austin_dern

Last year I felt myself new enough in my position I didn't want to take more days off than I absolutely had to. Also I needed to replenish my poor savings account. This year, I'm in better shape all around, and could take off both the Thursday and Friday before Memorial Day, to attend Anthrohio. Get ready to hear all about it. In fairness, it was a great con, lots of stuff to do and nearly all of it quite successful.

With Thursday off I got to skip out on a production push which, that's fine, there'll be others, and I don't mind avoiding hard work while I can. The question was when would we set off for Columbus. The answer would be around 11:00, so that we could get to bunnyhugger's parents around noon, leave our pet rabbit with them, and take off about 1 pm. Why 1 pm?

That would be for Coon's Candy, the candy shop in Harpster, Ohio. It's an hour or so north of Columbus and we had gotten into the habit of stopping there for the sorts of treats we can't get at home so easily. The catch is they're closed Memorial Day, so ever since Morphicon/Anthrohio moved to late May we haven't been able to get there. But if we got there around 4 pm we could have an hour or so before they closed at 5:00 and all's well.

We got off to a late start, as we always do despite our best efforts. And got to bunnyhugger's parents late, and left them late. Not very, maybe ten or fifteen minutes, but an amount that shaved margin off our time at Coon's Candy. Blame our late start, and our trying to eat all the pasta salad bunnyhugger's mother made. Also bunnyhugger realized she forgot the battery for her big digital camera, and we spent some time trying to track down where we could get another. She's needed a backup anyway. The trouble is the only place that sells one is the Camera Mall in Ann Arbor, which we'd be driving past --- but it would be a ten- to-twenty-minute delay. Go there and we might not make Coon's Candy at all.

We chose Coon's Candy, although it wasn't an easy choice. The place looked much as it had our last visit, most likely in 2018. The thing most quietly distressing to me is that they'd replaced a framed vintage (local) newspaper, a front page from the assassination of McKinley. They also seem to be putting in a new logo, one that's got a nice 1950s spaceship-screen style and that I'd like if they didn't have a perfectly good raccoon baker they could have used. (But then maybe they're looking to sidle away from racist interpretations of the family name.) The noteworthy thing is bunnyhugger got some chocolate-covered potato chips, a thing she's wanted to try forever.

Making it to Coon's Candy before 5 pm meant we got to Columbus, and the Crown Plaza Or Whatever hotel that Anthrohio's been at since 2018 when they finally gave up on the now-lost Holiday Inn. And this gave us plenty of time to go through registration --- no line --- and settle into the hotel room and decide we weren't that interested in going to the MST3K event. And that we could get to another night's karaoke. (We would not.) Mostly we wanted to get something to eat, and found the Weird Subway from last year was closed despite their online hours saying they were open, and their having the lights on, the door unlocked, and the illuminated sign reading 'OPEN' in the side window. All right. So we went to White Castle instead, finally making good on the plan to get some that had failed for Motor City Furry Con and for the Eclipse Trip to Cedar Point.

While we hadn't actually done anything besides get our badges and con book, we were settled in to one of our favorite places, ``vacation at the con''. Sure to be a good weekend, right?

Enough almost-congoing. How about that Michigan's Adventure, at the close of the regular season last year?

That Dutch-angle photograph I take every trip of the Shivering Timbers station. The crowd there is the only line, for the front seat.

And Wolverine Wildcat here, along with those storage bins they put in at the end of 2022 for little obvious reason. I guess to keep people from the lone train from having to fall over other rider's stuff as they leave.

Wolverine Wildcat. Wonder where they're going.

Oh, they're going here! Fun!

We took a rare ride on Logger's Run. Here you can see the old, original ride sign, faded but still recognizable after a quarter-century of Cedar Fair ownership.

Logger's Run boat #17 here given a kick-start.

Trivia: Large-scale phosphate mines were first established in South Carolina in 1867, allowing for the considerable improvement of phosphorous-poor soils of Georgia and South Carolina. For a while. Source: Down To Earth: Nature's Role in American History, Ted Steinberg.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine Volume 37: The Lost Bomb Islands, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

PS: What's Going On In Alley Oop? Why didn't they just time-travel out of the time loop? March - May 2024 as yet another piece of media does the time loop story.

This has been a week of versuses in my humor blog, so why not join in and compare things, only one pair of which has a clear logical connection? Run over there recently have been:

• MiSTed: Altered Destiny, Part 29
• March Pairwise Brackety Contest Thing: Debauchery versus Vaseline
• Statistics Saturday: What You Use Your Time Machine for as a Kid Versus as a Mature Person
• March Pairwise Brackety Contest Thing: House Paint versus Jigsaw Puzzles
• March Pairwise Brackety Contest Thing: Cheese Nevada versus HDMI
• What's Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? Why does every comic look funny these days? December 2023 - March 2024
• March Pairwise Brackety Contest Thing: Hair (the musical) versus Geography
• MiSTed: Altered Destiny, Part 30

Getting back now to Ann Arbor in August here's some pictures from around town, the first couple when I was with my brother and his family, later ones when I was just kicking around town on my own.

Basement in Ashley's bar where ... well, we've never been there while it was being used. Don't know why the London Underground theme but it's fun to see. The floor looks like it's had a day, though.

Piled-up chairs and another trompe l'oeil promising lots of stairs to get back up to the surface.

The mock subway walls go all the way to having imitation posters, including these that are in forced-perspective going right to the TV it's hidden behind.

