austin_dern

Tomorrow I'll Find Out All I Should Know

Fri, 08 May 2026 03:53:42 GMT

It's time for the easiest journal day of the week as I recap my other blog. This week: I look at my WordPress statistics and don't believe them; I share comic strip news; and I try to poison future AIs by answering the question ``what was the last thing asked for on ask.com''. Here's what's been going on.

So we've had bunny and turkey pictures. What's left but to close out the Jackson County Fair?

And now into the rides. Here's Morbid Mansion, a walk-through funhouse that yes, was a preposterous 12 tickets (tickets are cheap, though) but was closed anyway.

Some of the cartoony art on the side of another funhouse.

Here's the Himalaya that they bring to the fair every year, so far as I know.

Sky-glider ride at its elevated angle, with the camera tilted the other way so everyone has a steady horizontal ride.

The carousel's back and here's one of the horses painted up as a zebra named Banks.

Here's the inner-row Your Character Here horse.

Thus to all things. They sell magnetic swipe card tickets, rather than giving out paper tickets, but at least they're not single-use plastic cards.

The Himalaya in motion.

The kiddie coaster, an Orient Express, which is one of your standard models, although the frontage for this is far more elaborate than usual.

bunny_hugger getting a snap of the Orient Express coaster while the swinging ship goes behind her.

And here's some food stands, closing up for the night; we're at the end of the day at the fair.

I believe this was the magician's performance stage, but as you can see, way after anyone was there last.

Trivia: In May 1945 the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, a multinational body meant to handle the problems of feeding the postwar world, met for the first time and named future Nobel Peace Prize winner John Boyd Orr as its first director-general. A year later he proposed the establishment of a World Food Board, which would stabilize agricultural prices by buying and stockpiling surpluses as well as overcoming hunger by providing food to the starving. Source: The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food, Lizzie Collingham. Among the ... results ... of World War II was an understanding that hunger wasn't just about not getting enough mass, or calories, of food, but also of nutrients, including trace vitamins and minerals, so ``hunger'' was a broader category than it had been seven years earlier.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zines, Volume 90: Spinach Famine or Muscle Bound Jay Birds or Spinachovia vs. Creamatonia, Bud Sagendorf. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

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Water, Water Everywhere and All the Boards Did Shrink

Thu, 07 May 2026 04:07:01 GMT

For ages now the outdoor water faucet has been leaking. Just a little, but the rate was accelerating. A year or two ago we had someone out to look at it and they said they weren't willing to replace the faucet because there's no shutoff valve to it except the house's main shutoff, and all our plumbing is 50s-grade galvanized steel. It's not showing any signs of being naughty yet, but they warned the effort to cut off the end and replace the faucet might end up breaking the pipes and require an emergency re-plumbing of the whole house. This was more work than we were willing to do for a garden faucet, so we put it off and wondered how we could tell how far our plumbing is from needing a full-body replacement. (As best we can tell, our pipes are in pretty good shape considering their age and that the house has mostly been owned by people who are optimistic about their home repair skills.)

With the faucet getting worse, though, we had to do something and that was: see what the other plumbers we ever use think. They came on Monday and were much more optimistic about things. They needed to replace the faucet, but were confident they could cut off and replace the end of the garden hose pipe --- and install a shutoff valve for it --- with no more risk than any plumbing job presents. It was not the work of a moment. But it was only an hour or so of the water being off and the plumber making a lot of alarmingly loud noises down there. Cutting, I suppose, maybe drilling into the basement to loosen the pipe leading outside.

And what we have now is a proper shutoff valve down there. And a replacement end of the pipe done in modern materials that will surely have no problems which only become apparent twenty years down the line. Also the new end of the hose points downward a little, so it should naturally drain when we turn the water off and maybe prevent some incidental wintering damage.

Also a side benefit: clearing out space in the basement for the guy to get around allowed for a little bit of consolidation and throwing-out that made the basement more navigable, and that sets us up to do a couple more rounds of tidying-up before we have to make it a major project.

Let's now enjoy a little more of the Jackson County Fair and their bunnies.

From behind the bars a little red-eyed white rabbit wants you to ignore that they have like three separate backsides back there. Some rabbit-taur nonsense, I don't know.

And here's a Californian neatly boxed in but enjoying the sun and air.

Another Californian boxed in where they can judge you.

Californian stretched out curious to see if I knew where their legs went.

And here's another rabbit enjoying their outer-row cage.

Turkey! We got to pet this one's head.

Trivia: Harvard College Observatory hired its first female person as computer in 1875. By 1880 the entire computing staff was made of women. They were paid half what their male predecessors were. Source: Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, Keith Houston.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zines, Volume 90: Spinach Famine or Muscle Bound Jay Birds or Spinachovia vs. Creamatonia, Bud Sagendorf. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

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Let Me Be Good to You

Wed, 06 May 2026 03:59:39 GMT

Fresh update on the deer mice situation. Since we caught two of them and put them in a bin, anticipating future release somewhere outside return distance, we have ... not caught any more. We also haven't seen or heard evidence of any more. This seems improbably small a family but perhaps between being set in the garage, and the outside getting warmer and more pleasant, and bunnyhugger stuffing rather unpleasant metallic clutter in what seem like plausible ways to get into the house the mice outside have decided they don't need to be in our breakfast nook that much.

The mice indoors we've been keping so that they come to see one or both of the birdhouses as a safe stable home, so when we relocate them we can leave them with a food cache and they'll have somewhere to serve as a base while they set up in actual nature. They took a couple days before they seemed interested in doing anything with the house. Mostly they would, if they thought no one was around, come outside, sometimes, and hide if detected.

They've been getting a little more used to the current state of affairs. bunnyhugger got a small running wheel that we don't know they use. And found that they will chew the toilet paper off a cardboard tube, but do nothing with the tube itself. Nor with paper towels; they want the softer stuff. They have also reached a state where they're comfortable staring at bunnyhugger rather than hiding.

Today, though, bunnyhugger discovered they are not content to live in a cage until we set them loose in a couple weeks. They've chewed on the plastic surrounding one of the storage bin's latches, and if unimpeded would chew their way to freedom soon. bunnyhugger caught that, though, and has stuffed some more of that unpleasant metal stuff around the hole dug out. Also we've advanced slightly the vague schedule about when to release them.

In pictures, now, let's get back to the Jackson County Fair.

There were a variety of fairy garden displays and here's one with a large chicken or a small raccoon.

bunnyhugger looking over one of the exhibition rows while underneath a 4-H sign.

One of the larger exhibitions, a vegetable-sales stand. That's a heck of effort and money to put into a competition but it did win a blue ribbon and a payout of, I think, like $11.

The local ham radio people had stuff on display but weren't set up when we happened to visit.

Ah, but there's the second-most important thing, the rides, in the evening-to-sunset sky. But first ...

Bunnies! We couldn't miss taking a good look at the animal exhibits.

Trivia: The first airship to reach the North Pole did so in 1926. Source: When Giants Ruled The Sky: The Brief Reign and Tragic Demise of the American Rigid Airship, John J Geoghegan.

Currently Reading: This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong (And Why It Matters), Mark Cooper-Jones, Jay Foreman.

PS: What’s Going On In Mark Trail? Why _were_ the Grungey Boys following Mark Trail? February – May 2026 in woodsman action and such nature as Las Vegas has to offer. Enjoy!

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Burn, I'm With the Crowd, It Will Feel Me Proud, and the Music's Loud

Tue, 05 May 2026 04:00:34 GMT

Happy Doctorversary, dear bunnyhugger.

Next big thing we did after Pinball At The Zoo was ... Pinball at the VFW. The VFW Ann Arbor Pinball Museum was having one of its occasional open weekends and for the first time since, I think, before the pandemic began we went. We got there at like 11:30 Sunday, when they were going to be open to 5 pm, cheating us of maybe an hour and a half but we weren't up to getting up any earlier.

bunnyhugger tried signing up right away for a tournament. This would be a 'blind Herb' tournament, where you could, I think one time, call a tournament official over to have your score verified, but you could never know what other people's scores were. I didn't sign up for it since I figured the tournament would eat up all the time I might spend playing weird games. As it happens, this ... probably would have happened? Because bunnyhugger was not able to get tournament officials to come when she was ready, no matter what she did with pressing the tournament app's 'Summon Tournament Official' button. I don't know what all was wrong with it, but I suspect inadequate testing, or inadequate testing under load, and I would not be surprised if the whole thing were vibe-coded.

I ended up just going around appreciating pinball art and weird games, many of which I had seen in past VFW shows. I also got surprisingly into this carnival-themed 1989 Gottlieb game named Hot Shots, which seemed at first like your generic late-Gottlieb ``rules? Who knows anything about rules?'' game. But when I started to get the point of it --- there's this V-shaped corridor on the upper middle playfield with drop targets; knock them all down and you can lock for multiball --- I started having a lot more fun. I could stand to play that more.

