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austin_dern

July 2025

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We had to get up early the day after Christmas because that's when [profile] bunny_hugger's brother was going home. Not that we were driving him to the airport. Her parents are for some reason comfortable dropping off people at Detroit's airport, but not picking them up. But they needed the computer room to put the dogs into kennels --- they can't be trusted unattended for the potentially three or more hours they'd be unsupervised --- and so Sunshine needed to be out of that room, and so this implied our going home. So we did that. Weirdly, I was the first person up, so tried to find whether I could safely shower without preempting her brother's need for the shower. Well, I got away with that safe and sound. And we got back home pretty near lunchtime.

One of our other annual traditions is visiting the Crossroads Village, near Flint, one of those ``historical'' towns made by moving historic but uneconomical buildings somewhere they can huddle together. They always decorate for Christmas and the day after would be our best chance to visit. It was the warmest day we've ever visited there, which makes a nice contrast from days when it was, like, ten degrees Fahrenheit and snowing. Still, would like to go back to when 60-degree days in December happened, like, every eight years.

We got there earlier than usual, though not quite at opening. The parking lot was already full and we were guided onto the grass where we didn't even know there was space. We never feel like we have enough time and here ... well, again, we might have used an extra half-hour. But we did get to spend time lingering on a few things we've missed in the past, such as seeing the print shop actually working. They have a couple manually-operated presses and the woman there showed off printing (salable souvenir) sheets, these of to-do lists. They also had the forme for their Crossroads Chronicle newspaper. The front page this month was Who Cracked The Liberty Bell, with a second piece offering the recipe for Mrs Eldrige's Famous Sugar Cookies, so it's been a comfortably quiet season for the park.

What more than anything else draws us to Crossroads Village is that they have amusement rides. A C W Parker carousel, over a century old now, that runs at the design speed of six rpm. They advertise it as the fastest carousel in Michigan, which is true, although it's less impressive when you know the carousel population of Michigan. They also have a Parker Superior Wheel, a small Ferris wheel also run at high speed. As often happens [profile] bunny_hugger got into a talk with one of the women running the perpetual rummage sale that supports the rides. This conversation revealed to us that there's a third Parker Superior Wheel in existence, although it's held in a private collection. (Also that the one in Tuscorah Park, in New Philadelphia, Ohio, has a modernized control system.)

Next was to get back to the front of the park, for the Christmas Train ride. This is the slow ride on their antique train though a series of light displays. It's always fun, especially as they keep adding new displays to make the ride even fuller. A couple years back they stopped doing the whole spiel in which every light show was given some story, maybe about the characters, maybe about how they got the lights, maybe both (they have one that's a juggling dragon, we think named Clarence, that was delivered too late for Halloween one year and so became the Christmas Dragon). Now they introduce a couple pieces and mostly play Christmas carols. It's all right but feels like they're missing out on some chances to form lore.

The Opera House always has a show. For years it was a Christmas Melodrama. Last year they had a magician. This year they promised only that it was a show, no hint to what. It turned out to be a comic-musical revue, featuring Snowy the Polar Bear, Mrs Claus, Frosty the Snowman, and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Between doing the songs you'd imagine from those last two cast members there was a running thread about Snowy wanting to be Santa this year, and Mrs Claus insisting that his job --- in the postal department --- was essential to the ``snow business'', a pun they used an estimated 3,532 times during the twenty-minute show. It was fun and pretty lively, with a surprisingly on-model Frosty the Snowman, and a Rudolph with a tail that looked like it was made by someone dying a Sonic-comic-book-universe fox costume darker brown and running with it. (Also in the very last number Frosty's nose didn't light up.) It was a fun piece, although there wasn't even a single line customized to the Crossroads Village setting in it. I can't blame them for hiring a professionally-written show, but I like some of that homemade feeling and hope they'll get back to it.

