austin_dern

bunny_hugger e-mailed me explosive news last week. Premier Parks, owners of the Six Flags chain, had put up a bid to buy Cedar Fair, owners of Cedar Point, Michigan's Adventure, Dorney Park, and other such parks. Terrifying news. Not that we like everything about Cedar Fair, but we like the way they run parks more than we like Six Flags's. Well, just look at how the carousels are maintained at, say, Great Adventure versus at Cedar Point. Decades ago Six Flags made a similar bid for Cedar Fair, and got shut down right away. This time? There wasn't such a fast no, and a meeting between Cedar Fair and some group of their own investors got postponed. Unsettling stuff.

Thing is, park operations preferences aside, there'd be good sense to it. If we take the axiom that a bigger company is better off, a Six Flags/Cedar Fair merger would make sense. The companies are in the same line of work, after all, and run parks that are of comparable size and complexity. And both operate mostly in areas that the other chain doesn't. The places where they have parks near one another are in the Philadelphia/New York City metro area, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. These are places that can support several regional parks.

The bubble burst a couple days later. Cedar Fair said Six Flags wasn't offering enough money, and that difference in corporation structures would mean Cedar Fair shareholders would get a lousy tax bill after the sale, and there wasn't any way they could envision Six Flags avoiding that. Which is fine, although bunny_hugger and I were hoping for a stronger statement to Six Flags, one including a phrase like ``... and the horse you rode in on''. Nobody thinks Six Flags could put up more money, though, not at this time.

(Still, if a merger is logical, it seems like Cedar Fair could go and buy Six Flags. It wouldn't be the weirdest turnaround play. Like I said, it's not as though a Cedar Flags chain would be obviously ridiculous.)

So we at least have that security in our beloved amusement parks. We need it, too. The past month has been bad for news of old places. Clementon Park, in South Jersey, abruptly closed in the middle of September, just before a Customer Appreciation Day (customers showed up to locked gates). They cancelled their Fall Festival. They haven't been selling season passes for next year. Their Facebook page was deleted and their Twitter gone private. There's rumors about the park being up for sale.

Clementon is owned by Premier Parks LLC, which annoyingly is not the Premier Parks that owns Six Flags. It's the one that owns New Elitch Gardens outside Denver, and that up until 2018 operated Darien Lake.

And that's not the only park that we've visited to be going away. Coney Island Cincinati is removing all of its amusement park rides, to focus on its water park side. This is not the first time it did this. After Taft Broadcasting used the name and rides of the original Coney Island to open Kings Island, what remained --- mostly the swimming pool --- stayed open while the company thought what to do with the land. But in time new rides came in, and the swimming pool regenerated an amusement park around it. The park, which can trace activity back to 1870, is staying open I suppose, and that's good, and obviously anything might happen in future.

Lakemont Park barely exists anymore but says they'll open Leap-the-Dips next year. Bowcraft is closed. FunTown Pier's owners might still be talking about rebuilding but I don't see how anyone can believe that.

But it's hard to avoid the feeling that the amusement park ecosystem we're used to is contracting. It's hard not to feel there's doom here.

Trivia: An order of two thousand IBM cards cost US$3.60 in the early 1920s. By the early 1930s they were $4.20. Source: Before The Computer: IBM, NCR, Burroughs, and Remington Rand and the Industry they Created, 1865 - 1956, James W Cortada.

Currently Reading: 100 Maps: The Science, Art, and Politics of Cartography Throughout History, Editor John O E Clark.

PS: Exploiting my A-To-Z Archives: Knot, which would really seem like something that doesn't need explaining, wouldn't it? Well, live and learn.

PPS: More hanging around the VFW.

bunny_hugger playing the Apollo-Soyuz-themed Williams game Space Mission. The pile of papers next to her are stuff she had to grade because there were not enough days in the weekend to both spend a day at the VFW and get classwork done separately. I can't tell you how afraid I was that she'd lose something, but, she did never did.

Spanish company Recel's 1975 game Check Mate, with a backglass that makes you wonder ... wait, why is the guy so miserable over a chess game? It is just a chess game, right?

