's Park. It got a major facelift when the Laguna Beach waterpark got a big expansion, since the last time we visited. I'm sorry it's washed out. I had forgotten to change the camera settings from the super-sensitive low-light modes I used at the end of the day at Knoebels.


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Here I get the sensitivity appropriate for early afternoon so you can see what the colors should be. I'm surprised I didn't re-photograph the entrance gate but, mm.


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Part of Laguna Beach is this Leaning Tower of Pisa waterfall.


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Some of the Laguna Beach water park as seen from the elevated walkway to DelGrosso's.


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Free parking! DelGrosso's is ungated, but the parking lot is across a busy road from the rides park so that's why there's a pedestrian overpass.


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Looking down at the Park Office, where you can do ... park business, I guess ... as seen from the pedestrian overpass.


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Wacky Worm kiddie coaster, twin to the one we rode at Fantasy Island, although this time we didn't ride it. [personal profile] bunnyhugger and I did ride it when we visited in 2013, though.


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Photograph of the park map, since there were no park maps given out to my knowledge.


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Memorial park for DelGrosso's, here honoring Ferdinand J DelGrosso and Mafalda M DelGrosso.


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More of the memorial park, commemorating Ferdinand J DelGrosso (again) and a plaque about what makes a life well-lived; it ends with how in 1994 ``Fred Del Grosso's heart failed him; it never failed anyone else''.


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Floral garden and sign giving for the center front of the rides park.


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Safety Bear signs to cover all the park's rides, which have restrictions at 36, 38, 42, 44, and 48 inches.


Trivia: Australian vaudeville performers during the Great War referenced the SS Dimboola, a ship deemed unfit for transport duty, but which was used to bring performers between Adelaide and Perth, across the Great Australian Bight and its rough seas. Comedians referenced it enough that audiences recognized the name and laughed at it. Source: Fred Allen: His Life and Wit, Robert Taylor.

Currently Reading: Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World, Amir Alexander.

PS: Using my A to Z Archives: Quotient Groups, or how to make even-and-odd numbers hard again.

Happy Columbo Day! I'm glad the Internet has decided to shift away from celebrating a problematic figure in favor of someone everybody can get behind without question: a cop.

(Yes, yes, I know, there are important reasons why Columbo is a Not Problematic cop, especially including the class conflict which drives nearly all the stories, with working-class Columbo taking on rich-and-powerful murderers. But we're also really lucky they never did a story in Like 1974 where the local leader of the Black Panthers But For TV gets killed by a rival.)


Been more more busy times on my mathematics blog. You can read that on your Friends page, or through your RSS reader of choice. You should have an RSS reader of choice, too. But if that hasn't gone anywhere you like you can catch up on the last week-and-a-half from this roster of recent postings:

And then an exciting two-second cutaway in 60s Popeye: The Glad Gladiator and wait, is that Ham Gravy? I think that's Ham Gravy! So, if you want to see super-forgotten Thimble Theatre comic strip character Ham Gravy, here's your chance.


Now, at last, we come to the final pictures of our day at Knoebels in July 2019. Enjoy. I hope we can get back to it soon.

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Twister by night, with the top of the lift hill illuminated.


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Twister's loading platform seen in the night air.


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And here's the Christmas Cottage shop, looking sparkling.


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Flying Turns's return leg seen against a gorgeous purple-cloud night sky.


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Looking back along the return leg of Flying Turns, and to the bright purple drop tower.


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Santa waving from outside the Christmas Cottage.


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Scene from their shooting gallery. I'm not sure what's communicated by one person being a zombie? guy and the other a regular woman.


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Looking at Flying Turns and what I think was originally the construction shed for the ride. In the background is a Flying Scooters.


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Lights along the edge of .. I think it's the South Branch Roaring Creek, feeding into Mugser Run. Also the covered bridge over it.


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Looking from Impulse's queue over at the Grand Ferris Wheel.


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I hope those are supposed to come off! Seats off on the side of the Impulse roller coaster. I don't know their story.


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Shop staffer closing up for the night. Notice the souvenir medallions feature main mascot Kozmo as well as secondary figures Dexter Raccoon and a fox whose name, finally, we learned was Piper. Kozmo and Dexter have their names on their shirts; Piper we had to find from looking at the price tags.


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Impulse, at last, turned off for the night.


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And a last look back at the park, as the final stragglers get to their cars. It's a really well-lit grassy parking lot, you have to agree.


Trivia: Japan's 1945 rice crop was its worst harvest since 1910, and was about 40 percent short of normal yields. Source: Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, John W Dower. (It was a combination of bad weather, manpower shortage, tool shortages, and lack of fertilizer production.)

Currently Reading: Invisible Countries: Journeys to the Edge of Nationhood, Joshua Keating.

Busy today; will report next week. On to pictures. Those are coming now to the end of our day at Knoebels. We didn't have much night time, as the park closed about 9:30, not very long after sunset even given that the sun just had to hide behind mountains.

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Knoebels's Kasper Klaus-model Roto-Jet. This fan site lists only four parks which as of 2013 still had Roto-Jets. We've been to three of them, and rode it at Knoebels and Lakeside. I don't believe we rode it at Hershey. But now that we know it's significant we'll be sure to get to it next time we're at HersheyPark.


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Scenery! A turtle statue crawling through a log. Knoebels doesn't have the abundance of sculpture that Waldameer has, but ...


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Yup, they have a hare to go with the tortoise. A relaxing bunny, at that. Hm.


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Knoebels, like most Pennsylvania parks, has the benefit of great hills all around it and here's a look up at them into the clouds left over from the rain. Note the drop tower in the lower right corner, for scale.


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We'd popped out to the car for something and so got a look at the setting sun over the amusement park.


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[personal profile] bunnyhugger getting a ride in on what I'll assume is the lead horse of the Grand Carousel.


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Menu, and sculptures, outside the Old Mill Sundaes. There is a water wheel on the creek and apparatus that transfers that energy to rotating the roof of an eating pavilion.


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Also, you have to go over a slight creek as you go through the ice cream sundae line. In hindsight, you maybe understand why the park floods every 38 days.


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And here's the rotating pavilion, and a good bit of shelter from the rain.


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Kozmo Chipmunk appears outside most rides with a you-must-be-this-tall sign. For the log flume, though, he shapeshifts into Codzmo.


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Here's Kozmo back in his normal body, but dressed up for the Round Up ride.


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Round Up ride in the twilight, which MWS and [personal profile] bunnyhugger were kind enough to humor me with by suggesting we ride.


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Phoenix as seen by twilight. Notice there's a little lighted crown at the top of its lift hill, on the left.


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Spotted from Phoenix's station: a park worker trying to do something I could not make out, not from that distance. It doesn't seem like an exhibition but it's also a weird place to be doing legitimate work too.


Trivia: In the early 19th century Camden, New Jersey, was famous for its floating bathhouses anchored at Windmill Island, with patrons changing in unscreened accommodations visible to ferryboat riders from Philadelphia. (Windmill Island is, today, Soupy Island, which is not an island but has an antique carousel.) Source: This Is New Jersey, John T Cunningham.

Currently Reading: Invisible Countries: Journeys to the Edge of Nationhood, Joshua Keating.

We got a package from East Syracuse. We assume it contains a Switch. As I write this we have not opened it. I am not sure I have the energy to open it.

No one from Nintendo has contacted me, despite the promises delivered Tuesday. Even if this Switch should happen to work, I now want to know why getting the thing fixed has been such a complete, massive, multifaceted failure. They have not managed a single part of this process right and I legitimately want to know what decisions they made to create such a bottomless clusterfluff.


Going on on my mathematics blog, I'm Using my A to Z Archives: Quintile, bringing the explanation of a slight concept back out of obscurity.


Let's see a little more of that carousel museum at Knoebels.

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Menagerie! Plus horses, but also figures like dogs, goats, and zebras that aren't on the standard carousels. You can see the gift shop through the doors, too.


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Big sign for the Dentzel Improved Carrousel with the Germantown address like is on the Kiddie Kingdom Carousel at Cedar Point. Also a neon sign for where to return the steel rings won on the ring game.


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Some of the older horses, dating to 1900 or earlier. The black one in the background, hidden behind the almost-unpainted one, dates to circa 1876 and the United States Merry-Go-Round Company of that C-named town in Ohio with the chili.


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But this horse I don't know if it was striped clean as part of an abandoned(?) refurbishment or if all the park paint just wore off from use and ill care. It's striking, anyway.


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Better-looking unpainted or extremely-faded paint, but all the ``jewels'' intact, which still makes this Charles Carmel horse look pretty fresh. Note the blood vessels carved into the face.


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Another Charles Carmel horse in full paint and costume jewelry.


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Some more horses on display. The one that's cut off on the right I think is from a kiddie carousel.


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Camel, tiger, and ostrich, some of the more common menagerie figures on carousels. Steve Swika Jr there is thanked as oner of the tiger ``which he rode as a child and then bought and brought to Knoebels for all to enjoy''.


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Little better view of the tiger, a Herschell-Spillman from about 1918 and last operated at Newton Lake Park in Carbondale, Pennsylvania. The curious thing is Newton Lake Park apparently had an 1881 carousel, and while it's hardly impossible to have two carousels it seems odd for a small park.


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A circa 1870s lioness, carver and early history unknown.


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The pig they're more confident about: it was carved around 1905 by Salvatore Cernigliaro, working for Dentzel. It last operated at Jenkinson's Playland Pavilion in Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey.


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An an elephant to close things off.


Trivia: The Clark Bar, created in 1917, was also made in a special small size for American troops in the Great War, a move which made it socially acceptable for adult men to eat candy bars. Source: Sweets: A History of Temptation, Tim Richardson.

Currently Reading: Invisible Countries: Journeys to the Edge of Nationhood, Joshua Keating.

You might have seen this on your Reading page, or through whatever your RSS reader is. If you haven't, well, here's the past week's worth of things from my humor blog, which has stayed alive and posting despite, you know, everything.


Now let's return to Knoebels and yet another startlingly good thing within the park, and specifically within the carousel gift shop.

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The carousel museum! Knoebels has a room inside the Carousel Gift Shop and it turns out to be cramped but legitimately curated. Here's some scenery panels that make up the center of the museum room.


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Newspaper with the announcement of the 1926 Grand Opening of Knoebel's Grove. ``All ready, let's go to KNOEBEL'S GROVE and spend the Fourth in the cool shade and enjoy bathing in the new Swimming Pool. This is one of the largest and most sanitary pools in Central Pennsylvania and is supplied with real, honest to goodness, pure water. Parking and Admission to Grove FREE. Bring your friends with you, also bring the children as there is a place where the children can wade and bathe free of charge. Welcome All. H H Knoebels --- Knoebel's Grove, KNOEBEL'S GROVE Near Elysburg.''