This took us to 9:00, and the park's close for the night. Which is good as the cold had me pretty near wiped out. I had nodded off on the drive out, too, which is quite out-of-character for me. That's how you know I'm never faking it when I say I'm sick.

So we went back home, eating more of the kettle corn that's also a never-miss attraction at Crossroads Village in December, and settled in for the night.

Trivia: Super Mouse's name was changed to Mighty Mouse in cartoons released about six months before his outfit changed from blue-with-a-red-cape to yellow-with-a-red-cape. Source: Terry Toons: The Story of Paul Terry and his Classic Cartoon Factory, W Gerald Hamonic.

Currently Reading: The Definitive Prince Valiant Companion, Compiled by Brian M Kane.


PS: And now we emerge from Casa Bonita back into the less-unreal world.

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The fountain and the front of Casa Bonita; also, from this, I learn that I had adjusted my camera's clock to Mountain Time, so that's good.


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Fountain-side sculpture outside Casa Bonita. I'd had the impression it was a goose or other waterfowl although I don't know how I could justify that impression.


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[profile] bunny_hugger enjoying a moment near the spray of the Casa Bonita fountain.


Happy New Year, dear [profile] bunny_hugger. I'm so glad we're seeing it in with each other.


After we got dressed as well as possible for me, we had a couple free hours until dinner. This was our chance for another round of Betrayal at the House on the Hill. This time around the Haunt turned out to be new to us, even though it was one from the pre-expansion set, which [profile] bunny_hugger and I have played a fair bit with MWS. In this particular Haunt we had a Secret Traitor, one whose identity --- and goals --- were unknown to the party at large. Only the existence of one is known. [profile] bunny_hugger and her brother pretty instantly came to the conclusion that I was the Traitor. This although I was doing exactly the things needed to defeat the Traitor and in the fastest possible manner. This, of course, is because I wasn't the Traitor; [profile] bunny_hugger's brother was. [profile] bunny_hugger I suppose concluded that since I was so obviously not acting like the Traitor I had to be the Traitor. I don't know whether to find this flattering or insulting.

In the time between that and dinner I went upstairs to call my parents. They were visiting my brother and his family in Maryland, so I was able to say hi to a large section of my extended family all at once. This included a blitz of my father talking about his sisters, with whom he's reconciled after decades apart. And then he went and gave me a shiver by saying how he figures to go to his college reunion this coming year, but that'll be the last time. He will be over eighty by the next time a reunion year comes but, boy, that stinks to observe, doesn't it? Anyway, everybody's well right now, including my aunt that we had feared was going to die this autumn.

Dinner was again made by [profile] bunny_hugger's brother, with the support of his mother. This was a baked macaroni and cheese, made with some gouda and ... another cheese ... that we had gotten at Horrock's a few days earlier. Also gotten by me at Horrock's a few days earlier (we think): a mild cold, just enough to leave me achy and leaning towards cranky, although that wouldn't get genuinely bad before night. The cheese was the better deal, and it went into the sort of dinner that makes you realize how really deeply enjoyable baked macaroni and cheese is. We were eating leftovers of it through to Monday. This was made with the assistance of the wine I'd gotten for Thanksgiving and was unable to open; her brother bought a proper corkscrew, as we requested, forgetting that her parents have a proper corkscrew. It's [profile] bunny_hugger and I that don't. Or, didn't, now.

After dinner we suggested watching A Charlie Brown Christmas, to learn that they all had done that on Monday, without us. So we went instead to the Alastair Sim Scrooge/A Christmas Carol, which we watched without anybody raising their voices about getting the aspect ratio correct. And we renewed the annual tradition of [profile] bunny_hugger's father asking, during Patrick Macnee's introduction, of asking what part Patrick Macnee plays. (He's the Young Jacob Marley.) After the movie, [profile] bunny_hugger's father played a DVD featurette of Robin Gibb explaining the recording of his Christmas album. I'm not clear on why exactly. I think he wanted to share with his son, who's recorded and published three albums, what it looks like to produce an album. It's sweet even if I don't perfectly get what was going on.