Emergency repairs on one of the older games. The VFW as a private club presses like all its members into service for repair work on open house events like this.

We drove first to our hotel. We were staying again in the Holiday Inn Express that's across a dangerously busy street from the Motor City Furry Con hotel. It's enough cheaper that the hassle of driving back and forth across the road is worth it. But we were late enough in the day it made sense to check in and stow our things. The hotel was being renovated, with about half the rooms inaccessible, which is probably why the bookings seemed weird. We got a room that was a good bit bigger than we're used to, too, possibly a result of the hotel making do with fewer rooms. There were some hallways partitioned off with some generic but not precisely sensible motto about the renovations, and I don't remember what it was now. I'm sorry. It was one of those corporate things that teases you with the promise of content. They did have cookies to give away, though.

We were ready for a terrible wait for our badges at con pre-registration. We had to wait all of however long it took the person at the desk to look up. They had separated the giving of badges from the giving of the con booklet and souvenir mug and the T-shirt that sponsors collected, which probably moved things along well enough. We did get to the upstairs room for the mug and T-shirt just ahead of a mob of somewhere between six and 850,700 people came in, so, our timing was great.

In another sense our timing was terrible. We had both failed to submit any panel proposals to the programming committee. So there would be no Raccoons/Procyonids SIG, no Bunnies SIG --- for the first time in ages --- and nothing else that we might have done, like pinball or letterboxing or puppeteering. I felt like I'd failed to do my small part in improving the convention. We didn't make that mistake for AnthrOhio, at least.

But it did mean we could just go to the convention without responsibility. I didn't run the poll I would do about Raccoons (Trash Pandas: Yes or No, a question people want to spend a surprising amount of time parsing). But I did bring my guinea pig puppet. And bunny_hugger brought her newest puppet, a marionette she had got after Christmas. It's a fuzzy dragon. It's very simple, just one stick, and a head that she's learned how to make look at stuff on purpose. And how to make walk in a big, expressive, silly manner.

And this marionette was as big a hit as she had hoped. Everybody looked at it. Everybody wanted to stop and interact with it. Especially fursuiters. I would still attract a little attention for my guinea pig, since it's cute and the right size to fool people momentarily into thinking it's an actual animal. But this dragon was a star. The chicken purse of puppets, I would call it.

With our failure to submit SIGs the species-SIG track of the convention almsot completely collapsed. The only one that we could find was the Insects SIG, hosted by that ant fursuiter, Upstar. bunny_hugger's never had an insect character, and it's a bit awkward to mention the relationship between actual coatis and actual bugs in a situation like this, but we didn't want to miss the only species SIG of the panel. So that's one of the two programmed events that we attended on Friday, listening to people most of whom were not insects of any kind but listening to the people who were talk about what's so fun about the creatures. During the hourlong hangout an anteater, in suit, came in with a lunchbox full of candies with insects inside that this coati didn't join in on. Everybody made the expected jokes and hugged a good bit, as you might hope.

We poked into the video game room where they had some sweet-looking vintage consoles, including an Atari 7800 and some ancient games, going back to 2600 days. While talking with the people running the room bunny_hugger noticed a little plastic Easter egg. They assured her that it was hers to take: someone or other had been going around the con and hiding eggs around. Inside was a little pipe-cleaner-type creature, with a slip of paper describing what sort of critter it was. This added a nice bit of fun to the weekend: we'd spend some of the time looking for eggs. There must have been regular resupplies of eggs. Some of the ones we'd found were too obviously placed to have gone unnoticed long. Some, apparently, contained stuff tied to the convention's theme --- the Quest for the Holy Growler, and a reason for even more Monty Python jokes than normal for a gathering of furries --- although we'd never find one. We did spot an Easter egg on one of the game tables, in front of some people playing a Saturn(?) game. We couldn't tell whether any of them had claimed it, or whether they had just failed to notice it among convention table debris. And they were playing something longer than we were interested in waiting to see if they'd abandon it, so we left the egg to them. Next day I saw the same(?) egg, or its replacement, there and grabbed it for bunny_hugger.