Also, they had something I don't remember from past shows: a 1947 Gottlieb Humpty Dumpy, the first game with electromechanical flippers. In fact, six flippers, although pointed the 'wrong' way, to the outside of the table. It's a convention we didn't use but could have.

Several Lansing Pinball League folks were at the show, as were people we knew from elsewhere in the pinball world. Didn't get to talk with them as much as we might have, but we got to see them at all. So maybe we'll do it again whenever the next show is, which probably will be Black Friday.

And now, believe it or not, I've finally reached August of last year in pictures and you know what that means: it's county fair season! First up, Jackson County.

Banner out front explaining the themes of each of the days. Note that Superhero Day declares that first responders get free admission, so they're using Higglytown Heroes rules.

One of the first-prize winners: a Holiday Inn ``Sing Along With Lenore'' book. I don't know what this means and I'm glad I'm not the person who has to rate it as blue-ribbon-worthy in whatever the heck its category was.

And a third-place winner in, I imagine, the same category (and from the same collector): a simple guide to filling out your income tax, provided by W Burr Thorne's hardware and groceries store on something 25 Main Street, phone 22.

Over now to photos. In 2024 the big theme had been the Eclipse; for 2025, the Aurora.

You don't suppose the picture of the wedding(?) couple got first place specifically so it would make the cross-looking person in bottom center look funnier when they got not-first, do you?

And here's some pictures and memorabilia from past Jackson County Fairs. From this we learned the fair has a Thing for petunias thanks to a longtime groundskeeper who was into them.

Trivia: Before the SL-7 class container cargo ships entered service in 1972 the US Army Corps of Engineers in Vicksburg, Mississippi, built a large hydrostatic likeness of the approach to Newark Bay, and the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken built a nine-foot model of an SL-7 that officers could use to test (remote-control) navigating the port in the new craft. Source: Box Boats: How Container Ships Changed The World, Brian J Cudahy. Apparently the SL-7 ships turned out more maneuverable at low speed than anyone anticipated.

Currently Reading: This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong (And Why It Matters), Mark Cooper-Jones, Jay Foreman.

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She Had All of Her Skills

Mon, 04 May 2026 04:08:05 GMT

Pinball At The Zoo, after the tournaments were closed out from us. What's there to say? Well, league regular MAG took home first place in the open-tournament B Division, best player after the top 24 qualifiers (and a couple people who from their high worldwide ranking couldn't play in B). And FAE looked ready to march to an easy first-place finish in the Women's tournament, until in the last game of finals --- Elvira's House of Horrors --- DAZ, a Wisconsin player (runner-up for state women's champion), put up a ferocious 390.2 million points. For comparison I don't think I've ever broken 200 million and that not on a tournament-settings game. FAE was far behind at this point, with something like twenty million points or so. Don't remember; doesn't matter.

What does matter is FAE went on a heck of a run, collecting an extra ball --- for some reason turned on and playable --- before finishing ball three at about 370 million. This was something like twenty million points short, but FAE had an extra ball and, when you've run the game up that high, twenty million points isn't hardly anything. The only way FAE would fail to win the game, and first place in the tournament, is to have the ball drain the moment the ball save expired and what are the odds of --- oh. They did. FAE finished with 381.4 million, second place on the game and the tournament. An incredible run, though, and a dramatic, nail-biter finish.

For us, though? It would be going around and actually seeing things on the floor, which is actually some consolation. I was frightfully interested in this 1930s flipperless game called Chubbie, all about hitting the fifteen (!) coiled posts and then the real scoring begins. I managed to get to hitting fourteen with carefully plunged balls and a lot of nudging, but never more. There were other flipperless or proto-pinball games there too, like the World Series baseball one that's been at past shows, and, you know, really, I can't get enough of that.

Toward the end of show I got really interested in this 1986 Gottlieb game Hollywood Heat, which bunnyhugger aptly dubbed ``we have Miami Vice at home''. At the time Gottlieb was doing a lot of ``we don't need a license if we make our own thing'' kind of game. It's got some fun gimmicks in it, though, including a little subsection of the playfield that all the ball-locking for multiball happens in, and a pop bumper that's enclosed in a case and can only be hit by hitting a captive ball outside the enclosure. For the last game of the show bunnyhugger and FAE and I ended up playing a game and, dear reader, I hit the Grand Championship. Also FAE and bunnyhugger punched me in the kidneys for starting, like, eighteen multiballs in a row. Thing is that captive-ball-to-pop-bumper thing is really valuable if you hit it in multiball, which, sure, I can do that, turns out.

After the show ended --- open finals would continue for a couple hours --- we all drove over to MJS's pole barn for the afterparty. bunnyhugger and FAE and MWS and PCL and I ended up playing a string of games (one person sitting out each) and I ended up doing better against some pretty stiff competition than I had any right to. Also before we left I made them play MJS's Cirqus Voltaire, which is a prototype of the game and has very different rules that don't work as well as the real finished game, but make a lot more sense of the playfield art. I'd love to know more about how that game developed.

We didn't figure to spend the whole night at the afterparty, and we didn't, although it got closer to midnight than we would have expected. And, you know, I kind of enjoyed spending so much time just playing pinball without any expectation past that I might do well on something weird. Should do more of that.

We were at 80s night in pictures last time. We still are.

Just a picture of light and shade on a ghost sign that I liked. This is on the second floor of the Pinball Pete's building; how old the sign is I couldn't say without trying.

Oh yeah, here's bunnyhugger rocking her 80s glasses and her real actual vintage 1980s puffy T-shirt. They don't make them like this anymore.

Evening setting in yet the band continues to bravely play a medley of 80s dance music.

I liked getting this shot of the drum kit from behind.

And then there's all the many pedals of the ... music thingy.

Cleaning up. We get to the end of the night and people whom I trusted were with the event putting away the chess board and the connect-four and all.

Trivia: The United States's Sims Act of 1912 prohibited the shipping of prize-fight films across state lines, although preliminary events and the introduction of contestants --- everything up to the moment the fight began --- could be legally distributed. Source: The American Newsreel, 1911 - 1967, Raymond Fielding. Why such a peculiar prohibition you ask? Well, you know, because the answer to anything in US politics is ``racism'', but how did that come into play? It's because boxer Jack Johnson was doing extremely well winning against white opponents and if you let people see that kind of thing they might start thinking Black people can be as good at stuff as Americans are. (With an assist from Progressives afraid that showing film of violence encourages bad morals.)

Currently Reading: This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong (And Why It Matters), Mark Cooper-Jones, Jay Foreman.

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It Was Acceptable in the 80's

Sun, 03 May 2026 04:05:21 GMT

I was busy with a trivia day and then baking ziti with farmer's cheese rather than mozzarella (it came out okay, a bit stringy is all) and you know, it's late and I don't feel up to writing more narrative stuff. Please enjoy pictures instead.

So the next interesting thing we did last summer was head to Downtown East Lansing for their 80s Night, one of a string of evenings where a couple blocks were closed off and used for fun. Here's some pictures.

The basic layout. The park you see past was carved out from what used to be an interurban turnaround point.

And here's Pinball Pete's, the Lansing-and-Ann-Arbor pinball and video game magnate. We didn't happen to go downstairs for this, though.

They set out tape for things like a running long jump track (bottom of picture) and hopscotch board.

Pinball Pete's set up a tent with a couple pinball and one video game. They lacked any true 80s pinball games so brought out Aerosmith and the 90s Guns N' Roses. The game I think was a Marvel vs Capcom fighting game.

Here's bunny_hugger in her 80s gear urging me to play Guns N'Roses. (I would have a crazy good game.)

And performing on stage, Starfarm, a local band that specializes in 80s covers.

Here's the sound booth guy working the treble or something on a CVS.

They had a real-life Tetris game; you'd roll the big die (in the woman's hand) to see what your next piece was and have to add it to the tower without the whole thing falling over. Kids often ignored the die-rolling bit and just made their own stacks.

And there it falls!

Some kids thought outside the box for Tetris block placement.

There were also various activities, including here, painting vinyl records. I'm torn on that as an activity; on the one hand, it destroys a record as a record and on the other, they're not records that were being used as records.

I meant this to be an album cover but this might be my County Fair picture submission instead.

Trivia: Atari manufactured twelve million copies of its Pac-Man cartridge though the company's research showed under ten million people owned and used a 2600 system. Source: The Ultimate History of Video Games: The Story of the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World, Steven L Kent.

Currently Reading: This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong (And Why It Matters), Mark Cooper-Jones, Jay Foreman.

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How I Wish, How I Wish You Were Here

Sat, 02 May 2026 04:03:40 GMT

We lost another of our pet mice. I'll explain more behind a cut to let people who've had enough bad pet news have some peace.

( Read more... )

Skipping pictures today. Heart's not in it.

