austin_dern

Something Big Is Coming Soon, Something That Will Change Your Tune

2026-06-18T04:01:52Z

So in other home-repair stuff here's something that was not specifically connected to our recent trip. But it did make packing for the trip more stressful to bunny_hugger, who did not need that. She does enough travel planning and house-preparing, she doesn't need appliance malfunctions too.

What happened was the dryer stopped drying. At least stopped drying in any reasonable time; she had some pairs of blue jeans in for hours and they were only warm and damp after all that. The drum was tumbling and the dryer producing heat all right, but not much air was coming out the vent outside the house. It would fall to me when we got home to call a repair guy, and then to call a different one because it turned out I didn't remember who our preferred appliance repair guy was.

I know what a subset of you are thinking. Dryer has heat, and spins, but not much air comes out the vent. This has to be a clogged vent hose. Yes, you've diagnosed it correctly. Also, turns out according to sites that look legitimate-ish, you should be cleaning out those vent hoses more often than our current ``never''. One site said clean it annually.

Well, the appliance guy came today while I was in office --- my last in-office-Wednesday on the schedule by the way --- and apparently had some good patter going with bunny_hugger. He identified the problem as a clogged hose, and cleaned it out, digging out what he said was a bird's nest from near the dryer end of things. bunny_hugger was skeptical that it could be a bird that far inside the house but her research turned up evidence that yeah, they'll do that sometimes. It's hard not to suspect nesting mice, although they'd have to get in from outside the house at least as far as the birds would too.

And turns out it wasn't just the one clog near the dryer end of things; there was another near the outlet. So we got the vent vacuumed out, bunny_hugger judges from the noise of the machinery, and as I write these words we have a short while before we learn whether we've solved the problem. Also if we've got a new annual chore of dryer-vent-cleaning, up there with dishwasher-filter-cleaning.

Postscript: it works great!

But next up in photographs? Eh, let's take a half-dozen pictures of our pet rabbit, you deserve that.

``Now look, anyone could have eaten that fun-size Almond Joy bar.''

Great moment of bunny tongue stuck out at you.

Bunny exploring the edge of the knowable world --- she's not fond of the floor on this side of the room --- while her fur gets a little sheddy.

Bunny examining the underside of the coffee table; her verdict is that it hasn't been chewed nearly enough.

Did you know solid black rabbits could phase out of existence like that? Here she is at the start of the process with just a transparent hindleg.

And here she is leaping out of frame, both forelegs half out of reality.

Trivia: Signing the Versailles Treaty for Germany were Hermann Müller, the new foreign minister, and Johannes Bell, minister of transport, who only arrived at 3 am the day of the signing; the German government had trouble finding ministers willing to put their signatures on it. Source: Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World, Margaret MacMillan.

Currently Reading: Natural History Magazine, May 2026, Editor Erin Espelie.

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Good Luck Will Rub Off When I Shakes Hands With You

2026-06-17T04:00:52Z

Last week was our big amusement-park trip for the year (we figure). It was also a week of heavy storms rolling through the midwest, which would shape each of our days except the first and last. I will tell of this in time.

But the storms rolled through mid-Michigan, too, and hit our home. I saw on the Motor City Furry Con Telegram group folks sharing weather updates as we sat hundreds of miles away from it. (At one point someone posted a radar map with zones marked 'you can go to bed' as the possible tornado weather had gone by, and 'stay up' for those still facing possible evacuations.)

The housesitter --- for the first time we had someone coming regularly to check on the goldfish pond, the plants, and any mail delivered against a mail hold I'd filled out both online and in person (they did hold the mail, but delivered it all to the house instead of letting me pick it up the way I specified) --- took a big branch off the pond, after one of these storms. But we got home to find that our chimney cover had fallen off, or been blown off, or in any case wasn't where it should be. A neighbor (we assume) set it on our front porch, incidentally advertising how much we weren't home, and strangely the housesitter didn't mention this or move it somewhere else.

So our return home got to be less a day of sleeping in and resting up and doing laundry --- more on that anon --- and more figuring out someone who could come out and inspect the chimney and put the cap back on. A bit of digging around and we got someone who could come out today, that is, Tuesday, while I was in the office but bunnyhugger would be home.

I can't say it was but the work of a moment to put the cap back on, as I don't know. But it was back. If I understand the verdict the reason it blew off because it was a kind of a junky cap and we can't be sure it won't blow off again. We could make more certain by getting a better-quality cap, one with screws that go in at a more secure angle. (I'm not sure how that works but I'm busy with other things so won't be looking it up.) For now, though, our chimney's in good shape, just in time for a severe thunderstorm that rolled through and so far as we can tell did no damage, this time.

Next up in pictures? Well, we just had Halloweekends so what follows would of course by Halloween. We carved pumpkins at home, as there wasn't a good time to get together with bunnyhugger's parents for it, so there's fewer jack-o-lanterns than usual this year. Sorry.

My concept for this year was to try doing something kind of dragony, with the extra detail of ridged nose. It ... looks better by candlelight, I promise.

While bunnyhugger went with a classic growly face jack-o-lantern.

bunnyhugger hung Halloween lights this (last) year. I put up the pumpkin flag, although it long predates my ever being here.

Here's our carved pumpkins on the porch step, lit by candles inside.

And that third pumpkin? That's an owl bunnyhugger carved because she hadn't done enough.

Here's a different view of the owl making it look like it's looking over its shoulder.

Trivia: Singer sewing ordered Otis elevator machines for its headquarters in Saint Petersburg, Russia, which opened in a 1904 ceremony blessed by priests. Source: Otis: Giving Rise to the Modern City, Jason Goodwin.

Currently Reading: Natural History Magazine, May 2026, Editor Erin Espelie.

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Let Us Pass Through Our Perfect Park Pausing on a Sunday

2026-06-16T03:56:58Z

And now, with the last of my days being too full of doing stuff to write about doing stuff, here's the last of our Halloweekends pictures. We're not out of October yet in my photo roll but we are closer than we've been before ...

Now this is something you never see at Cedar Point: The Derby Dogs stand was open! But since they don't have veggie dogs we couldn't take advantage of that fact.

Are we getting on evening already? There's Siren's Curse in the distance, with Corkscrew in the upper right corner.

Siren's Curse tilting over while the sun sets behind it.

And the vertical position for Siren's Curse. This may look scary but let me reassure you: it is.

Some lovely color on the trees near Cedar Downs.

bunnyhugger takes me for a drive on the Cadillac Cars, lone survivor of the antique-autos rides.

Spot of late-afternoon sunlight from the Cadillac Cars ride, as ValRavn sends a train up the lift hill.

Raptor washed in some golden light.

Tall performer near the Boardwalk area. They would pose for pictures with anyone and I just wanted to admire the tallness.

The Ska-letons performing at the Boardwalk area.

And now, coming to the end of the night finally, a streak of light as Siren's Curse drops down its lift hill.

The Siren's Curse train whips around; the lights change over the course of the ride. Hope that lasts.

Trivia: In 1979 customer-research corporation ViewPoint asked a focus group of Black persons what celebrities they saw aligned with the Filet-O-Fish (a poor seller in Black communities). Respondents offered that the sandwich was like Paul Lynde, Mary Tyler Moore, and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Source: Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, Marcia Chatelain. The heck is with that question even? (If you can't place Paul Lynde, try and remember the voice of The Hooded Claw on Penelope Pitstop. That guy.)

Currently Reading: Natural History Magazine, May 2026, Editor Erin Espelie.

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On the Green Purple Yellow Red Grass

2026-06-13T04:24:56Z

Some more pictures from the last day of our Halloweekends visit to Cedar Point. A couple of these pictures have been moved around chronologically so that I don't split a little theme across days. Don't worry. Everything more or less happened.

Anyway here's the Calypso. Not sure if the kid in the center is having a great or an awful time.

The exit ramp down from Magnum; it's nicely styled and I don't pay much attention to it.

Here's the station itself, which has these little fingers over it like a Star Trek spacedock.

Here's Troika seen in the way of the sun.

And now finally the Peanuts show is going on! Snoopy's performer is all better again.

Everyone's happy as ... we didn't really get the hang of the show. I think they went trick-or-treating around a Willy Wonka-coded chocolatier's.

Bunch of pigeons all hanging out on one peak of the Coliseum.

The other peak, however, the pigeons want nothing to do with. I wonder what made one so appealing and the other not.

We finally got to The Shrieks! Contamination show at the Jack Aldrich theater. It looked about like this.

Nice thing about the theater is the lights were just right for my camera to understand.

Costumes were fun too.

Here we go, Shrieks gang, big finale!

Trivia: In January 1678 Le Mercure galant --- the first newspaper to provide detailed fashion journalism --- announced that King Louis XIV had named Mademoiselle Camillat to be the official coiffeuse for all the ballets held at court; the Sun King was a passionate ballet enthusiast. Source: The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafés, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour, Joan DeJean.

Currently Reading: Ad Astra, First Quarter 2026, Editor Rod Pyle.

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Sunday, by the Blue Purple Yellow Red Water

2026-06-13T04:22:50Z

Still no writing time. Instead please enjoy pictures from the last day of our big Halloweekends trip last year. I'm being a little more judicious in my sharing of pictures this time but don't worry. There's way more I could make you look at instead.

Sunday morning we had lunch in the park while watching a school (high school? college? who can say?) cheer group putting on a show on a small side stage.

Here's my poignant shot of one of the performers off to the side, alone, for some reason that probably is as simple as her part wasn't up yet.

Corkscrew bestriding the midway, with the Top Thrill 2 reverse tower in its center.

Noticed some nice flowers at the park despite it being late October.

Not sure if there's a bee in the picture somewhere or if I just did a depth-of-focus thing on the flower here.

Feeling more confident now that I took these pictures just because the flowers with a bit of amusement park far beyond was scenic or something.

What if you were barely an inch tall and someone noticed you wandering around the midway near Corkscrew? How about that?

Always fun to encounter old telephone logos around the park. I can not understand how they have the pre-Saul-Bass Bell System logo on any still-legible sticker.

While waiting in line for the Calypso we noticed the Skeleton Crew doing their acrobatics show at the Boardwalk stage.

Really like this moment of one of them midway between the light fixtures.

