austin_dern

My mathematics blog I am still pumping up with reposted material. But I also ran across a couple cute things about arithmetic trivia regarding the number 2022 and you might like that, maybe. Here's some recently-published stuff:

• From my Fourth A-to-Z: Topology
• From my Fifth A-to-Z: Tiling (the first time)
• From my Sixth A-to-Z: Taylor Series
• From my Seventh A-to-Z: Tiling (the accidental remake)
• 78 Pages and More of Arithmetic Trivia About 2022
• From my First A-to-Z: Orthogonal
• From my Second A-to-Z: Orthonormal
• From my Third A-to-Z: Osculating Circle

Back to the tour of the Wonderland of Lights!

Approaching the felines-and-primates house, with this nice outlining to give it shape in the dark.

We went past this festooned tree.

Big mood there, lemur.

And here's a couple of porcupines who were in the house because ?? ???? ????? ??? ?? (the zoo cares not for strict literalism in what's inside their houses) and snuggling.

More of a pair of porcupines enjoying one another's company.

Meanwhile, here's a feline.

Trivia: Public opinion surveys through 1922 and 1923 showed that, should he choose to run for president, Henry Ford would beat any likely opponent. Source: Ford: The Men and the Machine, Robert Lacey. (Warren Harding's death put an end to the Ford-for-President bubble.)

Currently Reading: Miscellaneous comic books sent me by a friend. So there's this Archie comic where an alien device transmogrifies Archie and Reggie into dogs. And they can speak, English to them, but dog-speak to everyone else --- including to one another, because Reggie and Archie don't know how to interpret dog-speak. So that's a twist on the turned-to-animals and the animals-understand-people-but-not-vice-versa gimmick I don't remember seeing before.

I was surprised to be the first kid up Sunday morning too. bunnyhugger's brother had hoped to go visit a friend before heading to the airport and I assumed he'd get up early, shower, and head out. I don't seem to have inconvenienced him, as he got up well after I showered Still I felt a bit guilty when I realized he hadn't gone out yet, until I learned he wouldn't have used the time anyway.

We had breakfast or lunch, a good bit of coffee cake that bunnyhugger's mother was anxious that I should eat. We don't have coffee cake much and it's really nice having some, really. And saw bunnyhugger's brother off to his friend's house. He promised to be back by 1:00 or maybe 1:30 and the consensus among the family was that he would not make even that. Their father wanted them to leave for the Detroit airport by 1 pm at latest, in your classic get-to-the-airport-14-hours-early mode, but 2:00 should have given them reasonable time.

While we packed up and loaded into the car everything we could --- basically everything but Sunshine and the stuff she immediately needed --- 1:00 rolled around and, to a wonder, he called. He was heading out and should be back by 1:30 and he was, or at least was close enough to not be too nerve-wracking. We made final plans for what gifts to send by mail, rather than force him to deal with hauling through security and through the long tiresome path from LaGuardia Airport back to New York City. And bunnyhugger's brother and parents left, leaving us for the last cleaning up.

Mostly, it was putting Sunshine in her carrier, and then cleaning up her area so that it could be returned to the dogs (their night kennels are normally kept in there). Also, bunnyhugger brought one of the kennels up from the basement, an act that somehow earned me thanks for getting that out of the basement. My reputation with her parents is unjustly elevated.

The only real reason we left --- really, the reason we didn't ride with them to the airport --- is that the Potter Park Zoo was having its Wonderland of Lights, the annual show where they decorate all the paths around the zoo. You've been seeing pictures of it here. The show was ending that night, though, to our annoyance; we could swear they've run as late as New Year's before. Maybe they couldn't secure the staffing for one more weekend. So we had to leave, with the promise to come back sometime soon and visit her parents again.

We unpacked everything at home --- Sunshine was so happy to get back to normal. And then studied the poor wounded fish, in the hospital tank. And realized that they were too badly wounded to recover.