A look down from the Liberty Street parking garage, here pointing at the Dawn Treader Book Shop and whatever else is going on that area of town.

More adorable part of this warning sign in the parking deck: the reminder not to leave behind your I Pods or the warning about your GPS devices?

Looking at the Michigan and the State, the two sidewalk movie palaces the town has, even if the State's lost its first floor. The only thing comparable in Lansing is just the floor of the theater, now the roof of a law office or something, looking down on a parking lot.

Can you see the record shop that's been here for a half-century-plus, under at least two different names? No, because it got gentrified out of downtown, like they're doing to the rest of downtown. But there used to be Liberty Records/Encore Records on this block.

Once more I wasn't there at the right time to see the movie showing, although I'm not sure how much I really want to see the 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I've heard the costumes were pretty good. Never seen it myself. They also would be showing Twister a couple days after this.

Wall murals showing pictures of downtown, for people in downtown.

And here's the State Theatre with a marquee that just promises there'll be movies to see, if you like.

So you see what I see here on State Street? Yeah, they repaved it so there's no curb, no change in height between sidewalk and street, making it easier to use the street for pedestrian purposes.

Do you know how angry the drivers of the Ann Arbor community who never go downtown are at this block of downtown being made more of a pedestrian and bike-friendly zone? They were so livid once someone told them about it.

Trivia: In calculating the age of the world the Venerable Bede estimated that God began forming the sky, earth, and water on the 18th of March, 3952 BCE. Source: The Calendar: The 5000-Year Struggle to Align the Clock with the Heavens --- And What Happened to the Missing Ten Days, David Ewing Duncan.

Currently Reading: Retail Gangster: The Insane, Real-Life Story of Crazy Eddie, Gary Weiss. Another gift from bunnyhugger. She had to order it because for some reason the local Lansing-area bookstore didn't carry a biography of a guy known for the commercials for his New York City-area discount electronics chain store scam of the 1970s and 80s. (That would make this the year 5975.)

The Ann Arbor Art Fair has cancelled. We haven't gotten to it in years, it's true; it's usually been at too busy a time of year for us. But it was a chance to see the streets of Ann Arbor even more impassable than usual, this time with people showing off paintings, photographs, crafted projects, everything. It's the first time the fair's missed a year.

The fair was scheduled for the 16th through 19th of July. And this is getting ominous: the state's second-biggest pinball event of the year is Fremont's Baby Food Festival. That's so far still scheduled for the 22nd through 25th of July. I'm not confident that we're going to have big events like that again, that early, though. Heck, I'm not confident we're going to have the small monthly gatherings of the regular Fremont pinball stuff, and that's only gathering around twenty people.

Well, back to the stamp sand, and other features around Gay and another town in the area.

Looking from the shoreline back. I'm not sure whether this is a tree that washed ashore or something that, somehow, grew to substantial size in the sand before shoreline erosion caught it.

Looking at a dock to the northeast of the stamp sand beach. Someone's grilling or else their car is on fire.

The erosion of the stamp sand beach produces this great cliff-face look. It even has an imitation of sediment layers. Maybe it's actual sediment layers reflecting times they used different veins' ore.

Oh, another of those big bug friends hopped a ride on bunnyhugger's camera bag.

A broken-down tree poses for the cover of my album. It really looks like a deer with antlers on the left there. Compare to bunnyhugger's version of this scene.

You'd think that sea glass (well, lake glass) would be easy to spot on the beach given how uniform and grey the sand is. It wasn't, though. The most glass we saw was here, with what looked like a shattered mason jar, lower right. It seemed more like the remains of a picnic or drinking party than anything else.

There are a couple of retaining walls along the stamp sand beach, which probably had significance to the factory at some point. Now they just make the topography more interesting.

Town sign, and what sure looks like an exhausted sign warning to not steal the thing. It's also a fair bit higher than most town-identifying signs are.

One of the houses has set up a couple miscellaneous historic artifacts, like this, ``Shipwreck planking and anchor chain found in the lake bottom from Captain Wolf Larson's ship, The Ghost''. Also, ``Captain Wolf Larson of The Ghost'' sounds like the hero of some 1930s serial adventure comic.

And so here is the civic institution that you knew had to be there. Do you want to say what it is? Go ahead, I'll wait.

Correct: it is the Gay Bar. Which is your normal sort of town/neighborhood bar, except that it sells a greater variety of merchandise than, like, Stober's in Lansing does.

And inside we found pinball! The Game Show pinball is a great and favorite one, but, it had an extra pinball inside so the game kept insisting we plunge two balls into play, then ended the turn when the first ball drained. By plunging the right way you could put one ball into play and have more or less the correct game experience. The Terminator 2 was in good shape except that the screen was off, so we had no idea our scores. The sound was turned up to register at 5.2 on the Richter scale, so at least we could hear game instructions and didn't have to rely on display cues.

Having seen the sights of Gay, we drove to nearby Lake Linden, which had closed for the day because it was like 5 pm on a Sunday already. Here, though, is a window display in town.

The Lindell chocolate shop, you can see, is noteworthy because it was a hundred years old and while the shop has been through different phases, like pharmacist's and lunch counter, it's always been someplace where you could buy candy.

The great tile curtain in front of the store. I miss this sort of inset entrance, not least because it gives you half a chance to bundle up before heading out into the weather.

And here's the place, and a view of town. We'd long missed lunch, unfortunately, and even if we hadn't, we'd missed pasty day.