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A sign explaining how the Grand Carousel came from ... Riverside Park in Piscataway, New Jersey. Hey, I know that place! There's one of those little fake historic towns, where they gather old buildings from around the county, there now. Roller Coaster Database doesn't list it, but if they didn't have a roller coaster, they wouldn't.


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Yes, it's the bill of sale for the Merry-Go-Round. Charles Schmitt of 38 Durand Place, Irvington, New Jersey, sold it for four thousand dollars. The sale's dated the 26th of January, 1942.


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Side board of a gryphon chariot along with some clown/performer figures.


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Plaque describing the park's very first carousel which, sad to say, was destroyed by Hurricane Diane.


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The only know ticket remaining from the original Knoebels carousel. It is surprising there's just the one known. Note the abundant spelling of carrousell.


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And a more thorough explanation of the Stein and Goldstein Carousel and its history being with the park, then not, then with again.


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Some of their carousel horses on display. I didn't get the signs explaining them, not clearly, but they do look like they're particularly old and I wouldn't be surprised if they're to 1910 or earlier.


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An M C Ilions side to a chariot. There's also a panel on the wall explaining the difference between a merry-go-round and a carousel: there is no difference between a merry-go-round and a carousel and never has been.


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The grey horse on the left they date to circa 1880 and the Armitage Herschell Company, out in North Tonawanda. The other one is a Herschell-Spillman and of course there's a reflection exactly covering the date on the sign. Sorry.


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And a row of horses, with chariot sides on the walls, and as you can see, lots of explanation.


Trivia: Alexander Gettler's forensic laboratory around 1924 found a simple test for carbon monoxide poisoning. Healthy blood mixed with lye turns into a dark, gelatinous ooze with layers of greenish brown. Carbon monoxide poisoning, even after death, causes the blood to stay crimson even as it gelatinizes with the lye. Source: The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, Deborah Blum.

Currently Reading: Invisible Countries: Journeys to the Edge of Nationhood, Joshua Keating.

PS: How September 2020 Treated My Mathematics Blog, the lowest-effort of my monthly mathematics posts.

Last time you'll recall I had agreed to send the Switch back to United Radio again. We had given up on getting the thing fixed. Nintendo is supposed to send us a new unit, one with different problems, and ``try'' to transfer the user memory over. We were able to use Ethernet to save [personal profile] bunnyhugger's Animal Crossing village online, so if this, for a change, goes right the worst we would do is lose her incomplete Octopath Traveler game. I took the box to the UPS store and shipped it out the 1st of September. They received it, says UPS, the 4th of September.

And there it sat until the 16th of September when the status went from ``Due In'' to ``Received''. Then started the waiting game for it to advance to ``In Service''. And ... waiting. And ... waiting. Monday, we passed more than a month since I sent the stupid thing in again, and more than two and a half weeks since they acknowledged they had it.

So I went to Nintendo Support Chat and asked where is it and why is this dragging on forever and why has Nintendo decided to punish me for wanting a working Switch. They could offer no insight to the last two questions. Nor much for the first, but did claim that I would be contacted ``by tomorrow or the day after most likely'' by someone and that they would ``escalate the situation so we can investigate further''.

I also resumed my e-mail correspondence with the general manater of United Radio who said he'd look into it and acknowledged they had a backlog of repairs. I said I was very aware of their backlog but refrained from pointing out I've been in it since early July. They found our Switch and said ``it was held up being evaluated as a return'', whatever that means, and he's ``having the team expedite this for you'' and that it should ``hopefully'' be on th way back ``today or tomorrow''. I clarified, this is a new Switch, without whatever problem they couldn't or wouldn't fix, and he said yes, and that they would be trying to transfer user data over.

So they did create a shipping label, and I have that. As of this writing the label is just created, not shipped. But, still, it's more progress than we've seen in a month.

If we actually get a working Switch out of this I --- well, I won't be happy. What I want now, besides a Switch that works, is an exact explanation for the choices Nintendo made to turn this into such a protracted, Kubrickian system of failure.


To mathematics! Today I published My All 2020 Mathematics A to Z: Quadratic Form, about one of those little things you learn about, when you're a mathematics major, and what I realized I did not know.


To amusement parks! Let's explore the mystery of that 13 X horse at Knoebels, seen in July 2019.

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That's right, that mysterious figure is from the Stein and Goldstein, Knoebels's other antique carousel. Here's one of the outer row horses for it.


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Running board scene on the Stein and Goldstein carousel showing a covered bridge. One of the bridges in the park is covered much like this.


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Bunny carrying on through winter in this rounding board scene.


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And here's a squirrel, plus rounding board art of the nearby Elysburg and Shamokin towns.


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That bunny's having a slightly better time of it in this summer scene.


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A sign that explains some of the Stein and Goldstein carousel's history. And, yes, this is a carousel that Knoebels bought in the 40s, then sold off, and then bought again in the 70s.


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The Stein and Goldstein band organ. In the background is the station for the scenic railway.


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Knoebels has also always been a working sawmill and shows off pieces of that history.


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Besides the (newly?) retired 1948 Farmall Model H they have a bunch of carving gear and carved woodpieces on show.


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Woodworks that for some reason I didn't get a close picture of. Maybe we were on the way to the scenic railway.


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I, uh, hope the oak was taken down for reasons besides to show off at Knoebels.


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The ticket booth and the entrance way to the Haunted Mansion.


Trivia: In 1888 tea imports to Britain from India exceeded those from China for the first time. Source: Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire, Roy Moxham.

Currently Reading: Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization, Richard Miles.

This morning instead of a recording about there being no trials for September, the jury duty hotline gave me hold music. Really, really awful hold music, the kind that's tuneless yet off-pitch but also played without any audio fidelity. I'm a forgiving ear. When I complain about the audio quality, you know it's bad. After seven minutes on hold I gave up and called again and got put on hold for another seven minutes. Finally they picked up and I said why I was calling. Oh, there's no jury trials on, don't worry. I confirmed that there was no need for me to call tomorrow. Happy to say there's not.

What I don't know is whether this counts as fulfilling my jury duty obligation so that I'll have the statutory waiting period before they call me again. I would assume it does? But I also don't know why they're sending out summonses like this. Maybe they thought, in late August, that it was plausible things might be operating at something like normal by October? I don't know. Also I don't know what's happening to people who do, after all, have the right to a jury trial. I fear they're being put under a lot of pressure to plea or to accept a bench trial instead.

Meanwhile, remember the Switch? The one we sent in for repairs in July, and again in August, and again in September? There have finally been developments. I'll believe it when I see it, but intend to give you the infuriating story tomorrow.


Looking for story comic plots? Want to know What's Going On In The Amazing Spider-Man? Could Jules Rivera take over Spider-Man too? July - October 2020 in review here. Bonus feature: Betrayal at House on the Hill jokes to amuse me and [personal profile] bunnyhugger!


Now let's get to the part of Knoebels that gave me a theme song for my subject lines here.

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Ah, but the rain did give us a good reason to poke into the Fascination parlor, which we were glad they still had. Not just that [personal profile] bunnyhugger and MWS and I all like Fascination and MWS hadn't been able to play it since Cedar Point got rid of their parlor a decade-plus back.


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Some Fascination tables. You roll a rubber ball over the wonderful arrow there and try to get it in holes that line out a bingo. You compete against everyone in the place, so it can get really fast-paced before you know it.


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Small crowd that afternoon, but enough to play a while at least.


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A pile of books in the corner of the Fascination room. You're urged to make a donation too. I'm assuming that these are free to lend to people staying on the campsite, or maybe to parents who just want to sit still while their kids run around screaming all day.


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Case full of winnable prizes and what I assume is a decommissioned door to the bathrooms.


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The woman running the Fascination game along with information like what the jackpot prize has reached.


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Couple cute little mouse dolls you could get with 35 Fascination tickets, in case anyone ever got that many Fascination tickets.


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And the recent achievements board for Fascination.


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Besides everything else they had this wheel of fortune, although we did not see it used for anything and I don't know if it's still used.


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The entrance to the Haunted Mansion, another dark ride and one that's not included with the wristband. (Makes it too much bother for bored teenagers to re-ride until they figure what stuff they can grab and break.)


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The long sign providing context to explain that the haunted mansion is haunted, and a mansion.


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And say, what is this mysterious carved horse with a 13 X painted on its back? What could that ever signify?


Trivia: The first fifty adding machines produced by the American Arithmometer Company in 1889 did not work, and needed to be recalled. They calculated differently depending on how hard the handle was pulled. Source: The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting, Darren Wershler-Henry.

Currently Reading: Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization, Richard Miles.

Moving on

Oct. 6th, 2020 12:10 am
austin_dern: Inspired by Krazy Kat, of kourse. (Default)

Had my first day of the jury duty obligation. This meant calling between 9:15 and 9:30 am to find out if they needed me downtown at 10:15 am. The scheme is pretty bad and we had thought they were going to change it to the reasonable ``call the night before''. Well, they apparently didn't need me today since the recorded message, through to 9:30, was just that the court was not hearing cases in September and everyone's jury duty obligations were cancelled. Which, all right, but this is not technically speaking September anymore. We will see tomorrow and I'm hoping for the news that there's no cases being heard in October either. But who can say? They need to have trials sometime.


From the pages of my mathematics blog? Using my A to Z Archives: Platonic Solid gets some new attention. Please, enjoy.


How about more Knoebels, then? We get to the last of the non-kiddie roller coasters and then start a second round.

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Black Diamond Mining Company's the indoor dark ride and arguably roller coaster at the back of the park. (I think it's got enough coasting elements). The ride used to be a gold-rush-themed dark ride at Morey's Piers in Wildwood and Knoebels went and saved that too, but rethemed it to the coal-mining industry, including elements of Centralia, which is in the area.


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A train engine that you can just play on. I don't know whether it was originally a working train but it would be very Knoebels if it were.


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Entrance station for the Black Diamond Mining Company ride.


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Back to Phoenix! A view of the spare train, ready for when there's more riders.


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Phoenix returning to the station. The roller coaster's nearly duplicated by Wolverine Wildcat, at Michigan's Adventure, but Wolverine Wildcast doesn't have the second train or switch track and it is, sad to say, considerably less fun. I think it's braking that Michigan's Adventure puts on the first hill.


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A clown cutout which the sign explains was one that used to be put at the Burch Drug Store in Elysburg to announce the weekend's shows.


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Door leading to some employee-access space, along with a little paper sign of Kozmo sitting with the invitation to please not sit on the steps. Also apparently the space is used as a de facto smoking area since they have hte sign explaining where to find the actual smoking areas.