On that sadness, after the end of family time, we bundled up --- I put on my long underwear and got my heaviest jacket even though it was only supposed to be about freezing --- and headed to the zoo. While in the parking lot, we got a call from bunnyhugger's brother. He was at the Detroit airport. His flight was cancelled. He was in line, to deal with how he was going to get back to Brooklyn. I asked if we needed to divert to the airport and rescue him; we didn't, not yet.

In the end, he would get a new flight, at Early:25 Monday morning, and they put him up in an airport overnight. Which is better than nothing, although had we known, we'd have been glad to house him overnight in our place. Although then we'd have had to get up at (Early minus three):25 Monday morning so perhaps that's all right-ish.

In the meanwhile, we went to the Wonderland of Lights.

Continue with me on the walk around the Poter Park Zoo's Wonderland of Lights.

Here's the otter tank. We never saw an otter, or hint of otter, but I love the weird solid glowing box it forms against the dark night.

And here's the path just past the otter enclosure. Like I said, we're both sure there were more lights this year even if we can't prove it.

Three very flat, hollow wolves. I think this fixture wasn't lit up last year either.

Trivia: According to his wife, Antoine Lavoisier would wake each morning at six and work on his science until eight. He would resume working on his science at seven in the evening, for three hours. The time in-between would be spent on his professional responsibilities, such as working at the Gunpowder Administration or committees for the Académie des Sciences. Sunday, his jour du bonheur, was set aside for conducting experiments. Source: Mendeleyev's Dream: The Quest fot the Elements, Paul Strathem. (Strathem notes that Lavoisier's schedule can't have been that rigid as we know, for example, how often he would spend nights entertaining other Great Scientists of the Enlightenment.)

Currently Reading: Miscellaneous comic books sent me by a friend. Not sure what's weirder in those Little Archie digests from the 90s, reprinting comics from the 70s: the many references to ``Women's Libbers'' or how everybody speaks of him as ``Little Archie'' even though, in the Little Archie continuity, he's never been any older. I get it if the adults refer to him that way and if his dad's name is also Archie (I don't know and don't have the energy to look it up) but it draws my attention now when his friends, who are all the same age, call him that.

PS: From my Third A-to-Z: Osculating Circle, a term that isn't ortho- to anything for a wonder.

After presents I went upstairs to phone my parents without forcing everyone else to be part of the chat. Last year we'd put together a big family Facetime meeting, but if there were any such this year I didn't hear of it, and neither did my parents. They hadn't yet opened the presents we sent them, so we would have a few days more to worry about whether they'd like any of it. (My mother would talk a good bit about enjoying the presents; my father never mentioned and I need to ask him this weekend.)

We would realize one tradition had been skipped this year: bunnyhugger's mother hadn't made the artichoke dip we usually snack on between opening presents. We had plenty --- more than that, even --- to snack on. Probably it was just the decision we had enough and the kitchen was busy enough and it would demand even more time and energy. But we've been haunted by the fear of everything passing away. I'm sure if we had thought of it at the time her mother would have explained how she didn't have the time to wash all the dishes needed for it and we'd have felt bad for asking.

A tradition we did not skip: watching Alastair Sim in Scrooge. Despite that, though, there was a slipped subsidiary tradition. Whatever the heck we did with the DVD player at Thanksgiving worked, and it played the film in the right aspect ratio. We didn't have to beg her father into changing the aspect ratio, a thing he isn't too sure he knows how to do and proclaims nobody should care about. We could just enjoy the movie and try to convince him it's okay to skip the Patrick MacNee introduction. Convincing him there must be some way to do this took as long as the introduction did.

Dinner would be two Quorn vegetarian hams, picked up by me when I misunderstood what I was supposed to get. I had offered (days before) repeatedly to exchange it and bunnyhugger refused on the hypothesis I'd been to the store enough. Still, it was wonderful, and it would make even better sandwiches in the week after. We got pretty well stuffed. We'd had to skip dessert on Christmas Eve, because we'd had too much. This time we saved a little room at least.

