austin_dern

So. Despite mild confusion about which station to transfer at, and which direction to take out of the Metro, we got to the Musée des Arts Forains just about on time for our 1 pm tour. There were maybe twenty people in the group with us, apparently about half the size of a normal tour group, which meant that some things would go quicker. The museum is at Les Pavillions de Bercy, a set of buildings that originally warehoused wine (the location was, back then, outside the limits of the City of Paris and so immune to the wine taxes) and that naturally grew open-air cafés and other little amusements. So this is why the buildings are a couple of huge, high-ceilinged spots, with plenty of space for everything inside, and separated by enough space for a modest-sized group to hang out in plenty of space.

We expected a tour something like we might get at the Merry-Go-Round Museum in Sandusky, with polite docents explaining the most interesting pieces. This is not the docent we got. The one we had, a young woman with a name that was ... I don't remember anymore, something archetypically French like ``Marianne'' maybe ... a performer. I'm not sure if she said she was actually a cabaret performer but she had the energy and drive of one, talking with it seemed everyone, encouraging people to call out answers to questions both serious and silly. (The tour was mainly in French, but she broke into English for the handful of people like us who benefitted from that. Also bunnyhugger had been given a laminated booklet, most of which she photographed, explaining the exhibit in English. There were also German and other language versions available.) You might get some of the tone of the place by descriptions of some of the busts of famous figures decorating the outside of one of the buildings. They had, for example, Charles de Gaulle and François Mitterand. Also Jimmy Carter and Mick Jagger. Why? Well, let's move on inside, shall we?

The museum has a number of pieces of amusement and fairground art --- signs, backdrops, figures from rides, that sort of thing. A lot of things that are illuminated. Some that go back a great way, like bagatelle tables that I teased bunnyhugger with by saying at last, we had found pinball! Some go back only to ... within my lifetime, such as the horse-racing midway game they had. This was one of those roll-the-balls-to-make-the-horses-move games, and everybody got a turn, in a couple rounds of trying. The mechanism they had, in lovely shape and well-painted and with all the horses working, dates to the ancient days of the 1970s. bunnyhugger came within a whisker of winning the race, her turn.

Ah, but the real centerpiece here was not the horse-racing game, or the many figures with bootleg Mickey Mouse or Popeye or such. No, the centerpiece was carousels. Three of them, just like Cedar Point. Once was your classic sort of travelling carousel, three horses across, though with some interesting twists, like, one of the non-horse rides was a rowboat that rocks side to side. I'm sorry to say we weren't able to get a ride in that, but kids leapt into the spot and you can't fault them that.

What we expected would be the most interesting was the salon carousel. This is a near-extinct breed of carousel, with mounts resting on the platform instead of suspended by poles from the canopy, and going for ornateness in the design. This despite being a travelling ride, most of the time, itself! In the classic installation the ride would have a facade built around it to look like a salon, the sort of place where you might discuss Impressionism or the Communards or Boulanger. The platform's made to look like marble, and the seats are tastefully overdone, as opposed to the American carousel style of ``stick some more glass jewels on it''. The carousel moves slowly, even by modern standards, but it's a stately sort of slowness, the sort of thing to make you feel like your'e drowsing in luxury, an attitude supported by the music that's got some classical, lullaby feel.

The penultimate attraction and something I'm sure draws private parties all the time was a band organ, one of the huge ones that dominates a room instead of being set out by a carousel to call people to the midway. It was the sort of thing I'd seen at the Speelklok Museum in Utrecht that bunnyhugger has since been sorry she didn't get to see herself. It played a waltz, and at Marianne(?)'s encouragement many people get into the dancing. bunnyhugger asked if I knew how to waltz and I could say what I did know: you and your partner go around in a circle, which itself goes around in a bigger circle. This is true enough, although people who actually know how to waltz also know how to move as a graceful epicycle among the main circle. Well, for only really knowing the waltz from cartoons and this one podcast I didn't embarrass myself. Only bunnyhugger.

The last big exhibit and the one we did not even imagine was there was ...