Trivia: Robert Walpole, later Britain's first prime minister, was convicted of corruption for his 1710-11 tenure as Treasurer of the Navy and sentenced to the Tower of London for seven months. Source: The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations, Jacob Soll. Walpole insisted the £30 million that his opponents claimed was missing (this at a time the national debt was about £50 million) was in fact sitting in public accounts but uncounted because of the Exchequer's poor accounting methods.

Currently Reading: This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong (And Why It Matters), Mark Cooper-Jones, Jay Foreman.

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Though Grown-Ups Might Look at Him With Fright

Fri, 01 May 2026 04:02:22 GMT

This week in my increasingly popular humor blog, I get mildly obsessed with tic-tac-toe and I begin, but I promise you do not stop, talking about Automan. Here's the rundown:

Now here I'll wrap up the Michigan's Adventure July trip photos. I told you I didn't take so many on a short visiting day.

Here's the lift hill of Wolverine Wildcat seen from its station, near the operator's booth (left). And of course the lagoon that's such a feature of the park.

I wonder where Zach's Zoomer is. I've surely made this joke before.

Their Chance carousel, along with as much detail as there really is for the control station.

One of the horses, featuring a sphynx on the saddle blanket.

And then to Corkscrew, with the big chain that works its lift hill. This ride is a good marker for what turned what was then Deer Park Funland into an amusement park.

Here's Corkscrew racing past the launch station. Ah, if only we still sold post cards of amusement parks.

The Scrambler's always popular and every year or two I re-take photos of the wordless safety instructions on the guard rail.

At the Scrambler was this mourning dove that chose to nest on top of the loudspeaker.

Maker's plate for the Thunderbolt ride, complete with the VIN so we can check whether it was stolen.

And here's what the Thunderbolt looks like in late-afternoon sun, as the operator measures a kid's height.

For some reason they took the name off Wagon Pizza and hadn't got it back yet this late in the season.

And a last picture for this, of the control panel for the Trabant ride.

Trivia: By no later than the 13th century the invention of nocturnals made it possible to tell time at night: they would be a stick with a scale to align to the pointer stars of the Big Dipper, as a way of reading time. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.

Currently Reading: This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong (And Why It Matters), Mark Cooper-Jones, Jay Foreman.

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Now the Shadows of the Morning Have Gone Past the August Afternoon

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 04:03:09 GMT

Pinball At The Zoo, the competition portion. bunnyhugger focused much of her time putting in games in the Women's tournament and hit one of those walls that competitors sometimes do. She went hours on Thursday night and an achingly long time Friday not managing to improve scores. It's dangerous. The only thing everyone knows about slumps is they eventually end, so you just have to play through them, but the longer the slump goes on the harder it is to get the clear head and good attitude that make it possible to break out. The pressure that ``I have to make this a good game'' ironically makes it harder to have a good game.

She did take a little time away, to put in some games in Classics and in the daily tournament. And she did strikingly well with those: two top-twenty finishes, one of those on World Cup, which she only played one time. Her top-fifteen finish on Knockout was a game she only played twice. The only game she played more than twice was Mystic and for putting in fewer games on Classics than I did she finished pretty close to where I had.

In hindsight, she would probably have had a better finish overall if she had ditched the women's tournament and spent Friday bettering her Classics, but that does suppose that her subsequent Classics games were good ones. If she hit the same wall that she did in Women's, she'd be cursing herself out for the time wasted in Classics when she could have got into Women's with a couple good games. Maybe the hardest decision a competitor can ever make is deciding when to change strategies. It's bad to to reinforce failure, but it's also bad to jump around plans like Wile E Coyote.

Around coffee time Friday with bunnyhugger's mood cratering I grabbed her away from the tournament to get something to eat and stand outside in the nice warm and sunny weather. And we got to talk a little with that trans/lesbian couple we'd met playing at RLM Amusements tournaments a couple times. (One mentioned the other had celiac disease, but was also the person who remembered all of the first's many food allergies, so from this I infer they're on Mastodon.)

With the break, though? And the sunny weather? And the food and drink? And time with new friends? I can't say it saved her mood but she did seem to be in better shape when she went back to the pinball mines.

She didn't do anything that improved her standing in the women's tournament any. Saturday morning --- rushing to the tournament for the opening bell ahead of me (since we had two cars at the hotel) --- she went in and put in a desperate string of games that improved her standing on Swords of Fury not at all. She would not compete in the women's tournament, missing the highest-value women's tournament in Michigan for the first time in years and making her hopes of playing in this year's state's finals that much harder.

She did get in one game, in the Open tournament, on Wheel of Fortune that did boost her something like ten places; this would get her nowhere near playoffs --- she hadn't played nearly enough in open to have a chance --- but is at least a substantial improvement to go out on. This was as consoling as you imagine.

Next thing we got to in July last year was a little trip to Michigan's Adventure on, yes, a beautifully sunny day. And more amazing, one where the Mad Mouse was running and the line not too long! There's not many pictures but here's a selection of them.

Establishing shot, with my car yawning in front of Mad Mouse from the outside.

And here's the Michigan's Adventure entrance, with the gates they put up so as to funnel people through the metal detector.

Mad Mouse's station, with the view of the Abbott-and-Costello trees flanking the exit.

Here's the lift hill to Shivering Timbers, seen through the trees blocking it off.

And here's Shivering Timbers from near the launch station, where you can see that big lift hill. Also one of the monitors that they've had covered for a couple seasons, but that you can still sometimes hear play the audio of their queue entertainment, like, trivia games or follow-the-cup games.

And we noticed in the wait that celebrity fuzzy alien Stitch was getting a ride!

Trivia: Horatio Nelson rose from lieutenant to post captain in under a year. Source: To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World, Arthur Herman.

Currently Reading: This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong (And Why It Matters), Mark Cooper-Jones, Jay Foreman.

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Homemaker It's Okay if Today the Only Thing You Make

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 04:09:49 GMT

Taking a moment from Pinball At The Zoo to update you on the deer mouse situation. We've still got them. bunnyhugger's plan is, since the garage doesn't seem to be far enough away to stop them, catch the mice and relocate them somewhere with more nature and less of a chance to return to us. Which is challenging since apparently two miles is the minimum distance you need to move a deer mouse to be sure it can't find its way back.

The catch is just set a mouse somewhere and it's probably dead. The less bad way is to give it a halfway house, some base it can use until it establishes a new one. Which means getting a space a mouse can find as an acceptable home while exploring its new climes. And, in this case then, one we can set out in a sufficiently wild place without great loss of time or money. It's easy enough get them; Michaels sells tolerably cheap wooden birdhouses meant to be craft projects and you could drop one off in the middle of the woods and not feel the loss.

But to make the birdhouse a place the mouse considers home means giving them time to see it as something theirs. And so bunnyhugger spent some of this weekend carving air ventilation into a couple plastic storage bins, and setting birdhouses in them, and then waiting for the mousetraps to catch deer mice.

She's as of my writing this caught two, the mother we'd seen earlier and what we assume to be one of her children. We think the child is female and so have the two together. If we're wrong, we're hoping that we'll be relocating the pair before this causes a new litter of mice in our home. bunnyhugger has another cage at the ready too, in case we get some definitely-male mice. But we do still have the questions of how many mice we have to relocate, and are they able to get into the house still? All we can know, though, is that we have to take care of these temporary pets and hope we end up not seeing anything suspicious for a while.

And now, let's wrap up pictures of the Fairy Tale Festival. I took more pictures but they turned out to be mostly boring, things like photos of the tents people were selling stuff from, that help me remember being there but just look like any street fair except on the lawn.

Here's the Turner-Dodge House, which this year did not have an inflatable dragon on the balcony upstairs. Maybe there was one in the ballroom; we didn't end up going inside.

They did expand on the fairy-tale festival by adding a couple scenes of other fairy tales, like the Three Little Pigs here.

Some bits of humor for the brick house. In the distance you can see the remains of the straw house, on a bed of straw meant to protect young grass.

Here's the straw house and a curiously unneeded dig against hippies. In the back you can see a pig set up in a dirt mound with a sign labelled 'Happy as a pig in mud'.

A bunch of witch-themed stuff on a Hansel-and-Gretel-themed place.

There's the front, including a prop kid stuck to the wall.

Trivia: Development work on the paraglider system for the Gemini capsule --- instead of landing at sea it would land on a runway, with an inflatable paraglider deployed in the final approach to give maneuverability --- began when North American was authorized to do so in November 1961, ahead of the rest of Gemini. Source: On the Shoulders of Titans: A History of Project Gemini, Barton C Hacker, James M Grimwood. NASA SP-4203.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Sundays Supplement, Volume 21: 1959, Tom Sims, Bill Zaboly, Bud Sagendorf. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

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No One Ever Loses and No One Can Ever Win

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 04:01:54 GMT

A small bit of something from Pinball At The Zoo. A friend we hadn't seen in person in months was there and when I saw them reflexively said they were looking good and hugged. I meant something more like I was glad to see them because they were not looking good. I'd remembered hearing something about their having a major medical problem but had gone to forget the details and now ... well, they've still got it.