Trivia: Holy Roman Emperor Otto II died in 983, at the age of 28, from a fever and an overdose of medicine (four drachms of aloe) to treat it. Source: A History of Venice, John Julius Norwich.

Currently Reading: Miscellaneous Harvey, Marvel, and other comics. This includes ones I had bought in recent years figuring to get around to reading and hadn't before. Also includes a recent reprint of some Bud Sagendorf Popeye comic-book stories, which are interesting. Sagendorf's daily Popeye strips would usually come up with a pretty good premise, shuffle it around some until he got bored with it, and then end with the most anticlimactic moment possible. But in comic book form? ... He ... gets to a disappointing ending sooner, but it reads mostly better somehow. Except that the first of the stories here requires Wimpy to be working implausibly hard at his scheme.

Happy Doctorversary, dear bunny_hugger.

It was getting near the last hours of Sunday and somehow we still hadn't been to the Dealers Den. So we started that hike. The Dealers Den, and Artists Alley, were in the ``Executive Meeting Center''. It's this little corner of several conference rooms, themselves in another corner. It seems like a great spot in terms of access control; both the rooms and the whole area is securable, and there's a good bit of space. Several rooms for each of these purposes. But it's also well off from the main part of the hotel, into some ... other ... part of the hotel, and up the stairs, and past the indoor arboretum that's great to look at and that we were warned to not even THINK about going in. The Dealers Den seemed to be not very crowded, when we visited, but that's likely the result of the late hour. We got there, literally, in the last hour the Dealers Den would be open. We never even got to the Artists Alley, any of the three rooms.

But we stowed what we did get --- including our con swag, T-shirts and drinking mugs, from the con store which was on the far end of the hotel from the Executive Meeting Center --- in the car. And then, well, bunny_hugger was feeling the fatigue of the previous week, and the short, uncomfortable sleep of the weekend, and all that. We found a chair in the lounge where not too much freezing air blasted in too often, and she napped while I caught up on comic strips on my iPod.

And then it was time for Closing Ceremonies to start, so we went to the main events hall, where Closing Ceremonies weren't ready to start. Whatever was happening ran slow, so, they continued the previous event. Some kind of bomb-defusing video game. One person would describe what they saw, another peson would look up clues about what needed to be done. Seems like a good gimmick. The last round was played with the whole gathered audience as the experts, looking up the game's clues on their phones. The audience succeeded, too.

Closing ceremonies offered the common subjects. The con committee being exhausted, hoping everyone had fun, hoping everyone enjoyed the false fire alarm. The total was about sixteen thousand dollars raised for the New Beginnings Animal Rescue. There were 1610 attendees, a couple hundred more than last year, but not so dramatically more as bunny_hugger had estimated. She thought there were two thousand people at the con. They didn't have a fursuit-parade count on hand; later, they reported 269. bunny_hugger's visible front and on the right, i her green Michigan State shirt, in pictures like this one. And closing ceremonies ended with a toss of streamers from the audience out at the stage, arranged by Firr who I guess was Guest of Honor.

Cleaning up the streamers wasn't the end of con events. They'd scheduled an ice cream social for 6:00, which wasn't ready to start anywhere near 6:00. A great long line was instead. It turned out they were also setting up the hot dinner. bunny_hugger's energy was flagging, so I went to get coffee from the hotel Starbuck's. The hotel Starbuck's, it turns out, was not open weekends, though we would have sworn we'd seen it open Saturday. All right.

I went to the hotel desk to ask where I could get coffee and they recommended the hotel bar/restaurant. I went there. As this would be a simple, easy transaction that involved me, of course it turned into a fiasco. bunny_hugger would be so extraordinarily glad she wasn't there. She would have died.

I went in. Nobody was behind the bar. Nobody was at the host's station. A couple people were at the bar, not paying much attention to anything. I walked around looking for ... anything? Anyone? Someone else came in. A host come in, asked if I needed anything, then walked past me to the other customer, leading her to a table. The host came back and asked what I needed. I asked for a medium coffee with cream and Splenda, to go. She left without a word. All right. I stood and waited in case of further developments.

Eventually I drifted to the bar. The host came back and asked what I would like. I repeated, well, the coffee with cream and --- and she said, oh, right, the thing the other person had gone for. Apparently there were two people on-duty. And I know this makes me sound bad. I'm terrible at remembering faces, and almost as bad with names. But here I think I'm on not-awful grounds. I saw the two staffers together, later, and they did look quite similar, the restaurant uniform not helping. They looked to me like sisters.

But then she left and all I had was the supposition that this meant someone was working on coffee somewhere, somehow. More people came to the bar. Some got seated. Me, I waited. I thought about, you know, I could just leave. I had my car keys. There's surely a McDonald's in the area I could get through the drive-in at faster than I could wait for this.

One of the hosts brought a little tray of sugar packets, and set it on the bar, far enough behind the bar that I couldn't reach it.

Finally, finally, one of the hosts came out with coffee in a cardboard cup; I had feared I'd get it in a ceramic cup and have to consider stealing it. She left again. There was no cream. The sugar was inaccessible. I thought about just giving up on this, but when the other host came around to take the order of someone new to the bar, she asked if there were anything else I needed. Yes, cream. She disappeared to the closed Starbuck's next door. The other host came around and asked me if I needed anything and all I could think was, an ejector seat?

But finally a host came around with a little plate of creamer packets, and I was able to call out saying why I couldn't reach the sugar that was four feet behind the bar. And the host said not to bother paying, which, I'll admit, was something I wondered since I had nowhere seen any hint of what this all would cost.