So, come the late 19th century. You know what's new and stylish and exciting? Bicycles. Not like those boring old horses and donkeys that everyone rides and is bored by. So what would be a great carnival ride? Something you could really take money for? Something where you ride a bicycle. And so this is the result of that thinking: a carousel that's a ring of one- and two-seater bicycles, set in a fixed ring around the center pole. Its power source? The pedalling of the riders.

bunnyhugger had heard of these, even seen a picture of one, ages ago, in one of her books about European amusements. She did not know any still existed. Neither of us imagined we'd ever be at one, or get to ride one.

There were conditions, of course. First, these were fixed-gear single-speed 'bicycles' so if your feet slipped off the pedals you were not to try getting them back on. Just put your feet up on the frame and wait for the ride to end. Also kids, don't try pedalling. Just sit in the passenger seats behind the pedalers. Also, Marianne(?) warned, it would not be comfortable. The seats were, fin-de-siècle style, hard lumps with no give, and the pedals were shiny brass(?) rods with very little footing, closer to what you get if you take the top off a stirrup than anything you'd actually use to bicycle.

It is also loud, sounding much more like thunder when you get it going, which takes less strain than you might expect when everybody's pedalling. And it gets going really fast, even with some people losing their footing and bowing out of the pedalling; the only thing to really slow people down is their exhaustion and their fear of how fast they have got the thing moving. It felt to us like it was going as fast as the Crossroads Village or the Cedar Downs carousels, although maybe that's an illusion created by how much of a hand we have in it. You don't get many amusement park rides that are rider-powered (the museum had a couple Venetian swings, out of service, though, one of the other kinds of rides you can just go on until you or the ride operator lose patience).

I'm sorry only that we were in too small a group for there to be two cycles on the velocipede carousel; I'd have loved to get a movie of the whole process. But surely other tourists have taken videos and put them wherever you get videos online. It is something else.

After this the tour was over. I hung back to get some last pictures of the Popeye and Mickey Mouse bootleg stuff. bunnyhugger (and many of the other people) used the chance to go to the bathroom, a thing I totally missed and would slightly regret, as the Gare de l'Est had pay toilets and we had no coins and weren't going to use credit cards to pee. Sorry to end on such a mundane note but there's only so much interesting to say about thanking Marianne(?) and agreeing it was a fantastic tour.

And now at last, another end, this one of the Jackson County Fair pictures! Or is it?

I have no explanation for this elephant.

The pink elephant, that I can explain.

Green I don't remember from Dumbo.

This time I noticed there's several models of Timothy Q Mouse and they rotate around semi-freely. You can see two of them in this shot.

Elephant making sure everybody sees how Timothy hasn't got pants.

And one of the crows asking, basically, Mmmmmmmmyes?

Trivia: Coleco paid Cinematronics two million dollars for the home rights to the Dragon's Lair video game. Source: The Ultimate History of Video Games, Steven L Kent.

Currently Reading: The Invention Of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America, Steven Johnson.

PS: Don't you want to know What’s Going On In The Phantom (Sundays)? What’s this B-17 crash doing? March – June 2025 gets explained to you in fewer words than it took to read this here.

We had an afternoon flight out of Detroit so we got the rare treat of being able to sleep to a roughly normal hour, and even to eat lunch at home before setting out. The flip side of this is it was a redeye into Paris, so we'd be arriving about 8 am local time or as our bodies knew it, 2 am. And this bothered me because I was sure it was only a five-hour difference between Eastern Time and Paris Time; after all Paris is just about the same longitude as London and that is five hours ahead of us. So it turns out that France is not in the same time zone as Britain; it's on Central European Time and has been since the Nazi conquest in 1940. Six hours it is.

The only remarkable thing about the drive in was a couple spots of randomly clogged-up traffic, and the only remarkable thing there was a spot near Novi where traffic came to a complete stop, sudden enough I had to slam my brakes --- my tires squealed! --- and bunnyhugger was not at all happy with this. Also my messenger bag slid, upside-down, to the space between my back seat and front seat where I couldn't recover it and couldn't straighten it until we got to the airport. Also at the airport I misunderstood the directions about which long-term parking garage we wanted, but we got that sorted out before I committed to any sudden last-minute swerves across lanes of traffic.