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Line outside the Cosmotron, the indoor Caterpillar ride with the music of ELO. Hey, do those clouds look threatening to you at all?


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So this is what we emerged into. Glad we had already gone on the log flume!


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If you look closely you can work out the line of the building overhang that protected us.


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As the rain recedes, some, [personal profile] bunnyhugger scouts out how bad it would be to get to some new safe point.


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And here's a view of the ticket window where we got our wristbands, as the rain's let up a good bit.


Trivia: By spring 1974, New York City bonds and notes amounted to about 28 percent of all tax-exempt bonded debt in the United States, up from the historic average of about 18 percent. Source: Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics, Kim Phillips-Fein.

Currently Reading: Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization, Richard Miles.

Sunday we had visitors. [personal profile] bunnyhugger's parents came to complete our big exterior household chore, that of re-hanging the flowerbox. Her father had been very good for months about trusting we would be ready in time, but finally asked about it as we were in the middle of priming and painting the area where the box goes. The major work that he wanted to help with was hanging the eight brackets which will hold up our surprisingly heavy flowerbox. Brought his own power drill and everything for it.

So he, really, had it all in hand. I stood by in case I might help, although the only thing I did was mention how the brackets had to be not-quite-uniform since there's this nice spiral decoration welded to the front of the box. I figured he had accounted for that already, but he later said he hadn't.

This took only about an hour's work, and we spent another hour in the backyard, eating potato chips and dip and watching squirrels at work. Also our goldfish. This was surely the last chance [personal profile] bunnyhugger's mother will have to see our garden this year and we were glad for the chance to see that. And then, almost before we knew what had happened, they were packing up everything and leaving.

To be done sometime soon, when other chores and weather permit: re-filling the flowerbox. To save weight and improve drainage [personal profile] bunnyhugger got a box of foam peanuts that'll serve as base. Amazon shipped this bag of foam peanuts inside a box protected by bags of sealed air. Yes, we took a picture of that. There'll also be topsoil and then the snapdragons that have been chilling in flowerpots all year.

Our neighbors to the north, whom we haven't done more than smile and wave at briefly, set some artificial flowers in their flowerbox. This has inspired [personal profile] bunnyhugger for what to do in the depths of winter when the snapdragons are done and it otherwise just has snow in there. So we owe them some thanks.


Now back to Knoebels, July 2019, and the important thing: their pinball machine.

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Oh, and here's the redemption counter. I want to say it's in the Fascination parlor but it's not surrounded by pictures of Fascination games so maybe this is just another redemption counter.


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Some of their games! So this is all impressive not just because they had replaced nearly all the games from when we were there last, and replaced them with really good modern tables. But, like, the Game of Thrones here? They had installed the new code update which was less than a week old at that point. That's alert, active maintenance.


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More pinball in saloon, eh? We'll just see about that!


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Another bit showing how they care: most pinball games from the 90s on let the operator set messages like this, although it's a pain. So, they bothered! It's worth it to them.


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Performance venue, that looks like it's set up for a magician and is getting ready for a band. Part of our search for other pinball in the saloon.


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Ah, more pinball indeed! They've got a Twilight Zone and that is an all-time classic game, so, good choice on their part.


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[personal profile] bunnyhugger playing a bit of Lite-A-Line, another bingo-style roll-a-ball game that feels close to Fascination but can be played solo.


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Back to rides! Operator sitting up and setting the brass ring machine for the merry-go-round. It's a long slot that you drop rings into, one of them brass for some lucky outer-row rider.


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One of the band organs set up by the merry-go-round. I don't think the figures move but could be misremembering.


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Nice little motion shot of the merry-go-round.


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Nice little motionless shot of the merry-go-round.


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A sign explains one of the other band organs and how it was previously at Clementon Lake Park out in New Jersey. We agreed we needed to get back to Clementon when we saw this, but Clementon announced at the end of 2019 that it would not reopen.


Trivia: Walter Schirra's Mercury capsule was detected from the USS Kearsarge radar station at a range of more than 150 miles, the greatest distance from which American radar had yet detected a reentering spacecraft. Source: Sigma 7: The Six Mercury Orbits of Walter M Schirra Jr, Colin Burgess.

Currently Reading: Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization, Richard Miles.

We walked from our house to the zoo, something that took a little longer than I expected, in part because we stopped to watch a freight train going under the road's bridge. It was our first visit to the zoo outside winter in a couple years. Unfortunately we couldn't get into the gift shop. Last time we visited they had a nice purse but it was right before Christmas. This time, given occupancy limits, there was a line literally out the door and several people deep. We thought we might get back later and of course they closed the gift shop before we did. There's free admission non-holiday Mondays before noon, so we could check the gift shop then, but she's also teaching Monday mornings.

The zoo turned 100 years old this year and so had a string of centennial signs. These put out some of the zoo's history and evolution. It started as a gift of some of the rich people in town, albeit with the provision that a trolly line be run out to the cemetery. And it started with what almost sound like ``the animals that happened to be on the grounds when we opened'', but that they said were gifts of a bear, a deer, a pair of raccoons. Also some elk.

For the Halloween season the zoo was decorated with, you know, comical gravestones and skeletons peeking around and giant spiderwebs. For the pandemic, the zoo was bisected, with chains and temporary partitions and other things to give the place a clear orientation and path. It wasn't far off the path we normally walk for the holiday lights, although part of me was bothered that it was pressed upon me. There were also a couple spots labelled the shortcut to the front of the zoo, or where to go to take another orbit around the park.

Also, it was kind of a busy day. Maybe not so busy as would normally be for a sunny, warm Saturday in late September but, really we would have been more comfortable going mid-week. There were a lot of people and while they never got close to us, it's still a lot of people. Also a couple areas were signed 'One Family At A Time' and people were not good about respecting that. At least once a family went ahead of us, too; I don't know if they didn't realize we were waiting, or didn't know what we were waiting for, or if they just didn't register that two people without a child were a family.

None of the indoor enclosures, the ones that have animals in December, were open. But then animals were out and on display, and since we were there in daylight, we could actually see the otters or the grey wolves clearly for the first time in ages. Also seen for the first time: Jaali, their baby black rhinoceros. He was born Christmas Eve last year, and was just about ready to be seen by the public when the pandemic started.

We got some nice views, for example, of the kangaroos; they have a couple red kangaroos, grey kangaroo, and wallabies. Plus some emus who hogged the front of the enclosure by the window. The red pandas were looking in good shape too. They also had the meerkats and banded mongooses and porcupines, in a couple enclosures that the centennial signs mentioned were built by the WPA and while seen as progressive for 1938 were now understood to be too small and not well-designed for most animals. Could be worse; they had pictures of some 1960-era enclosures that were just big rectangular concrete boxes, easy to clean but surely a nightmare for the bears and other large animals stuffed into them.

We spent more time than I expected in the farmyard exhibit, in good times the petting zoo, watching animals very like what we'd have seen at the petting zoos in an amusement park. Particularly they had a pair of Flemish giant rabbits, both with enormous dewlaps. This suggests they're both female, so, neat that they've got female rabbits together who like one another. There was also a rooster hanging around and we wondered what his deal was. He hopped up the fence and over to the adjacent enclosure, one with many more chickens and goats and whatnot, so I guess he just comes over and visits the rabbits when he's had enough of the local politicking.

We did look over the tiger and the lion enclosures and notice, particularly, the very steep drop in front. We wondered if in the past there might have been water at the bottom of the enclosure, maybe to make it safe to have an open-air viewing patio, rather that one protected by plexiglass walls.

The last thing we really saw were the spider monkeys, taking their feast of lettuce off to eat. This was fine enough to watch, but the kid in another family came over and declared they were boring, not even doing anything cute. Fun to hear. A bit later we overheard (the same?) kid explaining bat bites to their adult, that how a bat doesn't really want to bite you and if it does it's by mistake or maybe trying to be a friend. So [personal profile] bunnyhugger had the honestly winning idea that zoos should sell an audio tour guide to their zoo, animals as explained by enthusiastic kids. If you're telling me you wouldn't pay six bucks to listen to eight-year-olds say everything they could think of about wallaby psychology, you're fibbing.

Our reservation time of 2:30 would give us two and a half hours before the park 'closed', which was just no longer admitting people; they wouldn't kick anyone out for another hour. We had finished a full circuit of the zoo by about 5:30 and, really, we could have used another two hours or so. We're like that. Might be worth making another trip sometime before the weather turns nasty.

On the way back we passed a house that already had a pumpkin, bale of hay, and a signpost for 'Spooky Street' and 'Ghoulish Garden' and 'Haunted House' and all that. Watching over all this was a mostly black cat who watched us with withering contempt. Nice to see a place getting so into the spirit.


So we'd gotten to the wooden roller coasters of Knoebels. What was next?

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The lemon chill stand! It's another great bit of coffee-pot architecture and a reminder that Roller Coaster Tycoon can happen in the real world.


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Somewhere along the way Knoebels snagged a basket from True Value hardware.


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And here's a look at Impulse, and particularly its lift hill.


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Approaching Impulse. In the backround you can see the ski lift chairs that lead somewhere we will never know as [personal profile] bunnyhugger is not a ski lift sort of rider.


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The arch leading into Impulse's queue.


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Kozmo's Kurves is the roller coaster in the background. It's the kiddie coaster, nothing too intense, but someone lost their hat. And there's the Motor Boats ride through a channel underneath it, which is a lovely little ride.


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Kozmo's Kurves and the Motor Boats ride going past together.


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Kozmo's Kurves train and a high-water mark for the 2011 flood, the one that (if I have it right) gave us Dexter Raccoon's backstory.


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An Eyerly Roll-O-Plane. The once-common fairground ride only has a few instances left; one of the others was at Lakeside in Denver. There's one at Sylvan Beach Amusement Park, which we had been thinking about visiting this year.


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We sat down a while to get something to drink and who went by but Kozmo! He was strapped into the back of this cart to go off to some encounter; we don't know where. This was the best view I got of him.


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Another explanatory park, here for an ice-cream stand that goes back to before the Marshall Plan was a thing.


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A park memorial to World War II.


Trivia: A West German joke after the launch of Sputnik was to call the American Vanguard satellite ``Spaetnik'', ``spaet'' meaning ``late''. Source: Project Vanguard: The NASA History, Constance McLaughlin Green, Milton Lomask. NASA SP-4204.

Currently Reading: The Secret History of the Jersey Devil: How Quakers, Hucksters, and Benjamin Franklin Created A Monster, Brian Regal, Frank J Esposito.

PS: Using my A to Z Archives: Proper, a quick useful word and a surprisingly short essay for me.