We had ice cream (watching carefully that her father didn't sneak it into the microwave). And then it was late enough that [profile] bunny_hugger's father wanted to go to bed rather than play more board games. He gave permission for us to go ahead and play the next Mice and Mystics chapter without him. Mice and Mystics is a fun game and we are making progress only slowly through it. The game took only a quick 18 hours to set up, though, and we set out in the first room and ... got two of the four characters killed captured. I voted against restarting, because I usually like to see how the death-spiral plays out. In this case, fantastically: one more character was killed captured and then mine, the sole survivor ... went and killed captured all the minions left on the board, bringing our party back. And we made it through three more rooms, pretty good progress, before we did finally lose. We had almost no chance of making it to the end anyway, not after losing three characters in the first encounter. But this is a new and more complicated chapter. The rule book explains there's some trick mechanism you can use once to advance the plot, and recommends saving it until you really need it. You understand their giving advice. RPG players are notorious for using their special items the first moment it seems advantageous, and never keep the things around for the last possible moment. Anyway, we'll probably do better for having a little run-through like this.

Fun as that was, it was maybe a poor choice for game to play. It took forever to set up and to clean back up. Mysterium or Illuminati would have better fit the time we have available. This all took us to about, maybe even after midnight, and bed. We had to get up early for Boxing Day.

Trivia: The Gregorian calendar has reliably had the year start 1 January; the Julian calendar had multiple and varied year starts. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.

Currently Reading: The Definitive Prince Valiant Companion, Compiled by Brian M Kane.

PS: Reading the Comics, December 28, 2019: Running Out The 2010s Edition, pointing out a couple strips from you-know-what there.


PPS: And a little bit more of the end of Casa Bonita!

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This vending machine promises ``Fanky Malloon''. I infer that there is a story behind this but do not know what it signifies.


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And around these vending machines are these shelves of ... well, let's call them vintage posters and adverts and trinkets.


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And a last glimpse at the fake town layout within Casa Bonita. Heck of a place.

The advantage going to bed early Christmas Eve is being able to get up earlier Christmas Day. Not as early as [profile] bunny_hugger's parents warned we would. They had repeatedly told us how Pee-Wee makes such a loud, yapping racket in the morning that we wouldn't be able to sleep past her wake time of about 6:30. And, yes, true, she is a loud and yappy dog. But she gave a few excited barks in the morning, and some running around. But after about 812 door-slams as her parents took dogs in and out, all was quiet and we got a couple more hours' sleep.

[profile] bunny_hugger came downstairs in her Stitch kigurumi, and I came down to match as Angel. Her brother bowed out of Santa's Elf duties this year in passing out presents; I took the spot instead. It's been a while. I needed a little time to figure how to pace giving out presents so that multiple people weren't opening at once; [profile] bunny_hugger missed her mother opening some books from my bad scheduling. I was also trying to work out not giving people too long a time between presents, which was complicated by, well, not everybody got the same number of things. [profile] bunny_hugger's mother got a large number of gifts, many of them books, plus a couple jigsaw puzzles. Her father got only a couple, including one --- a flat-pack bookshelf --- he'd picked up when visiting us a couple days before. Her brother had a relatively few gifts, and was never quite clear about whether he was going to open the things going to his girlfriend back in New York City. And [profile] bunny_hugger had fewer gifts than average, something compensated for by the one big gift that her father particularly had been excited about the day before. He told me to give it to [profile] bunny_hugger first. But, when I realized what it had to be, I moved it to the end: everything else would be anticlimax. And, for my part, I received the usual sorts of mostly flat things. A lot of books, ranging from space-history or pop physics stuff through to Harvey Comics reprints. You know, the stuff that makes sense for me to read. Ah, but the big thing ... the climax ... and the last of the presents ...