Most surprising thing about getting through security? That it was so not-bad at all. We didn't have to take shoes off, and didn't have to unpack our messenger bags to place laptops on the bare plastic bin surface or anything else. We just set our carry-on bags on the conveyor belt, and set our hoodies and belts and pocket stuff in bins, and walked through almost like the normal days of the 90s. Even the passport-checking was nothing big as they used facial recognition stuff, taking a picture that they claimed would be deleted within 24 hours. Same with getting on the plane; they didn't even check our boarding passes, with just a picture they pretend will be deleted within 24 hours serving.

We did get seated next to one another, albeit in the center two seats of a four-seat middle row, meaning we felt very constrained in getting out to use the bathroom. Wisdom told us to relax and sleep as much as possible and I gave it my best try, but didn't really. I ended up watching movies much of the flight over. I forget two of them, but one was First Man, a bio-pic about Neil Armstrong that was pleasant enough but struggled with the problem of Neil Armstrong as your center character. Armstrong was a quiet, meticulous, thoughtful person and you only really get to see understandable emotion at the start of the film, where he's taking down notes trying to understand and do something about his daughter's cancer. Still, where else are you going to see the drama of the failed Gemini VIII mission? Besides the HBO From The Earth To The Moon series, I mean? (And that at much less length). Anyway I liked the movie but it did spark to a fresh life whenever Buzz Aldrin, portrayed as a guy unaware he doesn't have to say everything that comes to his mind, intrudes. It's possible bunnyhugger will remember the other movies I watched; we talked about them a bit after the flight and she recommended one --- Flow --- that I did watch on the flight back.

Getting through passport control threatened to confuse and overwhelm us; the signs at Charles de Gaulle Airport weren't explicit enough for a couple people who can overthink directions like a mathematician and a philosopher. Mostly we followed where other people were going and ended up in a mass of queues that guided us, more or less, toward signs saying what countries were to use these stations. I'm happy to say I didn't have any trouble; I'm unhappy to say that bunnyhugger, who went to a different passport control self-service booth, had some kind of problem where the machine wasn't reading her picture, and was eventually sent into another line. And a line with a lot of people in it and signs that suggested to her that she was in the wrong line, so she spent the whole while --- during which I had no idea where she was or what was taking so long --- worried this was futile.

I spent a while just past the booths where an agent stamped my passport, worrying that I had somehow missed her, or she had missed me, and I should go to collect our luggage or something. Or stick around where I was because surely I'd have seen if she got through? I found the instructions to log into the airport's Wi-Fi --- sponsored by Channel, in case this wasn't enough of a French joke --- and was trying to figure the best way to message her since I didn't have a European data plan (she did), so I wasn't sure texting would work, and I, uh, never got around to setting up my e-mail on my phone. I know. bunnyhugger was torn between being appalled and admiring when she learned this. But then I saw her in her long line, so I knew roughly where she was and what was happening and I could wait for whatever would happen. I would like to explain what happened but who really knows? It was one of those things.

We found our way out of the passport control people, and got our suitcases, and now we had just ... like ... seven hours until our connecting train.

Still haven't run out of Jackson County Fair pictures, so I hope you like these too!

Model kits on display. I don't know where they come from except you can tell they're from real model-building enthusiasts because they're not built.

I forget why I thought it important to get this picture of the Capturing The Moment pictures; maybe just to get that dog-and-turkey picture? And then I didn't even see the reflection would make it so hard for bunnyhugger to see. Too bad.

Hey, one of the kid artists has that Joy Division album!

This is as close as I dared approach the ham radio guys lest I get sucked into that world of old white guys with vacuum tubes.

Back outside again and looking at some of the amusement area. The ticket booth I think was now giving out cards so you couldn't even have the fun of tickets.

The merry-go-round here; that's a nice purple-orange tiger horse.

Trivia: In 1955, Paris had less air traffic than Louisville, Kentucky. Source: Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World's Most Revolutionary Structure, Alastair Gordon.

Currently Reading: American Scientist, May - June 2024, Editor Fenella Saunders.

A half-century ago (this September) Peter Singer published Animal Liberation, creating the modern animal-rights movement by the utilitarian argument that if we are trying to minimize suffering, alleviating the misery of animals which serve humans gives a great return on investment. A decade ago the University of Rennes 2 held a conference to celebrate forty years of the book's publication, and bunnyhugger presented a paper there and she and I got to have a suspiciously large number of close encounters with Singer. That trip was the original use for my 'Animal Liberation 40 Years On Tour' tag.