On that day

Oct. 2nd, 2020 12:10 am
austin_dern: Inspired by Krazy Kat, of kourse. (Default)

How's my humor blog looking? Pretty good considering that my mathematics blog ate up like every bit of my thinking energy this week, really. Run the past week have been:


Speaking of my mathematics blog. On it I ran My All 2020 Mathematics A to Z: Permutation, a day later than I'd have liked, but still, somehow still two thousand words. That's over six thousand words on my mathematics blog this week so I'm doing a great job keeping my writing to a reasonable workload here.


Now to Knoebels's other impressive and amazing roller coaster semi-rescues, as seen in July of 2019.

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Crossing over one of the creeks within Knoebels. There are reasons the park floods every eighteen weeks.


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And here's Twister, a near-mirror copy of the Mister Twister roller coaster at the original Elitch Gardens in Denver. And why did Knoebels decide to recreate a roller coaster beloved by the people of a city 1,600 miles due west on I-80? ... Anyway, so Knoebels, you know?


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The ride-height sign for Twister, showing off Kozmo all dressed for his day-job work as a home contractor.


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The Golden Bolt, a piece of the original Mister Twister brought over to give the new roller coaster historic continuity. The installation date of the 9th of October, 1999, puts it a couple months after the ride opened, the 24th of July that year. Mister Twister had closed the 1st of October, 1994, and was torn down in January 1999.


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Exit path from Twister. Also someone was sitting underneath that sign on the left.


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Another piece of the original Mister Twister on display.


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Launch station, along with some decorations hung for the coaster's birthday year and it just now struck me we were there not a week past its 20th birthday.


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Looking out from the front of the train. There's a nice little rolling exit for the train.


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And the roller coaster has my all-time favorite kind of loading station: curved.


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Swans hanging around in the creek outside the roller coaster and separating it from the main body of the park.


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The Crystal Pool, in heavy use. The swimming pool was one of the first amusement-type features that lead Knoebels from being a campground to being an amusement park.


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Here we get the pool explained. Opened 1926 and with a filter system added in 1933, so just think how dismal the water must have been.


Trivia: In Edmond Halley's 1678 Catalogue of the Southern Stars he created a constellation, Robur Carolina, referring to the oak tree in which Charles hid after the Battle of Worcester. King Charles in turn asked Oxford to give Halley his degree. Oxford did. Source: Compass: A Story of Exploration and Innovation, Alan Gurney.

Currently Reading: The Secret History of the Jersey Devil: How Quakers, Hucksters, and Benjamin Franklin Created A Monster, Brian Regal, Frank J Esposito.

My birthday started with very gently driving [personal profile] bunnyhugger crazy. This is because I figured to save opening my presents for later, and she wanted me to see her gifts to me sooner. But I'm the waiting type and she accepts that. I did open cards, from her and her parents and my parents. And talked to my father on the phone. My mother was out (she's running a campaign for a Democrat in South Carolina, and feeling that it's less dire than you'd think). She would call later, just after we'd gotten back from things. All my family's doing basically fine, is the big news and comfortable lack of news.

Our plan for the day was to go to the Potter Park Zoo. It's in town, it's in comfortable walking distance, and it's all outdoors (now, anyway; all the indoor exhibits are closed for the pandemic) so it seemed like the best low-risk thing we could go and do, other than go to a drive-in. We didn't know of any drive-ins with a show we were interested in. It turns out the Capri, down in Coldwater, was showing a double-feature of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Had we known, that might have changed our plans. I mean, yes, the audience to that double feature would have been insufferable, but since we'd be in my car, we would never have to know. Except getting popcorn between the pictures.

The downside is the zoo set up arrival-time reservations. Otherwise we'd just drift in when we felt like. But we also wanted to get to Bake-N-Cakes to get some cupcakes, and it was either get there before we went to the zoo or get there between the zoo's closing and the bakery's closing. Before going to the zoo seemed better. We had less time to just browse at Bake-N-Cakes than we'd have done in normal circumstances, but, these aren't circumstances to linger in a shop in. It was the first time we've been there, or really to any food place that isn't a grocery or a drive-in concession stand since the pandemic.

So we got cupcakes for later, and we got to the zoo. More on that to come.


Now let's return to Knoebels Amusement Park, in July of 2019, and the many wonderful sights of a great place.

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A real actual North Pole, covered in ice, outside the Christmas Cottage.


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And here's Phoenix, a regular visitor atop the list of all-time great wooden roller coasters. The name alludes to how the ride was moved from Texas and rebuilt, rather than lost to the ages.


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Ticket station in front of Phoenix. Dexter Raccoon and Kozmo Chipmunk (their main mascot) put in appearances.


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In the roller coaster's original location, Playland Park in San Antonio, Texas, it was known as Rocket and the park respects that history. Also, told you this is always one of the top wooden roller coasters out there. Phoenix would win Best Wooden Coaster Golden Ticket for 2019, too.


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You know these Northeast Pennsylvania people, they love their long-running American-Cornball story comics!


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Tumbling Timbers was the park's new ride for 2019, and was the first thing we rode besides roller coasters. It's like a very tight-radius Tiki Twirl and between that, the brutal direct sunlight, and that we hadn't eaten yet we were on the brink of nausea.


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So we went to the International Food Court. I don't remember the signs for the foods before but, like, what self-respecting raccoon wouldn't be up for being grabbed by a giant superpowered sandwich? (Knoebels would win a 2019 Golden Ticket for Best Food.)


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I like the three-dimensional sign for the chicken here even if it is yet another example of the suicidal food mascot.


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So somehow Knoebels has mascot lore and in it, Dexter, wanting to help and making a mess of things, turned out to be a great chef and that's I believe what they're going for with this three-dimensional sign.


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One of Knoebels's several band organs, this one not even attached to a particular ride.


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Hey, a Wurlitzer from North Tonawanda, New York! We know something about those now!


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Knoebels is also a campground and quite popular for it, and it would be pretty nice to just walk over from your tent or RV to the roller coasters and back.


Trivia: Babylonian superstition held that the 7th, 14th, 21st, and 28th days of any month were unlucky, though the 20th day of any month --- the ``49th day'' of the previous month --- was lucky. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.

Currently Reading: The Secret History of the Jersey Devil: How Quakers, Hucksters, and Benjamin Franklin Created A Monster, Brian Regal, Frank J Esposito.

PS: Another person's words about Otto Neugebauer, a quick heads-up about a person acting in admirable ways. To mention the Babylonians; a lot of what we know about Babylonian math we can thank Neugebauer for.

So the time I needed to write, particularly, the Playful Math Education Blog Carnival just ate up my opportunity to write up what we did on my birthday, and the day after. I'll get up to speed again. It'll just be a little while.

One of the things eating my time: explaining What's Going On In Judge Parker? Did Judge Parker just reset everything? July - September 2020 in plot recaps of a comic strip that seems sometimes like it might be about something other than what is literally shown on the page. I don't know how to describe this strange thing it's doing where things seem to represent other things. Weird, I know.


Well, so on to pictures! And the thing at the end of our long journey in Pennsylvania ... what could it be, what could it be ...

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Here's what we went on I-80 for: Knoebels Amusement Park!


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Impulse, their newest, and non-kiddie steel, roller coaster.


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So we'd wondered about the deal with The Loaf here, and what this bread-shaped building is even for. It's for catering, turns out. We love its coffee-pot architecture though.


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And there's the gate sign, far inside the park, that we assume was at the edge of the park at some point in the past.


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And here's the magic about to happen: buy tickets and get rides a la carte, or buy a wristband for unlimited riding?


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Wristband. Also I'd forgotten that the wristband is accompanied by a hand stamp; for our visit, the word is HAPPY.


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Our first ride, and the thing we got there first thing in the day for: Flying Turns! Also, note Dexter Raccoon over on the sign urging folks to Swim!


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A moment of warning. Each car of the bobsled-style Flying Turns can take only 400 pounds. [personal profile] bunnyhugger and I fit together in one car when we visited in 2014. Would we make it this time?


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Flying Turns has an airplane theme; the Gates correspond to the front, center, and rear cars of the train.


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And there's the view of the station, from after departing the ride. [personal profile] bunnyhugger and I did not make it in a single car, even putting down our cameras to shave a few ounces. But we've worked it out and we must have been just barely over, so apparently this 400 pound limit is a hard limit. Also, with the weight I've lost during the pandemic, we will have no trouble riding together when next we visit.


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Flying Turns and a view of the Looper, to the side. This is the only known instance of the once-common ride still running, which is neat since Flying Turns is the only instance of that class of roller coaster that still exists.


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Knoebels spent a long time and a lot of money making Flying Turns work and so I don't fault them turning that saga into a point of pride.


Trivia: Only 128 individuals bought more than 100 shares in Ferdinand de Lessep's Suez Canal Company. Only sixty bought more than 150 shares. Source: Parting the Desert: The Creation of the Suez Canal, Zachary Karabell.

Currently Reading: The Secret History of the Jersey Devil: How Quakers, Hucksters, and Benjamin Franklin Created A Monster, Brian Regal, Frank J Esposito.

The exciting day is here! I published Playful Math Education Blog Carnival 141, bringing together dozens of links and over four thousand words! Plus a lot of amusement park photographs, many of them ones you have not seen here before! Please read and enjoy.


Since that was, as I say, four thousand words I didn't have time to write up what we did this weekend. That'll come tomorrow and later. Here, let's have some pictures. Not too many. But from July 2019. It's a grab bag thematically but, you know? You'll probably follow well enough.

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From a night at Marvin's Marvellous Mechanical Museum: their King Cobra striking machine was having a bit of a rough time.


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I don't know why I photographed this moment of a Revenge From Mars pinball game. I suspect because this --- Robo-Lincoln about to punch the giant Martian so hard he soars into a flying saucer and explodes it --- is [personal profile] bunnyhugger's favorite moment in the game.


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A last look at our old fridge, and how we arranged magnets on it, before its replacement.


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The lower door of the fridge had less stuff on it because of that incident a few months before when the door kind of fell off.


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Our new fridge, at the neatest it will ever be for the rest of its existence.


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Ooh so now finally [personal profile] bunnyhugger likes the Grauniads of the Galaxy pinball. Not depicted: how I couldn't get anywhere near a decent score however many times we played.


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Wooden figure ``Dedicated to the American Indians (Seneca)'' and carved by Peter Toth in the early 70s. This was donated to this one rest area in Pennsylvania. Toth did a bunch of these and scattered them around the country. Lansing had one of Toth's carvings at the Potter Park Zoo. Toth reappeared a couple decades after the donation to do some repair work on Lansing's, but unfortunately it continued to decay and had to be taken off display like a decade ago. I have no idea where that one's gone, or why this one in Sharon, Pennsylvania, at a rest stop is in such good shape.


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Proud plaque at the Sharon rest area celebrating the opening of I-80 back in 1970.


