austin_dern

Happy anniversary, dear bunnyhugger.

Plopsaland De Panne opened originally something close to a century ago, as a park named Miel. Or it opened around 1951 with that name. Our best understanding based on looking at the signs is that it was a Knotts Berry Farm-like situation where they had a working farm, or bee gleanery anyway, that started putting in amusements until the amusements took over. And then in 2000 Plopsa took over. They're a media company, making a bunch of children's entertainment, so that the park became something like a Nickelodeon Studios park except we know even less about the intellectual property the rides deploy. Well, we know about Heidi, the basis for Heidi: The Ride, which had Nigloland not been closed was the roller coaster I hoped to be my 300th.

Anyway our Saturday opened, after filling up with a lot of continental breakfast, trying to figure out how to get the tram back to the park. We could certainly have walked to the park --- we'd done it yesterday --- but we figured it would be quicker and save energy to let the interurban do the hard work. The catch is there wasn't a ticket vending machine at the tram stop by the hotel, something that seemed to catch the desk clerk by surprise. He suggested an alternate stop that did have tickets, and that we'd been by the previous night looking for the Automat. We bought, I think it was, ten rides, figuring we'd use some that day and then some riding up and down the coast Sunday.

Then we waited for a tram that didn't come. It slowly dawned on us, after a tram going the other way crossed over the tracks and went past without stopping, that this station was out of service, something we could only have guessed if we thought about the implications of the track under construction just beside the station and why there were signs posted all over the next-train time monitors. Or if we had read those signs, which we finally did.

So! Back to the hotel and then a right angle to walk to the hotel's tram stop, meaning that overall we maybe didn't actually save time or energy over just walking to the park in the first place. Also maybe we should have walked along the tram line instead of going to the hotel and back as a way point but I haven't looked up what the track is like so who can say.

The park charmed us with the statues outside of various characters in I imagine character-appropriate poses, and the huge banner celebrating the 25th anniversary of the park's becoming Plopsaland, and we could see the tunnel on Heidi The Ride from out there. As we went to buy tickets from the automated booth a woman came up and, we believe, was offering to sell us spare tickets she had for €20. Which is a pretty good saving from the gate price of €50, if the tickets were legitimate, which we had no reason to think they were, so we feigned not knowing what she was talking about and she went on to someone else. It did remind us both, though, of the time we went to Chessington World of Adventure (London) and someone gave us a couple of tickets surplus from some newspaper promotion. But those were given to us free so there was no way we could have been cheated there; this, we just weren't sure about.

Between starting late and the trouble with the tram we were getting into the park about an hour after its opening, but we didn't think we would need to do an open-to-close day, most likely. And, all going well, you'll learn how that forecast came out over the coming days. (Just fine, pretty much.)

You know what I have to share with you now? If you said pictures of 2024's Calhoun County Fair you would be right, but also, this is the last day you would be right to say that! Unless for some reason I go back and re-share a bunch of pictures or maybe ones I omitted this time around, which I swear to you I did do. But the plan is this is the last batch of them, and they should share the surprise twist of how our night there ended.

Hope the riders have their seat belts on though this.

And here's the Ferris wheel at some speed.

See, we like this ride when it's doing warp five.

And then came rain! A sudden cloudburst came out and down very heavy.

It shut the fair down about a half-hour before it otherwise would have.

And it created ponds and rivers all over the park as we tried to find our way back to the car.

Trivia: Including the price of development, each of the approximately 56 miles driven by rovers on the lunar surface during Apollo 15, 16, and 17 cost something like US$680,000 (in early 70s money). Source: Across the Airless Wilds: The Lunar Rover and the Triumph of the Final Moon Landings, Earl Swift.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Sundays Supplement Volume 16: 1954, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have no explanation for this elephant.

The pink elephant, that I can explain.

Green I don't remember from Dumbo.

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

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

And one of the crows asking, basically, Mmmmmmmmyes?

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

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

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

Three weeks ago the 22nd season of the Lansing Pinball League had its eighth and final regular-season meeting. Yesterday being the second Tuesday in May it was time for finals. This season the top, A, division was shrunk from its ``half of all eligible members'' to ``eight people'' in the hope of having finals that could wrap up by the time the bar closed at 2 am. One consequence: while I finished in A again, I was one of the two weak links. Not much hope of advancement, unless I got lucky and some of the real power players had bad nights. But that does happen, so, while I was up against FAE in the right round of the double-elimination tournament, it wasn't absurd to think I could win.