The American Doll company has a girl, Julie, who's there for 1973. She has a hobby. She plays pinball. Her new table? The Flip Side. It is built in scale to the American Dolls, so it's maybe a foot back to front and about 18 inches tall. And ... it's a working pinball machine. It's a basic one: three pop bumpers, a little spinning paddle that adds chaos to things, two kickers, and a couple special standing targets and one scoop. But it works. And surprisingly well. The rule set is a little basic for its intended era, and it has an eight-segment LED score display instead of the scoring reels. But it's pretty good. This isn't just our being wowed by an outsider taking pinball seriously. Other people on pinball web forums got it ``for their children'' for the holidays and have found it rather fun to play too. And, it's pointed out, nobody can think of a real reason it couldn't be put into a legitimate pinball tournament. It lacks a tilt bob, so a tournament director would have to add some constraint to keep people from just picking up the game to prevent a ball drain. But there's regular ways to do that, too. [profile] bunny_hugger has declared she'll bring that to her tournament events to use as a tiebreaker game. I think everyone would love that.

There were smaller delights, too. [profile] bunny_hugger's brother's girlfriend had slipped a present into his luggage unsuspected; its wrapping, basic brown paper, she covered with a doodled emoji cartoon, and try telling me that's not wonderful. And [profile] bunny_hugger gave to me Timothy Young's children's book untitled, in which Carlos Coatimundi and Ignatz Capybara mostly complain about the story they're in not getting started. I had no idea the thing existed. The cast and the deeply self-referential nature of the book make it incredibly my kind of thing. I could probably get away with claiming it's a piece of Me Fanfic.

With presents exchanged and a lot of spinach-artichoke dip eaten and the rest of the potato chip dip from the previous day we all went and got dressed. This revealed I had done something bad enough it almost justified going back home for: I hadn't packed my shirts. A post-trip examination showed them next to the duffel bag I'd prepped, so I don't know whether the trouble is I failed to pack them ever, or they fell out when I picked up the unzippered bag, or I had taken them out for some reason and spaced on putting them back. What could I do? Not drive back home again. Fortunately I had t-shirts to use as undergarments that were just like ten percen less presentable than normal, for me, and between that and the disturbingly warm weather I could get away with that. Sloppy work on my part, though.

Trivia: In 1842 mathematics, philosophy, and astronomy Professor Ormsby MacKnight Mitchel of Cincinnati College began soliciting subscriptions from the public to support building an observatory. Going door-to-door he raised $9,437 for the telescope and about $6,500 for the building. Source: The Long Space Age: The Economic Origins of Space Exploration from Colonial America to the Cold War, Alexander MacDonald.

Currently Reading: The Definitive Prince Valiant Companion, Compiled by Brian M Kane.


PS: What's there to see at the end of Casa Bonita?

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One of the last attractions is this Treasure Room, set off to the side where kids can just discover it.


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And you're welcome to take something from the treasure chest! It's candies.


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There's a mass of coins embedded into the floor, though. It's hard not to reach down and try to pick some up.


It was another week of mostly comic strips on my mathematics blog. If you read it through your RSS reader you already saw these pieces, but if you didn't, consider these:

And it was an easy week for the story strips. What's Going On In The Phantom (Sundays)? What are Ambrose Bierce and Thomas Paine doing in The Phantom? October - December 2019 was easy to explore since it was just a dozen strips to read, and the last month has been setting up a new story instead of a story on its own.


Now let's appreciate how cool so much of Casa Bonita looks. Or at least how weird it gets.

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And the show! It was about a dinosaur (I think it was a dinosaur) worried that everyone forgot their birthday, but it's all right, because they went to Casa Bonita for it. The show surprised us with its brevity.


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The one thing that could possibly convince [profile] bunny_hugger's father that this Casa Bonita place is legit: they had a caricature artist there


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There's a tunnel behind the waterfall, and so here's a look out from its entrance onto the dining floors.


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Some booths hidden behind the waterfall, in case you want to have no chance of seeing the show. Well, maybe some divers jumping past the waterfall.