Another moment of the Skeleton Crew bouncing between Calypso light fixtures if you don't know about perspective.

I don't know how I got a double exposure here. It seems like the same weirdness of that beach picture and the guy walking past the sun.

Trivia: in 1939 Racecar driver Cannonball Baker drove a new Crosley subcompact cross-country and back on only 130 gallons of gas, proving the company's claim of 50 miles per gallon. Source: Crosley: Two Brothers and a Business Empire That Transformed the Nation, Rusty McCloure, David Stern, Michael A Banks.

Currently Reading: Ad Astra, First Quarter 2026, Editor Rod Pyle.

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Moons and Junes and Ferris Wheels

2026-06-11T05:03:57Z

It sometimes happens that my journal catches up with what I'm doing and I'm left with nothing but photo dumps to publish. This is almost one of those times: I'm caught up to the start of doing something that is going to be a big report, but I'm too busy doing the thing to have time to write about it. So, please enjoy the end of my Sky Ride that Halloweekends Saturday plus the one other photo from that day that I found interesting. Tomorrow, Sunday. I mean, the Sunday of our Halloweekends trip --- look, you understand this all.

On the Sky Ride now, looking west, toward ValRavn, from elevation. You can see Siren's Curse pivoting towards the upper right edge.

Watching as a gigantic Sky Ride cart crushes innocent people below.

Caricatures and face painting underneath; in the distance ... I ... this is weird. I feel like that's got to be Rougarou in front, and therefore ValRavn behind, but that doesn't look like a ValRavn train on the lift hill so now I'm confused. I can't think of any Cedar Point roller coaster that has five cars on it.

Here's one of the Sky Ride pillars and evidence of people managing to put their band stickers on, incredibly. You know those things on the lift hill can't be a train, they'd have moved by now. But then what are they?

Evening sun behind what is unmistakably ValRavn, never mind what might be on the tracks.

Peeking in here at the Cedar Downs racing carousel.

And there's Kiddie Kingdom, survived another year.

The near-sunset sky over Raptor and Blue Streak.

Raptor, Blue Streak, and a Sky Ride car going the other way; I got almost everything this time around.

And a beauty shot of Blue Streak in the distance.

Coming in for the end of Sky Ride here.

And, to close out the night, a look up the Top Thrill 2 reverse tower.

Trivia: A 1634 conference in Paris, called by Cardinal Richelieu (and attended by only the Catholic powers) agreed that longitude and latitude should be measured from a prime meridian through the Canary Island of Ferro (now Hierro), used by Ptolemy for his maps and in common use at the time. It also set the convention that a positive longitude should be east, and a negative longitude west of that meridian. Source: Marking Time: The Epic Quest to Invent the Perfect Calendar, Duncan Steel. Must admit I'm a little surprised people were comfortable using negative numbers in critical calculations like longitude as early as 1634.

Currently Reading: Ad Astra, First Quarter 2026, Editor Rod Pyle.

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King of the Impossible

2026-06-11T04:59:32Z

This week my humor blog's made that transition from one ancient MiSTing to another, explored a curious lot of doughnut days, and had like three times the story comic plot recaps of usual. Here's what you missed:

If you guessed that after going to the Merry-Go-Round Museum we'd return to Cedar Point for the rest of Halloweekends Saturday why yes, you'e definitely picked up on a very well-established pattern here! Thanks!

Steampunkified swan boat, formerly a decoration along the Frontier Trail when they were doing the steampunk-themed walkthrough. Now it's part of the Kiddie Kingdom decor.

Nice light coming in from near the building where Helen Keller gave the speech that inspired the Lions Club to support blind people.

Just a park building? Yes, but one we noticed on a walkway that we really never paid much attention to before. It's out of the way and doesn't lead you anywhere that bigger paths don't, which is why nobody uses it.

But they decorated it for the Halloweekends, such as with this faux-mausoleum.

This is the pathway and yeah, it's just a surprisingly quiet part of the park.

The path even takes time to commemorate a couple of trees.

Here's what ValRavn looks like from that little trail.

And here I emerge from the shade and point the camera that much farther up.

Next, I went and got on the Sky Ride. Here's the queue beneath me.

Almost ready to go Von Rolling!

I started from the far end of the ride, near Corkscrew's turnaround.

Looking from the launch platform off in the direction of Siren's Curse.

Trivia: In the late 17th century China allocated fifteen acres in Canton for the trading outposts of all outside powers, who had to share the small space. The traders also were allowed to stay only six months of the year, departing to Macao for the other half of the year, to avoid suggesting that the foreign powers had any rights to the land they used. Source: Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire, Roy Moxham. Also among the trading nations there was Denmark which, right? You never hear of Denmark sending merchants anywhere.

Currently Reading: Ad Astra, First Quarter 2026, Editor Rod Pyle. Special edition about the Artemis II mission.

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And Make Believe It Came From You

2026-06-10T06:35:36Z

Forgot to complain here about something I found at the house when we got back from Anthrohio. That would be our mail. I had put in a mail hold, but there it was, everything we might have expected to receive, waiting in the box. I know you might ask: maybe the letter carrier dropped it all off at the end of the hold, when we were getting back? No, because we got back from Anthrohio on Memorial Day. It and the day before were holidays.

So I went to the post office yet again and said, I was there to find out if any mail had been held, because this was six times in a row that I had filled out mail hold requests only for the mail to get delivered anyway. They actually went back and looked for some kind of supervisory person to try and reason out what was going wrong. Her best guess was that because our route doesn't have a regular carrier right now the substitute working it didn't know about the hold. Which, fine, that maybe covers this time, but every time for the past two years?

She also offered that maybe the morning supervisor who's supposed to print out the online hold mail requests failed to do that since apparently that's not always reliably done. And was not reliably done six times. But that couldn't be because it tuned out among the pile of wrongly delivered mail that I brought with me to the post office to make my point was the printed-out hold-mail form. Here she offered that maybe the problem is that doing it online you just get this regular old sheet of paper stuffed in the box for hold mails and yeah, that just looks like a letter put in there. This seems like a structural failure of the online-hold-mail request system.

So, they gave me a thick stack of the bright yellow hold-mail cards that you give in person or put in your mailbox and suggested that I fill out the real actual paper ones, since a bright yellow heavy stock card is easier to not overlook than a faded inkjet printout that maybe doesn't necessarily get printed out?

Perhaps going to the yellow card system will break the Post Office's ``actually somehow fails to not deliver the mail'' streak. No way to know for sure yet. More on this as it comes to pass.

And now we come, at last, to the end of the Cedar Point Museum and the Merry-Go-Round Museum visit from Halloweekends some Saturday last October. You can only guess what comes next, but probably you'll do pretty well.

Kid Arthur's Court is the former name for what's now the Kiddie Kingdom.

Back out to the merry-go-round part. Here's a French cow ready to lick you.

Activity game that they had in the gift shop for some reason. Do you spot literally any mistakes? I think the whole thing is a goof.

Advertising poster for Millennium Force when it came out and was sponsored by the NBA Jam 'Big Head' secret code.

That rabbit out in the front room of the museum, but seen from below.

And the sea dragons near the front door, given time on their own.

Trivia: For the first year of the Hit Parade radio show singers earned $100 per hour-long episode, musicians $75 (counting rehearsals), and announcers $35. The budget for a weekly episode was $12,000. Source: The Mighty Music Box: The Golden Age of Musical Radio, Thomas A DeLong.

Currently Reading: Michigan History, May/June 2026, Editor Erin Bartels.

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Our Courage Will Pull Us Through

2026-06-09T06:41:16Z

The latest Stern Pinball game, you maybe heard, was Pokemon, a game license it's a little surprising wasn't done at any point in the past thirty years. It took a while --- we kept getting bumped back --- but a Pokemon game finally arrived in our local venue (displacing Avengers: Infinity Quest, a game I kinda like but don't feel too bad about losing) and so bunnyhugger was able finally to hold the long-delayed Launch Party.

The qualifying format was eight-round Max Matchplay, in which pairs of competitors are drawn up at random on a randomly chosen game and the winner gets a point. What makes it Max is that you don't have to wait for every round to finish before starting some more; you just need enough players to be done with their games to start assigning new ones.

My night? Started out nicely for me, playing on Monster Bash and having a first ball that just ran away with it; I got lucky and I think broke my opponent's spirit. The second game I was playing DMC on Tron and while that's a game that usually treats me well, c'mon, I was playing DMC. I got lucky that he had an awful first ball, but he ended up with a 20 million point game, and going into the last ball I only had about half that. And yet, somehow, I kept managing to keep the game going and keep racking up points and on bonus beat him. Third game was Elvira's House of Horrors, again one of my pocket games and against a much weaker opponent. Fourth game was Jaws, another game I'm weirdly good at for not understanding any rules, and I again had a first ball that I think broke my opponent's spirit.

Now, the top four people --- of 18 playing --- would go to finals and maybe win the grand prize of a plaque and a couple rating points. After a four-game winning streak I started to think how if I just did okay from here on I'd probably be in finals. Dangerous stuff to start thinking, but, next game I got another lucky pick, Attack From Mars, against another lucky opponent, and got a fifth win. Sixth game I expected to lose, as it was Star Wars: Fall of the Empire, which I don't understand at all and can't play well reliably, against MAG, who's streaky but who's an A-level player when he's on. And yet I had a good third bal land he didn't and I had six wins. I didn't know where I was in the standings but figured I was likely in finals, and one win in the next two games would make that a sure thing. As it happens I was correct in this assessment, but ...

Next round was on King Kong against BMK, who I don't think has ever finished outside the top four in Lansing Pinball League. This was going to be a game I could win only if he stumbled badly and first ball? He stumbled badly. Unfortunately I stumbled worse, and did every ball, while he did quite well on ball two and didn't need to play ball three. That's all right, though. My eighth match was on Venom, which loves me, and against one of the league's perennial B-level finalists. While neither of us did much ball one or two, I got everything happening for a killer ball three and a score that she'd have to have the best Venom of her life on. Which, slowly but eventually, she did. While I was disappointed for myself I did congratulate her profusely because she had just that good a rally and it's exciting seeing.