We ducked out to Taco Bell to get a quick dinner that ended up slower than that as there was a huge line at the drive-through and it turned out the dining room was closed already. But this let us change and get ready for the dance, which we spent less time at than we figured. We sort of floated into con suite and spent time talking there, partly with a series of friends we mostly see at Motor City Furry Con. So we got in late. And we'd have to leave early, as the fursuit parade was at 11 rather than noon and we'd need an extra hour of sleep. Given the shaky status of dances at our furry cons lately we were hesitant to give up on this one before it was done. But it was probably the wiser course. And in any case it was what we did.

Trivia: One of the first medals struck by British coinmaker Matthew Boulton was in 1789, commemorating the recovery of King George III from his yearlong bout of madness. Source: The Lunar Men: The Friends who Made the Future, Jenny Uglow.

Currently Reading: Exploring Mercury: The Iron Planet, Robert G Strom, Ann L Sprague. Not surprised there's a quick slagging on the Faster-Better-Cheaper era of NASA probes. You know, roughly one out of every three Faster-Better-Cheaper planetary probes failed, whereas previously planetary probes succeeded roughly two times out of three. (The book is from 2003, from before Messenger was launched and we got pictures of the missing 5/8ths of the surface and all that, but I figured this would still inform me of things I didn't already know about Mercury and Springer-Praxis books on space are nice easy comfort reads.)

PS: Last hours at Bowcraft.

Ride operator for Bowcraft Amusement Park's Crossbow climbing up the lift station rather than going the long way around to get to the stairs. He recognized our Cedar Point shirt and hoped to get to that park sometime; we talked a bit during quiet stretches and it's always fun to chat with a roller coaster enthusiast.

Looking down from the edge of the Crossbow launch station so you see how far up the guy climbed. The bar on the left is maybe six feet off the ground and he just climbed up to that to swing his way up to the station, something like twelve feet above ground level.

Crossbow train full of kids returning to the station. You can see the mixture of faces, some kids having just had the best moment of their summer and some just horrified that life has come to this.

Let me change things up today and give you some pictures, then link to my humor blog's postings. Keeps you awake better.

Uncle Sam's Pizza Palace, apparently the main food place at Bowcraft Amusement Park.

Panoramic view of Bowcraft, looking west, with the entrance of the park on the left and Crossbow roller coaster on the right.

Another panoramic view of Bowcraft, from the Party Castle on the left to the Pizza Palace on the right.

The menu at Uncle Sam's Pizza Palace at Bowcraft Amusement Park. I don't know how this otherwise basic menu just screams New York City Metro Area to me.

Slushies stand at Bowcraft. Also serving ice cream and other chilled stuff. ... An ice slushie from here lasted basically the whole drive to Keansburg Amusment Park later and felt really good that day. ... I don't know why that kid in the striped shirt looks so suspicious of me.

The menu at the slushie stand. I'd had the lemon-and-lime, I think. bunny_hugger had one that it turns out you'll see soon; who knew?

Right, then, so the humor blog's features the past week:

• What They Found Inside City Hall, last week's big piece, based on a building in need of a lot of repairs.
• My Excuse For Today given me by a spell-checker.
• Statistics Saturday: Components Of May as I keep trying to find a joke that isn't necessarily even there.
• What’s Going On In Mark Trail? Why Is He Making So Many Nerd Movie Jokes? February – May 2018 and I don't know but there's cacomistle content in the strip lately so there's that.
• More Trouble At City Hall and some jokes I didn't think of in time for the big piece last week.
• The 34th Talkartoon: Minnie the Moocher, you know, that one featuring Cab Calloway!
• My Excuse For Today, Which Involves Calzones, But Indirectly and also links to an endlessly curious web site.
• Everything Interesting There Is To Say About Dividing Numbers, this week's big piece.

Trivia: A British study in 1911 estimated that an attack on the Dardanelles would require the Royal Navy landing between 75,000 and 100,000 men to deal with shore defenses and to open the narrowest parts of the channel. Source: The First World War, Hew Strachan.

Currently Reading: Timekeepers, Simon Garfield.