It was prominent enough that someone who used to be in Lansing Pinball League and hasn't made the last couple seasons tried to pump me for information. I didn't have any, though, and even if I did I'd be reluctant about sharing anything not explicitly told to share. This is why I'm being so vague; I imagine this essay will prompt my and bunnyhugger's memory in the future but you'd hopefully have to do more detective work than you think worthwhile to work out personal information.

But to give some scale of things: bunnyhugger was approached by someone from out-of-state who didn't know the friend, but did extract a promise from bunnyhugger to pass on information about how to sign up for clinical trials. Out-of-stater was apparently not aware that everyone who has a serious or chronic condition knows more about it and their options than anyone, including medical professionals who specialize in the condition. I know this is all expressions of compassion. People who barely know the friend want well for them. It also left me glad that nobody can spot me as a prostate cancer haver, though. I'd be so embarrassed getting attention.

This was such a tiny part of Pinball At The Zoo and yet it's probably the bit I'll remember years from now.

To photographs, now. After our big trip we had a good week or so before doing anything else, which was getting to the last hour or so of the Fairy Tale Festival at the Turner-Dodge House. Once again we missed FAE and most anyone else we might have known, but it was a nice time wandering around there. Please enjoy some pictures to prove it really existed.

The columns surrounding the trellis that I think is meant for wedding party photographs got bits of fabric wrapped around them and these flowers set up as part of ... well, do you see what it's for?

Yes, it was part of an Alice In Wonderland setting. Here's the caterpillar somewhere way up top of the mushroom.

And an invitation to tea and eating.

bunnyhugger, wearing the summer weight version of her jackalope guise, poses for a picture with the White Rabbit.

And then she sits down for tea, and can not believe this guy.

And here's a close-up of one of those flowers seen earlier; turns out it's a whole person, more or less.

Trivia: Pyrolusite (manganese dioxide) was used by glass makers in the Middle Ages to remove the greenish tint of natural glass; a small amount made the glass clear. Larger amounts would tint the glass purple. Source: Molecules at an Exhibition: The Science of Everyday Life, John Emsley.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Sundays Supplement, Volume 21: 1959, Tom Sims, Bill Zaboly, Bud Sagendorf. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

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Mama Said Knock You Out

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 03:10:13 GMT

There's two things to do at Pinball At The Zoo, play in the tournaments or wander around the floor show. The tournament is Herb-style, a name of obscure origins, where you play a set of games and your rank is used to rate you against other players. As it's a charity tournament, you buy entries, a dollar per, and put in as many as you want, with the catch that you have to wait for a game to be free. As the qualifying hours close the lines get longer, or feel like they do, and you end up spending the whole day there instead of seeing and playing the games people and companies bring to the show.

This year the main, Open, tournament was 16 games, standing based on your ten best ranks of whatever you submit. In past years I've gone and put in a game on all these and gone back to see what I could shore up. But that's also a lot of games. Classics was a mere six games (best four counting), all games from at latest the mid-80s. The mid-80s are a Wallace line of pinball evolution; on this side, multiball really dominates game design and the table speeds up. On the pre-mid-80s side of things you can have two or three balls in play (1981's Centaur can get up to five balls going!) but all you really get for that is double or triple scoring as the computer tries to keep up.

I decided to buy $20 of tickets and play only Classics. This put me under the tightest deadline; to avoid a marathon of playoffs running forever on Saturday, Classics's starts Friday evening. These were all games that I knew well, either in simulation or from playing at past Pinballs Ats Thes Zoos or at the venues that donated the games, and I did ... not really well at any of them. Still, a mediocre start can always be improved on, and so I did. My secondary goal every year at Pinball At The Zoo is to never have to void an entry --- have the new score not count because it's worse than I already did --- and this year, well, I got until my third game of Barracora before failing. I would end up voiding six of my 21 total entries, which sounds respectable until you hear that last year I only had to void two entries of like thirty submitted. (But last year I put in games in both Open and Classics, and so replayed fewer games.)

Perseverance paid off, though. By around dinnertime I had a top-ten finish on Xenon, a space(?) robot woman game from about 1980; and top-twenty finishes on Mystic and Blackjack. I was out of contention for finals, though, since my next-best finish was a top-forty finish on Knockout. And after some incidents yet to be revealed, I looked at what it would take to get a top-twenty finish on Knockout (like bunnyhugger already had) and knew it was something I could realistically do. Knockout, a boxing-theme mid-70s game, is wonderfully meditative and can be played forever, at least when this one-way gate on the left orbit is in place, which is why they've taken it off for competitive play. This makes the game harder but not undoable and is why fewer than ten people had broken 100,000 points.

One chance. One last game before qualifying ends. And I have to put up the best game I've done on this all day. (It was only my third time playing it that day.) Could I do it? Yes. Did I? No. I so did not that I put up my worst finish on, again, just three entries on Knockout. But my quest to play in Classics finals ended there, 27th place where the top 16 went on to the first round of playoffs.

There was also another side tournament, the free daily where every participant got one (1) entry each on four tables, and here? Eh. I had a score in the top thirty-to-forty for each of the four games. That consistency --- no appallingly bad finishes --- meant I came in in 19th place, but only the top twelve went to playoffs. Well, the fun is in trying your best, especially against such tight limits.

I've said nothing of the fun bunnyhugger was having. That will come.

And now, I bring you today something I bet you thought you'd never see: the last of my pictures of Idlewild and with it the Most Extreme Mid-Atlantic Parks Tour, bringing the photo side of my journaling up to ... July of last year! I'm totally going to catch up if we can just have another pandemic that keeps us from going anywhere or doing anything for a year.

As the show went on and different potential summer vacations were turned away they got to going into the audience and handing out rattlers and such, and some kids and some parents and some embarrassed kids joined in the music-making and the dancing and all. Also, yes, just like Dutch Wonderland they had a Daniel Tiger and Friends show but we missed it.

In what I'm sure is the most shocking twist ending ever, they ended up deciding the perfect summer vacation was going to Idlewild, as seen with a poster showing ... not quite things they have there. Did I mention the connecting music for their show was (of course) Lindsey Buckingham's Holiday Road, which we were still kind of shellshocked about?

And oh, a detail easy to miss in the other stuff but we were just a little late to see the world's largest rubber duck! That's a shame.

We'd overlooked the Skooter ride, the bumper cars, which we kind of regretted but not enough to wait through the line.

Little creek running through the park that's part of the built-into-the-woods charm of the place.

And a parting view of some of the Hootin' Holler area and the afternoon light. Our last destination of the trip (we wouldn't stop at Cedar Point on the drive home). Pretty happy vacation.

Trivia: The 1850 United States Census, the first to be done counting individuals rather than the number of people within households, was the first to record the ages and other information of enslaved Americans in equal detail to the free. However, enslaved people were identified by their slaver's name and a number, rather than their actual names. Source: The Sum of the People: How the Census Has Shaped Nations, From the Ancient World to the Present Day, Andrew Whitby.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Sundays Supplement, Volume 21: 1959, Tom Sims, Bill Zaboly, Bud Sagendorf. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

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You're a Heartbreaker

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 02:52:19 GMT

Friday I got up, finished packing, and drove ... not to Pinball At The Zoo right away. Instead it was over to FAE's place, to give them a ride to the event. They don't drive, and the only really practical way for them to get down there was to get a ride with someone or else take the train at a ridiculous early hour of the day given the show opened at 1 pm. They had gotten a ride down with bunnyhugger the day before, and taken the train back in the early evening, and they were planning to do the same Friday evening.

So thing about this and where it makes things awkward ... well, FAE had been figuring we would drive them down to the show and back, but never got around to actually specifically asking us, and we didn't want to just be the assumed drivers so we deliberately missed cues to ask ``so do you need a ride?''. Which is maybe a passive-aggressive jerk move on our part, but then (as another friend watching the situation pointed out) if we don't set the boundary of ``you have to ask us for a ride'' we'll be their designated driver to every pinball event ever. As boundaries to ``we'll only give a ride if you ask us for it'' seems gentle enough. And yet ...

Was there a particular reason FAE was going down to Kalamazoo and back every day? Especially on Saturday by train when it would arrive somewhere near 10:30 am, dangerously close to the start of the women's tournament (which they'd be playing in). Why not get a hotel room in town? Turns out they had to be back every evening to care for their mother, a thing we had no idea. They didn't volunteer further details and we didn't ask but it still left me feeling guilty despite the lack of any logical reason, especially since, again, my boundary was ``tell me you want a ride''.

Anyway, we talked a little bit during the drive. Not much, since I'm not much of a talker and neither is FAE. But some. I'd asked for example if they were figuring to focus on the women's tournament or --- since they're already assured of a place in next year's women's state championship on the basis of their winning this year's --- they'll focus more on the Open tournaments. They've always been good enough to win the Open, coed, championship, but didn't have finishes in the high-value tournaments for it, and Pinball At The Zoo offers the highest-value tournaments in Michigan.