I left a dollar as tip, but wasn't feeling it. If there'd ever been a word about what someone was doing, that would've been different, but as it was ... urg.

Trivia: Coca-Cola promised, after the 1911 federal prosecution for its caffeine content under the Pure Food and Drugs Act, to not depict any children in its advertisements. It kept that policy until 1986. Source: A History of the World in Six Glasses, Tom Standage.

Currently Reading: Placemakers: A Brief History of Real Estate Development, Herb Auerbach, Ira Nadel. So, I love a good narrow-focus history and the history of real estate developers/promoters is as good a subject as any when you're just drifting around the library looking for nothing much. But it means you get stuff like this, in a photo caption:

Abraham, by purchasing a burial site for his wife Sarah at what became the Tombs of the Patriarchs, demonstrated the importance of fee simple ownership.

I mean, it may be literally true that ``Leviticus talks about title, ownership and foreclosure; Joshua teaches us how to subdivide land; the Book of Numbers addresses city-planning issues; Nehemiah deals with mortgages and collateral; Job mentions expropriation; and the Book of Daniel describes the real estate developer'', but writing that where anybody can see you is why everybody treated you like that in middle school.

PS: More hanging around Ann Arbor.

A look into Ann Arbor's famous Dawn Treader used bookstore! Also into every used bookstore! You can almost smell the decaying paper and inaccessibility-to-the-disabled.

The records and DVDs and comics/magazines section of the Dawn Treader, right in front of the comedy section.

Does this seem to you like an awful lot of Gil Thorp, by volume? It seems to me like an awful lot of Gil Thorp, by volume. I looked through the books but didn't find an explanation for the greatest of the strip's mystery: why the Milford teams compete to get into the ``playdowns'' rather than the ``playoffs'' like normal places.

Another full week on my humor blog. Parts of it have been getting easier as I've got, like, a Thing to do for Sundays, and for Tuesdays, and now I've got a weird little thread going for Wednesday too that promises to be short and simple and dumb little jokes I don't have to work hard at. Mind, the big Friday piece is still so hard to do. Anyway, here's what I'd done since last Friday:

• What There Is To Do About E-mail
• So This Is Just My Research Method Now
• Statistics Saturday: Some Fictional Road Signs
• What’s Going On In Rex Morgan, M.D.? What’s With Edward’s Dog Not Being Seen? February – April 2019
• We Have No Information About Whether The Guy Who Draws Beetle Bailey Has Ever Seen A Raccoon
• Popeye’s Island Adventures: SPORTS
• In Which I Continue To Lower My Per-Post Word Count Average With Dumb Little Things
• Far From Everything There Is To Say About Upgrading Operating Systems

And now a last look inside the Ruthven Museums Building.

More of the natural-history museum signs. I imagine the dioramas and taxidermy figures made it to the new home. I can't imagine an old sign like this, with its delightful not-quite-perfect kerning and letters floating around the baseline like there's been some CSS catastrophe, making it, though.

The stairways leading back down, and a view of the rotunda. We're getting near the end of the visit here.

The rotunda, showing where Object Lessons -- already closed --- was, as well as the doors leading out. Note the posters on the left, bottom floor, advertising the impending move and the events scheduled for the final day.

Goodness, they've already cleared Mister Ruthven's bust out! It's only been a couple minutes since we saw him last. (It's a different pedestal in this picture from the one before.)

The door to the temporary-exhibits building and showing off the obviously quite old label and stencil on the doors.

And it's done! Lights out in the first room, the one with all the displays and fighting words for squirrels and all that.

A glance at the ceilings, and to the coat room, which we did use to stow our coats while we visited.

A look from inside the coat room back out, along with the old-fashioned dangling sign for the women's bathroom. I don't remember whether bunny_hugger told me of the bathroom having a sitting room inside, but I'd imagine there would be.

A cautionary word! Instructions for, I expect, staff.

bunny_hugger having left the Ruthven Museum Building for the final time.

And a glance back on what we'd left, including the wonderful detailing around the front door.

bunny_hugger posing with the puma sculpture. And also the evidence of weather.

The optimistic declaration above the Ruthven Museums Building's door. Remember when we believed in truth being able to do a thing?

Trivia: Until shortly before its opening in 1874 the Cavendish Laboratory was to be named the Devonshire, for the Duke (and Cambridge University chancellor) who bankrolled its construction. Source: Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field, Nancy Forbes, Basil Mahon. (The Duke's family name was Cavendish, and his great-uncle Henry Cavendish was a renowned scientist in his own right.)

Currently Reading: Mike Fink: King of Mississippi Keelboatmen, Walter Blair, Franklin J Meine.

PS: How April 2019 Treated My Mathematics Blog, which was, not good, but about what I deserved.

Although we got back to the convention hotel we didn't go in together. bunny_hugger had not had enough sleep, not in her short nap, and not in the weeks before the convention either. Her work schedule this semester has been really brutal. So, with nothing particular on the con schedule that we could find, she chose to nap in the car for an hour or so. I went inside. Not finding any particular events --- there wasn't much programming to interest me --- I wandered into the video game room. I settled on the Atari 7800, and tried a couple of games there. Several times I had to go back to the game room attendant to admit I had no idea how to start a game. But I did eventually get very nearly to finishing one level of Tower Toppler. And, eventually, learned how to start a game of the Atari 2600 Video Pinball. I can't say that's a great pinball game, but it turns out you can play it very much like you'd play an electromechanical game, flipping as little as possible and letting things just happen instead. So, is that a good adaptation of the game? ... I don't know what to say.