And that room? bunnyhugger's father put it to some of the peppermint ice cream we'd brought from Quality Dairy, the Lansing-area convenience store chain. He had riled up bunnyhugger the night before, saying the carton felt soft as though it had melted some. This is part of a longrunning quarrel in which he microwaves ice cream, to make it easier to scoop and to eat, and refuses to accept that bunnyhugger doesn't like it that way and especially doesn't like when it's been microwaved and refrozen and can tell. We would later learn that yeah, the ice cream had melted a bit; we should've packed more ice in the cooler bag to bring it down.

The rest of us, though? We tried a Yule Log. This is something that my father passed to bunnyhugger last year. It's a 1970s(?) Better Homes and Gardens(?) recipe. My father had gotten it when it was going around as a 70s Unbelievable Food Catastrophe thing. bunnyhugger was curious, though, and determined to give it a try. You've seen the pictures of it the last couple days here. She was able to make it more or less as directed, the biggest replacement being that nobody has two-pound metal coffee cans anymore. And the concoction is ... not bad, really. Not as tangy as you'd think for having that much Miracle Whip. I can't say we've fallen in love with it, but it's not the disaster you're thinking from how it gets presented online.

bunnyhugger's father attempted to negotiate with us just when we'd leave the next morning. The reason for this being they were taking bunnyhugger's brother to the airport and thought it best if we were packed up and gone in time for them to put the dogs in their overnight crates (lest they get into something, like food, that would be dangerous). After some debate we convinced them that we were able to clean the place up and lock it up on our way out. After all, we had their house key. Not stated: we had their housekey because when I went back to our house Christmas Eve, I picked it up, as insurance against their parents locking me out and bunnyhugger not being able to come downstairs and let me in. So the presents thing turned out to pay more dividends.

bunnyhugger, her brother, and I played one more game of Betrayal at the House on the Hill that night. This time we got a haunt that had no ``traitor'', per se, but that could be escaped only if at least one character died. For a while we puttered around all trying to uncover a room also needed to finish the night, and of course, we could not find it for love or money. Finally I realized: well, we also get out if only one character is left alive, so, I turned and went on a killing spree. This allowed me to slay bunnyhugger, and to slay her character, by pointing to one of my item cards and asking, ``Have you met my axe?'' Also I swiped from her character an item she thought useless in defense, because I noticed just what the card said about using it. (You get a bonus if you make a silly noise during your turn, a joke which the game tosses in to a couple items and such.) I was also far ahead of everyone else in using the Secret Stairs to get into the basement, launch an attack, and withdraw to a safer haven.

After all that brilliant play, I lost.

But we got to bed at a reasonable hour.

And one of our after-Christmas traditions is visiting the Potter Park Zoo to see how they've decorated the place for the holidays. We did that this year, too. Here's how it turned out.

The line outside the Potter Park Zoo for the Wonderland of Lights display. It looks like a bit of a queue but it's actually two queues, one for people with reservations (which we didn't know would be needed) (but were free) and one for people without. The 'without' line was shorter, but also was allowed in more rarely.

A fossil sign! The gift shop got renamed to something more generic but we noticed by the door this one mentioning the place's old name of 'Zoovenirs'.

Walking from the gift shop out to the main entranceway and the lighted trees for people entering or leaving the park.

Trivia: 28 bills passed by the Special Session of the 66th Congress became law because President Woodrow Wilson --- recovering form his stroke --- did not act on them within the required ten days. Source: The Year We Had No President, Richard Hansen.

Currently Reading: The Subatomic Monster, Isaac Asimov. Also I know nothing ages quite like pop science writing and I know he was working from the best guess available circa 1981 but it's weird zipping back to a time when there were no known verified exoplanets and so everyone just guessed, what the heck, solar systems will be rocky planets close to the sun, gas giants far off, and pebbles in the remote distance.

PS: From my First A-to-Z: Orthogonal, another cycle of reusing old O's.