In fact, the first game --- The Addams Family --- bode well for the night. FAE put up a major lead on the second ball, managing to get the high-scoring modes of Hit Cousin Itt and The Mamushka going simultaneously, as well as getting some nice extra five-million-point shots on the Swamp and Thing and such. But my second ball I managed to get a good rhythm going of shoot the ramp, start a mode, and even collected a big points payout in Fester's Tunnel Hunt, a mode I never do anything with. In the end I caught up to FAE, on the bonus of my last ball, and took a surprise-to-me win. Good start for the night.

As loser of the first match FAE got to pick the next game, and chose The Beatles, which you'd think would be a gift to me. It's one of my favorite games and I'm one of the few who regularly plays it. I can almost anytime put up two to three million points, often enough to win a head-to-head match. Except. The Beatles was also the side tournament game that I played before finals started, in a group with FAE, and they'd seen something horrible: I didn't have it today. Sometimes you just don't have the timing right on a game, and I did not have The Beatles right, at least not soon enough, and played a lousy game in the side tournament. I would do the same here, putting up a better game but still not breaking two million, not enough to win.

So my pick of third, tiebreaking game. I'd been thinking of Cactus Canyon, but chose instead Metallica, a game that usually treats me well. Based on FAE's first two balls, I made a good choice as they were not doing very well getting a game together. Unfortunately, neither was I; it took me to the third ball to get the Sparky Multiball going, and that's usually something I can get ball one. When I finished there was still a slender hope that FAE might have a poor ball, but they didn't, and they won and knocked me into the Loser Second Chance Bracket.

After a while I got my first opponent in the Second Chance Bracket: BMK, who by the way is one of the 700 highest-ranked players worldwide, these days. BMK chose The Simpsons Pinball Party, which left me feeling pretty good; this is another game that I often do well on. I'd need luck on my side, but not outrageous fortune. BMK broke six million points on the first ball, while I didn't get more than a half-million, but that's not an insurmountable difference. No; insurmountable is the 35 million points he put up on the second ball, and topped on ball three with another twenty million. It would require the best ball I had ever had, better even than the killer game I had on The Simpsons at Pinburgh in 2017, to catch up. But I put up that killer game on The Simpsons on a Pinburgh-grade tournament and Lansing Pinball League has much more forgiving tables. Well, I managed to beat the replay score, at least, but didn't come near BMK's finish.

So my pick, and I needed something I could win on. Or at least would have fun playing on. I picked James Bond, maybe the only modern Stern Pinball game that I can seriously compete with the likes of BMK on; somehow, I just know it. Except this time around I seemed unable to even make the skill shot, putting up ten million points in two balls while BMK got to around 350 million.

And with one ball to save myself from elimination, and the need to do four things --- start a Villain mode, start Jetpack Multiball, start Bird One Multiball, and then start the James Bond 007 mini-wizard mode --- what else was there to do but not lose the ball? (The mini-wizard mode also requires starting a Henchman mode, but I had managed that, and fortunately it doesn't require finishing the mode.) And the funny thing is, I managed it. Got a Villain going, brought Jetpack Multiball into that. Got a Q Mission going, which isn't necessary but can give you a bunch of points. Got the Bird One Multiball going. Along the way sometimes I got playfield multipliers going and turned the points I was earning into double or triple what it would have been. I had a lousy James Bond 007 mini-wizard mode but, you know? That didn't matter. I put up over a half-billion points that ball, and got a 200 million point lead on BMK that he'd have to make up on one ball. Not bad.

Well, dear reader, he did it. The clutch performance that got me a half-billion points was a good one, and let me salvage some pride out of my night's performance. But I was knocked out of the tournament, first one in A Division, and would finish in the bottom of the bracket. Some seasons are like that.

Here's a different season --- last summer --- and some more Kennywood pictures, from the old owners.

As a Saturday in late July it was busy at Kennywood and here's how busy: the carousel queue ran past a full ride cycle. Those grand carousels have enormous ride capacity --- a typical one can fit something like 496 people at once --- so when you have more people than can fit on at once you've got a lot of people in the park.

Tracking shot of the tiger in motion. Despite this being a very bright noontime picture there's some effective blur.

And here we are getting ready to ride the carousel or, as you see while on the ride, views of lots of rear ends.

Or you can get side-eyed by the horse looking back at you and totally not judging you.

Nice look back at one of the horses. Note the face in the breastplate there.

And a more usual side view of the animals.