This year they scheduled a 50th Anniversary conference, close enough to deadline that bunnyhugger would only be able to present a paper by spending all of May grinding away in the word mines. But if she did go, besides the chance to do the fun part of philosophy, and maybe picking up this homework assignment Singer gave her a decade ago, we'd also be able to go to some amusement parks we might otherwise never see.

So besides the crush of finishing the semester and doing preliminary work on her paper bunnyhugger also set to figuring out what parks we might attend. Disneyland Paris or Park Asterix were obvious candidates, but she noticed something weird and alarming about the early-June dates we'd be able to visit. The web sites that estimate what crowd sizes were like predicted that the parks would be crushed, as busy as they ever get. Why?

Blame Easter. That holiday was nearly as late as it ever happens this year, which means that the holidays tied to it --- the Feast of the Ascension and Pentecost and the Day After Pentecost (Whit Monday) --- were the Sunday before and the Sunday-and-Monday after the conference. And those are holidays and so French amusement parks ready for the deluge.

So you see the process that led us to looking at other amusement parks, ones that are maybe more remote or smaller and maybe less likely to be overcrowded. This is how bunnyhugger came to know of Nigloland and its curious origins as a sort of homemade copy of a Disney park. And how she came to find another park, this one just over the Belgian border, Plopsaland De Panne. There are several Plopsaland parks, including another in Belgium, but the good part about De Panne --- the city it's in --- is that the place is on the end of an interurban trolley line that runs along the Belgian coast, offering the chance to make a Shore visit of things.

This then is how we got the rough plan for the trip. Academic conference in northwestern France, Nigloland in eastern France, Plopsaland in coastal Belgium. The catch --- one catch --- is the only direct flight from Detroit lands us in Paris and so we're left with a bonkers zig-zagging itinerary. A solution that would at least space things out, though, was to move one of the amusement park visits to before the conference, allowing us to arrive in Paris and finish that day getting to --- well, I told you already, it was Nigloland. Then after that, take the train back to Rennes, and after that the train up to De Panne, and fly from somewhere in Belgium back to the United States. This way we could hit the French park the day after the Ascension holiday, and get to the Belgian park the Saturday before Pentecost, and with luck nothing would be too bad. The only cost of this: bunnyhugger had to finish her paper a couple days earlier still, but the deal sounded great. I asked for and got a luxurious seven days off --- six that would actually be in France or transit plus a day after to recover --- and our plans were set.

That set up, now please enjoy a half-dozen Jackson County Fair 2024 pictures.

Part of the curious layout of the exhibition building is some fake storefronts such as this, Ye Old Bakery. I think the previous year it had housed some of the baked-good exhibits but this year it just had placeholders.

Here's a bee-themed exhibit long with some ribbon-winning honeys.

And then a couple little setups. I guess one is to be the perfect camping setup. Behind that, on the left, I'm not sure; backyard picnic? It's a strange exhibit.

Genuinely don't know if this is a bunch of exhibits or if the entire General Store layout is a single exhibition.

Some prize-winning vegetables along with the memento mori that they're all to be tossed in the green dumpster outside.

This little water wheel is at the head of the creek that runs through the center of the building, and the flowers all around that.

Trivia: Hamburg had been the original intended target for the first thousand-bomber air raid, which would have happened on the centennial of the Great Fire of 1842, but the forecast for thunderstorms changed the target to Cologne. Source: The 13th Element: The Sordid Tale of Murder, Fire, and Phosphorous, John Emsley. Wikipedia also notes Cologne, unlike Hamburg, was entirely within range of the Royal Air Force's GEE navigation system at the time.

Currently Reading: Archaeology, January/February 2025, Editor Jarrett A Lobell.