I'm liking this low-key air on my humor blog, made possible by having the big pieces be MiSTings I wrote years ago. I'm continuing that. I don't know when I'll get back to writing original stuff. Posted the past week has been mostly me writing about cartoons or comic strips, though. To wit:

• MiSTed: Eating For Death, Part 1 of 2
• 60s Popeye: Coach Popeye, crowding on Gil Thorp by not teaching sports any
• Statistics Saturday: Some Needless Parts of my Brain
• 60s Popeye: Partial Post, featuring alien behavior and a flying saucer which is a good weird one, by the way.
• Tarzan comic strip ending syndication soon, also, Tarzan comic strip hadn’t ended syndication yet and I don't know if the strip will disappear from GoComics. There actually is a sequence I'm hoping to find and save, though.
• What’s Going On In Gasoline Alley? What did happen for Skeezix’s 100th birthday? February – April 2021
• 60s Popeye: Tooth Be Or Not Tooth Be, with extremely little Popeye which is a weird one that I genuinely wonder whether it's from a public service project.
• MiSTed: Eating for Death, Part 2 of 2

Now let's finish off the visit to the Potter Park Zoo's Wonderland of Lights. We did walk another loop around, since we had time, although took fewer pictures. That was more about just appreciating the nice setting.

Elephant fixture that at least a few people have gotten photographs next to.

The path leading back to the front of the zoo.

The trees from up front and the entrance midway.

We went back around. Here in the otter enclosure I noticed ... this strange thing, a volleyball-sized plastic-looking hemisphere with a black dot. Must be some kind of animal-enrichment toy but we didn't see any otters doing anything with it.

Another view of the concession stand.

It was a warm winter, one without a lot of snow. But we did get some snow, and some melting-and-freezing, and that allowed a few gorgeous bits of reflected light here.

The bases of trees wrapped up.

A cute little tree, this for the local airport.

And here more of the paths, with a light tree to the right.

The trees around the entrance midway.

Looking back at the entrance midway and the education building and all, this time at night. A zoo worker was passing out the craft project kits to make an ornament and such.

Looking out of the zoo. It was an overcast night, but didn't get up to snowing, as I remember it.

Trivia: In 1945 H L Mencken wrote that the Franklin Expressway which Robert Moses proposed for Baltimore --- a six-lane, mostly depressed freeway bisecting the city --- would win approval as it had ``everything in its favor [ ... ] including the fact that it is a completely idiotic undertaking''. The project was rejected. Source: The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways, Earl Swift. (It didn't die forever, though; the stretch of US Route 40/former I-170 through the city follows much of the plan. Only a short stretch of it, though; the highway was so unpopular it was never finished.)

Currently Reading: Pogo: Pockets Full of Pie, the Complete Syndicated Comic Strips Volume 7, Walt Kelly. Editors Mark Evanier, Eric Reynolds.

PS: How do I do a matrix in WordPress LaTeX? Seriously, I'd like to know.

Someone mowed part of our lawn the other day. The extension, the maybe four-foot-wide strip of lawn between sidewalk and street. It's an odd gesture, and a kindly meant one. We'd be content with that, apart from the implicit critique of our own lawnmowing. Except that whoever did it mowed down the daffodils bunnyhugger had planted in one corner. The flowers had died off, so it could look like a tall patch of grass. But it's hard not to want to send someone a letter about this.

That someone would probably be the guy who does yardwork for the landlord next door. Who got us worried Monday morning by making some great scraping noise at the side of our house. As best we could tell he was raking up the herb garden bunnyhugger keeps in an otherwise barely-usable three-foot-wide patch of yard. So I put my gaiter on, doubling the fabric over, and went out to ask what the heck was going on.

We already knew the yardwork guy was a loud talker, because we've heard him in the past, from as much as 15 miles away. What we didn't know is he's one of those genial and well-meaning persons who does not know that conversations can stop. He just loops back around to the starting point and goes through it all again. You feel bad for those people, for whom every social interaction ends with someone turning their back and walking away. But then you realize that they have no idea this is rude. They think that's just normal.