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Lower-key plaque commemorating the building of I-80 in Pennsylvania. Dedicated the same day as that other plaque so I wonder if they felt sheepish about how much quieter this plaque was.


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Bear figures at the Sharon rest area on I-80 that have had some better days.


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Oh gads what kind of stupid logic puzzle is this, rest area vending machine? I just want a huge bag of Combos.


And now what kind of weird thing could be going on that we'd be driving on I-80 in Pennsylvania? In July? Hmmm ... [ Deep thinking emoji goes here. ]

Trivia: Mission control was surprised by the three-second loss of telemetry when the second stage of the Gemini 1 launch vehicle fired. The loss of signal, caused by a momentary cloud of charged ions around the vehicle, was observed on every Gemini flight afterwards too. Source: Gemini Flies! Unmanned Flights and the First Manned Mission, David J Shayler.

Currently Reading: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, Barbara Kingsolver, with Steven L Hopp, Camille Kingsolver.

Pinburgh's tournament results finally posted! The tournament was the first weekend in August and ordinarily, the International Flipper Pinball Association expects tournaments to submit their results within one month or else they don't count. With a thousand players converging from the whole world they ... uh ... get exceptions. Also they have a very complicated database situation since apparently pinball people are lousy at ``give us your name and your IFPA player number''. Anyway, my finish, 672nd (of 998), was good for 4.63 IFPA rating points and between that and my Intergalactic finish, 506th (of 560), my world ranking dropped from 888th (you see why I remember that) to 900th. Also I'm the 907th-highest-rated player in the state of Pennsylvania. Tough state.

[profile] bunny_hugger's finish of 335th in Pinburgh and 359th in the Intergalactic were good for 9.40 and 2.96 points respectively. This jumped her from around 1250th in the world to 1152nd. She's 424th-ranked in Pennsylvania, too. She's risen to being the 44th-highest-ranked female player in open tournaments, too. (She's only 211th in women's-only tournaments, although the Women's International Pinball Tournament from ReplayFX weekend hasn't posted as of the moment when I write this.)

The results posting, even late, affects the value brought to all the tournaments played in August and September. This, particularly, made every tournament that AJR played in far more valuable: his third-place finish earned him over a hundred IFPA points. Luckily for us, the higher value of all his tournaments, and thus greater ranking earned by everyone who played in tournaments with him didn't upset our state positions. I'm not sure if it did make any changes. It didn't help AJR in Michigan, as only events played in Michigan directly affect Michigan's ranking. But he is now the 21st-ranked player in Pennsylvania, with his exactly one tournament played there. Keith Elwin, who also has only one Pennsylvania tournament, but it was winning Pinburgh, is now ranked 14th in that state.


And hey, here's a good chance to share this picture.

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Possibly the most screwed-up place I've ever seen a pinball get caught. During a particularly frantic multiball this pinball got trapped inside the kicker. Getting the ball trapped here has to have been just the wildest stroke of timing luck.


Trivia: During January 1864 three slaves escaped Jefferson Davis's bondage. The last also set fire to the executive mansion. Davis blamed all this on bribes from United States secret agents. Source: The Confederate Nation, 1861 - 1865, Emory M Thomas.

Currently Reading: Images of America: Seabreeze Park, Jim Futrell.

PS: Exploiting My A-to-Z Archives: Hat, a terminology post. I love these.


PS: So hey, how about pictures from the day we brought Sunshine home and into our lives?

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Sunshine hopping into the hutch, looking around to see if there's any good stuff here. The messy papers out front of the hutch are puppy pads, which we were using in case her litter habits weren't ready. Her litter habits turn out to be quite good, but we do have these pads underneath the throw rug just in case.


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Sunshine came quick to the job of sniffing and chinning stuff, ways that rabbits use to declare they own stuff. And why was she so eager to demonstrate her claim?


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Here's why. We still had Penelope, and we were still telling ourselves we were merely fostering her then.

MWS was happy to use his car for our Knoebels/Altoona/Pinburgh trip. He was, for some reason, reluctant to just stay in a hotel Sunday night and drive home Monday. He had the idea that hey, even if we left Kennywood at like 10 or 11 and that meant he drove straight home --- well, without traffic, that'd mean he'd get home at like four or five a.m. He's done that before, staying in Lansing or Grand Rapids until closing time and hanging out with people after. [profile] bunny_hugger and I found this prospect horrifying. But he held firm to the idea.

Finally I told him that I --- always the first volunteer to drive when he felt tired --- did not believe that I could safely drive on this plan. Not after getting up around 9 am, checking out, spending until 5 pm at ReplayFX, and then spending hours at Kennywood. For a brief while he proposed that he could drive us all to his house, and we'd just sleep in his guest room until [profile] bunny_hugger and I could make our additional one-hour drive home. But shortly before Pinburgh he relented, agreeing to stay in a hotel Sunday night. But somewhere outside Pittsburgh, so it would be cheaper. This seemed fair enough to us.

He nevertheless did all the driving, taking us the roughly two hours to somewhere outside Cleveland before stopping at a Red Roof Inn he'd booked using some kind of app. This would give us somewhere to sleep until either 11 am or noon; we weren't sure what the check-out time was. We aimed for 11 am, though, and were a little late getting out, to the consternation of housekeeping. I told the housekeeping person when we were actually finally done moving stuff out to the car.

From here the drive home was, well, ordinary. Just the Ohio Turnpike, past the Cedar Point exits --- [profile] bunny_hugger's and my season passes whimpered a bit as we drove past, but MWS didn't have a pass and it would be obscene to pay a day's admission for, like, two hours --- and finally stopping at a rest area with a burritos place. The cashier didn't give us sour cream or plastic forks and we couldn't find any among the fixings, so I went back to ask for both. It took some time for me to get a cashier's attention, in part because a big mass of slow-moving, slow-to-decide people had gotten there, and [profile] bunny_hugger was dying from embarrassment waiting for me to get this stuff. This served as a late-ish but welcome lunch, anyway. We never did find any rest areas with pinball.

And, we drove home. To MWS's home, at least, where we arrived in the early afternoon to the delight of his dogs. His more shy dog was glad to see him and rather put off that we were there, but all right. And K was happy to have MWS back too. He was still recovering from the first of two hernia operations and had spent the weekend mostly in the house, wearing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle pajamas.

After a bit of sharing the news of the weekend with K, I collected my own car keys and we loaded up, and drove the hour back to our home. Yes, we hit rush hour, but that's all right. We were home early enough in the evening. The next day we'd collect poor injured Magnum from the pet store, and set up a quarantine tank in the basement for him to continue his recover. And we'd go pick up Sunshine from [profile] bunny_hugger's parents.

Trivia: The HMS Dreadnaught, launched 1906, took a year and a day to build, in top secrecy. Source: To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World, Arthur Herman.

Currently Reading: Little Orphan Annie Volume One: Will Tomorrow Ever Come? The Complete Daily Comics 1924 - 1927, Harold Gray. Editor Dean Mullaney. OK, seriously, Warbucks has a couple street toughs come with him to kidnap the world's leading neurological surgeon from Paris in order to help Annie with her circus-acrobatics-accident-caused paralysis. Objectively this is appalling behavior but it's also kinda awesome. Like, it's not even subtle; his thugs even say, you know, it's gonna be real bad if Annie doesn't walk again, and they keep watching to make sure he doesn't escape. Just, wow.

PS: My 2019 Mathematics A To Z: Category Theory , describing a field of mathematics that's so important it might be all of mathematics.


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Oh. Condemnation sticker posted to the back door; its mate was posted to the front door. We never did learn what exactly the place had failed for but it does all seem pretty serious. Well, the place would stand for about a year, and then the owner demolished the building, figuring that it would sell better in a neighborhood everyone expects to gentrify soon if there weren't a building there. And so a landmark of the town for decades disappeared, sadly. Maybe someday someone will buy the lot. Put up a 24-hour diner there. The area has sore need of one.


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So by Theio's location is this traffic island with a sign welcoming people to the Lansing Eastside. Also it has this little tower, honorees of the Eastside Neighborhood Organizations. When I described this to [profile] bunny_hugger she, who has lived in this area for 21 years and passed this spot an estimated 20,408 times, had no recollection of ever seeing this thing.


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The Welcome to Lansing's Eastside sign in its full glory, with Theio's in the far background. We have a nice, laid-back letter 'd' on the Eastside. Lansing's Eastside is not East Lansing.

We met up with MWS, going to Condado Taco for one last visit. It'd also be a convenient way to spend the hour between the end of ReplayFX and the 6:00 hour when we were sure we'd be able to leave the parking garage without having to pay. We did not meet up with JTK or CVK. To our surprise they had left that morning, just after checking out of their room. The interpretation that MWS had was that their cousin had been quite bored with ReplayFX and longed to go home, and between that and only mild interest in our plans, they decided to take off.

Most of Michigan Pinball has left by this time too. CST, apparently, left so early after not making playoffs that he was able to play a tournament in Jackson, Michigan, that Sunday, which he won. Many others have left too. I last saw ADM on-stage as part of the Intergalactic finals, but otherwise people have just evaporated. All right.

Our evening plans were for a starlite admission to Kennywood. Alas, we wouldn't find anyone who could hook us up with cheap tickets; we had to pay the regular price. And this was, JTK and CVK would say, the deciding factor. They didn't want to spend the cost of the evening ticket for just three-or-so hours in the park. All right, but ... you know, leaving the parking garage before 6 pm implies they paid the full price for having parked downtown since Wednesday. Although since the gate was up maybe they just skipped out and trusted the attendant wouldn't care. Hard to say.

So Kennywood! The good news is it's Kennywood. The bad news is: MWS would not get his 100th roller coaster credit here. Their newest roller coaster, Steel Curtain, was closed. New roller coasters often have some shakedown period where operations need time to sort out. This weekend would be one of them. MWS was still up for going, just disappointed that he couldn't get his milestone here, and didn't know when he would be able to get it.

We would get to Kennywood late enough in the day we could park in the Preferred lot without paying the $7 they'd prefer. There's still free parking, it's just farther away. And we went right away to Sky Rocket, their linear induction motor coaster up front. The ride had been down most of 2018. It had the great indignity of reopening after several months being out of order only to suffer a fire that knocked it out the rest of the season, and I got to wondering if the ride would be taken out. Since it was running, even though there was a bit of a line, we all figured we should ride in case this was our last chance.

We did look at Steel Curtain, which is a giant coaster that dominates the park skyline, and that reaches over the central lagoon. Not enough to obstruct the picture we always take, from the bridge and looking at the Racer and Jackrabbit roller coasters. But still, it changes a lot of what the park looks like.