It was the end of an extremely long day, one that started with a midafternoon flight, a red-eye to France, and this after missing by inches rear-ending someone on the Interstate. As if stumbling out of Charles de Gaulle airport at 8 am clock time, 2 am body time, weren't enough, we then struggled with figuring out how to get on the metro, and from there to Gare de l'Est, for a nightmarish encounter trying to rent a locker to store our luggage for a couple hours. Then, since we had nearly six hours to go before our next train was ready, we figured out the metro lines and connections to get to a small private museum with wonders we could not have fully anticipated. And after that we had reversed the trip to get back to the train station, there to take several hours' worth of train ride out to the eastern region of France and a train stop that was desolate and all but abandoned. After the frustrating process of finding where there was a list of taxi services, and then figuring out how to use bunnyhugger's phone to call a taxi service --- thanks, phone, for warning that it looks like I'm trying to place a local call while roaming in France, so please press the + key on the numerical keypad that has no + symbol on it followed by the country code for France, whatever the heck that might be --- and try to make my voice, never clear in the best of times, clear enough trying to express what I could piece together from 45-year-old middle-school language classes, to get a taxi that arrived just past bunnyhugger's declaration that there would never be a taxi and we were stranded there. Then on for a ten-minute ride that somehow cost €70 to a boutique hotel, arriving fearsomely near nightfall, after something like thirty hours of our being awake and travelling.

But. We had managed, fatigued but game, to find our way walking from the hotel in the incredibly tiny town of Dolancourt, Aube, to the attraction. Nigloland, one of the most popular amusement parks in France. Patrice and Philippe Gélis, brothers, were inspired by a visit to Walt Disney World in the early 80s and decided to open their own pay-one-price park. And so they created their own, a sort of folk reconstruction of Disneyland as a couple enthusiasts jumping into the deep end of the amusement park business might envision. It's got a half-dozen roller coasters. It's got a galloping horse ride. It's got a walk-through dinosaur park ride. It's got the Rivière des Fées boat ride, and a show about the hedgehogs (mascot of the park, and through the Romani word for hedgehog, namesake as well) of the magical forest. It's got an attached hotel, the Hôtel des Pirates, which we would have stayed at except it wasn't taking bookings for Monday-night-to-Tuesday-morning, and Monday would be the day we hoped to visit. It's got a (modern) salon carousel, a particularly ornate kind of carousel that's all but extinct worldwide.

We had known that we would arrive after the park's closure Sunday. But we made the walk to the gate because we wanted, first, to be sure that our estimates based on looking at maps of the area were correct. And that we could find the entrance to the park. We could indeed; really, it'd be hard to miss, given the town is so small and the park has a 100-meter-tall drop tower you can't possibly miss.

I told bunnyhugger to pose for the Walley World disappointment picture, and took a good-looking one with my new-to-me camera. She got a matching one of me. And we walked the short way back to our hotel to load my first pictures of this park onto my computer, to sleep off so much travel (including a side museum trip), and to savor the day to come. And so that is the teaser. After tomorrow's humor-blog recap post I hope to share with you the full story --- the motives, the pretexts, the development --- of our European vacation.

You get the + symbol on her phone by holding down the 0 long enough.

With that sufficiently teased, now, let's take in some Jackson County Fair pictures from not quite a year ago now:

Some more small pet information. That poster about guinea pig care may seem like it doesn't have a lot of information but it's more than we knew about raising guinea pigs in the 80s.

And now on to the photography exhibits! bunnyhugger had something like a dozen pictures in and I was to see how they looked, whether any won ribbons, and what the competition was like. It was like this.

So here's the Buildings and Architecture, Black-and-White category. bunnyhugger's picture in the upper right took home nothing, even though it's a photo of the same house that won a best-of-class ribbon at Calhoun County's the year before.

A bit more view of the competition here plus some [ Wayne's World voice ] extreme close-ups! (She didn't enter that category.)

She did enter portraits and the picture of me with a Christmas tree, again, didn't place.

Capturing The Moment is another of those categories that seem really hard to explain just what you're looking for. bunnyhugger hadn't entered any of these, I think, but there are some nice moments here.

Trivia: Audubon Society membership rose from 120,000 to 400,000 in the decade after the first Earth Day; Sierra Club membership grew 46 percent in the same ten years. Source: Down To Earth: Nature's Role in American History, Ted Steinberg.

Currently Reading: BBC History Magazine, Vol 24 No 4, Editor Rob Attar.

Another day of Jackson County Fair pictures before ... probably another day of Jackson County Fair pictures! We'll just see what happens.

Here's a medium-size rabbit enjoying some privacy behind the bag of hay.