Trivia: A letter from Pope Leo X to the English court, in 1514, appealing for astronomers or theologians to advise on calendare reform, included the lamentation that ``Jews and heretics'' were laughing at the flawed Christian calendar. No reply from the English monarchy is recorded, and Leo sent three more letters on the topic which are archived. 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: The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts, Silvia Ferrara.

Following the directions to get to the Left Center Right: Furry Sticker Swap Event brought us to a darkened room of people at tables and computers showing dice rolls which didn't seem right. It turns out I was misled by the name, thinking ``furry sticker swap event'' meant something about, like, bringing out stickers and swapping them with people. Apparently ``Left Center Right'' is a video game and this is trading stickers in the sense of paying jackpots to the winners. So, we could have slept in more or been two hours less stressed about the traffic getting to Motor City Furry Con.

But I was not wrong that there was a sticker trading event that Friday and it was even in that same room. It's just that this was at 4 pm, and at that we got to the event a few minutes late. bunnyhugger did some mingling around and I tried to look friendly and like I belonged, and she found a table with enough empty space on it to spread out her stickers. Some were from the past year's sticker swap. Many were Mrs Grossman's Sticker Club stickers. Also occupying a lot of the table were stickers someone or other had put out intending them to be free and then leaving, but as we were at the table we kept getting asked if we were the ones making trades there. It was all generally nice except that the one time I did try taking a sticker that I thought was in the common area of the table the person watching over it explained that I could take it, sure, if I really wanted, only in an even more complicated way than that. So I ended up taking it and feeling like the only thing more wrong than taking it would have been to set it back.

After this we had a couple hours until the next event, and we still hadn't checked into our hotel, in the second overflow hotel. So we went there, and got our room with the easy-to-remember number 321. bunnyhugger noted that I somehow manage to find every number easy to remember. All right, but when I was trying to log in to the hotel's Wi-Fi I messed up our room number several times and couldn't figure why it didn't accept us as staying in room 323.

We had a couple annoying discoveries along the way. One was that bunnyhugger had forgotten her spare camera battery and her battery charger, so whatever was on her one battery was it for the con. It claimed to be full charge, but after about three months batteries always claim to be on full charge when they're actually twelve pictures away from empty. Another is that we'd left behind the earplugs needed to be sure she could sleep or, more urgently, to safely attend the dances. Another is that we'd left behind part of her Velveteen fursuit, and she'd have to either not suit as the plush rabbit at all, or suit in the wrong outfit, or try and find a Meijer's and hope there was an okay enough dress that still wouldn't have the velcro straps to attach her tail.

Here I made a decision that bunnyhugger treated as a far bigger sacrifice than I thought it was. I volunteered to drive home and get the dress and the charger and also stop somewhere to get new earplugs. The case against this is that it's a couple hours driving instead of doing anything fun and it would keep me away from the con. The case for was that there wasn't any particular programming I wanted to be at for three hours, and bunnyhugger had schoolwork she needed to do at some point this weekend anyway, and this would open up stuff she could do, so why not?

Although it had been trafficky on the first way to Ypsilanti, driving back was nothing big. There was construction near where US 23 crossed I-96, a change I needed to make, and I thought a sign said the 23-North-to-96-West interchange that I needed was closed. Turns out I read it wrong; they just meant the exit-only lane for this was closed.

Still it took longer than I expected to get to Meijer's and buy earplugs, and get home and confirm that I had the right dress and the charger, and drive back to the hotel. A small part of this was that I stopped at White Castle in Ypsilanti, figuring this was late enough we needed to get dinner and that bunnyhugger would like some Impossible Sliders with fries. So she would, although by the time I got from the White Castle to our hotel they'd cooled an annoying amount. As it turned out this was our only chance to get to White Castle this weekend, though, I'd made the right call.

My driving, and bunnyhugger's work, took us longer than we expected. But we were able to get back to the convention hotel --- no trouble parking at this hour --- and get to both Hospitality and to the Friday Night Dance.

At Hospitality, by the way, we discovered something wonderful. But I'll share that ... tomorrow, if my post-writing goes well.

Pictures, now, with more of the Cass County Carousel:

The obverse of the one-free-ride token seen yesterday. Or maybe it's the reverse. Not sure which side would count as 'heads' here. Different years get different colors and I think different patterns, so there are locals who collect all the variations.

Arty shot of the carousel seen through the ring dispenser with a regular old steel ring in its talons. Would you feel up to reaching for that at speed?

Model carousel horses and even full carousels set up around the side of the building, along with footprints and handprints made as part of the fundraising for the facility.