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The view of the waterfall from behind the cave walls.


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And another view from behind the waterfall. That's the bridge the gorilla had been on, in the center-left there; the sopaipillas stand is to the right of that too.


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A look from behind the cavern walls at that gazebo that was off to the right of the waterfall.


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Here, hidden behind the cave, are booths that don't have any chance of seeing the show. Or, here, a booth that isn't even a booth anymore.


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A last look up at the dining floor, here.


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And a last look down at the base of the waterfall and the diving area.


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The inclined walks that lead from the entrance and exit. The lowermost path leads to event rooms, in case you want to have a birthday party not interrupted by the high divers and gorillas and such?


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And on the way out? How about some coin-op rides? Notice that Basic Cable My Little Pony OG Lookalike that's behind the locomotive 'smokestack' there; nice, huh?


Trivia: On the 30th of December, 1914, 49,937 shares traded hands on the New York Stock Exchange. This was its lowest daily volume of the 20th century. Source: An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power, John Steele Gordon.

Currently Reading: The Definitive Prince Valiant Companion, Compiled by Brian M Kane.

As typical we had Christmas at [profile] bunny_hugger's parents. We got up in the morning and found the mail already delivered, settling the one thing we needed to wait for. (I'd gotten one present delivered late, although in time to wrap before this.) So after a light lunch we loaded up the car, put Sunshine into her carrier --- she thumped twice, so she's coming to be more at peace with these car rides --- and set Fezziwig up with a second water bottle so he couldn't possibly go thirsty while we were away for two days.

As we got off the Interstate for the last roads into her parents [profile] bunny_hugger remembered: we didn't have the board games with us. Her brother being home is a rare chance for us to play Betrayal at the House on the Hill. (Her parents are afraid of the game, although her mother is growing more curious about it.) Being with her parents is a chance to play Mice and Mystics. It'd be awful to miss the chance to play that. I volunteered: once we had everything offloaded, I'd go back home and get the games. Also, [profile] bunny_hugger had left behind Christmas cards so that was worth getting. I didn't take my jacket off, the better to keep anyone from talking me into ``it's not worth it just for the board games'', and took back off. I did stop for gas, and spent a bit more time than strictly necessary at home. I'd wanted to take care of something and also to give [profile] bunny_hugger chance to e-mail back whether anything else had been overlooked. Nothing had been, we thought, so I drove back to rejoin the holiday in progress.

(It turns out we'd forgotten a book [profile] bunny_hugger meant to give her mother. We'll make good on that New Year's Eve, though.)

I'd spent long enough driving out and back that it was getting to dinnertime. [profile] bunny_hugger's brother took charge of cooking, with her mother assisting, part of the project to have us feel really very full. He made vegetarian Salisbury steaks, reminding us all of how great it was to have Salisbury steaks back in the day. Even when they were the school lunch and not actually that good. [profile] bunny_hugger's father made a fire, using once again the propane torch. He said this was the first time he'd had a fire since getting Peewee, the hyperactive terrier-chihuahua mix(?) they adopted this year. This surprised me, but then apart from one week it's been a warm December. Also we asked him why the propane torch was still hissing; he asked about what hissing before acknowledging that yeah, it was leaking a bit. He turned it off, thankfully. This is too many unwanted toxic gasses in the area for me this year.

We played a round of Betrayal at the House on the Hill with [profile] bunny_hugger's brother. Their mother watched and kept seeming interested, but could not be coaxed into play. The game has you explore a house by drawing rooms from a random stack. This (mostly) ends when the Haunt begins, and we kept drawing cards and rolling dice that kept the Haunt from happening. The house ended up sprawling over most of the dining room table. Ah, but when the Haunt finally began? We had a nice simple game, [profile] bunny_hugger versus her brother and me. Our objective: get to the furnace room in the basement and --- oh. [profile] bunny_hugger's character killed my character in one turn. I'd lost a great deal of physical strength in a couple of bad rolls right before the Haunt began. And many of these Haunts are poorly balanced. So this was your classic Exploration phase lasting 26 hours of gameplay, leading up to the competitive aspect (the part which intimidates her parents) lasting half a turn.