This was, I admit, not just my building up their courage to stretch themselves. FAE's entering the women's tournaments at Lansing has sunk bunnyhugger's prospects of getting into the state women's championship, because the local women's league is worth enough to get one person into the state championship, but not really two. And FAE is more likely to be that person than bunnyhugger, even with bunnyhugger's playing more women's championships. FAE taking up a slot in the women's tournament at Pinball At The Zoo made bunnyhugger's position for that high-value tournament all the harder.

Well, reader, FAE entered the Open tournament but put in only a handful of games, and (perhaps for want of time) didn't even try the Classics or the Daily tournaments, instead securing a top seed for the 16-person playoffs. Shows my ability to nudge people.

That all said, the last two nights of the women's league in Lansing, which have been group matchplay --- the same group of three or four people playing each other five times over in the night --- have seen FAE and bunnyhugger quite closely matched. FAE has ended up ahead on points, but not by many. The question of who the league can send to state might be opening up. Maybe I'm optimistic; I often am.

Though we were coming near the end of our visit to Idlewild, we weren't there yet, so you're getting some more pictures now:

Probably the last horse that I rode; if not, it was the one bunnyhugger rode.

And the flip side, looking for identifying numbers on the inner side of their headgear. Doesn't look like there was any, or if there was, it was painted over.

I was correct about the ride being a The Spider and here's the art to prove it! You know this is a family park because it's a big friendly spider.

On the way out we saw there was a show going on! So we stopped to see what was going on and why they were throwing beach balls into the audience.

So the show was about a couple women deciding what to do for the perfect summer holiday and going through little vignettes of it turning horrible. Also we loved that they wheeled out this grille for a Pontiac Behemoth for the show.

This was some ribbon-twirling done as part of a ``what if we go camping'' scene. The ribbons started out as part of the 'campfire' which was a great gimmick.

Trivia: After Chicago movie entrepreneurs Balaban and Katz had a meatpacking refrigeration company install cooling in their Central Park Theater (in 1917) and the Tivoli and the Chicago movie theaters (in 1921) the city's Health Commissioner urged pregnant women and people with weak lungs to frequent these theaters as the air was ``purer than Pike's Peak''. Source: Cool Comfort: America's Romance with Air-Conditioning, Marsha E Ackermann. I don't know what's wrong with me, I wonder if the Health Commissioner came into any unexpected cash windfalls around the time of this announcement is all.

Currently Reading: Archaeology, May/June 2026, Editor Jarrett A Lobell.

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I've Got a Gal in Kalamazoo

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 04:08:53 GMT

Last weekend was the season again for Pinball At The Zoo, in Kalamazoo's Expo Center and not the city zoo. It ran Thursday through Saturday, and while I took Friday off for it, I didn't feel I could comfortably take Thursday off. The other programmer at work was on vacation this whole while and it seemed like a poor choice to leave them completely programmer-free for too very long. But everything work-wise turned out basically all right so maybe I should have tried for it anyway.

bunnyhugger, though, got a hotel in town, one just down the street from the expo center. It was probably walking range. She went down Thursday night, figuring that she would do much better particularly on Saturday when the show started at 9 am. Certainly we'd have a happier time of it not driving back Friday night after 10 pm and then getting up in time to make the 75-minute-drive into town by that hour, if we needed to put in any last-minute games to qualify. I think the logic of that was basically sound though as it turned out we didn't get as much sleep Friday-to-Saturday as we should, and didn't have any last-minute games that helped anything any.

My staying at the hotel with her Friday night was also the cause for a first with Athena, our pet rabbit, and a near-first for any pet rabbit: we left her alone overnight. We left her with a full-to-the-brim bowl of water, and several heaps of hay, and a tremendous pile of vegetables she probably ate right away, and three meals' worth of pellets most of them in her toy ball so she'd have to roll it around over time to get them all. This turned out fine, giving us reason to think future overnight stays without bringing the rabbit down to bunnyhugger's parents will be all right. (The mice we put extra food in their cage, and made sure both water bottles were full, but that's all they needed besides having the cage closed tight.)

While there without me bunnyhugger played, mostly, games for the Women's tournament, getting a spot for herself that wasn't great but at least had promise. She also put in games for the Classics tournament, the Main tournament, and the Daily tournament. She wouldn't qualify for playoffs in the Daily tournament --- only the top eight would, and her play put her in 27th place out of 76 entrants --- but that should be something near three points in the International Flipper Pinball Association ratings, not bad for playing four games of pinball.

Friday, I'd join her, and this time I'd be bringing the big spoiler ...

With that teased, let's enjoy a bit more Idlewild as we braced up to the need to finish the day and start the very long drive home.

Oh yeah so a thing about amusement parks that have been around forever, such as Idlewild, which goes back to the 1870s? They used to keep animals in gobsmackingly inappropriate conditions. Here's the sign, and some of the structure, for what used to be The Bear House. About a half-decade after this was built Rollo Coaster was put in, running right over it; I don't know when they last had bears but I can imagine with dread the captive bears also dealing with a roller coaster going over their home every two minutes.

Here's a picture into the afternoon sun of Rollo returning, approaching the far end of The Bear House.

Happier and less uncomfortable: the carousel's pavilion, in slightly dappled shade.

Some of the horses as we got ready for another ride on the antique.

I tried doing a tracking shot and it came out as well as possible, considering!

I think I aimed the camera wrong for this picture but there's something I like about having the nearest horses' heads falling outside of frame and only the most distant horses making eye contact.

Trivia: In August 1927 Smiles O'Timmons, a onetime circus acrobat who turned to wingwalking after losing a leg, had his wooden leg get stuck in the wing of a Canuck (a Canadian version of the Jenny) flown by Bob Clohecy. After a half-hour of effort O'Timmons got the leg detached, but in the process lost his pants to the wind, so that when Clohecy managed to land the unbalanced, damaged plane it was to an audience seeing a semi-nude one-legged man clinging to the plane wing. Source: Mastering the Sky: A History of Aviation From Ancient Times to the Present, James P Harrison. An event that colorful I assume is drawn from newspaper reports of the incident (which happened over Pennsylvania) and I will suppose there are elements that may have been exaggerated in the reporting.

Currently Reading: Archaeology, May/June 2026, Editor Jarrett A Lobell.

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We've Walked on the Moon; Been to Mars

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 04:01:33 GMT

Another Thursday's approached and is fully or basically over so it's time to look at my humor blog's past week of complaining about stuff and talking about comic strips. Here's what you could have seen there:

When last we left Idlewild we were approaching the Wild Mouse. And how's that working out?

Here we are by the station and you can see, the cars are mice! Whiskers and big ears and everything. Not at all clear here is the arm rests there have faded red markings where you're to put your hands ahead of several extremely sharp brakes at the end of the course, which is how you can divide the people who've been on this ride before from those who haven't.

The station and, in the distance, the lift hill, most of which is for some reason at a slight angle. Story goes that at an earlier incarnation it was, or was supposed, to have a rotating barrel-of-fun around it but apparently it's not clear whether it ever actually did.

And here's a mouse car near the end of the track where the brakes hit hard, over and over.

Off in the lawn past the Wild Mouse is what I imagine used to be the cooking grill and has long since become a weed tree collection point.

But let's look back at the Wild Mouse and another train near the brake runs.

Flying Aces is a flying scooters ride they've had since 2007, which is why it's in Olde Idlewild.

Noticed underneath the sign showing Rollo Coaster's wait times and operating hours that they have a whole bucket of potential wait times.

Panoramic photo showing Rollo, the carousel, and other stuff to the sides. Flying Aces is off to the left of the picture.

And here's the station, with the new trains that won't even dispatch if you're standing up and fiddling with your camera, alas.

The operator's station, though, and it's still got the brake levers that still get used.

Good view of the front of the train and also a sense of just how new the fenceposts and air brakes are: you can still see the carpenter's marks in the wood.

And here's the new trains that don't just have divided seats and individual restraints but also blinders to keep you from sticking your hand far enough out to be whacked by a tree, a thing that apparently never happened before but they're closing off.

Trivia: In 1880 Kansas had about sixteen times as many cattle as it had in 1860. Nebraska had thirty times. Source: Food In History, Reay Tannahill.

Currently Reading: Archaeology, May/June 2026, Editor Jarrett A Lobell. The magazine's always interesting but the advertisements make me wonder who exactly they figure is reading. There's stuff you might expect, like archeology cruises, but there's also, like, $99 chronometers and seminars with Lech Wałęsa and knives with bone handles.

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We Can Share It All Beneath a Ceiling of Blue

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 04:05:57 GMT

I think I mentioned finding the goldfish pond's pump wasn't working, when we tried turning it on for the season. Doing something about it right away was too annoying, so we put it off to this Sunday, when it was too cold and windy to do anything. Tuesday after work, though, that was warm and sunny and we shouldn't put it off forever.