Kennywood would be open only until 10:00, so we had to get in our must-do things quickly. One was getting the chocolate-dipped square ice cream cones which we've learned were called ``Balboa ice creams'' back when everywhere had them. Getting a ride on the antique carousel, and also pictures that [profile] bunny_hugger could use for her homemade 2020 calendar. She likes to make her own calendar with pictures of the carousels she's ridden the past year. Riding on the Turtle, the tumble bug ride, which we did just far enough into twilight that I saw a small rabbit sitting up and hanging around the grass outside the ride. I did my level best to point out where it was to [profile] bunny_hugger and MWS, but that's a hard thing to point out over the noise of a ride that is, after all, tossing you back and forth as it goes along a waving circular track.

I thought of something MWS had never ridden before. This was the Bayern Kurve, a ride that could arguably be considered a powered roller coaster, although few try to make the argument. It's a bobsled-type ride on an inclined circular track, with cars that tilt down into the curve and, when the ride is at maximum speed, a loud blaring horn. [profile] bunny_hugger and I hadn't been on it in years and both were up for this ride.

This grew into a slight fiasco. We were let on with a bunch of other people, of course, some of them a pack of kids who kept running back and forth trying to get into cars, always whatever one the three of us were heading towards. They also got in three separate cars, though any two of them could have fit together. MWS, [profile] bunny_hugger, and I could not share a car. We looked at trying it and, no. In short, they let enough people in that we couldn't all get on the same ride, so I went back to the queue and waited for the next ride. I liked the Bayern Kurve. I get the sense MWS was not such a fan. But MWS and [profile] bunny_hugger did observe that among the people in the painted-mural backdrop of the ride was The Cat In The Hat. Also Elvis.

The ride we spent the longest time waiting for was the one I insisted on riding. I didn't have to overcome much resistance. It was Jackrabbit, their oldest roller coaster, dating to 1920. This would always be a choice ride, but I had a particular reason to ride it: I was wearing the Jackrabbit T-shirt I'd gotten at Seabreeze. That other Jackrabbit roller coaster ... also dates to 1920. If any of the ride operators noticed they didn't say anything. We did notice that their ride photos booth no longer had the old sample photo, showing an elderly couple who did not seem to be enjoying the ride. Too bad.

When we first arrived at Kennywood I'd seen a train on The Phantom's Revenge, their (previously) tallest steel roller coaster. It seemed to me it spent a very long time at the top of the lift hill before going. And then the trains stopped going on it. The ride wouldn't run nearly the whole evening and so we went a second year without riding it. Also, and I don't know that this is related, but while we were walking past the Bayern Kurve I saw some EMT types rolling a cart in the general direction of Phantom's Revenge. However, they didn't seem to be hurrying, and there is a lot of park that can be described as in the general direction of Phantom's Revenge. That's the roller coaster which has its entrance a crazy distance from the platform and the exit, just like you get when you're an inexperienced Roller Coaster Tycoon builder and forgot you have to have entrance and exit paths.

We did go over to the Steelers Country area, the new themed area of Kennywood, but found it entirely blocked off; it wasn't just Steel Curtain that was closed. So, we got our photo from the bridge of the lake and the Racer and the Jackrabbit roller coasters. And a nighttime ride on the carousel before going to Thunderbolt for a night ride. Thunderbolt does not permit single riders, and with good reason: it has a lot of helixes and turns that would let a lone rider slide dangerously far. Our train was held up dispatching a while before the ride operators could find someone who'd accept the offer of two rides on Thunderbolt if they'd just take one sitting next to MWS. MWS is not such a fearsome person that you should avoid riding next to him on a roller coaster, I do want to make clear.

After that and our turtle ride we have maybe fifteen minutes left in the night. MWS suggested we at least see if Exterminator was still open. Kennywood closes ride queues before the park closes, in the hopes of getting the last riders off pretty close to closing. Exterminator always gets the longest lines in the park; it's a spinning wild mouse coaster, with a fairly low capacity, but the ride, with its dark ride-type attractions is always popular too. So we went over, expecting to be turned away, and found ... huh. The ride was still open. And it had almost nobody in line. We did not walk on to Exterminator --- such a thing is impossible --- but we did wait under five minutes which is incredible. We were not quite the last riders, but we were near that.

And then it was 10:00 and Kennywood was closed, and the rides got around to turning off the lights as we walked the long way back to the front of the park. As always, I leapt up and tapped the giant valentine-heart light over the exit tunnel, the one that says 'Goodnight', and we thought of when we would get back.

This short couple hours at Kennywood was the end of our doing things for the Pinburgh trip.

Trivia: In 1577 English merchant John Hawkins proposed (to the English crown) carrying a cargo including ``40 tonnes of Brazil dye-wood called Pernambuco'', valued at £600 to the Ottoman Sultan. This, and the other £6,400 worth of trade goods, were contraband according to the papacy. Source: Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance, Lisa Jardine.

Currently Reading: Little Orphan Annie Volume One: Will Tomorrow Ever Come? The Complete Daily Comics 1924 - 1927, Harold Gray. Editor Dean Mullaney.

PS: In Our Time podcast repeated its Emmy Noether episode, just a heads-up for people who like pop mathematics.


PPS: More exploring the mystery of why Theio's had closed and when and if it might reopen.

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Peering through the glass windows of Theio's. This is one of the wings where the pinball league afterparty would regularly be, although there would normally be those little baskets with miscellaneous fruit jam flavors in them, and JTK or someone would go roaming across tables looking for the good flavors.


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The other front wing of Theio's, and other place where the pinball league afterparty would be. I believe this is where the league was sitting the time JTK discovered that his eyeglasses had gouged these small ridges in the flesh of his skull. Yes, that's the Muffler Man in the background there.


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Theio's, seen from the outside. Well, you know, that all doesn't really look like too bad a place. Surely the fire department just needs a couple critical, yes, but minor repairs to be done before the place can ... [ To be concluded ]

We had to get up early Sunday. Not to check out, although that would be part of the day. JTV had only reserved his room through Sunday morning, and MWS would need to check out with them all. But Sunday morning was also the Women's International Pinball Tournament, itself a sort of miniature Pinburgh tournament with a hundred people playing five rounds of three games (an electromechanical, a solid state, and a modern game) each. Top 16 finishers go to finals. [profile] bunny_hugger was one of the 128 hopeful competitors.

So she got up earlier than me, and headed off to the tournament. Me, I finished packing up our stuff and rolled it through several blocks of Pittsburgh. I was returning stuff to MWS's car. He had parked in a great little lot next to the Embassy Suites. What's great about this lot is that on Sundays they just give up on collecting the parking charge. I mean, they leave one of the gates open all day. But at 6 pm the lone gate attendant goes home for the day, and there's no replacement until Monday morning. So even the gate attendant will just shrug and tell you yeah, it's OK to leave without paying. I'm not positive it isn't OK to leave before then. It's worth trying anyway. You won't find a better parking deal in town. Remarkably, our stuff --- with one rolling suitcase, two laptop bags, and a cooler bag --- packed extremely well into a transportable whole. I'd worried I would need to commandeer a hotel luggage cart and return it before someone noticed but, no, didn't need that. We packed really well.

Also I realized I could just have one more hotel breakfast before returning our keys, and did, eating yet another huge pile of eggs. I stand by this decision.

Between that and photo-taking and respecting the signs warning people not to enter the playing areas I didn't see [profile] bunny_hugger until maybe two rounds had gone. And she was doing ... not bad. Also I did see LE again; at one point she was playing in a group with [profile] bunny_hugger and they too were talking amusement parks. I also saw KEG, formerly of Lansing League, who was in a foul mood that I attributed to Pinburgh or the Women's International going worse than she expected. It was not; she'd had a bad personal matter happen during the weekend and, well, that royally sucks.

[profile] bunny_hugger was sure she was playing worse when I was watching, though. I finally took as the hint for me to go off and sample attractions while she got back to playing. I didn't see many Michigan Pinball people. RLM and MSS briefly as they walked the other direction. ADM, on stage, for the finals of the Intergalactic tournament. Otherwise, I was just enjoying oddball games like the 90s Gottleib Car Hop or the early 90s Gottleib game Cactus Jack's or the early 90s Gottleib game Class of 1812.

So there's these two vending machines in the convention center. They're way off on the end of the building. They almost seem forgotten. They're one of my great secrets since they sell a 20 ounce bottle of soda for $2.00. Inside the convention center there's booths selling pop, but at amusement park prices. If you don't want to go outside and get something, this is the place to go. Whoever runs these machines apparently was not aware that ReplayFX was this weekend, or that the secret of these games was getting out to the world. The machines ran out of pop by Saturday night, and never were restocked. By Sunday the only pop in the machine was this one bottle of Diet Mountain Dew which had, instead of being dispensed, fallen out of the machine's grasp and rolled to the floor of the refrigerated cooler. Dear reader, I was the person who tried to buy that lost pop bottle, ultimately the lone survivor of ReplayFX. Well, lone apart from like three bottles of something called Mountain Dew Ice. The machine was aware of the malfunction and refunded my $2.00.

Also Thursday morning I had taken my morning tea from the hotel and brought it to the convention center. I'd walked around with it until I went to get a soda, and absently left the empty cardboard cup on top of the vending machine and, in the confusion of the failed soda purchase, left the cup there. The cup remained there the rest of the weekend.

In-between rounds of the Women's International Pinball Tournament, when things seemed safe, I went and did something ... dangerous. At least, something unusual for me. I went to one of the techs working the tournament area and, confirming who he was, said, ``Hi. I'm Austin Dern''. You know, just like I was at a furry convention or something.

The guy, Dan, I faintly know because somehow we ended up following each other on Mastodon. I'd gotten to see his excited-and-frantic toots in the weeks before about getting game ready for tournament play and readied for moving and brought to the convention center. And while I'd given him the jokingly useless advice about how to recognize me in the crowd (``bearded guy with a black pinball league t-shirt wearing cargo pants''), this seemed like ... well, as good a chance as there'd ever be to just say hi to a normal person like another normal person, the way normal people do. That went great, and we agreed that it was an amazing amount of work and worth it. He also talked about how Saturday he had gone out repairing machines in the free play area, rather than work on the games in demand for tournament play with the high stress of getting a thing functional again now while finalists are glaring at you. He won't be making that mistake again.

So some more stuff played while I was free and [profile] bunny_hugger was annoyed Funhouse was somehow not the solid state game for the bank it was physically in and Dan got back to tournament game maintenance. The Intergalactic games were now all open, and without queues; I played a couple of tables that I had not had the time for the night before and while I never had a game good enough that I'd have been launched into finals, I probably would have gotten out of the bottom 100. Also I finally learned how to play Xenon. I have since forgotten how to play Xenon.