The day after Easter bunny_hugger ran the March Hare Madness tournament. This is one of her quarterly pinball tournaments, and this is the one named for beloved lost rabbit Stephen, with the funds raised for it going to the rescue we got Stephen (and Penelope) from. The couple days before saw, as traditional, bunny_hugger feeling the stress that she didn't have time to make trophies as good as she wanted. Particularly a lovely hare statue she wanted to use for one of the trophies broke, and she was cursing herself out for days that she had dropped it and that a replacement was nowhere to be found. It was part of Michaels's Easter tchotchkes and there wasn't another to be had within sixty miles of Lansing; we checked with the store. We had to go to alternate statues that didn't match her vision.

Also she worried about the conditions of the tournament. It was to be an Amazing Race format. In this, everyone in the group plays a game. The lowest score of the group is eliminated. Everyone else moves on to the next game. It can be a fun format. It rewards people who just never play lousy. It does mean the person who's put up a lousy game --- and we all do it --- has to sit there watching everyone else, hoping they do even worse. Not for the first time we've thought that the right mascot for this format is a vulture. Also, more of the pinball games at the Lansing venue have become a dollar a play. That's fine enough for regular play. But the Amazing Race format means you don't have to play once you've beaten the elimination-threshold score. And for the sake of saving time people don't. If someone's put up a rotten score, then you might pay a dollar to play part of one ball of a game and then drain; that's less fun. Fortunately most of the games on the upper level of The Avenue are 50 cents, half the pain. And there were enough games there that it would be a tolerable ``racecourse'' by itself.

Then the week before March Hare Madness --- which, again, was happening the 2nd of April, but consider that so was the NCAA Men's basketball final game --- The Avenue blew up every plan we had. They were going to have a show Monday night. They never have a show Monday night; that's always karaoke night, when someone drifts up to the microphone about 10 pm to stumble through ``We Didn't Start The Fire'' and ``Piano Man''. We could have a fair, not-distracting, tournament through that. But a music show? ... The tournament would get started way before show doors opened, so players shouldn't have to pay the cover charge. But the stage pretty much faces the balcony level, where all the 50-cent games were.

Oh also it was going to be a punk band playing. Apparently one of local renown, based on the publicity, and one that hadn't performed for years and that the local punk music scene found exciting. But, you know, just in case there was hope that the show wouldn't obliterate all the sounds of a pinball tournament from the pinball players, there we go. We thought hard about whether to warn people that there was the show scheduled. If it would drive away players to know a punk show would start sometime during the night, they just had to know. Worse than knowing this distraction was coming would be not knowing the distraction was coming. We'd have to risk the hit to the turnout.

Trivia: France's King Louis XVI was a skilled watchmaker. Source: The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey That Transformed the World, Ken Alder.

Currently Reading: Timekeepers, Simon Garfield.

PS: Someone Else's Homework: Was It Hard? An Umbrella Search, thoughts about how to solve a problem.

PPS: Some fresh Bowcraft pictures.

Operator's station for the Crossbow roller coaster at Bowcraft Amusement Park. N.J. Dept of Community Affairs tag number 6150.

Low-angle view of the Tilt-a-Whirl.

The bookbags and backpacks of the many, many kids who descended upon the park, all set at the tables off by the Party Castle. The normal-sized parking lot is in the back there.

So the answer to how last month treated my mathematics blog? Pretty good, I'd say. I'm forming plans for it for the coming month, though.

• Reading the Comics, April 25, 2018: Coronet Blue Edition
• How April 2018 Treated My Mathematics Blog
• Reading the Comics, April 28, 2018: Friday Is Pretty Late Edition
• Reading the Comics, May 5, 2018: Does Anyone Know Where The Infinite Hotel Comes From Edition

And on the other side of things: What's Going On In Mark Trail? Why Is He Making So Many Nerd Movie Jokes? I explore February to May 2018 in a strange lot of references to things. And now let's get back to an amusement park in Scotch Plains.

Plaque by the Bowcraft Amusement Park railroad station, declaring appreciation of Ted and Isabel Miller. Dated the 1st of July, 1955, and named for 35 years of their service.

Kid running up to the Dragon Coaster, Bowcraft's other and modest little ride.