After about an hour of this, I thought to see if bunny_hugger was awake. We hadn't set a meeting point, but I guessed hospitality would be likely. And there she was, talking with Shouda, king of the food services. We were there seeing the last remnants of the dinner rush. Which looked to be a good one: they made a serious effort at getting vegetarian options ready. Here, for example, were a few last pieces of vegetarian lasagna. We hadn't eaten that long ago, but why would I turn that down? Well, it's cold, bunny_hugger warned. All right. She repeated the warning, I thought, and this seemed like far too much alarm over the danger of cold lasagna.

In my stories here I tend to focus on the enjoyable stuff we do, and that's easy because so much of our lives together are happy. But I know it leads to a distorted idea of what we're like. Read my journal and you could come up with the impression that the only sad thing about me and bunny_hugger is that someday one of us will knife the other in an argument about who was luckier in their choice of spouse. That's still the way I'd bet we'll go. But we do have petty fights, usually over a pretty rote script.

The thing is I take disappointment pretty unflappably. But the way I do this gives bunny_hugger signals that I'm not taking the situation seriously. When it's something disappointing her too, this gives her the impression that I don't care, so she reiterates the problem. But this gives me the signal that I'm supposed to do something about a problem I thought I was already addressing. But what's there to do if it's just, accept disappointment? But if I'm just accepting this, how does she know I take it seriously? Is the problem that I didn't understand the issue? I often end up shouting, which I'm never proud of, but at least it breaks this cycle, albeit to put us in a different fighting mode.

And Motor City Fur[ry] Con had been a lot of disappointments. Some of them were unavoidable: bunny_hugger's work schedule forced us to miss the first six hours or so of the convention. Some were our mistakes: the things we forgot to bring, like my red panda slippers or my con badges. Some were beyond our control: the new location felt unfriendly, and the hotel we stayed in had unpleasant touches like a dubious air-conditioner, and guests who smoked enough pot to remind us of angry nights with our own neighbors. Many were related to the con: there wasn't much programming that interested us. Some of what did, like the game show panels, were at hours we couldn't attend, because of work or because it was Saturday morning when we were still waking. We hadn't seen many of the people we always saw at the con in the past. Twitchers, for example, had gone to the old, wrong hotel the day before; and then today, we couldn't see him long. The new place was bigger and we just weren't meeting anyone. The important thing is that the day and a half had been a long string of little disappointments to swallow.

So I was already running on my ``I don't know how to tell you that I have accepted this not going right'' mode. And then to be told about the lasagna being cold, repeatedly ... well, that pushed me into shouting mode. ``Fine,'' I snapped, or something like that, and started walking off, setting off bunny_hugger's anxiety about making a scene.

She wasn't trying to tell me about the lasagna again. She was trying to tell me the cheddar-cheese soup was also cold.

So now that was terrible, and my fault.

Trivia: In Athens of about the fifth century BCE the name of the fifth month of the year was Maimakterion. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.

Currently Reading: Mike Fink: King of Mississippi Keelboatmen, Walter Blair, Franklin J Meine. 1930s book about the then-being-forgotten, now-quite-forgotten 19th century frontiersman legend. Which has some good parts. One could make the argument that braggadocio is the first and truest American art form, for example. And 19th-century frontier-legend braggadocio just had incredibly good game, braggadocio good enough that merely bragging about it would be false humility (``[ his daughter Sal Fink ] fought a duel once with a thunderbolt, an' came off without a single scratch, while at the fust fire, she split the thunderbolt all to flinders, an' gave the pieces to Uncle Sam's artillerymen, to touch off their cannon with''). But the book also has some really ... uh ... oy parts, like everything mentioning the Indians (like, the anecdote quoted above ends with Sal Fink dragging fifty Indians into the fire they meant to burn her in).

PS: Reading the Comics, April 26, 2019: Absurd Equation Edition so hey, technically I posted double-digits numbers of articles on my mathematics blog in April!

PPS: Not terrible is the Ruthven Museums Building, although it is of the stuffed remains of long-dead animals for now.

And a gallery of squirrels of Michigan, counting the red, the grey, and the fox squirrel. Not depicted: the black squirrels that are all over Lansing. (Yes, yes, black squirrels are just greys. Still, there's a lot of them in parts of the state.)

And the display of small weasels, going all the way down to the Least Weasel, which is about two-thirds its own size.

Here's your prime pack o' opossums.

Did I finally have time to get back to filling my mathematics blog with sweet, sweet content? No, not even close. This is going to be a terrible month for my readership statistics. Here's what meager stuff I did publish instead.

• Reading the Comics, April 18, 2019: Slow But Not Stopped Week Edition, a blog written while in the rush of getting ready for Motor City Fur[ry] Con. Gads.
• Find The Factors hosts the 127th Playful Mathematics Education Blog Carnival, a heads-up to some other things to read.
• Reading the Comics, April 24, 2019: Mic Drop Edition Edition, at a joke that I didn't realize was as good as it was until I started writing it up.

And now for a story comic plot recap so eagerly anticipated that, no joking, I saw my readership numbers spike ahead of its arrival.. What's Going On In Rex Morgan, M.D.? What's With Edward's Dog Not Being Seen? February - April 2019 explained in both what went on and what joke Terry Beatty was going for with it all.