It was barely to midnight, but we were all exhausted and nobody felt up to playing another round, or going to another game. Her brother went upstairs, possibly to do more wrapping of things, maybe just to sleep. I got my computer to read the comics and stuff. [profile] bunny_hugger tried to check in with her friends and drowsed on the couch before finally going to bed. It was an early Christmas Eve, but that's all right, as that foreshadows an early Christmas Day.

Trivia: The first, test, observations of the Mount Wilson observatory telescope were of Jupiter. The images were awful, a half-dozen overlapping images of the planet. Source: The Perfect Machine: Building the Palomar Telescope, Ronald Forence. (The Mount Wilson telescope was very vulnerable to changes in temperature, a sensitively not anticipated.)

Currently Reading: The Definitive Prince Valiant Companion, Compiled by Brian M Kane.


PS: Some more prowling around Casa Bonita.

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The promise of Black Bart's Loot, buried deep within the cave.


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I don't remember whether this is the exit to the treasure cave or whether this is just a staff area next to the puppet theater.


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People gathered around the puppet theater as a performance starts. Notice there's a face in the hill up there that I don't remember coming into play in the show.


I did nearly all my Christmas shopping at the bookstore this year. I did not use the charity-volunteers gift-wrappers' services, though, and for no really good reason. I guess I just wanted to add something else to my pre-Christmas rush. (Also there were a few gifts that could plausibly go to more than one person and I hadn't decided the exact arrangement.)

In late October [profile] bunny_hugger finished her Halloween jigsaw puzzle early, and feeling it was too soon to do a Thanksgiving puzzle, got another one. It took more than the week or two she anticipated. It's a great scene of a witch brewing something. But it's a hard puzzle, with a lot of nearly-identical black pieces. It's been sitting on her puzzle board, moving from the dining room table to the coffee table and back as she puts a few pieces in, now and then.

So I to make space for wrapping things I took the puzzle board --- a giant wooden board her father made for her --- off the dining table and, for want of a large place unoccupied by decorations, set it on the living room floor. And left it on the floor when I was done, so [profile] bunny_hugger would have space for her own wrapping. She left it there and we were careful not to step on it.

When she opened the pen to the rabbit's area, to decorate some, our pet rabbit leapt out. [profile] bunny_hugger didn't worry as the rabbit likes to hide under the coffee table, now that there's tablecloths draping from it, or under the sofa. But Sunshine, attracted by the curiosity, went over to the puzzle board and the half-assembled jigsaw puzzle on it, and set a paw ... [profile] bunny_hugger yelled no and the rabbit flew off (I was in the kitchen and cannot judge what happened first) giving a good kick to the partial puzzle.

Jigsaw puzzles, it turns out, are surprisingly stable things. You can lift an assembled one like a blanket. The higher-quality puzzles, the more you can lift. This is not that high quality a puzzle. And only chunks of it were assembled. Some of the puzzle pieces flew loose. Some folded over, like a crepe. Some chunks flew off into little exiled islands of Halloween puzzle. [profile] bunny_hugger howled. Sunshine retreated to safety.

For a moment [profile] bunny_hugger was ready to break down a puzzle that has been frustratingly slow to assemble. She was miserable anyway. I couldn't think of anything to do but try to straighten it out, and to search the living room --- three separate times --- for any lost pieces. We didn't find anything on the last several searches so unless Sunshine ate the cardboard in record time for her then at least that's safe.

It ate time that really we didn't have. But it does seem like the puzzle's been restored to about what it had been. But, boy, this puzzle has been demanding a lot of [profile] bunny_hugger. With luck she'll finish it early in the new year and can move on to ... well, I nominate a Christas puzzle. It's not like she's got any great Groundhog Day jigsaw puzzles to work on.