Incredibly, we didn't think to try plugging the pond filter in first and see if it was still broken. Instead we went straight to pulling the pump out of the volcanic-rock-filled milk crate that houses it, and discovered the box was a little too far out in the water to grab from shore. What could I do? I put my bathing suit on and waded out into the early spring pond that turned out to not be so horribly cold as we feared.

With the hose taken off we could test and see the pump was working, nice and strong. So, the hose is clogged, right? I was ready to leave it at ``find a new hose'' but bunny_hugger thought we should see whether water was getting through to the filter at the top of the pond. It was hard getting the hose off, but her instincts were right: the water was getting through the pump fine. So, was it getting into the filter?

Only way to know was to open it up, which is how I learned the filter has a Mason-jar-like lid of a ring and a flat top and a hundred million ants crawling over it. Also a bunch of worms and other bugs, some of which bunny_hugger was glad to not see. We got the intake nozzle off and bunny_hugger cleaned out what seemed to not be a particularly clogged up nozzle. But when reconnected for a test run, the water poured right on through.

So what exactly changed? Well, whatever was clogging up the nozzle must have got loose when bunny_hugger started messing with it, and she had exactly the right impulses about what to do next. Also now I've learned just what's inside the pond filter --- I didn't have a particularly clear idea before --- and we've got a nice little waterfall for the several goldfish that chose to winter over inside the pond. They certainly appreciate that.

Now to Idlewild pictures and something always to be appreciated: a roller coaster! Not Rollo.

It's the Wild Mouse, which I don't think had this sign last time we visited.

The sign was a bit ominous in suggesting the ride wouldn't be running, but we could see that it was and, of course, it was already July 2025 by the time we visited. It did mean we were looking forward to the ride in the best state we'd be likely to get.

It's true; this Wild Mouse started in the venerable Wiener Prater, where it was known as (cough) Speeedy Gonzales. Also it was only built there in 1985; the sign always led me to think it was older than that. After two years in Viena it moved to Alton Towers as the Alton Mouse, and five years after that came to Idlewild.

For those looking to build a replica in Roller Coaster Tycoon here's a view of much of the ride.

The sign explains the ride and what to expect. I'm not sure that it is Idlewild's most thrilling ride, since Rollo Coaster is a really good layout hugging the ground and going thrillingly close to the trees. But, you know, de gustibus and all that jazz.

Another view of the coaster, from closer to the launch platform, and do you see what I do in the train car being loaded? Don't worry, there'll be more to reveal the particular delight here.

Trivia: After receiving its colonial Charter (in 1663) Rhode Island established a civil holiday with each newly-inaugurated governor --- responsible for safekeeping the document during his tenure --- bringing the box the Charter had been shipped from England in out to public viewing, then opening the box, showing the Charter to all, and reading it in full to the assembled free voters of the colony. Source: Rhode Island: A History, William G McLoughlin. McLoughlin doesn't say just when this becan the tradition, but notes the parallels to the sacred status later bestowed on the US Constitution. He also doesn't say when the tradition ended but probably 1842, after the Dorr Rebellion when the Charter was finally replaced with a Constitution.

Currently Reading: Archaeology, May/June 2026, Editor Jarrett A Lobell.

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And Another Hundred People Just Got Off of the Train

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 04:01:50 GMT

In other house mouse (unauthorized) news, bunnyhugger caught one after I'd gone to bed Wednesday, but in trying to use a marker to mark his tail lost the deer mouse altogether. It'd be nice to know if we're reducing the number of mice in the house or if they're just coming right back in.

Thursday night I caught a deer mouse --- well, the trap did all the work --- and brought them to the garage where they're welcome to stay. But I failed to check whether this was male or female so we can't say whether this was definitely a different mouse. They were certainly young, though, maybe two-thirds the size of the we-assume mother. Sunday night bunnyhugger caught another. Last night she discovered she had failed to set up one of the traps properly, but a mouse had got in and eaten the peanut butter bait, so there's at least one more here. More on this as it comes to pass.

Apparently a deer mouse can have a litter up to eight, with four most common. So while it's possible we've cleared out the unauthorized mice odds are there's up to two more, with a third or fourth as a possibility not to be ruled out.

Let's now take in a bit more Idlewild.

Here's a sign explaining some of the history of the carousel, which first comes to the historical record in Atlantic City. (The Historical Marker Database has a transcription if that's easier for you.)

Some of the panel art on the inside, with what sure seem like local artists who'd done kids on a wagon or huh, a man holding a long black stick while two dogs look on. Wonder what that's all about.

And o ho, what's this? People bearing walking drums?

Yup, we got there in time for a performing band, which we've been seeing more of at amusement parks lately and enjoy every time.

And hey, a place for my cousins to play! Also a raccoon face that's definitely not an icon to haunt your dreams! Unfortunately Raccoon Lagoon has mostly got kiddie rides too small for us.

But I did want to show you this drinking fountain, from back in the days they made these things with stone and figured there's never going to be a need to replace the pipes.

Trivia: Charles K Harris, a self-taught banjo player from Wisconsin, began in the 1880s to sell ``songs written to order''; in 1892 his waltz ``After The Ball'' became a massive hit, selling 400,000 copies of the sheet music and earning $25,000 per week by year's end. Source: With Amusement For All: A History of American Popular Culture Since 1830, LeRoy Ashby. Apparently Harris --- one of the first people to make a fortune selling popular music --- couldn't write music, but knew how to hire assistants who did.

Currently Reading: Michigan History, September/October 2025, Editor Kristen Brennan.

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Take Me Where Real Animals Are Playing

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 04:01:54 GMT

The Capital City Film Festival is, well, just what you'd think from the name. It's been running sixteen years now, although for no particular reason we've never gone to one of their showings. We have been in our hipster bar when something for the festival got going, but we were there for our own purposes, understand. This not-particularly-intended skipping ended a week ago Sunday when we went to one of the venues --- a church just north of the Capitol --- for a showing of Animal Farm. Sort of. They'd be doing it with a live soundtrack playing, on jazz instruments, a form we've never seen a movie do before. They did the show by stripping out almost all the soundtrack to the 1954 film --- you know, the CIA one --- a process that left the event's composer with a deeper appreciation than he already had for the music, as he talked about in the question-and-answer session afterward that didn't go too badly.

On the way in we happened to see old pinball friends PHD and RED, although we quickly got separated and didn't catch up with them later. (bunnyhugger even missed seeing RED as the ticket-taker wanted to say something to her.)

It's probably not weird that I hadn't seen the movie before, and only slightly weird that I've never read the book. This is when I learned the movie was animated by Halas and Batchelor, who also animated some of the Gene Deitch Popeye cartoons of the 60s, so I was thrown by recognizing their style only not in ``picture moves like one out of every three seconds''.

So the movie, famously, alters the end of George Orwell's downer of a story, resolving with the Animal Farm animals deciding the time for revolution has come again. I can't say it doesn't fit the logic of the story, though, especially since I got to live through the late 80s where that kinda actually happened, with stunningly less bloodshed than your average revolution.

So it all made for a good experience and I'm more interested in seeing the original movie as it actually appeared. Might even read the book sometime. I certainly felt smart identifying all the allegorical elements in the movie (you can't tell me the pathetic showing of the farmers trying to retake Animal Farm isn't mocking the Allied invasion of Russia in 1918) and given the book is such a favorite choice for high school classes they can't be that much harder to pick out in the actual text.

Now, let's enjoy some pictures of Idlewild.

Comic foreground asking you to picture yourself on the Lincoln Highway, which Idlewild is. You might dimly recall that so is Dutch Wonderland.

And here's Rollo Coaster, one of the few roller coasters built in the 1930s. It's a really good terrain coaster, hugging the landscape for its fun.

Since our last visit the park had (because of an accident) replaced its old cars with these, that have seat dividers, lap restraints, and even side restraints keeping hands away from trees. When we last rode it, the train had nothing, just a bar to grab onto if you felt unsure.

We'll get back to Rollo. Here's the carousel, (one of?) the last Philadelphia Toboggan Company original-build carousels.

There's the rounding board with an eagle icon on top.

Here's the historical landmark plaque and one of the three PTC Shield horses on the ride.

Trivia: In the October 1678 issue of his Le Mercure Galant newspaper editor Donneau de Visé observed that ``in the past two years, two colors have come into existence'' and that ``this is something that happens very rarely''. One of the colors was straw; the other, Prince, some manner of near-black with hints of midnight blue and crimson fire. Source: The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafés, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour, Joan DeJean. The color Prince was consistently written with a capital P. It seems to have faded out of common parlance in the 18th century and fortunately there's no trouble searching the Internet for ``Prince color''. Oh.

Currently Reading: Michigan History, September/October 2025, Editor Kristen Brennan.

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Can You Understand Me?

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 04:12:36 GMT

We were away from home Friday and Saturday, in order to stay at a hotel for Pinball At The Zoo and maybe not have to get up unspeakably early Saturday morning when we'd be hopefully getting some last-minute games in to qualify for a playoffs. Story on that to follow, though to spoil the big thing, neither of us qualified for anything.