Lift hill for the Dragon Coaster. You've seen this ride at many amusement parks, but here it is in this one. The building behind it is the arcade and what slight souvenir shop the park has.

Queue sign for Bowcraft Amusement Park's Dragon Coaster. Notice where the minimum height's been increased from 32 to 36 inches.

Close-up of Dragon Coaster ascending the lift hill. This is what happens when I'm feeling arty.

Dragon Coaster ride operator injecting air into the nozzle of the dragon's shoulder. The air jet is used to unlock the seat belts of the train.

Route 22 Bump-A-Rama: the sign for Bowcraft Amusement Parks' bumper cars ride. I realized I ought to take pictures of the ride signs. It's worth giving attention to parks that do their own work like this.

Queue sign for the Drop Zone ride. The ride was temporarily closed the whole day we were there and something about the sign suggested that it had been temporarily closed for a good long while.

Musik Express and the Crossbow roller coaster just past the top of the lift hill.

Trivia: The circular-blade saw was invented in the 1770s (although there are those who claim Dutch carpenters did this a century earlier). Source: A Splintered History of Wood: Belt-Sander Races, Blind Woodworkers, and Baseball Bats, Spike Carlsen.

Currently Reading: The Nemesis Affair: A Story of the Death of Dinosaurs and the Ways of Science, David M Raup.

Oh, now, let's see what's next. Oh, the Chinese New Year festival at the mall, so you know how far behind I'm running now. I'm going to catch up; we had a lot of boring times in February and March that I can skip. This always opens with a parade, with lion and dragon dancers, through the mall and we always open this by getting there too late. At least we feared we were too late, and actually made it with something like five minutes to spare. Not enough, but still, something. They only had one lion this year, but they had a new, I think, dragon, one much longer and held up by more than a dozen kids.

As in past years they had a talent show that included some things that had definite Chinese cultural content, like a fashion show or excerpts from Chinese operas. There seemed to be fewer things that merely showcased someone who happened to be in the Chinese community, like the guy who sang Eidelweiss. Wasn't there this year, although the zumba dancers were. The show always runs longer than the schedule projects, and as it happened it ran long enough that bunny_hugger had to go off and miss the final bits of it. She had a haircutting appointment set for, we had believed, tolerably after the end of the scheduled events and it just wasn't.

Every few performances they called out some raffle numbers to give away prizes. We never figured out where they were selling raffle tickets, though. We did eventually figure out where the tables for the crafts projects --- origami, coloring pages, small crafts with that black wax you carve off of rainbow paper --- that were conspicuously absent from the back of the mall corridor where they normally were. Those had been put inside the area of a closed store next to the performance stage. (This makes me suspect the raffle tickets were sold somewhere in the store, although not by the time we found them.) As a use-of-space thing this was great; there was plenty of room for people without blocking the flow of traffic around that wing of the mall. Also there was enough room that some bored kids got on the wheeled carts for moving pallets around and went sledding where adults wouldn't bother them.

So while we felt slightly disorganized through it, and bunny_hugger missed the finale of the thing, we had a pretty good afternoon of it. And got to add to our collection of things to decorate the house in February. Plus bunny_hugger could show that she did, after a bit of thinking, remember how to fold an origami swan.

Trivia: In a 1793 address to the Bengal Asiatic Society, Sir William Jones laid out the argument that Sandrokottos, named in Plutarch as an Indian army leader whom Alexander the Great met, was the Chandragupta who led a revolution that took the Magadhan throne, the first figure well-known from both Greco-Roman histories and Indian resources. Source: India: A History, John Keay.

Currently Reading: The Nemesis Affair: A Story of the Death of Dinosaurs and the Ways of Science, David M Raup.

PS: Reading the Comics, April 28, 2018: Friday Is Pretty Late Edition but at least I wrapped up last week in time, right?

PPS: More photos of Bowcraft! I have something special slated for tomorrow, too.

The band organ for Bowcraft Amusement Park's carousel. It's plugged in but I don't remember if it was functioning. ... Must admit it doesn't look good; see how faded the eagle-on-shield logo at the bottom is.