Anyway his intention was innocent. The driveway between our houses is sunk in, possibly because it's as much as a hundred years old and drainage on that lot has been a hypothetical matter. A couple months ago he'd put in some small rocks and dirt to try to level it out and keep people from driving over bunnyhugger's herb garden; now he's taking that out and trying something else. He reassured me, at five-minute intervals, that he had no intention of digging up the herbs. And was delighted to learn what was there (some mints, mostly, as they'll grow even in our terrible lighting conditions). And offered, at four-minute intervals, to get whatever herbs we'd like from his supplier. Also mulch, and some wood boards to create a protective fence around it. Also that he liked the day lilies at the end of our house, mentioned at six-minute intervals. And he apologized, at three-minute intervals, for alarming me but he just wanted to do something about the driveway situation and make it safer for our plants and to keep anyone from steering so wide that they'd hit our chimney.

It's hard to dislike someone who's expressing that much concern for you, especially on a continuous loop, and I was able to pull away from the conversation. I did not have the courage, or the opening, to bring up the daffodil.

Today, I mowed the rest of our yard.

Back to the Potter Park Zoo, and its Wonderland of Lights from last December, now.

One of the dentist's trees was decorated with toothbrushes and rolls of floss and plastic retainers and all.

I loved how the lights squeezed tight to the tree illuminated patches of bark.

Coming up on the concessions stand here.

Evidence of free-range wildlife in the zoo.

The big open area outside the concession stand, opposite the WPA-era enclosures.

They had a bunch of fixtures, all on timers, so things kept appearing and disappearing.

We tried to remember whether the lights here were flashing in 2019 and we couldn't figure it out. All my pictures had everything lit up, which is either patience on my part or they weren't flashing for 2019.

One of the WPA-era enclosures. I think this was the one holding meerkats, who're off wherever their winter home is.

Tree illuminated outside the closed-to-the-public bird house.

Normally we'd warm up in here a while. Also they'd have a peacock light fixture in the windows.

Skating bears seen from a great distance away.

I believe these are the same bears seen from a different angle.

Trivia: Harvard Professor John Winthrop's observations of the Transit of 1761, made in St John's, Newfoundland, were the only data for that year's transit from the Americas used in the international scientific observation project. Source: The Long Space Age: The Economic Origins of Space Exploration from Colonial America to the Cold War, Alexander MacDonald.

Currently Reading: Barnaby, Volume 4, Crockett Johnson. Editors Philip Nel, Eric Reynolds. Reading through the appendix that means to explain contemporary references and shaking my head at some of the old-time-radio stuff that's fumbled. Of course, we all have cultural blind spots, but in annotating a strip about stock radio jokes to not note that every comedian around 1948 had a joke about Bing Crosby's horse finally coming in? And they make a wild guess about a bit of eye-dialect where they guess what sure reads to me as Charles Loughton is guessed at being an Eddie ``Rochester'' Anderson bit because ??? ?? ????? ?? ?????? ???? ??.

Our dishwasher seems to be better! The repair guy was out just a little after 5 pm, as promised, and without warning us by calling to say he was on his way. And the problem was a simple one. You know the filter, that lets steam out and such? And that builds up a great terrible mass of black gunk if you go twenty-plus years without cleaning it because you didn't know it was there and needed periodic cleaning? Yeah, so it turns out it builds up a great terrible mass of black gunk if you go twenty-plus years without cleaning it. Water ended up with nowhere to go except out the door. We've done two loads with the dishes that had accumulated since Tuesday and all's dry as should be.

Also the thing I would have least guessed about the pandemic is that we'd have to run a full load of dishes every 38 hours, but that's the world we live in now.

I had a third math piece this week! Reading the Comics, April 1, 2021: Why Is Gunther Taking Algebraic Topology Edition, another essay about a single comic strip and how to make sense of a line that doesn't need to make sense.

And now? The end of my birthday at the Potter Park Zoo, back in September 2020. I hope you've enjoyed seeing animals.

Eagle owl posing for a job as a profile picture or maybe a meme template.

Southern ground hornbill hanging out in, I think, the bongo habitat. Not interested in posing for me.

Spider monkeys, the last animals that we got to before the park closed.

They were having a lunch of heads of lettuce. One of them dropped the head and decided it was too much bother to go down to the ground and recover it just now.

``Tiger Car donated by Williams Auto World'', which answers every question you might have about this figure, right?