Trivia: Estimates are that by the end of 1958 there were about 100,000 coal pits, worked by twenty million peasants, in China, as part of the Great Leap Forward attempt at developing the country's steel industry. Source: Coal: A Human History, Barbara Freese.

Currently Reading: The Definitive Prince Valiant Companion, Compiled by Brian M Kane. Uh ... huh. ``Diane, the one who can teach [ Arn and Paul ] most, has been excluded from their play because she is a girl, so [ Queen ] Aleta issues a royal proclamation decreeing Diane a boy for a year and a day''. Huh. (story #64, Back In The Misty Isles, pages 918 through 931, running 12 September through 12 December 1954.)


PS: Some more prowling around Casa Bonita.

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Pirate skeleton watching over a treasure chest, part of the explorable caves within Casa Bonita.


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Looking down from the top of the caves to the floor below. At the top of the picture is where the piñata had been.


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And from the very top of the caves here's the puppet stage.

And here's my humor blog, filled for the week with stuff to read. Or at least to look at. Here, try looking at this stuff:

And now let's look more at the spectacle that is Casa Bonita.

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The show gets under way! Comedy bit with the guy as the incompetent daring jungle explorer, the woman as the host who can not believe he's captured a gorilla, and a gorilla.


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Showing off how friendly and tame the gorilla is, right?


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And I think this is about where the gorilla figures he's had enough and goes about his business instead.


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The gorilla jumps up on a railing, to look like he's climbing a tree, and making me wonder how this can possibly be safe to perform.


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The gorilla goes strolling off into the audience.


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Walking across a little bridge from which you get a good view of the waterfall.


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The gorilla shows his opinion of the jungle explorer.


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Gorilla sneaks up on the hostess.


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I forget what the pretext was that had her out by the diving platform while the gorilla was poking around free, but you know where this is heading?


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Dramatically down! Into the water. High diving is part of the show; it's also a separate performance done on off-hours.


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Gorilla returns to the performance stage, triumphant.


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And we bring the show to an end, from lower down.


Trivia: Between 1820 and 1839 about two-thirds of a million immigrants entered in the United States. 501 thousand of them, about 75 percent of the total, arrived at the Port of New York. Source: Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, Edwin G Burrows, Mike Wallace.

Currently Reading: The Definitive Prince Valiant Companion, Compiled by Brian M Kane.

PS: Reading the Comics, December 21, 2019: My Favorite Kind Of Explanation Edition

Sunday we had the usual slightly mad dash of finishing decorating before [profile] bunny_hugger's parents and brother visited. This would be their chance to see our decorations and we still had to put up the lights around our interior doorframes. Somehow the lights that we had strung up around them last winter have gone missing. We have no explanation for this and just trust that now we've bought replacements the old ones will appear. Although we may have jinxed that by forming plans for what to do with the excess lights. Anyway we were still stringing the lights when our company knocked on the door.

We went for an early dinner to Dagwood's, the neighborhood kinda-dive bar that's holding out against the area's wishful gentrification. (The area isn't actually gentrifying, but developers think it should be, so they're doing stuff like putting in empty mixed-use apartment/commercial blocks and closing neighborhood stuff that does things.) Although they're possibly in danger too as they expanded over the summer in construction that [profile] bunny_hugger does not remember seeing. It seems to have been just adding in a proper kitchen. The menu was a fair size bigger, although still basically ``stuff you can fry'' like burgers and clam strips and fries and stuff. We had a good meal and very nearly all fit into the booth we'd sat in. We got a couple pitchers of beer and after the rest of us poured our glasses [profile] bunny_hugger's brother poured his, slopping suds over the side and onto the table. This let me observe that he's the one professional bartender at the table.