Part of the main area of Bowcraft Amusement Park, showing off the carousel and some of the kiddie rides and, on the left, the scrambler. The roller coaster Crossbow is in the far left.

bunny_hugger so distracted by the interesting attractions she doesn't notice she's going to run into a pig.

The last Sunday in January we put into action our search for a new rabbit. bunny_hugger's father told us there was this large rabbit, listed as a Flemish Giant, at the Huron Valley Humane Society near Ann Arbor. They named her Judy Boggs, he insisted, a baffling name considering. The Judy part is easy enough but surely they named her Judy Hopps, we said? No, he was confident the rabbit was Judy Boggs.

Well, this would let us visit the Rabbit and Small Animal rescue, the small and overworked (and, really, probably winding down) shelter from which bunny_hugger and her starter husband had gotten Stephen a decade before. It's nearby. We were at the door of the Humane Society when the woman running Rabbit and Small Animals asked us to come to her place first, lest we inadvertently bring fleas or ticks or anything from the shelter to her poor bunnies. This seemed excessively fussy to us, but we would comply.

The woman remembered Stephen, of course, because he was just that sort of superstar. And remembered bunny_hugger, partly from the original news and partly because she had gotten back in touch to report Stephen's long healthy life, and the sad end of that life, and to turn over donations from pinball charities in Stephen's name. Also because she had a rabbit with, she suspected, the same affliction that struck down Columbo, and she wanted to see what we thought. Our thought: her sick rabbit moved exactly like Columbo did. We shared what we could tell about our experience caring for Columbo and what we wished we'd known.

And rabbits they had up for adoption. One, Penelope, was taken from her spot in the big exercise playpen --- an area outside their cage that each rabbit takes turns sharing --- and nestled a bit on the couch with bunny_hugger. Then bit her leg. ``You just bit yourself out of a permanent home, Penelope!'' said the rescue woman. Not by that, of course; we know rabbits will bite just to nudge someone out of the way, and it's not their fault humans don't have thick enough fur to take it. Despite Penelope's outgoing nature, and the general niceness of other rabbits, there just wasn't anyone we felt that connection to, and we made our apologies and promised to keep these rabbits in mind.

Back to the Humane Society. We got there with less than a half-hour to closing. And they wanted us to fill out a form, about our home accommodations and what our setup was like and how much we thought a pet would cost and such before they'd even let us see the animals. By the time we were done with that there was fifteen minutes left and they told someone ahead of us that there were no more animal visits on the day. We pleaded our case: we were here from Lansing, an hour away, couldn't we get any time? They allowed us a few minutes with the rabbits.

Judy Hopps was this cute, medium-to-large blue-grey rabbit. Seemed nice, but we barely had time to see her, or this other rabbit also freshly admitted. We were able to talk with a volunteer cleaning the room about them, and what they were like. But we just didn't have the feeling that we knew the rabbits well enough to want to commit to them. We drove home, feeling like it was a long way for not having accomplished anything.

Penelope, you know, we took in a couple weeks ago as foster. This would relieve pressure on the rescue, which has more elderly and sick rabbits than they can care for. And relieve pressure on our own bunny-lack.

This week, we told the Rabbit and Small Animal rescue that we want to adopt her.

It's a bit more complicated than we had planned on, as Penelope and the new adoptee don't get along. But, gosh, we can hardly give her back now.

Trivia: At the naval Battle of Ushant (1778), the British Royal Navy's code-signalling book had no code by which a captain would report a failure to see or understand an instruction, nor any way for an admiral to indicate a change or orders or that a new signal superseded the first. Source: The First Salute: A View of the American Revolution, Barbara W Tuchman.

Currently Reading: The Nemesis Affair: A Story of the Death of Dinosaurs and the Ways of Science, David M Raup.

PS: How April 2018 Treated My Mathematics Blog, the easiest writing I do every month on the mathematics blog!

PPS: Let's soak in some of that lovely Bowcraft Amusement Park, shall we?

Other figures along the path of the railroad at Bowcraft Amusement Park. I imagine they're vintage figures but couldn't guess when they were from; this is about as close as we could get to them.