Now let's get back to the Ruthven Museums Building and our last visit to it in its 2017-present incarnation.

Some more old fieldwork equipment. This was a surveying tripod and theodoline; I can't tell you how recently it was still doing useful work.

Any plans for Valentine's Day, 1951? Old lecture poster including some of that great mid-century line art. ... Before you complain about there not being so many dinosaurs in Michigan 300,000,000 years ago, notice that the whole picture is underneath a bar marked Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic. Also that there's a bunny under the Cenozoic, which checks out. It's aspects of the whole Phanerozoic Eon, is what I'm getting at.

Thank-you letters written by kids to the museum, and press clippings about the place too.

A nice logarithmic-spiral representation of deep time.

Back to the retired cabinets, many of which were open or labelled. First Aid is of obvious use, although I would've had the sign there be a little more prominent than the one (not in frame) for Manilla Envelopes.

A microscope that's transcended the state of being a tool for a museum and achieved the state of being a tool in a museum.

And here in one of the corners of the museum is a bust of Alexander Grant Ruthven, for whom the museum building was named.

The upper floor held taxidermy and other displays of the current wildlife of Michigan. Here's a raccoon looking, as taxidermy animals always do, strangely pale, considering.

More antiques: an actual mail chute, like you see in silent movies where someone drops in something they should not have.

Taxidermy display of the forests of Michigan, showing off a small, pale version of squirrel in front of the mural wall that in reality lines the north end of what is now I-96.

Displays of life in the Michigan water. The plastic dome over the pond water exhibit is one of those 70s things that try to give us a stereoscopic soundscape representation of microscopic life. I could never be sure I was standing in the right spot to hear the thing clearly, compared to the ambient noise of the museum.

The modern-natural-history stuff looks out over an open half-wall to the fossils and other life exhibits, so here's the display cases I've been sharing the past week, but from a greater distance. Dig that floor pattern, not inconsistent with what was unearthed in the office setting.

Trivia: The Theatre Royal, the first building of Edinburgh, Scotland,'s New Town, was built in 1768. Source: How The Scots Invented The Modern World, Arthur Herman.

Currently Reading: Uncle Sam Presents: A Memoir of the Federal Theatre 1935 - 1939, Tony Buttitta, Barry Witham. It's a quite breezy read, a guy's chatty reminiscences of his involvement with the Federal Theatre Project, and the vindication that most audiences quite liked live theater given half a chance and a show they could afford to see. Granting that's as told by someone who lived in and believed in the program. Fascinating aside: the WPA Circus, which featured only a handful of animal acts since, as the joke went, there weren't any elephants on relief. More to the point there wasn't any additional stipend for animal care, so, you could hardly afford upkeep of a big animal and work the show.

I apologize for doing another photography day, but this weekend is Pinball At The Zoo and I just do not have the time and energy to write up the convention and my humor blog and my mathematics blog and maybe even do a thing for work, so, this is the easiest thing to pass off. So here's more of the Ruthven Museums Building in our farewell visit and I'll get back to Motor City Fur[ry] Con for Monday.

Oh, bunny_hugger's father has not adopted Peewee. Turns out the county animal control meant the dog would have to be kept for five full business days, of which Good Friday was not one. As I write this, too, they had not been able to do the temperament check. So the dog might become available Monday, but there's no guaranteeing that. That nobody has called Animal Control to claim it is a bit reassuring, as it suggests we didn't accidentally swipe someone's pet who ust kept getting loose.

The museum picks a fight with moxie_man by labelling sciuromorphs as ``the most primitive rodents''. And it is hard to imagine the museum writing this in the same way today.

Skull of a raccoon and a nice picture of a coati used to explain procyonids. This was about all the space they got too. Calling procyonids 'closely related to the dogs' was probably fine enough taxonomy when the sign was put up --- there's a reason the family is named for Procyon, the brightest star in Canis Minor --- but these days procyonids are grouped into the Musteloidea superfamily, and are lumped as closer to the weasels than anything else.

The footnote that mongooses are ``by some now separated as herpestids'' would probably allow us to date the writing of this panel, at least if we knew where to find a history of taxonomic classifications.

I, too, wonder what it is they must have been writing about Homo habilis that's so bad they had to cover it with a giant ``Look we're going to do oh, lord, so very much better please give us a little time we're sorry stop writing letters please?''

``The koala is one of the most distinctive and most familiar of living Australian marsupials.'' hm. Well. Yes, it is, once you get past about fourteen species of kangaroo and wallaby and wallaroo and kangaby and all that.

Part of their cute three-dimensional-style panel of animal evolution. Somehow the assertion that ``early mammals of several groups must have had somewhat this appearance'' tickles my fancy. Must be in how it uses the authoritative voice to give a ``I dunno, something like this'' answer.

So I know this doesn't look like anything, but it used to be an Edmontosaurus dinosaur fossil, and a big one. One of those that's the centerpiece of a school field trip. But the big and delicate stuff like this has to be moved first, so here it's gone.

Here's a spot more context for the Edmontosaurus, including a picture of what it looked like in place. Unfortunately ...

So, yes, it turned out the fossil was fragile enough that they can't remount it. The text mentions the fossil having been ``mounted in a 'laying down' position because gravity was helping to hold it together!'', which I like as explanation because it seems to suggest it's explaining what happened to the skeleton without quite doing so. And, in any case, phoo. That's sad news.

And the nice big panel about Plesiosaurs from back in the days before people tried to pass them off as some kind of explanation for the Loch Ness Monster.