Giraffe statues ``may be hot'' which, again, we'll let the ASFR community decide. But also the statues are ``closed'' owing to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Exiting the park. The map kiosk got some extra legs to make it look like a spider. Good luck if you don't like spiders!

Zoo bench sponsored by Theio's Restaurant, the beloved 24-hour not-quite-competent diner that closed several years ago and was demolished by 2019. There'd also been a Theio's bench in the Feline and Primate building, which was closed to the public. I don't know if this is the same bench.

Walking back home. This house was decorated for Halloween already, and this cat was ready to help the atmosphere. Or maybe wait for me to get close enough to slug me.

Trivia: Around 450,000 people died in the Madras famine of 1865-6. Source: Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire, Roy Moxham.

Currently Reading: Thurber: A Biography, Burton Bernstein. Lot of slams on Ohio State University, both as it existed in the 1910s and as it was at time of publication (1975), to the point I kind of wonder if Bernstein was a U of M graduate.

So how is the gauntlet of 2021 treating us? Monday, as we were recovering from the news about our mouse, bunnyhugger discovered the dishwasher was leaking. It looks to my untrained eye like the seal around the door maybe has a hole, and it feels like something that should be easily repaired, but ...

Tuesday morning I called the appliance service place up the street. They took my name and number and said their technician would call back to set up an appointment and see what it needs. We haven't been called back. Wednesday I asked bunnyhugger the name of the appliance service guy she normally uses. They ... were not in the office and would not be until Thursday. All right. We've already got a sink full of dishes --- during quarantine we've been running a full load about every two days --- so this is exciting. Might have to just run a load while regularly changing out towels. This is all great fun. Really, really, really great fun.

On my mathematics blog I ask When is Easter likely to happen? It's a question I answered several years ago, but this is a good time to remind everyone that I did. You're welcome.

With the meerkats and mongooses quite well looked-at let's carry on with the circuit of the Potter Park Zoo.

Another view of those African porcupines, and a chance to see them conferring while looking a bit like comets.

Historical park explaining the Bird and Reptile house.

Actual Bird and and Reptile house, with barriers to close the general public away from it.

An unused enclosure, among the grotto area, that looks great. Seems well-laid out for showing off animals that have to be kept away from the audience.

Peahen storming around, sulking how if peacocks weren't hogging all the attention people would notice how they're beautiful birds too. Look at that iridescent neck.

King Vulture making a goofy face at me.

Historical plaque explaining the old bear moats, which you can see are these giant concrete shoeboxes. They're still visible when walking to the park along Aurelius Road. They'd hosted large carnivores despite being, as you can see, transparently bad places to put animals. I'm shocked they were built in 1961.

Water system designed to help people beat the late-summer heat. It was like 80 degrees, so not ferociously hot but still cozy for late September.

Sneaking up on the Magellanic Penguins, who had only a few representatives out and about.

Couple of the penguins enjoying the relative cool, I assume, of the water.

Plaque that reveals they only started getting docents in to support the park in the late 80s. ... I could imagine myself doing this sort of work, if I were up for being out in public for any length of time.

Dexter cows are shorter than I imagined, and have way longer necks than I would have guessed!

Currently Reading: The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey Into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein.

So we brought our pet mouse back to the vet for a follow-up check on his troubles.

On to happy stuff. More photographs of our Potter Park Zoo visit, back in September 2020.

Phineus, the zoo's black rhinoceros, who came to Lansing in 2017 from the Caldwell Zoo in Texas.

Phineus prowling around while we wondered where the zoo's baby rhino is? There was one born Christmas Eve 2019 and who would have first gone on exhibit in March 2020 had everything suddenly gone off exhibit.

Another historical plaque, this about what the Works Progress Administration did for the park, which was generally to make it much better. Monkey Island, as seen in the photograph, is a decade gone now. I did read in a history of the zoo that next to Monkey Island was a mound on which they housed guinea pigs, a reminder that animals don't have to be big and all that exotic to rate as worthy attractions to the zoo and also that apparently in the 1920s you could just put anything you had hanging around in the Potter Park Zoo.