The entry sign for the Speedway USA antique-cars ride, in good shape despite the ride not being in service when we visited in June 2017.

The entry queue and a gas pump for the Speedway USA antique-cars ride. The elephant and the cranes from earlier are off in the distance.

First thing we could do back home again was, well, sleep. And recuperate. bunny_hugger had classes to pick up again. But come Friday there was an outgoing social activity we could actually get to and do. This would be the Guardians of the Galaxy launch party. That's for the Stern pinball machine, and based on the movie. Possibly also the sequel. I'm not sure. Haven't seen the second movie yet. This was something like six weeks after the pinball venues had gotten their machines in, but I so don't understand the logic of release parties.

This one was at Marvin's Marvellous Mechanical Museum, which is always great to visit. The routine of a launch party is pretty simple: everyone gets a certain time or number of chances to put up a score on the launched machine. The people producing the top four scores go to a playoff on the table to win whatever the prize is; I think it was a trophy provided by Stern. Maybe also a translite, the art that goes on the backing of the machine. The vagueness with which I describe this should tell you whether I won or not.

Mind, I had fun. I like the theme of the table. And I joke about giving the table the Secret Raccoon Handshake and all. But I've had pretty good games on it surprisingly often for how few chances I've had to play. MWS was disappointed by the game early on, pointing out how similar the playfield is to Metallica, which isn't by itself a problem except that MWS burned out on Metallica after it had been his favorite game. Well, I finished in 6th place, out of 20 players, which isn't bad considering the field and that, I think, I only took one entry rather than the two theoretically open to me.

The rest of the time I did other stuff. Going around the attractions at Marvin's, particularly, and trying out coin-op amusements. Many were working. Many I took movies of so that, if the worst happens, I'll have recorded images of not quite what I really wanted to see.

Also I got to playing Aerosmith. The game's the first of Stern's that uses a proper flat-screen TV instead of a dot-matrix display for the scoreboard. It's a hard table. It's fun, if the balls don't drain right away, but it's so hard to keep them from draining right away. I kept thinking if I went back to fundamentals, just practicing trapping the ball and aiming at a couple targets, I might get to avoiding disastrously bad games. I didn't manage it, though. And it would be moot: when we came back next week the table was gone, replaced with the new Houdini pinball. Marvin's was the last place I knew of that had one in. Aerosmith had been released in March of 2017; we first played it when we went to Dallas so bunny_hugger could compete in the Women's World Championship. And now it's not anywhere I know of. I suppose the table's just a little too hard, at least for public venues.

Trivia: The Imperial Chinese civil service had among its responsibilities the suppressing of counterfeit almanacs. Counterfeits might have counterproductive rituals listed. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.

Currently Reading: The Best of Simon and Kirby, Joe Simon, Jack Kirby. Book Editor Steve Saffel.

PS: So my photo roll has got up to our anniversary trip to New Jersey last year. First up, Bowcraft! This is going to have a lot of pictures since it was (probably) the last year for the amusement park and so I have a lot of proving-the-thing-existed photographs to share for future amusement park archaeologists.

The very skinny front parking lot to Bowcraft Amusement Park, in Scotch Plains, New Jersey. If it looks like it's in a strip mall that's because it kind of is; it sits off the edge of Route 22, a typically busy North Jersey divided highway and there's strip malls on either side of the place. There's a larger, normal, parking lot around back.

Peeking in from the strip-mall-grade parking lot into Bowcraft; the building with the clock is the station for the train ride. Bowcraft, in Scotch Plains, is near but not actually in the New Jersey highlands. In the background, a high land. Not pictured: plains.

And the somewhat faded front sign for Bowcraft. Roller Coaster Database says the place has been named ``Bowcraft Playland'' since 2007, but this is what the highway sign was saying in June 2017.

We had, by any standard, the park to ourselves. There was a slight crowd, and the whole day ahead of us. We ate, first. We'd headed out with only a quick snack from Wawa and that was already two years in the past. We got pizza (``Uncle Sam's Pizza'') and that brought to mind how the Brooklyn-influenced pizza of New Jersey is just different from mid-Michigan's, even if it isn't explicitly a different style. Also I soaked my slice in pepper for the first time in forever.