So, I ended up with six wins. Three people were tied with six wins, for two spots in finals (two people were tied with seven wins). So three of us --- me, DMC, and MC, a newcomer to league who was having a killer night --- would play one game of The Addams Family, lowest person going home. MC looked good to be the lowest finisher, except that I did spectacularly worse. MC managed to come to about fifteen million points, a normally disappointing score. I didn't mange to break six million, and you can break six million on skill shots alone that game. (DMC, an expert on The Addams Family, reached the wizard mode of touring the mansion on ball one I think it was, and was on his way to a second tour before his finish became moot.) After six rounds of perfect play, I finally hit three perfect failures, and was out.

BMK, FAE, DMC, and MC would go on to finals, three sets of four-player games with standings determined by finishing order. FAE --- top seed from qualifying --- won the first game (Cactus Canyon, their pick and also the game I would have picked if I'd had choice) and BMK took second; the second game (Rush) FAE took second and BMK first. At this point MC could hope for nothing better than third place in the tournament, and that if he won the final game, Pokemon, which he didn't, so all this work only got him to fourth place. DMC got third place in every game and finished third in the tournament. The champion would be whichever of FAE and BMK did better on Pokemon and FAE put up an intimidating lead. And, much as happened to me on Venom, BMK just kept whittling the lead down and down again until it was gone, and BMK won. Bad news for FAE --- who bunnyhugger realized after was wearing a whole outfit themed to a particular Pokemon I have definitely heard of and have always known a lot about --- but, goodness, everyone's thrilled to see a comeback from far behind. It's such a good show you enjoy it even when it happens to you.

This all ran way too late into the week, but that's all right, there's other times I could sleep.

Continuing on here with the Cedar Point History Museum, as of last October:

Panel of Fantastic Facts about the park that can't date to any later than 1978 given the Jumbo Jet roller coaster's appearance in it. (That Jumbo Jet coaster was last reported operating in Belarus, if you want to ride it.)

That 'The China Shop' sign sure seems like they're saying The China Shop that had survived in the park since the 1970s and the last independent concessionaires was gone, doesn't it?

Now here's an adorable project: making miniatures of the various eras' trash bins and the parking lot section signs that used to name rides. bunnyhugger observed that Iron Dragon stands out here for being just the ride logo rather than a monochrome ride photo.

And here's a miniature reproduction of the old Iron Dragon ride-height sign. The park doesn't have ride height signs with any kind of pictures or interesting detail anymore.

I'm sorry not to have a better picture of Wildcat's ride height sign because it sure seems like a design choice.

Old photograph, from a photo opportunity I'm surprised the park hasn't brought back. They've re-created the 'Barrel of Fun' photo opportunity; surely a bench made to look like a biplane's wing wouldn't be any harder.

Trivia: In December 1860 John Sherman, chair of the House Ways and Means Committee (and brother of General William Tecumseh Sherman) told his colleagues that the federal government lacked the cash to pay their salaries. Source: The Money Men: Capitalism, Democracy, and the Hundread Years' War Over the American Dollar, H W Brands.

Currently Reading: Michigan History, May/June 2026, Editor Erin Bartels.

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Live Free and Beauty Surrounds You

2026-06-08T04:43:53Z

Last Thursday came the event we'd known we needed to do, but also kind of were okay letting slide indefinitely. But the weather Friday was forecast --- and proved to be --- utterly impossible for what we needed, heavy rains not letting up for hours. This would be the day that, at last, we released the deer mice.

bunnyhugger had scouted out a spot in a not-too-nearby park, one which had a decent amount of shelter from the sky, was not too far from water, was also not too close to the river, and seemed like somewhere we could hide the couple cheap wooden birdhouses that the mice had been using as nests. So we drove them down to the park, walked the quarter-mile-plus to the spot, and then loosely taped cardboard covers over the holes to their houses, where they were definitely holed up waiting for whatever frightening thing we were up to to pass. We wanted the cardboard over the doors so they would have to chew their way out, and so that they would not immediately look at their new surroundings and panic. That's the sort of thing that gets fresh-released rodents killed. Instead, the birdhouses are meant to be stable enough starter lairs, places they can return to for reasonable safety, while they explore the terrain and find a spot that's okay enough.

The locations also turned out to be near altogether too much poison ivy, so when we got home we slathered this stuff that's supposed to repel the ivy's oils and took showers. I've at least not gotten anything noticeable, and while bunnyhugger got a mild case she noticed from her scouting, it hasn't grown worse enough to complain about, at least.

So we set the birdhouses out --- the girls one we had a spot immediately ready; the one with the lone male we actually had to do some last-minute scouting because turned out there were fewer good spots than we expected. (We didn't want them set next to one another in case they don't actually get along.) We set down caches of food, and bowls of water, and even some bits of toilet paper since they so enjoy nesting with that. And set down branches and pieces of bark so that the houses are, if not fully hidden, at least hard for a casual human walking the trail nearby to notice. We know some things from letterboxing that come in useful here.

The disappointing thing is we never got to see the moment the mice emerge into their new lives, ones we hope fulfilling and natural enough to make up for them being much shorter than if we just kept them as pets. bunnyhugger noted that it's possible given the maximum lifespan of deer mice in captivity that they could outlive our pet rabbit, if we had kept them; and, now, that won't happen unless catastrophe strikes Athena.

The next day it rained heavily; possibly the first time the adult mice --- certainly the first time the babies --- experienced it. We hope we've done something that will be good for them.

On to less ambiguous stuff. Join with me now in more explorations of the Cedar Point Museum, roommates with the Merry-Go-Round Museum and filling up slightly more than the Merry-Go-Round Museum's main event space:

1972 Cedar Point-branded calendar --- looks like they closed Labor Day after a buyout day --- and a couple 'credit cards' from the early 90s that aren't explained. I'm going to guess something for park employees to use in the cafeteria or something?

Cedar Point resort newspaper for September 1898, a time when Kennywood was barely a plan for a dining hall.

New York Central club excursion ticket for the park. Also some tickets for specific rides on the right.

A 1910 dance card. The program seems to be alternating waltzes and two-steps, neither dances I could do.

Used to be you could just get anything in glass with the year on it.

Is that one of the horses too valuable to leave on the Frontier Carousel that's since been moved to Dorney Park? No, this is a replica that they have because of reasons. But I spent time looking for evidence.

Trivia: Formosa (Taiwan) adopted a time zone based on the Greenwich meridian in 1896. Source: Time's Pendulum: The Quest to Capture Time --- From Sundials to Atomic Clocks, Jo Ellen Barnett.

Currently Reading: Michigan History, May/June 2026, Editor Erin Bartels.

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Once There Was a Way to Get Back Home

2026-06-07T05:04:24Z

Monday was the day to return home, and we could enjoy sleeping in a bit since check-out was a luxuriously late noon. This is not to say we had everything out of the room at 11:59 am, but we were tolerably close. There were still a lot of people bringing stuff out of their rooms as we checked out; it wasn't like the old days where we'd see Punk Cat and nobody else. (Also we never see Punk Cat anymore; hope they're doing all right.)

We've sometimes done specific things on the Monday after Anthrohio. Letterboxing (where we saw a wild rabbit flop and realized why they do it), or going to the Olentangy Caverns, one time even the Columbus Zoo for the segment that used to be an amusement park. We'd talked about maybe doing the Zoo again, since the roller coaster had reached an anniversary year and it's been like a decade or so. And one time we took the long diversion to Cedar Point to get some amusement park time in; would you believe we got all the way into June without any amusement parks this year?

But when it came to making the decision, you know, we decided we didn't feel like doing much of anything. The zoo we expected would be packed --- it was sunny and not too hot --- and it's a bit pricey to go in for only a couple hours and not even see most of the animals. And other stuff didn't seem that urgent and we didn't bring our letterboxing gear anyway. In the end it felt more appealing to get home instead.

So, we went to a Skyline Chili for vegetarian five-ways --- first time we've been there in ages --- and headed north, making more stops than we did on the way down. Since we had the time we stopped at bunny_hugger's parents, to give their dog the extra-long walk she'd been denied Thursday, and to tell something of what all we had done, and finally to collect our rabbit and the deer mice. With that, it was but the work of an hour to drive home and, neatly, we reached the end of our backlog of Greatest Generation episodes just as we were pulling in to town. It's rare we're caught up like that.

Tuesday, I could return to work, and bunny_hugger could return to summer vacation, apart from the pinball stuff.

Pinball stuff will wait. Now, some pictures of the Merry-Go-Round Museum's roommate, the Cedar Point history museum.

They have so much Cedar Point ephemera, and it's not stuff that used to be in the Town Hall Museum. Here, for example, cans for discount admission from back in the sad days of Cedar Point being a Pepsi park.

Here's a 1907 letter by that G A Bockling sending a railroad line the Annual for that year. There's also what seems like a budget broken down by department, which makes it look like they were spending a lot on cigars in the day.

A century-plus old season pass, and a book of pictures of the park.

A life jacket from the days that a ferry was the only way to get to the park.

Back in the 90s Cedar Point was all ready to name a roller coaster Banshee, and then someone looked up what a Banshee was and they panicked and renamed it Mantis. So there's a little display of the not-used Banshee stuff. (Kings Island, owned by the same people, named a roller coaster Banshee, but that was literally over twelve years later and in the southern part of Ohio, not the northwest.)

Here's a copy of the memo ordering all Banshee-themed merchandise destroyed. If you zoom in you'll see, I'm not joking about ``someone looked up what a Banshee was and they panicked''.

Trivia: 44 percent of the 12,889 United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration members in December 1946 were women. Source: The Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second World War, Ben Shephard.

Currently Reading: The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, Roland Allen.

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Gonna Take Some Time to Do the Things We Never Had

2026-06-06T18:22:17Z

Sunday opened up with sleeping in, which I know it sounds like we did a lot but bear in mind we were up to the end of dances and sleeping is nice. But there wasn't anything to get up early for except bunny_hugger dropping her sketchbook off at Artist Alley --- something she could do just by throwing on a kigurumi and going downstairs, a blessing of staying at a furry convention hotel --- and the inflatables meetup at 10 am that, oh, going to bed after 3 am I wasn't ready for.