Like many zoos, Potter Park used to have elephants. And also like many zoos, they finally realized zoos are really bad places to keep elephants. The zoo's last elephant, Tombi, went to Indianapolis where they are hopefully doing a less-bad version of caring for her than Lansing could.

And here's the other black rhinoceroses! The mother, Doppsee, comes from the Sedgwick County Zoo in Kansas. The calf, who didn't have any interest in looking at my camera, is named Jaali,

Jaali means ``powerful'' in Swahili, says the Zoo. It's hard not to notice that a major road not far from the park is Jolly, which gets pronounced the same so far as my ear can tell.

Meerkat doing sentry duty in one of the WPA-designed grotto enclosures.

That sentry meerkat again. Have to admire the persevering nature that after all this time without lions or anything the meerkats are still watching.

Couple off-duty meerkats prowling around the scenery.

Bat-eared fox who's already checked out for the day.

A plaque about the moat exhibits, like the meerkats and bat-eared fox are in. The sign warns they'll be replaced in the ``near future'', although there've been rumors about their imminent replacement for a long while now.

The bat-eared fox is inside there. I think. Turns out this is really good bat-eared fox camouflage; who knew?

Trivia: In August 1979 NASA extended an invitation to Canada to name payload specialist for one seat on the space shuttle. No reply was ever received, apparently as the addressed person (former chair of the federal committee on space John Chapman) unexpectedly died in September. Source: Canadarm and Collaboration: How Canada's Astronauts and Space Robots Explore New Worlds, Elizabeth Howell.

Currently Reading: The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey Into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein.

PS: The 145th Playful Math Education Blog Carnival is posted, and I had nothing to do with it! But, please, enjoy.

bunnyhugger called down to ask if I'd heard the news about Clementon Park. Clementon, in South Jersey, was shuttered without warning near the end of the 2019 season --- on Customer Appreciation Day! --- and never reopened. It got put up for auction this month. I knew of at least one group that wanted to buy it and run it as an amusement park, but that was a slim hope, especially as it was a group of investors who'd only recently come together and who hadn't run parks before.

She said the park was bought and by someone crazy. Guess who?

My thinking: Well, she's not despairing, so that suggests someone who'd run it as a park. Obviously not Six Flags, since they already have Great Adventure in the area. Also likely not Cedar Fair, since they have Dorney Park, a couple hours' hike but still right in the area. Parques Reunidos, who owns Kennywood, Idlewild, and Dutch Wonderland? ... That would be a bit wild but not crazy. Clementon's the sort of small and ill-used park --- with a history; it opened in 1907 and is one of the dozen or so trolley parks still extant --- that they could take over and maybe revive, the way they'd rescued Story Land in New Hampshire. So I thought of who might be crazy and guessed, ``Knoebels?''

The answer was Indiana Beach. Gene Staples, who'd put together the salvage of Indiana Beach from a sudden unexpected closure at the end of 2019, apparently learned of Clementon in February. So put in the high bid, for about US$2.6 million. The plan apparently is to get the water park at least open by Memorial Day and the rest of the park open as practical.

It's awfully hard to not see this as good news. The group at Indiana Beach has only had one season of running a distressed park, but they managed it, and in (I hope) the worst possible conditions to have an amusement park open. This year won't be easy, but it won't be impossible either. And that they're looking to expand already is ... well, this is probably the cheapest you'll be able to buy any amusement park this decade (and I sorely hope that's true). It's got to be very good news for Clementon. It's hard to think of a better buyer without getting into fantasies.

So now I am again more than six months behind real-time in my photographs, although I think that's still closer to current than I have ever been before. From the Potter Park Zoo at the end of September 2020:

Donkey wondering if this was the best use of their time.

And here we see a chicken got into the rabbit enclosure. We did see the chicken going back home across the fence.

Oh, this rabbit's so dainty; look at how elegantly she holds her forepaw while eating.

Oh, also there's other rabbits. Did you see? ... And that's a lot of foot, by the way, on the red-eyed white rabbit.

Grey Flemish Giant (I'm assuming) deciding to rouse herself a little.