Closer look at some of these model carousel. The Lego one I hadn't seen before. I think the Merry-Go-Round Museum has one like that.

bunnyhugger chatting with that ride attendant/docent and hearing interesting stuff about the giraffes and not accidentally stumbling back off teh carousel platform however much I was worried she might.

Readying for another ride! I forget why I'm two horses back instead of just behind the giraffe; maybe I stepped back for a better picture.

Trivia: The sandwich invented by the Earl of Sandwich (John Montagu) was a piece of salt beef between pieces of bread. (While the popular legend is that he ordered this for convenience while gaming, it is also reported that he used this as a way to eat while working long hours at Admiralty House.) Source: To Rule The Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World, Arthur Herman. Without digging into the probably unresolvable source accounts my guess would be he'd order it in both places because, c'mon, it's a really easy way to eat salt beef.

Currently Reading: One Heartbeat Away: Presidential Disability and Succession, Birch Bayh.

Our pet rabbit Athena has broken the blockade underneath the sofa. When last updated I'd put the top of our broken coffee table underneath the sofa, making about two-thirds of this space inaccessible, and used a string of empty cardboard boxes, backed up to the wall, to leave the rest blocked off. That's held firm, despite her chewing on the ends of boxes.

No, the gap was a little space between the table and the boxes, which I had filled with two of the legs of the former table. These are long but lightweight blocks of wood and I had supposed that Athena wouldn't be able to do much about them. At any one moment, no, she couldn't do much, but she could keep chewing down on it and tugging one, getting it an inch or two moved, and she could keep at this. Finally she made enough progress to pull one of the legs out of the way, and the other one slid out easily, and then she disappeared inside to attack cardboard from the other side.

We're fine with her chewing cardboard and I'm glad she found a more appealing target than the underside of the couch. But she was also vanished underneath and now somewhere that we couldn't just grab her or harass her with a broom until she left. And I had to go to bed, so bunnyhugger would be left waiting for her to come out of her own accord if we didn't act, and she might never do that.

I tried getting a treat and using the clicker to summon her. She would poke her head just enough out of the couch to see me and sniff at the treat, but she wasn't coming out to take it. I also tried pouring in pellets and getting fresh vegetables, which often summon her out from the couch, but she wasn't having it.

(This week she's been more prone to eating her pellets completely. Perhaps not coincidentally we've cut down how much she's getting. It's imaginable that she had been stuffed.)

So, nothing for it. I had to lift up the couch, to I'm sure bunnyhugger's shock that I can do it one-handed, and to a shocked Athena reached in, grabbed her, and tossed her in her pen. There bunnyhugger gave her the belated treats she'd earned by listening to the clicker.

So, I need something better as a barrier for this gap. A brick seems obvious, or maybe getting a four-by-four from the hardware store. Something too heavy for her to move of her own accord. I think we can make this work yet.

Now some more of the Cass County Carousel, in Logansport, Indiana, as we saw it on our anniversary.

Giraffes! And maybe more stunning, ones that look pretty good, compared to the inadequately referenced onces they had on display at the Merry-Go-Round Museum a couple years back.

bunnyhugger and I ready for a ride.

Here's the ring dispenser. It works about like you'd imagine, rings slid into the arm and the arm extended or pulled back depending whether there's still a brass ring to grab.

View that was probably over the back of my shoulder at the horses behind and the band organ.

Little secondary-figure cameo on the saddle, showing a wolf who looks sad.

Another secondary-figure cameo on the saddle, showing a dog who looks sad.

Trivia: The largest salar, or saltpan, in the world is the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia. Tourists can stay at a hotel made entirely of salt. Source: Napoleon's Buttons: 17 Molecules that Changed History, Penny Le Couteur and Jay Burreson.

Currently Reading: One Heartbeat Away: Presidential Disability and Succession, Birch Bayh.

Longtime readers know bunnyhugger and I went to Closing Day of Cedar Point's season. This was not a decision made without sacrifice. bunnyhugger had to skip a women's pinball tournament in Grand Rapids, one that --- if it were big enough --- might have affected her position in women's rankings for the year. I would give up ... well, getting to see the FlopHouse TV streaming show live as it aired. It turned out neither was a great sacrifice. The pinball tournament drew only five people; even if bunnyhugger had been there it couldn't have affected anything. And the streaming show we could watch anytime between now and the end of February, so, okay.