So when we got up after noon we went to hospitality for a couple quick snacks (they'd be closing at 4 pm, before even Closing Ceremonies), and then another pass around the Dealers Den before going to the Theme Park Furs panel. This is usually held by the same person who was doing karaoke the night before and turns out he wasn't there. Substitue people whose names I didn't get were there and explained the original host had some emergency come up. So the panel, which usually is a bunch of this guy trying to pull up his on-ride videos (taken with GoPro glasses or something so it's not quite as reckless as you fear) instead turned into an open discussion mostly among the people who had worked at amusement parks. Mostly Cedar Point and Kings Island. I never had the chance to pipe in with my ancient and non-ride-operator experience at Great Adventure.

This did let us hear a bunch of fascinating gossip about little park stuff, mostly misbehaving riders. There was a hilarious one of the ride operator seeing security confronting people he'd called them for, over having their phones on the ride; the rider tried insisting there wasn't any rule about not taking the phone out on the ride and the security guy wordlessly marched over to the sign and pointed to that rule there in print. Like a movie. Then there was someone who, they claimed, somehow squirmed their way out of the restraints of a coaster stopped on the lift hill and walked down saying just, he gotta go to the bathroom, bye. You can understand while also wishing you had video of him doing it.

Also the most fascinating bit of trivia: Millennium Force is never turned off! Or at leaste not before a couple years ago when they redid the whole control system. I wasn't clear whether the new control system has the same problem, which is that fully bringing it online takes over eight hours. As a result, during the operating season, the ride is still left powered up and ready to go. They put it in a Ride Park configuration, where it's not just pressing one button to make it go, but if you needed to do a Clark Griswold and make something run, you could do it solo and pretty quickly. Wild. Up to this point I just assumed they always left the support lights on overnight because it makes a beautiful night sky. (Probably they do. I would imagine ride lighting and ride operations are different systems.)

That closed up with enough time for us to get a last visit in to Artists Alley (for bunny_hugger to pick up her sketchbook) and the Dealers Den (where I got the last possible copy of that convention history graphic novel), and then it was already Closing Ceremonies. We got in in time to see the last bits of the charity auction going and the preposterously large bids put in for funny convention badge numbers for next year, and had great seats to see the con board tell about how enormous the convention was and deliver the figures of nearly four thousand attendees, one thousand fursuiters parading, and the eighteen thousand or whatever raised for the charity, which we completely missed throughout the con. (It's a group matching service animals t children with sensory or other special needs.)

After all that we finally went to the North Market for a last meal --- they would be closed Monday, Memorial Day, when we could have used an exciting farewell lunch --- and I repeated my kielbasa sandwich while bunny_hugger tried something new. A Bahn Mi, I think, but if I have it wrong it doesn't matter. We were there right up to the brink of their closing; yes, they flickered the lights on us. But we also got an ice cream to close out the day and thought how much weight we'd gain over the trip. (We lost weight, maybe from having only one meal plus snacks and spending all day up and around doing things.)

We didn't get to the Dead Dog Dance until about a half-hour into it, which would disappoint us because the DJ was playing a mix heavier into 90s dance music that we sort of know how to move to --- bunny_hugger does, at least, and I could recognize the cadence of songs in way that I can't for EDM --- and we really enjoyed it. bunny_hugger would be offended to see online somewhere comments criticizing the DJ for going ten minutes over his scheduled time. We imagined that the dance probably started ten minutes late --- we've seen these dances start as much as a half-hour past schedule --- but maybe these new arrivals don't know how things used to be. The DJ after that was a bit heavier on the EDM, but still had enough of older style music that we what was going on and were happy for it. The second DJ continued his set to about twenty minutes past the hour when things should have closed.

And then ... that was it, the last scheduled event for Anthrohio 2026. There were a good number of people still hanging around, though, the convention having enough mass now that the lobby and hallways could have crowds even without anything happening. That is a benefit of the con being ten times the size it ever was back at the old Holiday Inn Worthington, granted. Also somewhere around here we realized they had not held a Cake Decorating Contest, the last event that was uniquely and distinctly Morphicon. I hope it's because whoever was supposed to organize it couldn't this year, and that it'll return. It's always hard losing any tradition, but that's the sort of thing to make us wonder what we're at the convention for. The audio people also didn't play Toto's 'Africa' as chaser.

Yet, it was a great time. An exhausting time. A stimulating time. A time when we got to see most everyone we hoped to, unlike the cursed Motor City Furry Con where we missed everybody. Maybe we do have room for an enormous convention in our lives.

But we are hoping to see if Michigan Anthro Weekend this October is the sort of small cozy event we used to go to Morphicon/Anthrohio for.

And now, some more Merry-Go-Round pictures plus the revelation of what something new has been added to the place ...

Here's a more interesting pan centered on the sea serpent carvings the Merry-Go-Round Museum made in-house.

Carousel horse with a dragon of fire and electricity on its shield.

And then say, why is a skeleton sitting in some kind of ride wearing a Halloweekend 2004 crew t-shirt?

It's because, dear reader, the Merry-Go-Round Museum is now also a Cedar Point History Museum, with such things as this partial boat from the recently-removed Snake River Falls shoot-the-chutes. The skeletons are just flavor.

They had the Blue Streak height ride sign last year, and the roller coaster simulator that's usually turned off even longer than that, but 2025 saw a huge expansion in the old park stuff.

They also had up front a comic poem in tribute to a retiring park employee.

Trivia: Women living with a male partner do on average five more hours of housework per week than single women do. Men living with female partners do an average half-hour more. Source: Seriously Curious: The Facts and Figures that Turn Our World Upside-Down, Editor Tom Standage.

Currently Reading: The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, Roland Allen.

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Every Little Bird in the Tall Oak Tree

2026-06-06T04:03:34Z

I only got to the Rabbits and Rodents panel after the whole thousand-person-long fursuit parade ended, and after getting through the dense cloud of people milling around, including fursuiters running back to get out of suit and into something where they could breathe. Finally I got to the panel room where I found bunnyhugger already there; she'd arrived just before, and she too had been late. When she arrived there was someone else who'd taken the lead and started the round of people telling who they were and what their rabbit or rodent thing is. So great thanks to whoever it was saw the gap and took charge, and we had a pretty good time going around, talking, and even managed a much more orderly transition upstairs for the group photo. If we missed anyone, they didn't complain.

We finished at a reasonable time, got back to the room to unload stuff, and went across the street again to the North Market for lunch or dinner or whatever it was you eat at that hour. It was past 4 pm. We ended up going to the Polish counter where bunnyhugger got more and bigger pierogies than she could eat. Me, I felt an irresistible longing from my heritage, and made a rare exception to my basically vegetarian diet, getting a kielbasa hoagie. Vegetarian kielbasa has gotten very good but, oh, there is something in the crisp, juicy crackle of the real meat skin being punctured that isn't there yet. We joined mystee and spouse and friends, a semi-lucky break given we'd known they were going to lunch too.

Afterwards we went through the Dealer's Den, finally getting a sense of what was there. And bunnyhugger got a promise from an artist to do a sketchbook sketch, but the artist wanted to take her sketchbook only Sunday morning and return it that day. This gave us the time to return to our room and rest a while.

Because we had three panels left in the day. One to go to: the con history guy was doing a panel Con History: From Costume Masquerade to Fursuit Parade. This was in a much smaller room, packed so full we only got seats by climbing over a row of attendees and also someone deciding they were leaving. It was in some ways an expansion on one thread of his discussion the previous day, with a lot of pictures and stories, not all of them about Forrest J Ackermann being all like that.

This was great, but we had to leave as it was nearing the end because come 8 pm bunnyhugger had her next meet-and-greet to run. This was for birds, and bird-adjacent creatures like gryphons and such. I believe a couple dragons also popped in because you can't keep dragons out of things. This was a smaller group, probably because of the lateness of the hour, but the downtime we'd had before heading out did mean bunnyhugger had the chance to change into her peacock kigurumi, putting her on theme. She'd been annoyed she hadn't had the chance to bring her squirrel puppet to the Rabbits and Rodents meetup. This got things a little better at least.

Also for the photo someone in a really tall suit joined in. I don't know what kind of bird they were representing, but something with enormous legs, performed by their walking on stilts. This added just a foot and a half or so to their height, but that is a lot of height, especially on a thin body. Everyone was impressed.

Then came the last of our meet-and-greets, me running the Mustelids panel. I started out admitting that a member of the raccoon family isn't technically a mustelid, but then neither are all the skunks here either. They're in the Mephit family, a thing taxonomy has been clear on for decades and that hasn't filtered into the public consciousness as well as the ``rabbits are not Rodents'' classification has. However, both the raccoon and the skunk families are part of the Musteloidea superfamily so there's at least some relationship there. I was able to also correctly bring in the red panda suiter, as that family is also Musteloidea. I did go and blow it by saying the otters weren't mustelids either, but no, the otters are a subfamily of Mustelids. I was apparently inventing families inside the weasel superfamily and not even bunnyhugger called me on it.

Anyway, when all of that got finished fine, and we happened to notice out the window there were fireworks going off. Professional fireworks, so we knew it wasn't something like a major political figure turning up dead. No, it was just Memorial Day weekend, probably around the AAA baseball team. (Columbus's team is called the Clippers, after the mid-19th century sailing ships designed for oceangoing speed that I don't think could possibly get to the center of Ohio?)

We would spend time after this back in our room, rebuilding our energies. When we ventured out again there was some point where I ended up in the video game room alone and playing Tetris far better than I would have thought I had the reflexes for. (My secret is not accelerating the piece's drop because you can use the time to figure what to do with the next piece.) We would spend some time at the dance; we'd also eventually get to the karaoke, which was moderately well-attended but half of everyone called to a song was missing. It turned out the waiting list was something like 90 minutes long and you can understand people giving up and wandering off. And we were there when there were under 30 minutes to the scheduled end of the event. The karaokemeister said he intended to stay until they kicked him out; but we didn't stick with it. bunnyhugger, taking her daily walk, happened to be past there about 90 minutes after this and found the room empty. We do not have the information to determine whether they exhausted their singers or got kicked out.

Good dance, though. We were getting to sleep something like 3 am, so it was a good thing there wasn't anything happening Saturday morning we really needed to be awake for.

In pictures, now, we're carrying on with the Merry-Go-Round Museum, as mentioned packed with more things and I still haven't even hinted at the really big addition. It's coming.