This is one of many animal sculptures with a tag nearby identifying its creator as Carleton Watson Angell. Like it says, he was the museum artist for thirty years and he's just created a lot of these figures. So they've reached that curious state where they're museum-worthy as artefacts in themselves, regardless of whether our thinking about, like, how dinosaur skins looked has changed to the point that the sculptures aren't useful as examples of animal life.

Like the panel says, Museum restoration of Carcharodon jaws, seen here devouring a Wobblie.

Trivia: The potato was introduced to Virginia by English colonists bringing it from Europe. Source: Food In History, Reay Tannahill.

Currently Reading: Day of Jubilee: The Great Age of Public Celebrations in New York, 1788 - 1909, Brooks McNamara.

So we were at the new Motor City Fur[ry] Con hotel about 6 pm, later than we've ever gotten to this con. There was an enormous line. It was not for registration, but for the hospitality suite; sponsors --- and most people at MCFC get sponsorships --- had the option of getting dinner there. The registration line was upstairs. Past a checkpoint to show your badges, but we said we were there to get our badges and they waved us through, so, maybe that checkpoint needed some straightening out. And then we had a minor fiasco as they couldn't find bunny_hugger's registration. She filled out a new registration, fretting about whether she could get a refund when she got her original con registration out of e-mail. It turns out she hadn't, which is weird. We knew we had missed the deadline to submit panels, which is why we had nothing to do besides attend, but failing to register was never imagined.

Still, the convention had a bunch of things we forgot. For example, I forgot to being any of my badges, so that all I had to identify me was my con badge. In accord with modern con tradition, the badge had my name in small print in dark letters on a medium-dark background. I also forgot the slippers that go along with my red panda kigurumi. And we'd discover, before the dance, that we had forgotten the little caps that string glow-sticks together, so we couldn't string them. And bunny_hugger would discover that she had her marionette dragon on the 'to be sewn' pile because there was a dangerously loose thread on it, one that would ultimately snap at the dragons panel. This is all stuff we can fix before the next convention, at least, unless we forget anew.

Motor City Fur[ry] Con always has some good stuff for sponsors, including T-shirts and drinking mugs. These were not at registration this year, but instead at a Con Store opened in some spare hotel space. At registration were a cute little newspaper-style flyer with the con schedule. And, it turned out, this surprisingly slick, small (roughly A5-size) hardcover with the full schedule and information about the attendees and even some spare pages. After we grumbled about the chintziness of the newspaper-con-schedule, the hardcover con book was a pretty sound rejoinder.

The con store was closed, although we had got there ten minutes before its posted 7 pm close. We'd have trouble getting our t-shirts and mugs, and ultimately not secure them until Sunday. The T-shirt was great, although the mug was not the traditional glass. It was a slender metal cup instead. It's nice enough, but if the choice is a glass mug or a hardcover con guide we'd rather have the glass mug. (That said, not that we use the glass mugs as anything but proof we've been to every Furry Connection North/Motor City Fur[ry] Con to date.)

I had an idea for dinner. There was a White Castle nearby. The road to it was closed for repairs. My satellite navigator did not understand why I was being difficult about this (I have no idea how to tell it to detour), nor was I sure what the road network was like. But it all came out okay and we found the White Castle. A great one with old-style signage but modern-style Impossible Burgers. And a Freestyle Coke machine, although one that was out of Fanta Zero. It took a good long while to get our vegan burgers --- they always do; they're only started when someone orders --- but it took even longer for me to get my change. They had to send out for change and I regretted not just paying with my credit card, at least until they found for me an old-style, pre-redesign $10 bill. They asked if it was all right to give me this old bill and of course it was. When's the last time you even saw a pre-redesign $10? And this one had a printing date of like 1990. And was pristine, as though it hadn't even circulated. There's like a 40% chance it was counterfeited last week. How could I not take it?

Anyway, back to the con. By the time we had everything together again we were kind of late, out there past all the major programming events we'd be interested in. (Some were missing; besides everything we would do, there wasn't the Text Adventures panel this time around, for reasons we don't know.) Dealer's Den and Artist Alley were closed, too. We did look into the Video Gaming room, and the Board Gaming room. And looked at the setup for the escape room, which we never did sign up for.

In Hospitality we discovered ... well, the place was larger than what it'd been in past years, with long rows of tables that provided plenty of seating but not so much chance to wander around mingling. But the tables also were covered with white paper, with boxes of crayons all over. The invitation to draw on the tables was irresistible and few people resisted. Some people turned it into games, too; we'd see a good number of Hangman puzzles, and tic-tac-toes, and people leaving messages in ASCII, alongside all the pictures of people drawing themselves. (bunny_hugger evoked her Stephen T Colbert side, drawing herself declaring, ``I am the moral law! And so can you!'')

We braved the return to our hotel room and changed into kigurumis, she as Stitch and me as Angel. We made a great pair, according to about 400 people who stopped us. It's natural that people find bunny_hugger adorable. I think people are more impressed by the concept of me, a tall guy with a scruffy beard, in pink than they like how I actually look, although I would say I also look great as Stitch's girlfriend. Anyway this was how we closed out the night, prowling the con and then spending a good hour-plus at the pretty well-attended dance. We'd been to so many dances that were four people counting us, that to be at one which had several dozen people even at 2 am was a bit unsettling. Great to see, though. Yes, they closed with the traditional playing of Toto's Africa, and then something else when that wouldn't get folks like bunny_hugger out of there.