Prompting us was partly the thrill of going to Cedar Point in November. The park usually closes at Halloween, but would stay open if Halloween were any of the weekend operating days. This year, Halloween was a Thursday, which they've expanded Halloweekends to fill, but for some reason they were not open the day. They also skipped being open the Sunday after Halloween, which is why we had to decide how to spend our Saturday. So, we got out there for Saturday. This would be the first time since I got my current job that we went out for a day trip to Cedar Point that closed at midnight, leaving us driving home and flopping into bed wearily at something like 4 am.

Our goal for the day, and it was successful, was to ride the Kiddy Kingdom Carousel a lot. We hadn't found any confirmation --- or refutation --- of the sale rumor and so bunnyhugger wanted to be sure she rode all four rabbits. And indeed, as he was doing the safety check for our first or second ride the operator who'd given us the strange rumor the week before started a chat with us about how it was a great ride and his understanding was they had already sold it to the Ohio State Fairgrounds. We could not figure out whether he recognized us from the week before and was updating his rumor or if this was a rumor he was passing on to anyone who looked like carousel appreciators.

We would not just ride all four rabbits on the Kiddy Kingdom Carousel and photograph it, but we also took documentary-style photographs of the rest of Kiddy Kingdom. We've always wondered when the area --- which hasn't had any major changes in decades --- would be renovated and removing the carousel, if that is happening, would be a compelling time for it. So we've fortified our memories of things.

Despite being the last day of the season it was still a Saturday, and somehow a warm, beautifully clear one as well, so the park was busy. It's hard not to miss the days before 2015, when the old climate was still hanging on, and the first weekend in November would be cold and threatening snow and there'd be more park workers than attendees. (And yet the day before, with no less bad weather, our pinball friend JTK was at the park and it was so deserted that he got in all the riding he wanted and wouldn't bother coming to the park Saturday, a thing bunnyhugger took as if bragging.)

We would not get one of those fantastic-riding days where we get on all the (adult) roller coasters. But we got rides on all the carousels --- the Midway Carousel was still going backwards and I hope this marks a start for Cedar Flags being okay with rides going the ``wrong'' direction --- and towards the end of the night the crowds thinned out and we could get on coasters again. Including, happy to say Iron Dragon, which was operating again. When we had seen it the weekend before, and the chain for the lift hill was off the ride, we assumed it was closed for the season and no, they got it back for two last days of operation.

The Kiddy Kingdom Carousel closed for the night, along with the rest of the Kiddy Kingdom, at 10 pm, so by 9:30 we were heading back there and got on the last couple rides. Here a different operator was doing Kiddy Kingdom Carousel trivia, which bunnyhugger nailed every question for besides the hard-to-answer one about the ride's age. (It's around a century old, but nobody seems to have a definite word about exactly when it was made, and it's plausible that it was carved and sat around the warehouse a couple years before it was first installed; the mid-to-late 20s were when the carousel carvers had such a glut of product that the market would collapse, just in time for the Depression to close a lot of parks.) We did our best to make sure we rejoined the line just after the safety inspection started, so we would always be the first people to pick seats, and so would get two rides in a row on bunnyhugger's favorite rabbits. If it should be that the carousel is gone in Spring, she will at least be the last member of the general public to ride her favorite rabbit.

The operator also told us names for the various rabbits and a couple other animals that we're not sure we believe, but at least her given name for the lion matched what bunnyhugger remembered hearing from before.

There was some pretty good riding to be had those last couple hours, including enough time for me to divert to the Power Tower for a ride on the ascending side, shooting me up several hundred feet and lowering slowly. There was some kind of fuss getting people loaded on one of the drop towers, with several rounds of unlocking and re-checking the constraints. And on top of that, at some point someone jumped the fence and cut across the lawn to get on the ride. The operator repeatedly got on the speaker to warn that the lawn was a restricted area and get off of it, and if you got in line you would be asked to leave the line and re-enter by the queue, appropriately, instead. That she had to repeat this indicates that whoever it was either was paying no attention at all to the announcements (very likely) or figured the operator was bluffing (possible, but I wouldn't want to bet that way). Cutting across the lawn is weird behavior, all the more baffling because there was no line to speak of. Like, there were people waiting but it was for one or two ride cycles and yeah, the drop tower was taking a long time to get its cycle going but it's not like the rider was saving any time cutting across the lawn instead.