And here's the sea dragon from the point of view of someone about to be licked up by them or snorted into their nose. Enjoy!

The brass ring game arm, here, plus stairs such as one would use if one were loading the rings.

Happened to catch the side of this horse you can see the lighting from. Yes, they're hollow. I bet you can think of two good reasons for that.

Here's a close-up look of the hollow. The main body is built around a box.

Unpainted lion that's on display in front of the brass ring arm and stool, probably limiting the number of people who climb up top of the stool.

Did a little panning shot of the carousel and got a good in-focus view of the other chariot while everything was in motion.

Trivia: In 1940 the average auto worker salary was $1.04 an hour. Steel workers earned 95 cents. Coal miners made 99 cents, but worked ten fewer hours a week than factory workers. Source: A Call To Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II, Maury Klein.

Currently Reading: The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, Roland Allen.

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He Said "No, We're Outta Bavarian Cream-Filled Donuts"

2026-06-05T04:03:46Z

Over on my humor blog we've reached the end of another MiSTing and who knows what I'll dig out to share next. Also in miscellaneous other stuff I ramble about hair dryers and doughnut celebrations. Just look if you don't believe me:

We'll spend today with more of the Merry-Go-Round Museum because there is so much to look at even if you've seen some of it before. A lot of it you have not.

Skeleton just hanging out in one of the chariots. It's looking backwards, it doesn't have the head of a horse.

The inner side of one of the horses --- I think this is one of the horses they built as a duplicate of one they raffled off --- with the light glowing behind.

And here's the inner side of the rabbit that, alas, is too small for bunnyhugger to ever ride.

Back to the video panel explainers. An advantage of the rotating screen is that they can show more information about each item and, for example, identify that the British centaur is that of Second Boer War general Joseph Maria Gordon. I do not know why the scare quotes around U.K. in identifying the carver. He was promoted to Major General only after the war; during the conflict he was made a centaur for he was chief staff officer for Overseas Colonial Forces.

Here's General Gordon leading an ostrich.

And here's an old figure that hasn't been restored, or at least not restored in decades.

Now, in front of the M C Illions scenic panel was this array of horses from, turns out, Dorney Park!

Here the panels were very helpful as they rotated through several pieces of the 1901 carousel's history, which Dorney Park used as a special-events carousel until a couple years before the fire that destroyed their 1930s carousel.

The carousel was painted red-white-and-blue for the Bicentennial, a choice which seems hard to make stylish but there you go. I assume the current paint is a reproduction of whatever the pre-bicentennial look was.

The 1901 Dentzel sea horse; look at all that gold fringe there.

And the lion's also from the 1901 Dentzel, I believe. The camel, who can say?

Slightly more up-close picture of the sea horse so you can use it to make your own carousel postage stamp.

Trivia: Gemini 4 carried about seven thousand square inches of AMERCO sponge cloth lining installed along bulkheads, sidewalls, the floor, hatches, console sides, and stowage boxes, with the hope that the material would absorb excess moisture inside the spacecraft, despite some fear that the heat of reentry might make absorbed water boil. It did work, although there was evidence of steam on reentry, not enough to require redesigning the 'wallpaper'. Source: Gemini 4: An Astronaut Steps Into The Void, David J Shayler.

Currently Reading: The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, Roland Allen.

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Local Folk Lined the Streets in a Midwestern Town

2026-06-04T04:06:17Z

So, the fursuit parade. After hastily dressing bunny_hugger in --- not her BunnyHugger fursuit! We were worried that bringing all our con gear plus the rabbit plus the deer mice for the first hour of our trip we'd be out of space, so we packed relatively light and left one fursuit and several kigurumis behind --- we got up to the floor of the other hotel where we'd taken group photos. And bunny_hugger disappeared into the assembly area, apparently late enough to have missed the group photos. Meanwhile I found a spot near the top escalator, by the windows, so I could take video that wasn't backlit. Even better, I was around people who didn't spent a lot of time weaving into my line of sight or talking about nonsense, one of my better experiences.

The parade started maybe ten minutes late, which isn't bad by furry event schedules, and the route --- going down at least two levels of escalator --- would prove to be maybe optimistic. At some point one of the escalators stalled out under the load of every fursuiter in line on it, and the con hastily arranged traffic managers who spaced every suiter at least eight steps away from their neighbors. And there was even a side track; some of the suiters, especially ones with very large suits or with mobility issues, jumped out of line to get into the elevator.

There were a lot of people. I'm used to a fursuit parade that goes on ten minutes, maybe fifteen. I knew this was a big parade, though. It was when my camera reached the 30-minute limit of its recording that I started to realize: this is freaking enormous and also we have a panel in like fifteen minutes. Also, I still hadn't seen bunny_hugger. When I finally did I figured we're in the clear since she likes to hang out near the back of the parade and yet the parade kept on going, and going, and going. Now, there were a lot of suiters, and a lot of great suits, and a good number of people doing things interacting with the 'Rock You Like A Furricane' theme, but the whole thing wore out my camera battery and in all ran at least fifty minutes.

And that's to watch. What was it like in person? Well, I don't know, but I am told by a reliable source that bunny_hugger, whose vision was better than in the BunnyHugger fursuit but still extremely limited, at one point lost track of what the actual parade route was. But that's all right; in that case, you just follow the person ahead of you and hope for the best. Only, in this case, that person started walking outside, and outside for a longer time, and longer still, until bunny_hugger realized that she was following someone who had nothing to do with the parade at all and was just roaming downtown Columbus. So she turned around and retracted her steps hops, finally intersecting the parade again and rejoining it after ten minutes or so, not yet having missed the end.

When the convention closed they gave official attendance statistics, and the estimated fursuit parade length. It was about a thousand people in that line of furries, in which case getting everyone past a fixed point in under an hour is doing very well. But also: this is literally three times the size of Anthrohio back when it was Morphicon and we started attending. As the performers at one event. The entire convention, we would be told, was just shy of four thousand people. To put it another way, it was the size of Midwest FurFest in 2013, the year we decided the Midwest FurFest had gotten too big for us. Considering what we most liked about Morphicon was how cozy and compact it was, and how you could know everyone, this moment was sobering. We're still planning on going next year, but it's not the convention we were going to a decade ago.

When the parade finally ended Saturday, we had a practical problem. We had not arranged a meetup point, but bunny_hugger also was not able to bring her phone, and the mob was too big to rely on the ``we'll both go to where it seems the other person will be looking for us'' that usually works better than it ought. More, it was past the 3:00 start of our next panel. I made the guess that bunny_hugger would try and find her way to our hotel room, to get out of suit, and the best thing I could do was get to the Rabbits-and-Rodents meet-and-greet and hold things down until she could arrive. But what I found there was ... to be revealed.

Now in pictures we're on to Saturday of Halloweekends, which starts by not going to Halloweekends and instead ... do you know where we're going? Mmm?

That's right, it's the post office! I mean, the Merry-Go-Round Museum in downtown Sandusky! But wait, there's more ...

This year they had a lot more stuff, making the museum weirdly cluttered. Also new: monitors with rotating information panels, which I'm torn about. A flat plaque is easier to read at your pace, but a screen does let you go into more detail.

Also new: giving out plastic cards to tap for your rides, instead of wooden nickels. I guess the advantage of the cards is you get souvenirs, but, like, you can keep a wooden disc too.

You know what this is? Inside the ear? It's a spider, painted on to the figure. Now why would a spider be painted on to a figure?

Yes, because it's a pig, and now you get the spider connection, don't you?

And here's some of the horses that I've probably shared photos of before, because you see that secondary figure on the right there? That's a billiken, which seems like it should be a Japanese legend brought over to North America but which is in fact a creature created in Kansas City that for some reason got to be lastingly popular in Saint Louis and Japan.

Trivia: Sections of the underwater telegraph cable laid from Ireland to Newfoundland in 1873 were still in service over a century later. Source: How The World Was One: Beyond the Global Village, Arthur C Clarke.

Currently Reading: The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, Roland Allen.

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Everybody Wants To Be A Cat

2026-06-03T05:07:33Z

Saturday would be the day we earned our Anthrohio attendance. This isn't a joke; we were comped our memberships in exchange for hosting panels. This wasn't even our idea, remarkably; the head of programming messaged me saying they were looking for people to run species meet-and-greets, and knew that bunnyhugger and I had run some in the past. They sent us a list of panels they were hoping to run and asked what we could take. We, loving the days when the convention was mostly special interest meetups, were certainly going to help run them. And, not knowing just how big Anthrohio would be, not knowing whether there'd be anyone else who might run, say, an avians meet-and-greet if one of us didn't. For my part I also felt like if I were getting a whole (basic) membership paid for I should do as much as I felt I could be competent to run, and to trust that I would be co-host to anything bunnyhugger ran to support that.

Our usual for a meet-and-greet is under a dozen people, though the first conventions after the start of Covid brought crowds of as many as two dozen. This was the upper limit of what we imagined possible and imagine our surprise as we got, running late, to the Dragons and Mythicals panel room at the end of a long corridor in the other building to find a crowd of dragon types outside the room. This because there was no room inside the room; every chair was occupied and all the wall space full of people. Imagine our reaction.

Just having everyone who could fit in the room introduce each other would occupy nearly the whole session, which took the pressure off thinking of things to talk about afterwards. But also meant we couldn't do stuff like share favorite dragon cartoons and stuff. Also there was the question of the group photo, which was made more intense and anxiety-producing by a guy who wanted to do it now before we forgot or something and how the room wasn't going to be good for the group photo. Add to that a request we'd gotten from a staff member as we walked in, that any group photos be done upstairs because it was too crowded on that level. Said staffer did not suggest where upstairs, a floor we had not yet seen, to go, but my supposition was we'd figure it out from there.

So after introductions and with maybe ten minutes left in the gettogether we tried to move outside for the big group photo. There was a decent enough spot upstairs, at the end of the escalator; easily visible as you come upstairs, at least, and if it was backlit from the window walls, that's what a fill flash covers. But it also took a long while getting everyone together, and foolishly I went out in the middle of the group, thinking my nice long tail would be a good enough banner to guide everyone, rather than hanging around to the very end and bringing up the stragglers.