And here's a very small rabbit enjoying some privacy by looking directly at me.

Sprawled-out Californian gathering some solar power.

Here's a fine-looking rabbit taking on a pose to match the rectangle of the cage surrounding them.

Pretty sure this is the face of a rabbit.

Couple shorthaired black rabbits just sitting up together, telling secrets.

Hotot wishes you to know they ANGY cotton ball. But Hotots always look like ANGY cotton balls.

Rabbit who looks a bit like Colombo chatting with a rabbit who looks a bit like Roger.

This is a rabbit proud to have accomplished this much in life.

Meanwhile, outside the rabbit barn, there's stuff going on, like golf carts and horses. And say ...

I knew they had horseshoes, but horse boots is new on me.

And also horse ankle braces too, it looks like.

Trivia: In directing the city design for Philadelphia, William Penn --- a Quaker --- rejected as immodest naming city streets after himself or other people. Instead the streets would be numbered, with the cross streets named after ``things that Spontaneously Grow in the country'', such as Cherry, Chestnut, and Mulberry Street. Source: The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power, Dierdre Mask.

Currently Reading: Archaeology, May/June 2025, Editor Jarrett A Lobell. The articles are all interesting and the advertisements are all kind of creepy weird, like, ``status'' watches and stones on the ``brink of extinction'' and meteorite-ore rings.

Next thing was the Jackson County Fair, which I went to on my own because bunnyhugger was visiting her brother.

The fairgrounds you access through this building, which as a community recreation center I suppose was saved in the 80s.

Among the first things I saw and did not understand: Dan Dan The Farmer Man driving around. I never saw what his deal was.

Here's the carousel. They switched to tickets being pretty cheap but rides taking a gobsmacking number of tickets in trade.

The teacups ride for kids is a mere nine tickets, though.

Pharoah's Fury is a twelve-ticket ride. I like this kind of swinging ship ride; bunnyhugger is less fond of them .

Redemption games offered a couple models of space alien to win, either inflatable or plush as you like.

A Dragon Wagon kiddie coaster, which I could probably have ridden if I wanted to bang my knees up enough.

Another Ring of Fire, 12 tickets. Note that you're not able to bring a hat on the ride, which does leave you suspended upside-down for a while.

You may think, well, all the adult rides are 12 tickets, right? Nope! The Ferris Wheel is a big 15 tickets.

And the Himalaya is also 15 tickets, which I find interesting pricing because I'd rate the Ring of Fire a more intense and exciting ride than the Himalaya.

Can't tell you how many tickets the Starship 3000 (a Gravitron ride) was. But here's a photo along some midway.

And now into the horse barn. The entrants create their own heraldic symbols for their horses that are neat to see.

Trivia: English banks and private investors put something like £150 million in loans and £200 million in stock subscriptions to Latin American companies and projects in 1823 and 1824. Source: A Nation of Deadbeats: An Uncommon History of America's Financial Disasters, Scott Reynolds Nelson. The crash came in 1825.

Currently Reading: Michigan History, March/April 2025, Editor Sarah Hamilton. Also some tiny insight into why Kalamazoo used to be called the ``celery city''; apparently it's where the crop first got planted in the United States and pitched as a food rather than a medicinal plant.

This week I'm trying something I haven't done in ages on my humor blog: letting Robert Benchley write it. I like this. He's got a pretty solid comic voice. Here's what you might have missed if you weren't reading it day-by-day:

• MiSTed: The 72 Hours Saga, Part 42
• There Are Limits to What I Can Say About Notable Soups
• Statistics Saturday: Some Unsuccessful Soups
• Robert Benchley: The Lost Locomotive
• Robert Benchley: ``Take The Witness!''
• What's Going On In Mark Trail? Why is Kelly Welly pitching AI garbage? March - May 2025
• Robert Benchley: The New Strokes
• MiSTed: The 72 Hours Saga, Part 43

With that having got you moderately amused now please enjoy the end of our stop-in at Cedar Point last July, as photographed:

This is not the Space Age ride mentioned as a rotation point. This is a ride in Planet Snoopy, a completely separate kids area on the other side of the Coliseum from the Kiddie Kingdom.

And this is a small performance area in Planet Snoopy that I think we've never been around when it was in use.