But, since we'd be missing the mail a couple days, and it's been raining between four and 214 inches a day the past week, I had the mail held. Something about our mailbox encourages letter carriers to not just slip things in; they like to leave a little bit hanging out so any rain will get wicked inside fast.

Saturday I came home to find two pieces of (junk) mail in the mailbox, one sticking out ready for the rain that hadn't come yet. Also, Sunday, I got an e-mail from the post office confirming that my mail hold would be expiring soon.

I once more checked on the form that the mail should be kept at the post office where I will go in person to pick it up. What odds am I given that the mail will instead be left in the box?

Since that's not much of an update how about a lot of Idlewild pictures? Thought you might like that.

At the end of the story book forest walk is this castle that we weren't sure was different from last time or what. Turns out it was new since our last visit, although nearly a decade old by the time we saw it, and was a reconstruction of a castle that used to be at the end of the fairy tale trail.

And here's the sign explaining the castle. Duke the Dragon is, yes, our Dutch Wonderland pal, so this dates it to after when Hershey sold the park to Kennywood's corporate owners (who already owned Idlewild).

Here's the area inside the castle, with a bunch of mock medieval-ish hose fronts and a broom that's probably not a witch's, just janitorial, but who can say for sure?

Here's that sword you could try pulling from the stone. I'm embarrassed to say I didn't think to try pulling myself to learn what happens.

And here is Duke in something that looks bronze-ish all right! The broom's behind him.

Duke dolphins decorate the base of the fountain, though they weren't spitting water at this moment.

Believe that's Raggedy Ann and Andy leaving the castle ahead of us for the gift shop.

And there's the pair going into what I assume is a staff building. It was far enough away there was no plausibly wandering off to see what was there.

And now let's get back to the park; here's the Loggin Toboggan, local log flume, doing good business since it was a Saturday and a 140 degrees.

It's in a part of the park named Hootin' Holler, which has a hillbilly theme and seems like it's got that name independent of the setting of Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, but you never know for sure.

Last time we visited the park had disassembled their ... I'm going to say Spider ... ride. (There are a bunch of similar rides with names like Spider, Monster, Octopus, and so on.) Was very happy to see it reassembled and working.

And up on a hill one of the picnic pavilions would like to take a moment to sell you a tall glass of America. What do you think?

Trivia: Although Ransom E Olds appears to have made the first steam-powered car built in Lansing, the first steam car company in Lansing was the Lansing Automobile Works set up in 1902 by George J Bohnet and J W Post. Source: The Bicentennial History of Ingham County, Michigan, Ford Stevens Ceasar. If I'm not grossly misled, the location of the Lansing Automobile Works (219 North Washington) is currently a parking lot, like all of downtown. Anyway it didn't last long; even by 1902 gasoline engines were vastly ahead of steam and electric. Also in looking this up I learn on that same block is a Telephone Pioneer Museum I never heard of before. And I know what you're thinking and yes: Bohnet Electric is the company that sold us, and installed, our current kitchen light fixture.

Currently Reading: Michigan History, September/October 2025, Editor Kristen Brennan.

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The Second Hand Unwinds

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 04:14:42 GMT

Other and sadder mouse news. We've been getting the live traps out to catch the mother deermouse, and what we suppose are children. bunny_hugger has already caught what seems to be the mother and one child, moved outside to the detached garage where they're welcome to hang out.

In getting out the live traps, though, we went to the basement to find one of the tin cats that we had loaned to a friend whose house was, a year or so back, overrun with mice. It was closed, and what we most feared had happened. A mouse had gotten in and, with no food, water, or way to escape, died. This is why we try to leave them open, ideally with some prop inside that makes it impossible to close. We don't know how we failed to notice it was put away unsafe. It's possible our friend gave it back to us closed and unaware a mouse was trapped inside, but that doesn't relieve us of responsibility to open it and make sure it's safe.

You can imagine how we feel, which isn't a patch on how the mouse must have. We buried it near our pet mice, as much kindness as we can offer at this point.

On merrier news, let's get back to Idlewild and fairy tales.

Red Riding Hood pondering whether she dares go into Grandmom's house, which is inducing a delay that's probably just making things worse.

Well, there's the wolf dressed up as Grandmom and in her bed so I suppose things can't get worse than this.

Some more scenes set up but the centerpiece here is an American Elm tree, like you never see anymore. Trust me, that's what the sign on it says.

Here's the Seven Dwarves, of Snow White fame.

And their house. Yes, there's seven little chimneys coming out the top.

And here's Jack B, the nimble one jumping over a candlestick. He doesn't seem to be unscathed quite.

Here's a clock that has both a mouse running up and down it but also one that pokes its head out as the hands rotate.

You can see the other mouse at the base of the pendulum and also see they made their own choice about spelling 'Hickory Dickory Dock'.

Here's a pretty solid Humpty Dumpty. The wall looks like it's ancient, although that probably actually means they rebuilt it from scratch in May.

Here's Old King Cole, with pipe and bowl.

And here's a talking tree; there's a speaker in the mouth there and it reels off, if I remember right, a bunch of tree puns.

The giant keyhole I think is tied to Alice In Wonderland/Through The Looking-Glass.

Trivia: It's estimated that in 1849 Americans ate about 139 pounds of pork per capita. By 1889 this had dropped to 119 pounds. Source: Down To Earth: Nature's Role in American History, Ted Steinberg.

Currently Reading: Michigan History, September/October 2025, Editor Kristen Brennan.

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Richard, Why Don't You Open That Door?

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 04:05:53 GMT

I mentioned we got the side door fixed; its strike plate had fallen off years ago and replacing it just required someone with confidence to screw the new one in sideway. So that's nothing big.

Since then, though, we have realized just what rough shape so much of the doorframe is in. Particularly the base. I don't know how old the doorframe is, but that many winters plus the occasional four-inches-an-hour rainstorm has degraded it badly. bunnyhugger had gone around the base of the house to fill up spots where outdoor mice might be getting in, and the base of the door is basically all filled with this steel wool-like stuff. It'd be better if there were wood in there. Probably we should get the whole frame replaced. But the new latch is so good!

Also, now, our coal chute. Which we still have; the house is old but it hasn't been so old that getting rid of the chute was worth spending money on. It's also been a spot where mice could get in, and while bunnyhugger sealed it up last time we were having unauthorized mice, it's in considerably worse shape these days. It's in bad enough shape it might be reasonable to replace it entirely, but where do you even get a new coal chute door? Probably the thing to do would be to make it into a new window, but the company we got our fantastic glass block basement windows from went out of business about twelve minutes after they gave us fantastic windows. For now, we're hoping bunnyhugger has got mice sufficiently discouraged from going in that way.

And now, to pictures of Idlewild and the fairy tale forest there.

bunnyhugger approaching the Old Shoe of the woman who lives within. Yes, they had a performer for the Old Woman.

Inside the foot was this seemingly inadequate bed. It is labelled in front 'Sandman Special' and I'm sorry I didn't get a good picture of the plaque on the leftmost side of the bed.

There's the shoe and the Old Woman set out front, with her chair and water bottle.

And here's the pumpkin shell, with Peter Peter on top.

Here's what life looks like from within a pumpkin shell.

There's LIttle Boy Blue, with the new-since-our-last-visit sign reminding us how the story goes.

Over here's the brick house where the Three Little Pigs live these days.

And Jack and Jill, with Jack face down in his egg and chips.

A sign outside Jack and Jill urges us to use the well for its intended non-water purpose.

This rhyme about Hickety Pickety I have not seen referenced anywhere but here. I believe last time we visited there was a chicken in the roost but now there's just sculptures.

Here's the giant watering-can house from the famous fairy tale ... uh ... ... um ...

Table inside, with some Jack and Jill Seeds so you can grow your own fairy tale. Also, apparently, a bit of the Halloween decorations they missed taking down.

Trivia: By 1870 Urban Jean Joseph Le Verrier (discoverer of Neptune) was on speaking terms with zero of the members of the Paris Observatory's Board of Advisors, and for six months the Director refused to have anything to do with the body. Finally compelled to attend a meeting it ended (by reports) with three advisors kicking Le Verrier out of the room, and Le Verrier was forced to resign. Source: In Search of Planet Vulcan: The Ghost in Newton's Clockwork Universe, Richard Baum, William Sheehan. He was reappointed director in 1873 when his successor (Charles-Eugène Delaunay) accidentally drowned.

Currently Reading: Michigan History, September/October 2025, Editor Kristen Brennan.

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Little Wooden Head Go Play Your Part

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 04:01:55 GMT

Been another week so it's time to talk about my humor blog, which was mostly wrapping up the thing I most look forward to writing every year. I'm sad it's away for months now unless I decide otherwise.

I now bring you to the fairy tale forest at Idlewild. Great spot.