We went to the roller coaster for our first ride. It was the highest-priority thing, of course; if it went down later we'd not forgive ourselves for missing it. In 2006 the park installed Crossbow, a compact but perfectly respectable roller coaster. It's on a hill, looking down on the park and dominating its view, remarkable, considering there's even greater hills beyond it. This just makes it look larger, somehow. The ride's only 55 feet tall, but it's a good-looking ride and evokes Kennywood's Sky Rocket, possibly because of its colors and prominence. We walked on, naturally. The ride operator noticed my Cedar Point shirt --- I think I was wearing the Corkscrew ride shirt --- and he was interested to hear word of this distant park. I forget if he said he had been there, or whether he just hoped to get there. It struck me also that ride operators interested in other amusement parks is one of those signifiers of a good park. One with people who want to do good amusement park work.

And then we went to the carousel. It's not a golden-age-of-carousels antique, but it is an old Chance Carousel. Old enough that its maker's plate has been rusted and painted over and there's no making out its serial number any longer. It's worth some attention.

And we took in the setting, the atmosphere. Even though the park was not closed it had some things no longer there, such as the Speedway. This is the antique-cars ride, the one where a car rattles around a track that goes past scenery. There was no sign that cars were ever there, apart from the gas pump, and the track that the course had followed, and the queue gates that open on to nothing anymore. And the statues: decorations meant to be driven past. Some of them were the heads of garbage bins, the ones that look like ducks or lions or whatnot, taken off and set on the ground where the car might see it. It gave us thoughts of Conneaut Lake Park-style amusement-park scrappiness, of making do with what they had.

The former antique-cars ride wouldn't be the only way to see those statues, though, or the other decorations and open space and that whole odd side of the park. There was also a miniature train ride. At least, there were miniature train tracks, and what turned out to be the station that we approached from the wrong side, stepping over the tracks where objectively speaking we had no place being. We waited a while, without seeing the train, and we never would; if it ran at all that day, we never saw it. Maybe it was the fault of our being there on a Tuesday, and that ride would go on the weekend or a July or August day instead.

We did take, for the heck of it, a ride on the Dragon kiddie coaster. One might ask why a couple of childless adults would ride a tiny ride the duplicate of zillions of others in kiddielands. And might accuse us of doing it to get the credit for riding as many roller coasters as possible. But what was on our minds was, you know, why not? When are we going to be back? What are we saving by not riding? Plus, of course, we like dragons. The ride operator for this was less interested in tales of exotic amusement parks than the one at Crossbow was. So?

We kept circling around the Musik Express, finding it closed each time we approached, although it showed signs of maybe getting staff and going through test runs? We had hours left before we planned to leave, and had got to the most important things at the park anyway. So we went back to Crossbow for another ride on the roller coaster. And there, on the lift hill, looking down onto the parking lot that's off the main road --- behind the strip-mall portion where we had left our car --- I saw the enormity approaching.

Trivia: Egypt's King Ptolemy VIII was known as Physcon, or ``potbelly'', for his girth. Source: An Edible History of Humanity, Tom Standage.

Currently Reading: Time Travel: A History, James Gleick.

PS: And the last of my good pictures from the ballpark minigolf from when they replaced the outfield grass last year. I've got way more, which is why I can't fit all my pictures on my laptop anymore.

Another panoramic view, this one from home plate, showing what a wonder a panoramic view can do to angles because look at that baseball diamond, huh?

Spoiling the magic: the bulletin boards inside the Lugnuts dugout. Yeah, they're illegible. On the left side is the roster and current statistics and stuff. On the right is a printout of an e-mail with rules for the home run derby against Michigan State and the schedule for when the home run derby's to be and when the ceremonial first pitches are out and all that. (``For post-game, we are planning on a dinner for both teams in the Chevrolet Terance (right field concourse). Will be nice to have both teams mingle together and enjoy a meal.'')

PPS: The Summer 2017 Mathematics A To Z: N-Sphere/N-Ball, one of those simple things that turns into my longest of these essays yet.