Walking over to something or other (Iron Dragon) we saw a pack of musicians performing in front of the Coasters Diner. Also someone who bought a seagull backpack, that's nice.

Also you can see a mother who does not have the time for people in poodle skirts dancing.

And here's Iron Dragon, always a favorite, although in its last season before the indignity of a fast-pass line-cutting lane was installed.

Meanwhile the griffin, now gold, stands proudly there and refuses to explain why it vanished for a few years and why it's in front of Iron Dragon instead of the griffin-themed GateKeeper.

Now here is the turnstile outside the Cedar Downs racing carousel. I photograph this just because I'd never paid any attention to the manufacturer of the turnstile before, so here we go.

The afternoon light flatters the horses here.

The lights inside not being on improves the composition here. I should have centered the center area, though. If I ever get the chance I'll have to re-photograph this right.

Tilting the camera this severely emphasizes how the horses are racing, moving back and forth in those slots, so that some look like they're leaping ahead of the pack.

Cedar Downs is next to the Cadillac Cars, last remaining tracked car ride.

And that's our drop-in done. Here's a look to the front of the park from Cedar Downs on the right and in the concrete you see how much has been done to dry up the rain already.

Trivia: On the fourth flight day of Gemini 4, the astronauts found themselves unable to turn off the computer (to conserve spacecraft power). Even after switching the unit to off the computer light stayed on, with no malfunction light. Source: Gemini 4: An Astronaut Steps Into The Void, David J Shayler.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 63: The Abdominal Snowman, Ralph Stein, Bela Zaboly, Editor Stephanie Noelle. There's a lot of energy going into this story, especially after the four thousandth college football story by Sims and Zaboly.

You know what we did after that Kennywood visit and that Pinball event? If you guessed ``went to an amusement park, probably Cedar Point'' good news, you get to see pictures of exactly that event now:

Traditional establishing shot, proving that both my car and Cedar Point were in view at the same time.

The entrance, looking not as grand as it did during the eclipse but still, nice. Note the electronic sign warns that Top Thrill 2 will not open today; it could have said, all season.

Boardwalk Nights! The Cedar Point 150 sign turns out to be a good spot to put signs for all kinds of temporary events.

Blue Streak, standing firm despite the threatening clouds.

And here's Raptor, again with clouds that look like they don't want any fun going on.

Of course even a short visit to Cedar Point will see carousels, such as the Kiddy Kingdom one here.

We spent a little time looking around the Kiddie Kingdom rides, mostly out of a sense that someday they're going to renovate them otu of existence and we'll feel bad about that.

Though a lot of the Kiddie Kingdom rides are like this, a toy vehicle going in a circle with a buzzer the kid can press to make noise.

There's the carousel. The armored horse on the left is a fiberglass replica; the original is, last anyone confirmed, gathering dust in the art department for some reason.

Back to rides, like the spinning tubs one here that was closed lest the rain you see there make it unsafe to operate.

Here's two of the rabbits on the Kiddie Kingdom carousel. At the end of the season an operator claimed they had names, although we're not sure we believed the claim and I'm not sure I remember them. They were straightforward ones like you might make if you weren't trying very hard, like, Snowball and Caramel or something like that.

Kiddie Kingdom Carousel, some flat kiddie ride or other, and one of the domes of the Coliseum.

Trivia: On the second day of its flight Gemini 4 astronauts surpassed the total duration record of all eight previous United States astronauts combined, as well as the duration record for a multi-crew spacecraft set by Pavel Belyayev and Alexei Leonov on Voskhod 2 three months earlier. Source: Gemini 4: An Astronaut Steps Into The Void, David J Shayler.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 62: WEE vs I.O.U., Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly, Editor Stephanie Noelle. Yep, that sure was another college football tale, although this one at least introduces the element that Olive Oyl eats a lot of olives, thereby justifying one element of this one Gene Deitch-made 60s Popeye cartoon.

(PS: there is no significance to the subject line, a lyric from Sparks's ``Tips for Teens''. I couldn't think of a good song to use and this was playing. Pay it no mind.)

I don't have the time to really write anything up right now, so please enjoy pictures of the Revived Women's International Pinball Tournament, 2024 edition.

bunnyhugger discovering how much of Total Nuclear Annihilation she's lost touch with.