We went to the back of the park for the last rides of the night, conscious that we were going to have to walk to the front of the park once the last ride closed. We went to Mine Ride, getting on to find we had the train to ourselves (and the train ahead was empty), and decided we were going to stick to this the rest of the night. Which was only one or two more rides, but we were thrilled by the idea we might have the last Mine Ride of the season to ourselves. We did not: there was one last train, that they were letting everybody get on, after our final ride, the last of the season. But we had a couple trains all to ourselves, including that last one. And since we were on that train when midnight struck --- well, we were on a roller coaster on the 3rd of November, the latest in the year we've ever been on one and the closest we've ever been to bunnyhugger's birthday on a roller coaster.

This also meant we had been to Cedar Point this year both the earliest (Eclipse Day) and the latest days (November 2/3) it was open, a first for us. Felt pretty good, that. And as we were leaving the park for the day, the Midway Carousel's band organ played ``Mysterious Mose'', just as we'd hope to close out the season.

Also we once again got caught up to the present on the Greatest Generation podcast, although since we haven't gone anywhere together since then we're now like two episodes in the hole. We'll catch up.

Speaking of closing, is this the closing of Pinball At The Zoo? No, no it is not. But look on, dear reader, and enjoy, I hope:

And here is the tilt bob for Circus! If the pendulum rod touches the ring outside, it completes a circuit and registers the tilt, ending the game (I expect, given the era). The weight around the bob is just to control how fast the pendulum oscillates and how long it takes to settle down.

There was something wrong with --- I forget what, maybe the credits reel --- and so gradually more and more middle-aged white guys came to examine the mechanism and try and fix it.

You see where the problem is, there's not enough photos of cats in the machinery.

They spent a while trying to fix it by the light of people's phones. Not all of that time was spent in pointing at things.

Oh yeah, pinball tournaments. Here's the plaques and the prizes to be given the top four women finishers. bunnyhugger would not be among them.

Not sure if this is the last moment of play in Women's Finals, but it's got the energy of the last moment of play.

Trivia: 503 wealthy Parisians are recorded as being taxed in 1423. 43 of them are money changers. Of the twenty paying the highest sums of taxes, ten were money changers. Source: Gold and Spices: The Rise of Commerce in the Middle Ages, Jean Favier.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 47: Square Egg Island. Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle. Sims and Zaboly way overestimating how much this reader wants to see things come back to ``how can the college football team win every game this season again?''. There's also a really weird sequence of looking at pictures from their last several adventures, making me wonder what, did they need to vamp for two weeks before the next story came in? (Author Tom Sims wasn't replaced on the daily strips for three years after this story was published so it's not like he was filling out void space in a contract.)

Sunday we made our second amusement park trip of the Halloween season, and our first to Cedar Point. We hoped for our usual sort of six-hour Sunday trip --- bunnyhugger had Monday off for reasons of academic calendars but I did not (and won't have this coming Monday off either) --- but ended up at the park about a half-hour late. The construction zone that blocked off our access to US 127 South has grown a side blockage to keep us off the other path to 127. There was a literal stoppage on I-96 East. And turns out there's construction all along US 23 between I-96 and Ann Arbor. I assume someday there's going to be an end to this construction zone, but I know there won't be. There's similar problems with the other side of 127 that bunnyhugger needs to get to and from work.

It was a busy day at the park. Not so packed as Columbo's Day Weekend will be, but still, it was sunny, cloudless, and in the low 80s, a fine late-August/early-September day except for being in early October. Despite this there were weird lines for things. At one point Millennium Force's electronic queue estimated the wait time at 30 minutes, and from what I could see of the queue it probably wasn't even that. That's just freaky. GateKeeper, no less freakily, had a wait of 30 minutes or so according to its queue. When we first saw that wait, it was because the ride had been down for maintenance and most people were waiting it through. But later on, after the ride was going again, the line was still almost as long. Again, quite freaky.

But most freaky of all? And wonderful? And that would have got us going to the park even if we hadn't already planned to go? Remember how the carousel at Michigan's Adventure was dubbed the ``Scare-ousel'' and was running backward? They had the Midway Scare-ousel and it was running backwards. They warned people that it would do this at the start of the ride, I suppose heading off kids offended that the rules of the universe were betrayed by this. And they were still using the band organ --- already in need of tuning --- playing the Halloween/scary-songs soundtrack, plus the theme to Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?. Also from the tunes playing I learned bunnyhugger doesn't know the tune ``Mysterious Mose'' or at least doesn't remember it by name. I'd have tried to hum it for her but everything I try to hum comes out sounding like Morse code.