Well, the important thing is that we missed a couple people. And big people too, fursuiters with tremendous and eye-catching costumes. One was an inflatable Godzilla, which yeah, you could just buy at the inflatable Godzilla store, but that's still fun seeing. But the other was a homemade two-person costume of a wind-up toy dragon, something enormous and fantastic and big enough that it had to go around the elevator. And they were visibly hurt by missing the big group photo, but were also so late that too many people had already dispersed to get a photo together again. bunnyhugger and other people took photos of the wind-up dragon separately (Godzilla had already deflated), but at least one of the two suiters was sour about it and tossed a couple comments about that off into the Anthrohio telegram group over the weekend.

No time for a postmortem. Next up, and in the same room --- we would see a lot of this room over the day --- was Raccoons and Marsupials, the panel I was most interested in running. I didn't make the choice for Raccoons and Marsupials; like you, I can't see much taxonomic link between them. Finally I realized they were thinking of opossums as the marsupials of choice, and raccoons and opossums have been teamed up under the ``trash animals'' meetup at this and Motor City Furry Con before. bunnyhugger was unconvinced then, and afterward, but it makes sense to me anyway.

This time around, with me ineffectively sharing a fun panel from a recent Mark Trail where Cherry worries their son is going to be an antisocial weirdo who only talks to raccoons (Rusty Trail skipped a scout meeting to hang out with a raccoon) I thought to try going upstairs to do the group photo before coming back for chatting. And we were better-coordinated this time about getting both the front and end of the crowd together; as far as we can tell, we didn't lose anyone, not even the opossums who kept passing out and getting con staff over to check whether they were just playing dead. Con staff have got to get so tired of opossum suiters.

But it will not surprise you that when we reconvened there were barely half the people we'd started with, and that people from the next panel --- one we weren't running --- had occupied the room. We carried on bravely, though, with what conversation we could until it was time to yield to the next panel and, for us, the next event: grabbing something to eat from Hospitality and getting bunnyhugger ready for the biggest fursuit parade she has ever been in.

In pictures, now, we're at the end of Halloweekends's Friday, which you might have guessed from how dark pictures were getting.

Cheery ghost sticker I noticed on the sidewalk.

View up the Top Thrill 2 tower and the Power Tower tower.

And I got a picture of the control panel for Iron Dragon, for those who want to practice the ride at home.

Motion shot of Raptor, showing a train arriving at what sure seems like a bit fast for the circumstances.

Another night, another night ride on Siren's Curse, and you can see the red streak of a train going past.

And here by the way is the storage locker for everything that might go in your pockets for Siren's Curse. I don't like having to empty my pockets and reload them afterward but I have to admit it does really speed up the loading and unloading of trains on the platform when nobody has to fiddle with what to do with their souvenir drink bottles and other clutter.

Trivia: Tanzania borders eight other countries. Source: The Uncyclopedia: Everything You Never Knew You Wanted to Know, Gideon Haigh.

Currently Reading: The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, Roland Allen.

PS: What’s Going On In Gil Thorp? Is _Gil Thorp_ done with the interlaced plots? March – May 2026, featuring an anti-ICE walkout so you know Gil Thorp at least is on the side of good.

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I've Done Everything There Is

2026-06-02T04:10:16Z

The thing I was most interested getting to Friday night was the Con History: From First Fandom to Furry Cons, which I had imagined was just going to be a history of furry cons. I wasn't paying enough attention to the title or description; this went back to Hugo Gernsback's original plan to gather ham radio enthusiasts around his science fiction magazine and soak them for cash. And along the way create these astounding stories of intense fandom drama. This was by --- well, I think of them as The Inanimorphs Guy, from their disused FurAffinity account; I can't find their name on the program guide. But it was condensed from their Ursa Major-award-winning work, including a graphic novel that it then became my mission to buy a copy of. But every time I went to the Dealer's Den on Saturday and Sunday they were away, with the 'At Panel' tag hung on their booth. Finally in the last quarter-hour of the Dealer's Den hours Sunday I got to their booth and ... they were sold out. Had just sold the last copy. But ... and they looked through their backpack and found the copy they'd been using to edit copy and for notes that they didn't need now that the con was over. So that quest ended happily.

(This copy has on the cover the label 'Ashcan Copy', and I don't know if that's just what the cover says or if this reflects this literally being a copy-editing copy no longer needed since it went to actual production. I am aware of the professional meanings of 'ashcan copy', as a mockup meant to establish or secure intellectual property rights, or as a limited-distribution promotional copy. The latter seems more likely in this context, but without comparing to other copies sold at Anthrohio I can't know what's meant.)

The work was really, really good, presenting a compelling case with a lot of references to specific contemporary texts to support the narrative. Also it emphasized how much women and Black people had to do in pioneering every major element of fandom, including heading the first clubs, making the first cosplay patterns, and creating essential elements like hospitality suites. I suppose I've heard of many of these people or events but always from the white guys' perspective. The lone important flaw to the presentation was that it spent so much time on the earliest events --- admittedly the ones that set the most core elements of conventions --- that everything from about 1980 to the present was smooshed together in a really deep breath at the end of the panel. Also I missed whatever thesis statement might have introduced Bronies and My Little Pony cons; there was a good bit of talk about how these were important but apart from introducing the consent-to-interaction badges I missed why they're worth this much talk. The lone flaw in my experience is we ended up in seats behind some people with huge headgear so I could see the screen only intermittently. Well, I could have moved, a little, because the room was packed.

After the panel we got to Artist Alley, which had set up --- finally --- in the evening, in a few niches of free space in the hallway around the stairs. It seemed bizarre that Artist Alley would set up so late, and with so few tables, but the schedule promised that this was just a teaser. Because it turned out that the convention, Saturday, would become much more enormous.

The Hilton Or Whatever there is actually two hotels in the Columbus Convention Center, connected by a skybridge, and for Thursday and Friday Anthrohio had only one of the hotels. Saturday whatever the heck the other event was cleared out, and suddenly much more space was available. Friday night, then, and Saturday morning the con staff organized and prepared a bunch of meeting rooms, and a new, ballroom-size Main Event space, and a dance floor, and got that prepared for the start of events the next day. The upshot of this is what had been the surprisingly puny Main Events of Thursday and Friday became Artist Alley, and what seemed like had been a decently-sized convention bigger than we were used to suddenly became the biggest furry convention we've ever attended.

That, dear reader, was in our future. For now, for this moment, we were just getting to the dance and getting ready for what would be our busiest day ahead. One we dared not sleep through.

Much as this report was about Friday at Anthrohio, these pictures are about Friday at Halloweekends, so I hope you enjoy these moments from Cedar Point.

Another trick-or-treat station in the Kiddie Kingdom. This too is themed to an old Halloweekends haunted house, so there's nostalgia for the parents at work.

Got a picture of a bird taking off!

The afternoon offered some fantastic shadows and rays of light.

And looking east, here's some seagulls minding their business. I like the one near the center that's preening their chest.

After the sun went down we went past the petting zoo again and noticed the ducks hadn't been put back together yet.

A duck tries valiantly to sleep despite having had its feathers detonated.

Trivia: Gail Borden opened his first condensed-milk factory in 1859. By 1863 Army contracts brought production to 17,000 quarts per day. Source: Down To Earth: Nature's Role in American History, Ted Steinberg.

Currently Reading: The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, Roland Allen.

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I've Seen Everything There Is

2026-06-01T04:01:47Z

We slept partway through Opening Ceremonies. The problem, post-incident investigation concluded, is that the white noise program bunnyhugger was using had its alarm set to go off in 10 hours, rather than at 10 am, a mistake you can understand a sleepy person making when setting the alarm at the end of a long day of fish-water-changing and driving and dog-disappointing and hauling luggage and briefly dancing and more things of minor import.

Since we'd missed the start (and, probably, the finish) of Opening, we decided to go to lunch at North Market. Just across the street from the hotel was conveniently a big construction zone. But there were directional arrows on the sidewalk leading to one of the entrances. There were probably other entrances but I never figured how to get to one of them from our hotel. It was raining a bit, as it did much of the weekend, just enough to make us briefly wish we'd brought light jackets. We didn't melt, is the important thing.

What we did do was examine the North Market's array of food stalls --- several dozen of them --- before settling on one of the first we saw, the crepes place that bunnyhugger recognized as having sent a grease truck to Anthrohio in its old location. This was good eating, though, and this and a quick trip to Hospitality before its frightfully early (8 pm!) close kept us fed for the day. That and some of the Coon's Candy haul.

We got to a couple of little con events in the afternoon. A walk around the Dealer's Den, which found nobody bunnyhugger was quite interested in commissioning from. Also turns out sketchbook commissions aren't so much a thing anymore, artists preferring to use digital or loose sheets of paper, in part for fear of losing someone's sketchbook. This fear is reasonable and if I were good enough to take sketchbook commissions I'd probably be shy to for that reason.

bunnyhugger also made it to the games room for Blood On The Clocktower, a Werewolf/Mafia-style game she'd hoped to learn enough to play. Her team won, despite (as she described to me) her fumbling her role in the social-deduction game early on; her explanation that she did things that should have made the villagers very suspicious because she didn't know how the game worked was accepted, at a key moment, even though it runs roughshod over the boundary of in-game knowledge. Good thing to know in the future, though.

When I rejoined bunnyhugger in the gaming room, after Clocktower had ended, we noticed a bunch of colorable button scenes, many of them with animals playing rock band instruments. (The convention theme was 'Rock You Like A Furricane' and there was a lot of fun rock band imagery going around.) Our interest in this collapsed as the game room organizer explained how he had used LLMs to generate the image blanks --- I think I actually said a consoling ``oh, dear'' when he said this --- and his attempts to explain how he had to really work at it to turn the LLM images into something usable did not help matters any. bunnyhugger observed (to me) the interesting point that people who use LLMs to shortcut creating things always go on to explain how much work they have to put into it. But we still had to wonder, how many artists attending the con would have been delighted to draw a dozen colorable templates?

I'll continue to narrate Friday at Anthrohio, don't worry, but for pictures I'm still sharing Friday at our big Halloweekends 2025 weekend. Please, enjoy seeing some beloved comic strip characters like you maybe remember seeing them last year.