A look across the lower level of the movie theater. It was before noon so that's why the lower level isn't busy enough to be dead. Later, the smell of movie popcorn would dominate things.

And here's the trophies for the top four finishers! bunnyhugger would not be among them, but she didn't do badly.

Waiting area and lounge set up for players in the middle of the floor, along with a projection screen that would show whatever they thought deserved it. On the side you can see a Genesis, conceivably the one of my long-departed glory days at Pinburgh.

People gather together to hear opening announcements and play the Pinball National Anthem (the high-score theme from Space Station).

And gathering for the group photo, with both real cameras and cell phones!

bunnyhugger joins in the Pledge of Pinball Allegiance (liberty and just a wee bit more margin on the ball save timer for all).

Round one! Tragically, bunnyhugger's tournament would begin with Paragon. The format was the same as the WIPT of 2019, at least.

And here she faces up to, ugh, Paragon.

Sometime later she writes down scores (probably) for one of the other games that bank. Feels like Aladdin's Castle to me, but no way to know for sure. Or she's just setting the pen down.

Meanwhile with nothing else to do I got some time in on blob-themed game Quicksilver, in the free-play area.

Not sure I'd ever seen the airbrushed side panel art on a Quicksilver before. Turns out this melty blobby game manages to find room for silhouetted nipples.

Trivia: Albrecht Dürer, after receiving one of Martin Luther's works as a gift from Duke Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony in 1520, wrote (Duke Frederick's secretary and court chaplain) that he would draw Luther's portrait and engrave it in copper, ``if God helps me to come to'' him. Dürer would never meet, nor draw, Luther. Source: Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance, Lisa Jardine.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 61: King Bee and Queen Bee, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly, Editor Stephanie Noelle. And after an intriguing start the characters just decide to leave. It's a choice that kind of makes sense but it should have been used as a stronger punch line.

When last I reported about my lost camera and Motor City Furry Con we'd had established two important things. First, they had my camera! Second, it was in storage so who knows when they'd find the chance to recover it?

Well. I could manage going to Pinball At The Zoo without a camera and even the handful of things we got to in May without. Mostly local pinball stuff, although this might be the first time I don't have a proper ``what we compete for'' picture of the plaques at pinball night. But we are coming up on things I must have a camera for, and while yes, my iPhone is probably adequate for most purposes I want a camera that's a proper camera.

So I went looking and found a used Panasonic Lumix camera, one very close to the camera I had before my misplaced camera. And I finally have all the pieces I need for it together --- camera, memory card, battery and spare battery, charger, and the data/power cable that connects it to a computer or USB power supply! I even found that my old camera bag, the one used for the previous camera, fits this new one just fine. It lacks a strap --- I'd transferred that to my Samsung camera so that's in the Motor City Furry Con Lost And Found Storage Locker right now --- but the important thing is I can take good pictures and plenty of them. And the zoom on this doesn't --- yet --- get jammed up partway through, putting it ahead of my Samsung.

Now, of course, I just have to explain what I need to take pictures of that made me spend money on this.

We close the month now with something I bet you'd never thought you would see: the end of Kennywood pictures from our trip last year! And what comes up to follow this? Hm. There's so many possibilities ...

Oh yeah, we rented a locker for the second time ever and had to get stuff out of it. Do you see our locker number? Well, it was easy to remember since it was 1054 and I need hardly remind you what an important year that was.

Super Kaleidoscope, the charming circular-shaped building up front with the candy shop inside. It just looks good. You can make out the Old Mill's frontage in the background.

The Goodnight heart, last thing you see before entering the tunnel to leave Kennywood.

They've painted the tunnel with all kinds of Kennywood memorabilia and items, including a replica ticket from nearly a century ago and the reminder to gentlemen after using the washroom.

Looking back at the park from the parking lot.

And here's a panoramic view at the end of the night, to match the one had at the start of the day.

Trivia: The pancreas's name reflects its label as ``pan'' (all) and ``kreas'' (flesh), an organ of all flesh. The name may reflect early lack of knowledge of what it did and was simply there. Source: The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human, Siddhartha Mukherjee.

Currently Reading: The Harvey Comics Companion, Mark Arnold.