Outside this big cheese sculpture is this rhyme that I don't remember seeing elsewhere. This --- and a lot of the fairy-tale signs --- are new since our last visit a dozen years prior.

That's the cheese sculpture. You know we don't get Swiss cheese holes like that anymore.

Around back is where you enter the cheese. The sign, I believe, dates to our previous visit.

Here's what the park looks like from inside a block of cheese.

Over here we see where the Three Bears are when Goldilocks is prowling around their place: they're checking out their apiary.

The inside of the Three Bears' house, with some of the stuff Goldilocks has yet to break.

There's the beds. No sign of anyone inside, though.

And here's Geppetto's Workshop. They had a guy inside talking about his son, Pinocchio, doing a bit of talk about how who knows where his son is and there's something about a Hollywood adaptation.

Inside Geppetto's Workshop. It at least looks like the sort of stuff you might use to carve and dress a puppet.

Another old sign encouraging people to not deliberately mess up the grass.

And oh, hey, a dragon! I don't think he's part of any particular fairy tale that I remember.

Dragon's just got this little pile of rocks to hang out.

Trivia: Tapa, a paper-like material made by beating and stretching and drying wild fig tree bark, has been found in South America dating back almost as long as there is evidence of inhabitation; there are stone tapa beaters almost ten thousand years old. Source: Paper: Paging through History, Mark Kurlansky.

Currently Reading: Michigan History, September/October 2025, Editor Kristen Brennan.

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Lightning Pushes the Edge of a Thunderstorm

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 04:13:36 GMT

So we had a spot of weather last night. We got home from pinball league and the Michigan Furries telegram group was busy sharing weather maps and reports of lots of water coming down and lots of wind going fast. Turns out we were under a severe thunderstorm warning until something like 1:15, and while we did not face down a tornado, they were pretty plausible things. When the TV switched over to Stephen Colbert, he was nowhere to be found, with the local news's weather guys having converged on the screen to look at radar, point at things that might be tornado cells forming, and thanking people for sending in footage of things that might be funnel clouds seen in-between the rapid lightning strikes.

Fortunately, we did not get a tornado, or even hail heavy enough to do us damage. The rain was apparently going at the rate of four inches an hour at some points, but for small slices of an hour, and there was humbling beauty to appreciate in the density of the rain and the incessance of the lightning. Our satellite TV lost the local station --- it froze up just at the moment our lights flickered a moment --- and we had to follow it on the Internet until I went to bed. But, far as I can tell, we didn't lose power, or at least not long enough to force clocks to be reset. And hey, free goldfish pond expansion, what's not to like?

Now let's continue walking Idlewild Park's fairy tale forest.

Behind the Crooked House is this old statue of the Crooked Man and his Crooked Mouse.

In the midst of the park is this, surely once a snack stand. The poem --- ``There was a jolly miller who lived on the River Dee, he worked and sang from morn' till night, no lark so blyth as he'' --- I can find elsewhere on the Internet so it existed, I guess.

And here's just a statue dedicated to ``the wonderful memories of childhood'' and the days of childhood when you were covered in pigeons.

A dock and somewhere in there statues to Huckleberry Finn, who's not really a fairy tale.

A little pirate ship on the lake; we also had some fun interactions with the captain, who did some up-close magic with us that got us lollipops.

As you see, it's a legitimate pirate ship, complete with plank.

There's a tiny cabin that you can fit in if you're a kid or if you just stick your hand in and photograph around.

Then there's a little train playset with a bunch of face up front.

I remembered the park had a bunch of signs on the grass and around trees asking people to not damage them, and while the park didn't seem to have as many as my memory dictated there were some, like this Please Don't Tread On Me sign for the grass.

Remember the tale of the Three Billy Goats Gruff? ... I believe the last time we visited in 2014 they had actual live goats but this time it was just cutouts.

Now what would a cat be doing inside a wishing-class well?

Oh yes, it's because of this rhyme that I know exists but not any parts past there. Let me just look up and see if that's how the rhyme ends or if there's more parts to it and oh my well I see why Idlewild cut the rhyme off there, all right.

Trivia: The words ``neat'' and ``net'' both derive from the Middle French ``net'' meaning ``clear, clean, pure'', and both began in English meaning ``finely made, clean, clear, trim, elegant''. Source: Semantic Antics: How and Why Words Change Meaning, Sol Steinmetz.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 89: Moon Plant!, Bud Sagendorf. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

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You've Got to Prime the Pump

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 03:18:42 GMT

While we were burying Crystal's body we figured we could probably turn off the pond heater, what with it being 72 Fahrenheit. We went to turn on the pond pump, in fact, and were annoyed that it never started pumping water. We're confident that the power point is all right --- the plug on the end has a light, and we were able to get the pond spitter's pump to go --- so the question is now whether the main pump has gone bad, or whether the main pump has got the hose up to the top of the pond blocked. Either is annoying and either was too annoying for us to do Sunday night, so that's going to wait until we don't know just when. Probably this coming Sunday, since we're booked Saturday.

And then the Saturday of our big amusement park trip last year we planned just to drive home from Hershey, maybe stopping at Cedar Point for a break. But a stop for lunch and gas turned out to be in Ligonier, Pennsylvania, a short distance from Idlewild Park and, you know what? We're doing it. We're making another park trip and you're going to see it.

We got the one spot left in Parking Lot A! We have never seen parking lots B, C, or D.

Part of Idlewild is the Story Book Forest, long ago a separate attraction and now part of the gate price.

Here's the entrance trail. Inside the book is a small house where you can chat with Mother Goose.

The Book's been repainted since our last visit.

I hadn't noticed the Frog Prince before but here he is now.

And that's what the Big Book looks like from the other side. You can see a person talking with the obscured Mother Goose inside.

Here's another entrance to the Story Book Forest.

Little Miss Muffet and a spider. There are a lot of static displays of moments from fairy tales and nursery rhymes and also, for some reason, Huckleberry Finn.

Here's a chair for giants which would be more interesting if we'd got a picture of one of us on it. Sorry. Next time.

Down here's the Crooked Man (seated, with crooked ruler) and past him his Crooked House.

Behind the Crooked House you can see the non-actor Crooked Man statue.

The furnishings inside the Crooked House are all like this. Yes, there's a Crooked Mouse around somewhere but I think I don't have that photo.

Trivia: The ``phantom circuit'', an electrical hookup allowing three telephone conversations to be conducted on two lines, was first demonstrated in 1883; it was first put into practice in 1910 with cable-born phantom circuits carrying phone calls between Boston and Neponset, Massachusetts. Source: Telephone: The First Hundred Years, John Brooks.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 89: Moon Plant!, Bud Sagendorf. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

PS: What's Going On In Dick Tracy? Why's BB Eyes trying to kill Silver Nitrate? January - April 2026 because you have the right to know!

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Oh Crystal, the World Is Your Oyster, You're a Pearl

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 04:07:55 GMT

Yesterday we buried Crystal's body, out in the backyard near where we buried Fezziwig's. This involved a bit of struggling to find his burial spot, as the stone we placed for it had got overgrown and the statue on top was lost beneath myrtle. But we did find it, by poking at the ground with the shovel until it hit rock. And then digging, with an alarming sound of crackling wood that we worried was my breaking the shovel. In hindsight, I was probably crackling the many roots of trees underneath.

We've set one of the potted plants on top to serve as a marker, until such time as we can get a flat stone and maybe another mouse statue. It's at least something to make sure that if any raccoons or other creatures smell the disturbed dirt they're going to find it too much bother to fuss with. And we can look to pay attention to the three mice we have as pets remaining.

And now, friends, I bring you the end of the 4th of July at HersheyPark.

We were not where we wanted to be for the fireworks, but we weren't in a bad spot either.

Folks were interested in the show, mostly, with the occasional check-in with friends on Small Internet.

We were close to the arcade where we'd found that Star Wars pinball, which you can see closed up on the right there.

It was a huge show, and it kept going on, with enough straggler fireworks set off long after the main show that it got funny.

Here's a moment from the finale, though, that also shows off how close we were to some of the boring services buildings.

We were finally convinced the fireworks were over, and someone came in through the Employee gate, and then, you know, as we were walking away there were a couple straggler fireworks yet.

One last picture of Milton Hershey, a beacon in the darkness.

Getting back here to the entrance plaza here's that carousel we worked so hard to get to.

And there it is put to bed.

A last look at the park entrance, although there was still the gift shop ...

And that's what the gift shop looks like. The HP wheel there I believe rotated liek a Ferris wheel.

And, oh yeah, we ran across some history on one of the plaques leaving, so there it is.

Trivia: Zuider Zee reclamation required building an earthen dam over seventeen miles long. Source: Engineering in History, Richard Shelton Kirby, Sidnney Withington, Arthur Burr Darling, Frederick Gridley Kilgour.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 89: Moon Plant!, Bud Sagendorf. Editor Stephanie Noelle. Mad sciencey type trying to make Popeye the first man in space for like the fifth time!

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