The Peanuts gang came out, though not for their show; for some reason one of their performers couldn't perform so they just came out for photos instead.

So, what do you figure Charlie Brown's costume is? Is that Frankenstein's Creature? It's got to be Frankenstein, right, only you don't think of him as having a Beatles wig.

Godzilla patiently waits for the chance to get a photo with Princess Sally Brown.

There is something wonderful in people wearing costumes to the park. It's a delight.

The Kiddie Whip, the only Whip the park has. While I still, somehow, have failed to see it running I realized something that might explain how it gets a whip action with a circular rather than oval track: note that the cars are closer to the center on the left side than on the right. Somehow this thing is rolling the cars off-center.

I didn't know they had a The Birds haunted area this year.

Trivia: The ancient Icelandic calendar had 52 weeks of seven days each. In 955 Thorstein Surt introduced ``sumarauki'', a supplementary week added to summer each seventh year. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.

Currently Reading: The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, Roland Allen.

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You Say 'Stop' and I Say 'Go, Go, Go'

2026-05-31T04:07:31Z

Our Anthrohio '26 visit --- our first in two years, since last year's was held Easter/Pinball At The Zoo weekend --- started Thursday morning, and late. This because in trying to put the goldfish outside for the summer we found there were several fish in one tank that we weren't able to get. The nitrate levels had crept up to the not-really-good level and bunnyhugger had to do a partial water change so the stragglers could have some more comfort waiting for their eventual release. The rest of the goldfish are doing fine, by the way, and we're hoping they're having a low-stress time underneath the new netting that seems to be holding up fine.

Visiting bunnyhugger's parents to drop off the pets went well. Our domestic mice we felt safe leaving at home, with abundant food and full bottles of water. The rabbit, of course, needed to come and get her usual vacation quarters. And the deer mice needed to come along to make sure that they would get full bottles of water every day. Her parents were not sure they were up to taking care of the deer mice, but they did just fine considering her parents never saw the mice. They also never saw baby mice, but the night we got them back bunnyhugger did.

Her parents' dog was thrilled to see bunnyhugger since her presence is always prelude to a special, extra-long, 45-minute-plus walk around the park/s. (It's one big park area, but which park depends which side of the river you are.) Here the poor dog was to be sorely disappointed, because we had to get going fast. We would make this up to her, don't worry.

But what did we need to leave so soon for? Coon's Candy, the (family-eponymous) candy shop in Nevada, Ohio, which would be closed Memorial Day --- when we would be driving home and could use a nice break in the drive for candy --- and would close at 5 pm Thursday. We haven't been to it in years and so could only make it if we took off after a quick lunch and drove efficiently.

We drove efficiently, getting there with not quite an hour of the store's closing. They've made some small changes, particularly in apparently using a new logo style that deemphasizes the raccoon-baker motif they used to use, which is bogus. They didn't even have it on the plastic bags of haystacks and buckeyes and stuff. They were also having a sale on divinity-flavor fudge; bunnyhugger got her own bar and I got carrot cake that I just now remembered I haven't eaten. Hang on.

After that we drove with a little less efficiency the rest of the way to Columbus, and to downtown Columbus to the new Hilton Or Whatever where Anthrohio has been for a second year running now. It's a vastly larger space, two hotels in the Columbus Convention Center, and by the time we were checked in, had got our stuff from the car into the room, and got our convention badges it turned out the nearest place to get food --- the North Market, which I'd call a hawker center if it were in Singapore and had a chicken rice stand --- was already closed since it was the late hour of 7 pm.

What we ended up doing for dinner was getting snacks (we still weren't very hungry from lunch) and Coke Zero from the hotel's self-service convenience store, at prices that were riotously too expensive. We wouldn't be doing that again, by virtue of having good-sized lunch-dinner fusions at North Market until we checked out, but I'd be fibbing if I didn't say I kind of wished we'd brought a 2L bottle of pop for our room from Meijer's. Maybe for next time.

Though there was an MST3K event --- Alkali telling jokes over The Apple --- we got only to the very end of it, and to help move chairs out of the way for the start of the Thursday night dance. We were happy that the dance was more of a 90s style, eschewing the Electronic Dance Music that's the standard for cons we attend, and bunnyhugger at least knew how to dance to it. But we could only be at the first couple minutes of it, because that Thursday night was also the final Late Show with Stephen Colbert and we got back to our room to watch that. We stand by the decision, but it did mean it was near 1 am before we could emerge back into the convention and by then all scheduled programming was done. We could do some wandering around, at least. And then finally flopped into bed, looking forward to getting up for Opening Ceremonies at 11 am Friday.

Now in pictures to a Friday, Halloweekends in late October 2025.

One of the music shows was The Shrieks!. We would get to them, don't worry.

French Quarter Flags Hung Upside-Down Count: 1.

Stitch pausing to admire and take a picture of the Midway Scare-o-sel. (I should mention I was wearing my Angel kigurumi so we were adorable together.)

Cedar Point seen from the wrong way around. They'd taken down the 150 sign from in front of the carousel but had a new park name one up in its place.

And here's the Kiddy Kingdom, which we worry every year they're going to renovate out of existence. The big Frankenstein figure used to be part of the parade that they haven't done this decade.

Now who's this handsome red dragon at the trick-or-treat station? (The trick-or-treat stations are all themed to retired Halloweekends areas or haunted houses, in this case the Fear Faire that used to be near the Town Square Museum.)

Trivia: Polynesian sailor Ui-te-Rangiora is supposed sometime around 650 CE to have sailed his canoe to the edge of Antarctica and been stopped by the frozen ocean. Source: On The Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks, Simon Garfield. It is, of course, unclear how much stock to put in this legend, or even how much of the legend is actually Polynesian lore rather than Western reinterpretation of Polynesian lore.

Currently Reading: Walt Kelly's Pogo and Albert: Dreamin' of a Wide Catfish, Walt Kelly. Editor Mark Burstein.

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But I've Found a Driver and That's a Start

2026-05-30T04:07:36Z

It's not my intention to put off our Anthrohio trip report indefinitely but it sure gets to looking like that, doesn't it? I promise, it'll come soon and keep on going a while.

But right now I just want to cry a little about my car. Not seriously. It's just that it came up for its 150,000-mile maintenance, a modest-sized one. And I figured this was a natural time to replace the hubcap I'd lost at on Ohio Turnpike toll booth. (Guy in the Parts department said yeah, that happens a lot, which is either confirming a very particular mid-Michigan car problem or is trying to be empathetic in ways that come out weird.) I also figured it was a natural time to get my driver's side headlight fixture replaced, since the passenger's side came out so fantastic and also the driver's side was now terribly fogged up. bunnyhugger had asked back when I had the passenger-side replaced why I didn't do both at once and the answer is just that I didn't think it had needed it then. But the comparison was dramatic; I was fine with my left headlight before, but now, with a brand-new crystal-clear cover? It was inadequate.

But, you know, things come up and a wheel bearing failed inspection and, fine, I'll replace that given how I'm hooked on this ``wheels do not fly off unauthorized'' meme. So this ended up being an expensive --- but not long --- repair and, mm, glad I'm working.

Speaking of work. We still have, officially, the plan to move downtown, which was originally scheduled for around October last year, but we still don't know when we're actually doing it. But we're doing something tangible to ``prepare'' for it. Part of the move included a shift to working in-office Monday and Tuesday, rather than Tuesday and Wednesday. Starting in a couple weeks, though, we're changing the in-office days to Monday-Tuesday. The benefit in the new office is to be that we're sharing space with some other department and they have Wednesday-Thursday. The benefit in moving to the new schedule now is that any Monday holidays then result in only one day being in-office that week. And fortunately we'll be seeing a Monday holiday as soon as ... well, Labor Day, but the principle is still good.

Speaking of holidays, how about Halloweekends? Here's some pictures from the start of our Friday, now a full day at the park:

Here's a train on Steel Vengeance and on the unusual angle of going up a hill away from us. You never see that.

Here's a more normal picture of the train on one of its spirals.

And some good news: despite it all, the carp in the Mine Ride lagoon have survived and continue to look for food.

The geese meanwhile can not believe they have to share the water with these folks.

Stitch taking in a view of the freak show signs at the long-ago Frontier Carousel building.

There was just one goat dressed up for Halloween, which suggests we may have walked through a transformation story without recognizing it.

Trivia: Albrecht Dürer's father was a goldsmith who'd migrated from Hungary to Nuremberg. Source: Paper: Paging Through History, Mark Kurlansky.

Currently Reading: Walt Kelly's Pogo and Albert: Dreamin' of a Wide Catfish, Walt Kelly. Editor Mark Burstein.

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Baby I'm Ready to Go

2026-05-29T03:59:17Z

It's Thursday or Friday depending on just which time zone you're looking at this and exactly when I set visibility public so please look over my last week's work on the humor blog:

And with that looked at --- thank you --- please enjoy the next thing on my photo roll which is indeed amusement park trips! To wit, Cedar Point and Halloweekends. We got there for Thursday, the new partial day with only a few rides open, to see this:

OK, I know this looks like everything is closed but I swear, there were rides that were totally open! Like, uhm ...

Oh yeah, Top Thrill 2! Which I believe we rode for the first time this visit; that September trip was when we got on Siren's Curse for the first time.

The park continues to decorate flower beds with pumpkins for the season and they're mostly not in horrible shape even after two months out here.

There's even patterns. This owl represents a figure on a big haunted light fixture the park has had forever or at least since I first saw a Halloweekends.

Demon throwing off heavy metal horns here, over near where they have the heavy metal clowns playing. It's near Gemini.

Just a nice peaceful moment at the railroad tracks. The skeletons in the house in the center there are part of the regular train ride and not a specific Halloweekends thing.

Wait a minute, Maverick with a zero minute wait? Regular and line-cutting lines? Even the gate operator seems upset that the queue sign is telling such a transparent lie.

And a-ha! It was not a zero-minute wait as you see from here where we joined the line, which was like five minutes from actually riding. This is as short a line as Maverick ever gets so we enjoyed quite short waits for two marquee rides here. Steel Vengeance is in the far background.

Night already? Huh. Yeah, night already. The big illuminated structure there is Cedar Downs, the racing carousel, which looks almost like a light fountain with this exposure.