[profile] bunny_hugger would not make playoff in the Women's International Pinball Tournament. However, she missed by less than she expected: only two more wins over the day and she'd have been in. I still don't know where exactly she finished in the tournament but it's a good showing. And it meant that she would have a couple of hours yet to just hang out and enjoy ReplayFX.

I got in my revenge games on the tables that did me the most harm. Game of Thrones. Miss-O. Simpsons Pinball Party. Oh, that Simpsons. Some games that had spoiled my chances in past years, like Asteroid Annie and the Aliens. Some games that are just gorgeous to look at, like Space Race or Time 2000. Space Race, an electromechanical, I had a fantastic game on, and was more than halfway to rolling it, with a bonus built to its maximum 100,000 ... and double bonus lit ... and when the ball drained, it just never registered. The ball wouldn't catch the sensor that detected drains and it just froze there at the end of a magnificent game. Too bad.

[profile] bunny_hugger and MWS and I gathered together again, this time to find a FunHouse and play it. I'd seen one in the free play area --- the one in the tournament area never did come back on --- and we had our one and only game on this this particular ReplayFX. I had a great game on it too, managing to get two jackpots as I recall; it's spectacular to get one. I did get my name on the high score board, but as it was only position #3, I did not post it to AJG's thread of Pinburgh Grand Champion scores.

And then ... mm. Rock-o-Plane. It was still going. Still running. Who knew when we might see one again? When we might ever run one? [profile] bunny_hugger decided to take the chance, if nothing else to say she had ridden one of these. I went along with her, although in separate seats, per the ride operator's direction. The ride had some fun signs including reprints from a late 40s Popular Mechanics about how rides are designed to be both safe and thrilling.

We both went onto the ride figuring to just let the car ride as a normal Ferris wheel seat, done by not pulling on the lever that locks the car's angle relative to the rotating spoke. I did that for a few circuits and then decided, well, I'll try holding the brake and see what I thought. And that went well; it was pretty fun and if I slid a little bit toward the 'top' of the cage it's not like it did my head any real harm. Eventually I got more adventurous, including doing whole loops locked in place, including one where I was upside-down at the bottom of the ride. And a couple times I held the bar and let go so I would rock around a little, not quite spinning. Only a couple times. I didn't want to make myself sick. We had plenty of ride time, still.

With less than an hour to go I ... got to play an oddball old horse-racing-themed game named Derby Day. Dan had recommended this on Mastodon to anyone at ReplayFX, including a shout-out to me particularly and I was interested but the thing was always going down. The table has, in the backbox, six horses on posts which ratchet from right to left as you hit corresponding targets. If your horse crosses the finish line first, you get a bonanza of points. But the game had gone down a lot over the weekend; horse #3's chain got stuck a lot. Finally one of the techs --- Dan, it transpired --- left instructions about what to do when the game claimed it couldn't start. Here, it was having one of its good working periods, although an elder man was hovering around and playing game after game until I had to just gulp and ask if I could have a turn. He agreed, but did want to ask if I knew just how remarkable the game was. I did very well nearly getting horse #2 to the finish, because I kept trying to shoot for horse #3's targets, so I didn't have a very good game. But I got to play a nice odd old game and that's important.

In the last half-hour of Pinburgh we ... didn't actually have a plan of where to meet up with MWS. So Class of 1812 seemed the natural place to go. I was the one to point out that although the game begs you to play multiball --- the music when you have multiball going is a rendition of the 1812 Overture, done first as regular and then as clucked by chickens --- that's not where the points are. The points are in knocking down the rows of drop targets on the left and right of the playfield. This was such a revelation to MWS, which startled me because I'd have expected him to have noticed this before.

Not that it matters; we'll never play Class of 1812 in a tournament, except if we're very lucky at Pinburgh. We can play it here, and at the VFW Ann Arbor Pinball Hall of Fame, and both places, play for laughs. So these are the laughs we were playing, as 5:00 came to us and ReplayFX closed, ending for the year with the tables being turned off.

Trivia: Among the rights secured by New Jersey's 1776 Constitution was that the estates of suicides were not forfeit; their heirs would inherit as usual. Source: New Jersey From Colony To State, 1609 - 1789, Richard P McCormick.

Currently Reading: Little Orphan Annie Volume One: Will Tomorrow Ever Come? The Complete Daily Comics 1924 - 1927, Harold Gray. Editor Dean Mullaney. The first story with ``Daddy'' Warbucks has him beat up a loan shark that Annie's noticed preying upon a nice person, which, yeah, good for him. Also the first time ``Daddy'' Warbucks disappears it's because he has some business he has to get to in Siberia. Now what would a respectable American arms merchant be doing in Siberia in 1924?

PS: Exploiting My A-To-Z Archives: Benford's Law, the rare mathematics piece that let me talk about my car.


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The Vaguely New England Waterfront lights hanging over each of the booths at Fish and Chips.


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The Pepsi clock was there when [profile] bunny_hugger moved to town. The Daily Specials board ... I'm not sure how far back that goes, but it's a while. Can you spot where they ran out of I's and used a / instead? How about where they turned a W upside-down?


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Sometime in the 80s the place expanded with this glass-lined extension that's attractive but absolutely freezing in the winter. The floor tiling makes pretty clear where the old limits of the establishment were.


Never mind the rest of Michigan Pinball. What did we do Pinburgh Saturday? ... Well, sleep in, for one. Through noon, a much-needed break. We made up for the missed hotel breakfast by teaming up with JTK and CVK for, ultimately, a meal at this fast-Italian/deli place. We'd gone there for Saturday lunch last year too. This time I did not make the foolish mistake of ordering a calzone, so we got to eat in a reasonable time. They also served [profile] bunny_hugger one too many plates of fries --- even the first plate was plenty --- a thing we couldn't account for until another customer went wandering table to table looking for her order of fries. Well, mistakes happen. She didn't mind taking a used plate.

Back at the actual convention we did some browsing around. Some watching of the finals. BIL had already been knocked out of D Division playoffs by the time we got there. The lone FunHouse in tournament play was blocked off, reserved for one of the division finals. This game would frustrate [profile] bunny_hugger: it kept being turned off, or blocked off for special purposes, or sometimes both. The only FunHouse she would play all weekend, on Sunday, was in the free-play area, not one for Pinburgh. We also browsed the vendors tables; there's a lot of people who come to sell vintage video game stuff. If you ever need a program cartridge for the RCA Studio II Home TV Programmer, I know where to go, at least four days of the year. We also looked from afar at an actual fairground ride.

ReplayFX had promised there would be a Ferris wheel in the convention hall this year, and if anyone wanted to buy naming rights they were for sale. Nobody bought naming rights. ReplayFX didn't bring a Ferris wheel anyway. They brought a Rock-O-Plane. It's a fairground ride, first made by the Eyerly Aircraft Company in the late 40s. It resembles a Ferris wheel, with cars going on a vertical wheel. But it's not one. The egg-shaped cages have restraints to hold the rider securely in place. This because the rider can pull a lever inside the car to freeze its position relative to the wheel spoke. This means that the car can roll upside-down as the wheel turns. The rider can relax the lever too, rolling free. As much as they like. [profile] bunny_hugger's never ridden one. I haven't either, to my recollection. It seems ... oh, boy, that's an intimidating ride. We're used to going upside-down in roller coasters, but that's done at speed, inertia guaranteeing our place in the seats. Here, only the padded bars can hold you. We don't ride. Not now, anyway.

We have a pinball tournament to play. ReplayFX hosts a side tournament, the Intergalactic Pinball Tournament. This is Herb-style: you join, you get ten entries to play a bank of (this year) twelve games. Your top four finishes give you a tournament ranking. The top forty(?) finishers go on to a finals on Sunday morning. We join.

The thing is, like, everybody else in the world joined. There are long queues for every table. We aren't forced to stick around waiting for our names to be called. The tournament has virtual queues, so you can check on your web browser roughly how long it'll be until you're up. This has us more loosely tethered to the game bank, but still: we can't just go off somewhere and lose ourselves in the scene. We have to come back every half-hour to an hour.

Last year I had one outstandingly good game in the side tournament and then a bunch of mediocre games. This made me the 187th-ranked player of the 416 who played. This time around? No good games; I end up 510th out of around 600 players. [profile] bunny_hugger has a pretty solid game of Bonebusters, in-between its breakdowns, and this launches her to 358th. MWS has some stuff put together on Fireball and Flip Flop, but he still finishes at 290th.

So I think this is going to be my last Intergalactic. It's nice to have a side tournament. And, if you do have one or two good games, you're mightily well-rewarded with International Flipper Pinball Association points. My 2018 showing, which again was based on one killer game, netted me 4.54 points, which is about as good as I can do playing any given pinball league. But the queues are long, and you can't really play any game enough to feel like you have a chance unless you're someone who could make A Division playoffs. ADM, having missed the A Division playoffs, makes it into Intergalactic, for example. But with all the demands, including that you can't just drop in, play some games, and go back to the convention, I don't think it's worth it for me.

There are people in costume. ReplayFX's big cosplay contest is Saturday and we get to see figures like anime character from a series I don't know, character from an RPG I don't know, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Ghostbuster.

I talk some about going out for revenge games on the tables that I lost unfairly on during Pinburgh, but I don't get around to any. I do get some other play in, including a round on Elektra where I follow the insights [profile] bunny_hugger had had, and have a fantastic game. They also have a Genesis, likely the one I had my glorious playoffs series on two years ago. I give this a try and my lone game is magnificent. I get ready the game's ultimate achievement --- unveiling the Metropolis-style Mara robot --- but don't quite do it. Meanwhile [profile] bunny_hugger uses the Super Orbit that's in the Pinburgh banks --- and that I had played --- to work out strategy that she uses on the Intergalactic bank. Not to help her position, though. Her rather good score on Bonebusters, pretty good Space Invaders and Jackbot, and decent Fire! are where she gets her position.

Another piece of what's fun at ReplayFX this year, and that I haven't mentioned explicitly: they have a much better hangout-and-waiting-around area. It has a small bar, yes, and also a bunch of green carpet and lawn chairs and some lawn games. Cornhole and a giant Jenga block set and all. It's swiftly dubbed the Oasis and it's where Michigan Pinball folks have congregated if they want to step away from the tournament play. At one point some kids take the Jenga blocks and start building fortresses and toy cities and such, mixing the blocks up with other giant blocks there for some reason or other. It's a nice little hangout.

We would hang around, dipping in and out of ReplayFX, until about midnight. About 9 we met up with BIL and JDO and a couple other people, and went to a pizza restaurant just across the street from the pierogie place, while trying to watch the A Division finals on people's phones. The pizza was pretty good, although large and pricy; [profile] bunny_hugger and I split a pie and had plenty. Everyone else got a pizza the same size apiece. They must have not eaten so big or late a lunch.