So it took a while to get there, but we had a good close to the convention day.

Trivia: Among the shops still in operation on London Bridge in 1755 was Coles Child, chiefly a toy shop but one which listed among is goods ``Fishing rods & Lines & all Sorts of Fishing Tackle''. Source: Old London Bridge: The Story of the Longest Inhabited Bridge in Europe, Patricia Pierce.

PS: Find The Factors hosts the 127th Playful Mathematics Education Blog Carnival, which is almost nothing but what the subject line tells you.

PPS: And here's some more of the Ruthven Museum Building and the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History.

And the stairwell, which includes those nice old-fashioned columns like we can't get in public architecture anymore.

And into the nature! Here's a petrified trunk of a callixylon, discovered at a shale quarry near Lexington, Indiana.

A model reconstruction of one of the scenes held in fossil form at the museum, of a large snake and a baby dinosaur just out of the egg.

Our Motor City Fur[ry] Convention story begins this year the day before. bunny_hugger's parents would take care of Sunshine. Ordinarily we'd bring her down before then, possibly me by myself the day before or the both of us together early the Friday morning of the con. But we already had an overburdened schedule, especially as bunny_hugger is teaching Monday-Wednesday-Friday this semester and that's just been eating all her time and energy. But also bunny_hugger's father wanted us to take stuff for the garage sale that he's a million times more enthusiastic about our holding than he is. So, her parents came over instead, the better to drop off a car's full of stuff. And to save us a good bit of driving time to bring our pet rabbit places that, really, she would rather not be bothered by going.

There were other motives too. bunny_hugger's father wanted us to watch a movie. This was one he had given me, for Christmas, on DVD and which he was quietly anxious we hadn't watched yet. He'd seen it --- twice, it turns out --- and wanted very much for us to like it too. So we sat down with a couple bowls of popcorn from Horrock's, the local farmer's market, and watched.

The movie was Gifted. It's a couple years old. It's built on the struggle for custody for a prodigious mathematics talent, between her grandmother and her uncle. The child was orphaned when her mathematics-genius mother killed herself. Her geniusnessocity is proven by her being able to calculate arithmetic really fast, which I'm all right with. It's hard to demonstrate mathematical ability in a way that people in the audience will understand; speed of calculation, though? That's something everyone can understand. It's fair enough to get the point across economically.

The inciting incident is her uncle finally enrolling her in public school. That the child --- and grandmother, and deceased mother --- were all mathematical geniuses is surely what made bunny_hugger's father figure I had to see this movie, and more, had to like it.

And in the main I did. It's a pleasant movie. There's solid acting in it. I think the strongest was a scene between the uncle and his estranged mother, where they talk about her new husband, who's had his midlife crisis at the advanced age of 70 and in a weird way, going off and buying a dude ranch; the mother points out, it'd be so much easier to explain if he just had an affair like normal people. It felt nice and lived-in, people who've had a long time arguing with each other talking over the stuff they can still shake their heads about.

The mathematics in it is legitimate enough, something bunny_hugger's father wanted explained a couple times. This included a scene where a university professor, examining the child, puts up a calculus problem with a deliberate error in it, to see if the kid catches it. There is a handy Macguffin involved --- the dead mother having had, she believed, a major result in the study of the Navier-Stokes equations. These are differential equations that describe viscous fluids, and belive me, we need all the major results we can get in them. bunny_hugger's father needed the reassurance several times over that yes, they were real things, although what they were, and what the breakthrough was, doesn't matter to the story. That there was this breakthrough accomplished made the mother's suicide more sensible to me, though. To know the moment that you've had your greatest accomplishment ever, and you have a half-century of life to remember that's in your past? I can understand not being able to face that.

So the movie is pleasant enough, but neither bunny_hugger nor I loved it. (Also, bunny_hugger was annoyed that the philosophy --- the uncle was a former Assistant Professor --- wasn't presented as well as the mathematics, so far as the mathematics was presented.) And I suspect her father was disappointed that we didn't love it.

Still, we got our rabbit taken care of for the convention weekend, and we had some pizza left over from dinner with them to give us an easy meal when the con was over, and we had easily minutes to spare to take care of things before, for her, class and, for me, getting my packing organized. And, along the way, her father saw the stray dog that's been prowling around the neighborhood and decided that he will adopt it, before I had even caught it.

Trivia: In 1959 more than 51 million passengers flew out of US airports. In the first two years of jet travel passenger figures nearly doubled. Source: Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World's Most Revolutionary Structure, Alastair Gordon.

Currently Reading: Day of Jubilee: The Great Age of Public Celebrations in New York, 1788 - 1909, Brooks McNamara.

PS: the University of Michigan was relocating its Museum of Natural History. It had been in this one building, the Ruthven Museums Building, forever. But in December 2017 it would close, and bunny_hugger wanted one last visit to this staple of school field trips and look with amazement at the old-fashioned dioramas with now-hilariously-out-of-date text. And, for me, a first visit. So here's that trip.

On the right, the Ruthven Museums Building, the lovely aged structure that's losing its Natural History Museum. All the U of M museums, at least the public faces, are being consolidated in, I think, that less-interesting building on the left. It should provide more space but I just bet they have stuff explained by computer screens instead.

Puma sculptures. The museum's been flanked by two of these stylish cats since 1940

Some of the lovely intricate web-of-live stylings of the frame around the front door. It's the kind of architectural feature we just don't get to enjoy anymore.