On Raptor we saw a weird ribbon of water creating an awkward puddle in the queue. I believe bunny_hugger had the guess about what this was and why which proved correct. To test the ride out the park has a bunch of plastic mannequin shells which they fill with water to get to approximately human weight, and as they didn't need that anymore they'd emptied the test figures, and some of the water was pouring out. (If they left the water in the dummies it'd freeze overnight and break the shells.)

Siren's Curse by night, with a train just dropped down the vertical track and making a nice long warp trail.

And here's another train posed at the edge of the lift hill, ready.

Trivia: Radioactive glow-in-the-dark paint dye for watches and clocks was typically made by a mixture of radium bromide and zinc sulfide, the zinc sulfide glowing from the alpha particles the radium bromide emitted. Source: Nature's Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements, John Emsley. The radium-painted hands would not endanger the watch or clock owner because the alpha particles couldn't penetrate the enclosure, not even the glass face.

Currently Reading: Walt Kelly's Pogo and Albert: Dreamin' of a Wide Catfish, Walt Kelly. Editor Mark Burstein.

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Thinking They Look Well in Velveteen When They're at the Table

2026-05-28T04:11:36Z

I'm not sure where I left off in the story of the mice. I mean the deer mice, the wild animals we've been temporarily housing so we can give them a ``soft release'' and their best shot at getting back into the wild and out of our living room. When she first caught the two we'd set in the cage bunnyhugger thought one of them looked pregnant. But a couple days later, the same mouse didn't, and supposed she had been mistaken.

You know what's come next. It was not a happy surprise to learn that the mouse had had babies, since, among other problems, it pushed back our release date by several weeks. The mice were exceptionally tiny balls of fluff that I never saw, but that bunnyhugger was able to return to the wooden birdhouse the adult mice set up as their nest. There's more here but it's sad and we've had enough of that.

This week, we figured, the baby mice would have aged enough to be mobile and maybe come out on their own. And Monday night what do you know but they did. I saw a little ball of brown energy and worry running on the wheel, and before much longer we saw both of them at once, plus an adult mouse, so we know we're not merely misidentifying them all.

Their great cuteness, and unexplained lack of fear of us, makes a strong case for keeping them as pets. Especially considering deer mice in captivity enjoy a good lifespan of up to eight years --- this is as much as quadruple a house mouse's --- but they would be a lot of trouble to keep as pets. Given how much emotional wrenching we've dealt with lately --- the past month and the past decade --- having a couple balls of happy little running fluff has been rejuvenating.

All going well we'll scout a place to set them soon, and release them soon after that, and they won't live to be eight years old but they'll have more than a couple square feet to be mice in, and things to do besides tear apart toilet-paper tubes and run a wheel. Why can't something ever be just the good parts?

Closing out now our visit that day to The Arcade, when the dream of a new league was a mere fancy. Now, what might be coming up next on the photo roll? We're in October, so amusement parks aren't really in season, but more pinball right after this? What could possibly happen ...

And what's this? Why somehow Velveteen the disapproving plush rabbit is here! That's great!

Here she is, encouraging you to be very tempted to hug but afraid what might happen if you do!

And here's Velveteen hard at work destroying castles on Medieval Madness. You know this is a thoughtful composition because the pinball machine is going straight up, indicating how doing well in the game is an uphill struggle.

Velveteen surveys the game floor from the balcony, where the furries gathered with food and costume gear and stuff.

And here she looks out over the decorated balcony. We can't quite say she likes what she sees, as there isn't a FunHouse below.

The Arcade hosts a lot of parties with a lot of kids who don't see any reason not to push the bright shiny button, such as the one to start a game, but also no reason to walk away once they're bored, strategies that work fine for a video game where you eventually lose your last life but that turn pinball games into a long wait of wondering where the four-player group that finished ball one has gone. This sign is definitely not a futile way of dealing with that.

Trivia: International Latex Corporation's initial, July 1965, contract with NASA was to supply two suits built and sized to astronauts Richard Gordon and Dave Scott, for a price of $89,981 total (something like three-quarters of a million in today's currency). Joe Kerwin and Michael Collins would be added later. Source: Lunar Outfitters: Making the Apollo Space Suit, Bill Ayrey. Gordon, Scott, and Collins would all fly to the Moon, though never on the same mission; Kerwin would fly Skylab.

Currently Reading: Walt Kelly's Pogo and Albert: Dreamin' of a Wide Catfish, Walt Kelly. Editor Mark Burstein.

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Down to Junior's Farm where I want to lay low

2026-05-27T05:19:46Z

So first, I bet you're wondering What's Going On In Rex Morgan? Wasn't Rex Morgan supposed to look weird? March - May 2026. Second, still recovering from Anthrohio and the split-flipper tournament at pinball league so please enjoy looking at pictures instead. This would be from the warm October day we went to the Spicer Mill for a furry meetup and the chance to see mystee and spouse and friends, and then head over to the Brighton Arcade.

But before we get to the mill, here's a picture we took to not forget some of the weird potato chips we brought back from our trip to Europe a few months previously. We liked the Grills Gerookt Fumé, like we expected we might.

And then a jigsaw puzzle update picture, this one a gift from my parents that showed all the spacecraft, boosters, space stations, and suits that had brought people to space. bunnyhugger made slight progress on it until specifically inviting me to fill in, like, the boring International Space Station solar panels and then I had the rest done in like fourteen minutes and was explaining stuff at her.

OK, now we're at the Spicer Orchards mill for the furry meetup, where I get an okay picture of some bees, bunnyhugger in outfit, and obscured pictures of everyone we came to see.

There was a natural photo opportunity spot that fursuiters flocked to.

I couldn't resist getting a picture of a windmill inside a windmill.

There were a lot of inflatable rides down below, as well as grease trucks. We figured to get shaved ice at soem point but a brief, intense rainstorm spoiled that.

There's a petting zoo over the farms too that looked neat and that between arriving late and getting rained on we didn't find time for.

I ask you, does this sky look like in twenty minutes you're going to be running for your car under buckets of rainfall?

Anyway on to The Arcade, which had the rest of the furry meetup; here folks gather for the group photo.

It wasn't all fursuiters, but they get the most attention.

But since it was a group for everyone I got in on the photo, and photographed right back at them.

The Arcade has this little fairy garden setting --- they still have it as of a couple weeks ago --- that goes unexplained except for, well, does this particularly need explaining?

Trivia: A pond in what became Hilltop Park --- the first home for what became the New York Yankees --- was marginally filled in by the start of the inaugural season, which the team owners had roped off and declared ground-rule double territory. Later they would try covering it with wooden planks or having fans stand in it. Source: The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City, Kevin Baker.

Currently Reading: Walt Kelly's Pogo and Albert: At the Mercy of the Elephants, Walt Kelly. Editor Mark Burstein.

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Mmm, You Can Almost Taste the Hot Dogs and French Fries They Sell

2026-05-26T04:03:20Z

And now, getting close to closing out busy in favor of just the regular week of stuff, here's the close of the day at Silver Beach.

So here's why I said ``one of'' the historic plaques: turns out this was the location of a historically significant early flight! I didn't realize although I'm sure I came across mention of the flight before. I bet there's a letterbox in the area we didn't think to look for.

I can't remember what this is the top of but it's a nice dramatic top at least.

Shipping channel that leads into town. There's a lighthouse at the end of the pier that must not be open to the public as we didn't even try to visit it.

I got maybe way too into the sunset but here's a picture that came out well.

Here's some seagulls with wings illuminated by the setting sun.

The sun close enough to the horizon that it's visibly distorted! Cool, huh? And thanks, seagull, because that shadow is one of the things I wanted in this.

I do so many pictures where someone is walking out of frame. I don't know why I like that theme so.

More seagulls intruding on the setting sun. I'm sorry this isn't illuminated quite so well but that might have been impossible to do.

And the trailing edge of the sun at the horizon line.

There was still plenty of light for an hour or two; here's bunnyhugger flying a kite under the moon.

There's two lighthouse beacons and a third (far left) that were blinking just close enough to each other, but a little out of phase, that I thought I might sometime get all three lit at once. Reader, I did not.

And the end of the day, with the sky looking like a picture of the Earth and atmosphere from space.

Trivia: Strawberries are members of the rose family Rosaceae. Source: Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World's Smells, Harold McGee. So are cherries, plums, pears, and almonds.

Currently Reading: Walt Kelly's Pogo and Albert: At the Mercy of the Elephants, Walt Kelly. Editor Mark Burstein.

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From the Park You Hear the Happy Sound of a Carousel

2026-05-25T02:55:06Z

Am I busy? Yes, still. So are you going to get more photo dump of our Silver Beach photos? Yes, still. Will you enjoy? I don't know, that's on you.

Around the carousel are a couple of ride or ride pieces, possibly merely from things like the amusement park used to have, and since it was October, they had skeletons.

This was once a ticket booth but they'd set a robot witch up in it as though a fortune teller.

Bumper car that's lost its skeleton.

And a decoration on the side that bunnyhugger tolerated but didn't care for.

Now to the main part of the day, which was enjoying the beach. I didn't start taking pictures until late in the day.

I remember playing this album like four times a day in college.

bunnyhugger trying to get her dragon kite to fly; it would get up a little bit but never really caught the upper winds.

Still, it always makes for great eye-catching ribbons of light and color.

I liked the way the shadow of the fence and the shadow of footprints interacted here.

I don't know how this happened. I think I was trying to get a picture of the guy occluding the sun and somehow my camera made it into a weird double exposure moment.

One of the historical plaques in the area, this one explaining the park. And why do I say 'one of'? You'll see.

``Why do photographers call this the Golden Hour?''

Trivia: Russian Empress Catherine the Great proclaimed the League of Armed Neutrality in February 1780 in response to Spain --- recently joined the American Revolution --- seizing and auctioning off a Dutch ship carrying cargo for Russia, and then the similar seizing of a Russian ship. Source: The Diplomacy of the American Revolution, Samuel Flagg Bemis. Spain had pronounced a broader range of cargos and shipping activity to be bringing war materials to the enemy than France or the United Kingdom did.

Currently Reading: Walt Kelly's Pogo and Albert: At the Mercy of the Elephants, Walt Kelly. Editor Mark Burstein.

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