Sadly none of the other carousels were running backwards. I hope Cedar Point's gotten good response to this, though, and will break their rules and let other rides go backwards. We would return to the Midway Scareousel for our last ride of the night, and thought we might get two rides in a row, to catch the last ride of the night. But we and a couple people ahead of us in the queue were cut off, told that they were full up for the last ride. There were many seats left, including the chariots. We have no explanation for this and the ride operator offered none. My guess is that while the ride can get to, or close to, its usual speed in reverse it can't do that with a full load. Otherwise the operator just wanted to turn away the kids in front of us who were dressed in wolf costume. I don't see why he'd want to do that, though.

There's more to share. I'll get there.

Next on my photo roll ... pictures from walking around the neighborhood a little, for good reasons. I was going to say it was nothing special but you'll see the first picture is rather special after all.

And here's the special thing: the three-foot solid chocolate rabbit of Fabiano's chocolate. This year it sold for $750; I believe their past years' rabbits were more like $550.

The chocolate rabbit and other, much smaller chocolate things, to give you an idea what the place looks like. A couple weeks later all this would be sold or melted down. (Apart from the three-foot rabbit, given to charity.)

Street outside the chocolate shop. The trees haven't got to their blooming yet.

They were about to start a major project rebuilding the streets and sidewalks. Here's a sidewalk in so need of reconstruction that they've spray-painted warnings on its edges.

A bit of the neighborhood. In the background you can see the local Papa John's, which is unrelated to the evil company and did manage to shoo them out of town.

The streets around here could use reconstruction. But you can see peeking out underneath the old roads, like these brick- or cobblestone streets. There's a fair chance someone in there are trolley tracks.

Trivia: The novelist J B Priestley wrote of W C Fields, ``Nobody could suggest the malice of objects better than Fields. At his best moments, an ordinary room, empty of other human beings, could turn itself into a mined mountain pass.'' Source: The Encyclopedia of Vaudeville, Anthony Slide.

Currently Reading: The Emerald City of Oz, L Frank Baum. Marvel Comics adaptation by Eric Shanower, Skottie Young.

So I'm all caught up! Enjoy then a double dose of pictures. Also don't worry, because I'm going to have fresh stuff to report on starting tomorrow. Meanwhile, please enjoy some Crossroads Village photography.

Continuing the walk to the southeast end of the village. The nutcracker figure pointing is not just a fixture but also a way to guide cars on the path they're supposed to take, those nights that the village is open only for driving through.

Here's just a big old tangle of lights and fixtures.

The giant white-light ornament ball was back for 2023. Here's a picture of it lined up in the middle of one of the outline-light trees, because I thought that would look good.

Turns out that looks less good than this, lined up so it looks as if it were hanging from the end of a branch on an outline-light tree.

First view here of the antique rides section of the park. You can see the deer or reindeer lights on the right side there.

And here's their most noteworthy ride, the C W Parker Carousel. And for once I took the time to try and center the building and I think it shows!

Here's the carousel, dressed as normal for winter operations with the blankets that are a bit Christmas colored and also keep mud and snow off the horses.

The chariot, with its winged dragon intimidated by a snake, I always like. Here for once I take a picture showing the back and its hard-to-see image of the roiling sea.

Here's the ticket booth, and some of the Mickey Mouse baners that they have for decoration.

This red snowflake decoration is the most snow we saw in December.

Crossroads Village runs its carousel faster than anywhere else in Michigan, and as fast as anywhere in Michigan and Ohio, and you really feel it when you take a ride.

Tracking shot of the four-abreast kid-size horses with the chairs behind for the kids' parents to have a less exciting ride.

Trivia: In 1921 the Crosley Manufacturing Company received its radio license and as station 8XAA began transmitting on a four-tube, twenty-watt model. Powel Crosley Jr began programming, mostly by giving his name and telephone number over the air and inviting anyone receiving the signal to call in, and then playing a record, usually ``The Song of India'', by putting the phonograph horn next to the radio microphone. Source: Crosley: Two Brothers and a Business Empire That Transformed the Nation, Rusty McClure with David Stern and Michael A Banks. I don't know that it was this specific recording, but it's plausible that it was this song anyway.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine Volume 44: Truth Is Stranger, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

Our next noteworthy event was our anniversary, 12th of its kind. We had to decide what to do for it. I had a clever idea, which disappointed bunnyhugger.