We did leave about midnight. ReplayFX wasn't closed yet; they'd stay open to about 2 am. The Intergalactic tournament wasn't even done either; in fact, none of us had put in all ten games. But we had a commitment Saturday morning.

Trivia: The Port of Singapore Authority's total assets, on its creation in 1964, including apartment complexes, office buildings, docks, and warehouses, were worth less than US$50 million. Source: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, Marc Levinson.

Currently Reading: Little Orphan Annie Volume One: Will Tomorrow Ever Come? The Complete Daily Comics 1924 - 1927, Harold Gray. Editor Dean Mullaney.

Exploiting My A-To-Z Archives: Asymptote, bringing up an old essay I'm really happy with.


PPS: Now some pictures of things that aren't there anymore. In spring 2018 the venerable Fish and Chips restaurant, once an Arthur Treacher's, was closing and we went for a last meal and some pictures of the place.

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Side view of the restaurant and the parking lot. The sign on the right, with the Fish and Chips logo on two sides, would turn but only with the wind, and was restrained by the tree that's grown around it.


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[profile] bunny_hugger enjoying a meal, and cole slaw. The main counter and the menu board and the pumps with tartar sauce are visible behind her.


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Looking up from our booth at the ceiling, which had seen better days. Fish and Chips had been there since the early 70s, and had been an independent concern since the late 80s.

We would get to sleep in Saturday. So would MWS, and so would our would-have-been roommates JTK and CVK. What about other people?

A few Michigan Pinball people made playoffs in their divisions. A good number didn't, though. CST, in A division, finished 70-50 overall and is in 58th place. AJH, also in A, is at 63-57, tied for 148th. His father PH is in the tie for 68th of B division, at 65-55. (One win ahead of Roger Sharpe, ``the man who saved pinball'', and who had a birthday Pinburgh weekend.) GRV, also in B Division, finished 64-56 and tied for 133rd. JDO, whose reservation at the Drury was the one we used, landed in E division, and at 27-33 was in a tie for 141st. KEG, who'd been the only woman in Michigan to out-compete [profile] bunny_hugger until she moved away last year, went 55-65 and finished 184th in the B Division. ADM, in A Division, went 63-57 and is tied for 148th there. I don't know what the whole group has done --- I'm not even sure who the whole group is --- but, you know? There's no doing bad at Pinburgh. There's just not doing as well as you hoped.

And the people who did well, did very well. BIL, one of our roommates at state finals back in January, and (as a schoolteacher) one of the few pinball people [profile] bunny_hugger can commiserate about work with, finished tied for 4th in the D Division. He doesn't just go to finals. He gets two rounds of byes, not having to play before the third round of five. Sad to say that's the only round he plays, losing on a tiebreaker game at the end of the four-game round, and he's at liberty the rest of Saturday.

SJG, the guy whose incredible skills I admired back as an undergraduate at Rutgers, makes playoffs in the B Division, and goes out in the quarterfinals. He's not a Michigan player, though, and if he remembers I exist I shall be most surprised.

And then there's A Division. Three Michigan players have made playoffs. AND, who's by the way hosting the state championship next year, finished 80-40 and is tied for sixth. He gets a one-round bye in the playoffs. AND's son, AJR, finished 85-35, tied for second place at Pinburgh regular play. He gets two rounds of byes. Also getting two rounds of byes: AJG, who at 84-36 tied for fourth place.

Everyone's thrilled for AJR, who's one of those up-and-coming kids. He just started attending Michigan State University. We've been trying to get him to join the Lansing Pinball League, and he protests he doesn't have a car, and nobody can get him to accept that there's a bus that runs right from campus to our league's bar. We did warn, though, that if he wins Pinburgh he's not invited to Lansing League anymore. AJR's the early favorite to win Michigan's state championship in 2020. The very early favorite to win 2021. AND, a past several-times state champion, is popular enough too.

AJG? Well. He's not a universally popular figure, though he, too, is a several-times state champion. He's controversial, to understate. He's had a lot of pointless fights stirring up drama in Michigan Pinball social media groups. He's been caught, if not cheating, at least coming extremely close to the edge. And for no good reason: it's not like he needs that kind of edge to win. He is a really good player. He has uncanny control over where the ball will go. And he has a superhuman ability to find repeatable shots, things that will grind out points as long as he doesn't bobble the ball. He doesn't need to, like, death-save (a forbidden way of shaking a game to return a ball to play) while he thinks nobody's watching.

And. He's been so boastful, so full of himself, for so long, that you'd think he draws a comic strip about a unicorn. The thing is that he is that good. And, since coming to realize that his arrogance has offended a lot of people for no good reason, he's been trying to present himself more kindly. And nobody wants to discourage him from acting in better ways. Even then he mis-steps, unable to avoid the humblebrag. At one point that weekend he posted to Facebook an encouragement for people to stop being shy, post pictures of where they set grand champion scores on Pinburgh tables, like he did, here. He smiles easily now; it's hard not to see Eddie Haskell.

He's boasted in the past about how he'll win Pinburgh. And he's flopped each time. One interpretation of this has been that, well, he doesn't travel. He plays a couple of venues, with the same people, all of whom he considerably outclasses. When he does go to Pinburgh he suddenly plays people who are about as good as him. And then --- faced with the paradox that he has played a game and not won it --- he doesn't know what to do. Doesn't know how to step his play up where it's needed. Still, this time? In ten rounds of Pinburgh he had only one round below .500, and that one was 4-8. And he only has to play three rounds of finals.

Each round is four people playing four games, earning points for each finish, first place taking three points, second place two points, third place one, last place none. Just like the regular days of Pinburgh. Two first-place finishes and anything other than two last-place finishes nearly guarantee you move on. Even weaker finishes can be enough. One can plausibly win a round --- as you'd have to do to win finals --- by finishing in second place in all four games. (Other players would have to split their finishes just right, and you'd still have a playoff game you'd need to win.)

In the ten rounds of Pinburgh play, scored the same way that playoffs are, he's been one of the top two players nine times. He's been the top player six times.

So he might well win Pinburgh, and everyone knows if he does that he will never shut up. And, we have to admit, he'll be right to.

If you want to watch all this, by the way, you can see just over six hours of A Division playoffs on YouTube here. And then The final hour of play is at this link. I recommend skimming around some. But you will see how really, really outstanding players handle the ball, and make it look like they have magical control of their flippers. There is not a thing they do that you can't do too; you need only try.

The first round AJG plays, he takes fourth place on late solid state game F-14 Tomcat, third place on early solid state game Flash gordon, third place on modern game Metallica, and second place on the electromechanical Pro-Football. The two people, of the four playing, with the best record go on to the next round. AJG has the worst record of his quartet. He's knocked out. The rest of us don't have to think how we'd be gracious to a person who would be challenged to handle being a winner graciously.

AND, playing the same games but in a different quartet, takes second place on Metallica. He finishes last on Pro-Football. He wins F-14 Tomcat. He takes third place on Flash Gordon. He finishes third in his quartet, and is also knocked out.

Michigan Pinball has one representative left. AJR finishes in third place on late solid state Funhouse, first place on early solid state Solar Ride, third place on modern game Jack-Bot, and second place on the electromechanical Spanish Eyes. This is strong enough to bring him to semifinals.

In this round he finishes last on Willy Wonka, Jersey Jack's newest game and something barely anyone's touched. He has a first place finish on electromechanical game High Hand. He gets first place on Jurassic Park, a modern game doing service as late solid state. He finishes in last place on Meteor, the early solid state game. This sends him to a tiebreaker, on Pro-Football. This he wins. He's on to finals.

He is, at least right now, one of the four best people in competitive pinball.

Right now, I should say, is like 9 pm. Players had to report at 9:30 am, and the first rounds started at 10 am. There've been breaks during the day, the A Division players getting that sort of consideration. Plus in A Division they take time between plunging balls. But when I played in D Division two years ago, even without breaks, it was like 6 or 7 pm. And these are people who can play even the fast games forever.

AJR's opponents: Keith Elwin (KME), everyone's pick to repeat as winner of Pinburgh and a strong candidate for best pinball player of all time. Cryss Stephens (CDS), who cleans up in Pennsylvania and Ohio and mercifully doesn't come to Michigan to mess up our tournaments anymore. Daniele Celestino Acciari (CEL), an Italian player who's routinely winning stuff like the Dutch PInball Masters or the Danish Pinball Open, and who won the 2017 Word Pinball Championship and the 2018 European Pinball Championship.

First game. Metallica. AJR, the third player, finishes the game with 34,536,550, taking the lead. Keith Elwin takes it back, barely: 35,096,110. CDS finishes third, at 30,479,990. CEL has a relatively weak 16,397,410.

Second game. Pro-Football. KME is the first to play and scores 96,400. AJR has the second game, and scores 51,040. CDS, playing third, just squeaks this out with 52,990. CEL can't be stopped, though, and scores 106,220. AJR has a second place and a last-place finish so far.

Third game. F-14 Tomcat. It's a deeply hard late solid state game. CEL goes first and scores 1,344,480. AJR is the second player; he can't get anything together and scores 906,130. KME, the third player, actually has a good game and scores 4,185,710. CDS wraps it up with 2,917,690. AJR has a second place and two last-place finishes. It's now impossible for AJR to win Pinburgh. He could still take second, though. But with two wins and a second-place finish, Keith Elwin has secured first place in Pinburgh, whatever he does in the last game.

Elwin does not win the final game, Flash Gordon. He's the first player and finishes with 691,840, which is good for second place. CDS, second player, finishes with 459,300. Player three, CEL, finishes with 598,660 points. And AJR ... he scores 725,930, finishing the round with a great first-place showing.

AJR has tied for second place with CEL. They play off on Willy Wonka. CEL scores 217,630. AJR scores 58,840.

Michigan's last representative to Pinburgh comes in third place.

Trivia: Between October 1846 and October 1847, 783½ miles of railway track came into operation in Great Britain. Source: The Age of Paradox: A Biography of England, 1841 - 1851, John W Dodds.

Currently Reading: Pogo Volume 5: Out Of This World At Home, Walt Kelly. Editors Mark Evanier, Eric Reynolds.

PS: How August 2019 Treated My Mathematics Blog, my least mathematical post of the mathematics month. It's also usually one of my best-liked pieces.


PPS: Can you spot which of these pictures of meeting Penelope is maybe the single best narrative photograph I have ever taken?

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Penelope starts to explore her environs and finally holds still long enough for me to get a clear photo. (I'd left the camera's simulated ISO on, like, 80 which is inadequate for our house interior, which gets no light.)


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Penelope really likes being here and is excited to meet us!


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After exploring the hutch she came back out to her wooden tunnel and carrier and other things that smelled of her old home.