That is a lot of dewlap.

(Person blocking off the turtle statue kids could sit on before they get bored with sitting) ``I'm helping!''

Slightly misaligned old sign that would explain something about the name of the African Spurred tortoise if only the bottom slat were nailed in two inches lower down.

A local black squirrel figured out the red panda enclosure's a cozy place to reside too.

And here's a red panda yawning at us all.

Another red panda trying to remember an appointment on the other side of the pen.

Red panda wondering how it's all come to this, though.

Trivia: England's King Charles II said of Thomas Hobbes --- who had taught him --- coming to court, ``Here comes the beare to be bayted!''. Source: Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shapes the Modern World, Amir Alexander. If I'm parsing Alexander's writing and reference correctly this seems to have happened just the once. It's still ... well, funny, but you kind of see why Hobbes was like that, then.

Currently Reading: The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey Into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. Um. So, yeah, did not realize there were people who referred to Quantum Chromodynamics, developed in the late 50s through the 60s, as ``colored physics'' and that this was a name picked by people who never imagined talking to a Black person.

Was this past week a tease of a return to normal activity on my humor blog? If you've added it to your Dreamwidth reading page or to whatever your preferred RSS reader is, you already know the answer! Or you were waiting to see what all I did post in this weekly recap. So here's what it's been.

• MiSTed: The Tale of Fatty Raccoon, Chapter XX and the end of Fatty's main adventures.
• I am saving _Wonder Park_ for a special treat in a short post dumb enough to be a tweet. (See me @Austin_Dern if you'd like more of me, plus commissions of my character.)
• Statistics Saturday: Some imaginary _Star Trek_ movies which is one of those pieces where the list is maybe redundant to the premise.
• 60s Popeye: The Big Sneeze (warning: sneezes not all *that* big) which is all I have to say about these forgotten cartoons for the week, to my surprise too
• In which I apologize for not opening up more which is another short post dumb enough to be a tweet.
• What’s Going On In Spider-Man? When will you stop covering Spider-Man? December 2020 – March 2021 A plot recap. I figure to stop when Rocket Raccoon's story stops, at the end of August.
• If only there were a solution which would not have to make things worse which is another short pos and based on a trivial inconvenience in my life.
• MiSTed: The Tale of Fatty Raccoon, Conclusion in which I spin out a little bit more of Fatty. Alternate title for this: the Raccoonclusion.

Back to the photo roll. Here's photos from my birthday trip to the zoo, six months ago today.

Potter Park Zoo bald eagle not giving me the time of day.

The other bald eagle, though, figures he can take me.

Did I mention it was a month to Halloween and they were decorating? We didn't see it in full Halloween livery (we think), but it was nice seeing some fun being had.

Grey wolf hanging out. We usually only dimly see them, by night, at the Festival of Lights in December.

Grey wolf hanging out on top of a deck.

And here's the grey wolf standing up giving a chance for everyone to study the anatomy of a kind of dull pose.

Red kangaroo who figures that's as close as you need to get, thanks.

This red kangaroo agrees.

Strrrretching with a smaller kangaroo.

Still from a picture of a (Western grey?) kangaroo, having some lunch.

Some more of the kangaroos keeping me at a distance.

Oh! Yipes! Uh ... hello?

Trivia: Between 1939 and 1940 the Soviet Union opened new metallurgical plants at Magnitiogorsk, Kuznetsk, and Nov-Tagil; industrial complexes at Chelyabinsk and Novosibirsk; aluminum works at Volkhov and Dnepropetrovsk; coalfields at Kuznetsk and Karaganda; and an oilfield in the Urals-Volga region. Also thirty chemical plants in the trans-Urals. Source: The Second World War, John Keegan.

Currently Reading: Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear, Jim Steinmeyer. So (in an anecdote that maybe even happened) the magician Edward Victor, finding that the Disappearing Donkey trick failed --- a stagehand had ``fallen asleep'' at the critical moment --- told the audience, ``I promised to show you a disappearing donkey, so, here I go!'' and walked off stage. Great bit, even if it's not true.