It comes to carousels. In Cass County, Indiana --- not quite at Indiana Beach, but nearby from our perspective in mid-Michigan --- is an antique Dentzel carousel. A Gustav Dentzel carousel, not one of those William Dentzel carousels you've seen everywhere. Gustav was the patriarch; almost none of the carousels his business carved are still operating. And if that weren't impressive enough, the Cass County carousel still operates the brass ring game, where riders on the outer row can reach out and try to grab a ring good for one free ride. We've wanted to get there, and keep thinking of it when we think of going to Indiana Beach, but never think to check when they're open or where precisely they are.

So I checked. Could we get there on our anniversary? Incidentally for this I tried Apple Maps for like the first time since everyone was laughing at it and uh, yeah, it's not bad actually. Anyway in distance certainly; it's closer than Cedar Point and we day trip there all the time. Piggybacking that on a trip to Indiana Beach would be even better, as long as the ride was open. And here was the sticking point. Their web site gives hours, but web site hours rarely keep up with the truth. Their Facebook presence, though, that had a post specifically stating what their hours would be the 4th of July. It had a couple-weeks-old post about their hours for that weekend. From this I supposed that they were open weekends when they could and they were absolutely going to be open the 4th of July.

Thus the idea I pitched. For our anniversary, go to Michigan's Adventure --- but the real fun would be the 4th of July, going down to Indiana Beach and also, hey, the Cass County Carousel was open so we could go there.

I thought bunnyhugger might be disappointed not to go to Indiana Beach for our anniversary --- we'd done that twice before --- but hadn't imagined how much she would rather go down on our anniversary rather than the Thursday after. Even with the promise of the carousel. She stated her belief that the carousel was open most weekends on the web site hours and that the occasional Facebook posting was just reinforcement, not the exception. And she certainly found my Michigan's Adventure idea disappointing for reasons I could not imagine. Did not imagine, at least.

Well. If all we wanted to do was go to Indiana Beach, we'd want to get up around 9 am anyway and hit the road by 10, so, I could call first thing in the morning and ask if they were running the carousel. So that's what we planned. A few tired moments after 9 am on our anniversary we got the confirmation: the Cass County Carousel was running, and we would aim for that to start our anniversary.

Back to Halloween night, now. Let's see what bunnyhugger looks like in her new fursuit, at the hipster bar where we play pinball. Yes, more of that. She's that good-looking.

Velveteen does not approve of how quickly she got the bonus.

Only thing I'm sorry about with this picture is there's no telling where the ball is; a good action shot of that is fun.

And I like how here Velveteen and the playfield almost exist in a void. The side of the game is hidden in shadow, but also by the edge of a booth.

This set of costumers were a safe bet to win the costume contest.

Velveteen having a pretty good game on Monster Bash, considering that ever since it moved to this location it's been brutally hard.

The costume contest going on. Sorry the light is appalling but that's what it was.

Trivia: American athletes to the 1920 Antwerp Olympics rioted aboard the Princess Matoika, the rusted troop carrier bringing them to Belgium. Apparently the sea was rough, the food awful, and the 108 male athletes in below-decks cabins miserable. (Female athletes and a few officials had top-deck cabins.) Source: Encyclopedia of the Modern Olympic Movement, Editors John E Findling, Kimberly D Pelle.

Currently Reading: John Adams, David McCullough.

With today's pictures we wrap up that trip to Michigan's Adventure. You'll never guess what's coming up with tomorrow's photo dump!

More heaps of gourds adding color to a park that's already amazingly colorful.

Meanwhile in Camp Snoopy, Snoopy and the Beagle Scouts just found that waterfall everyone was talking about!

I believe these skeletons are using some stuff from the water park off-season like this.

bunnyhugger rides the carousel's white rabbit, as our carousel white rabbit at home isn't ridable, among other things from not being on a carousel.

bunnyhugger pats the rabbits' head and ear for good luck.

This is just a little quiet spot near the carousel that looked particularly nice.

Here's the entrance to Corkscrew just glowing in the afternoon light.

And the midway leading to Mad Mouse decided to throw in every possible color for this picture.

Here's what the Giant Wheel looks like set within trees turning color

And the Mad Mouse, in another brief interval of running.

Not sure I've ever seen the Giant Wheel looking this well-set.

Our day is done and it looks like the Mad Mouse coaster is emitting a giant raincloud. Well, that'll happen.

Trivia: Prison Side Track, in Jackson County, was a station on the Michigan Central Railroad built in 1878 for the convenience of those going to and coming from the State Prison, which was about a mile outside the city of Jackson. Source: Michigan Place Names: The History of the Founding and the Naming of More Than Five Thousand Past and Present Michigan Communities, Walter Romig, LHD.

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