At home we spent a while listening twice to [profile] bunny_hugger's summertime purchase of the Ray Conniff Holiday Singers album, and watching the fire in the fireplace, and our rabbit Sunshine avoiding the fire in the fireplace. [profile] bunny_hugger's family stayed only for about four hours in total, to get back before their dogs would have too serious a need for them. But it was a nice time, and then we could settle down to something useful and pleasant and relaxing for the night.

Then we smelled gas.

Just a bit of natural gas, and it lasted for only a couple minutes, but still. So we called the gas company and they had someone out in about fifteen minutes. He poked around with a detector, through the living room and all around the basement, and told us: yeah, there's nothing here. Usually if there's a gas leak they detect it, but there's no natural gas and no carbon monoxide that he can find. He advanced the proposal that maybe it was a bit of sewer odor? He thought he smelled a bit when he first opened the door, not a thought [profile] bunny_hugger liked at all. And did say that sometimes weird odors get caught like that; he told of a day a couple weeks ago chasing the odor of a nearby trash dump around the houses it was settling on. For now, though, there's just ... nothing to do.

In the meanwhile we have everyone's favorite condition, a vague transient signal with potentially live-threatening consequences with a cause that can't be pinned down. And, at that, a problem which at worst impairs the cognitive abilities of the people who would have to manage it and live with the consequences. That's a great blend!

Trivia: Charles Keeler tried to promote the name ``Emotograph'' for what came to be known as the Keeler Polygraph. Leonarde Keeler preferred ``Respondograph''. Source: The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession, Ken Alder.

Currently Reading: The Definitive Prince Valiant Companion, Compiled by Brian M Kane.

PS: Just reminding you that you could watch Arthur Christmas since I haven't yet used up all my season's slots for reblogging old content, somehow.


PPS: Fun shows and architecture at Casa Bonita.

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Back to the stage area: here's a better view of the waterfall. To its left is a spot where two- and three-person comedy bits get done; to its right, not quite to the gazebo there, the spot divers jump from.


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And looking away from the stage: the lower level takes you to the exit and entrance; the upper level is where we had eaten.


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Rock walls set up near the performing area. Notice the South Park Bottomlessly Awful Person doll embedded in the decorations.


Merry Christmas, dear [profile] bunny_hugger, and thank you for the gift of this year with you.


Among the normal Christmas activities is [profile] bunny_hugger's brother flying in from Brooklyn. As often happens [profile] bunny_hugger and I volunteered to pick him up from the Detroit airport, and to bring him to their parents' house. We got off to a slower start than we wanted (among other things I had Christmas cards to send), but it worked out surprisingly well. We spent the last hour listening to one of my old-time radio podcasts, which had an Orson Welles-produced version of A Christmas Carol. [profile] bunny_hugger is happy anytime she can encounter a new adaptation of this story. She hasn't listened to much old-time radio, either; that's my thing. She enjoyed the experience, though, despite some critiques. Like, that they cut out Scrooge's reconciliation with his nephew, possibly because they used up that air time for stuff like the lighthouse scene. Also, as she protested, ``They had the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come speak!'' I answered, ``It's radio'', but she was correct that they could have described the Ghost's appearance. (Welles was doing double duty as Scrooge and the Narrator --- live, by the way --- and could have fit description in through either voice.)

Also we finished the show just as we pulled up to the arrivals curb, just as her brother was getting out with his bag. This is remarkable because [profile] bunny_hugger had been watching the Muppets Christmas Carol, several days ago, and finished it just about simultaneously to her finishing all the grading for this semester. And then had re-watched the Muppets Christmas Carol, finishing the downstairs decorating almost simultaneously to finishing the show. We do not know by what power A Christmas Carol synchronizes to finishing things this year, but we appreciate it.

Picking up her brother was effortless, and we got to their house without problem. This was her brother's first chance to meet the new dog, who was very excited by all these strange people hanging about now. The old dog was also quite mopey and distressed that all these strange people were hanging about. There was some relief: He went out to see a friend for dinner, while [profile] bunny_hugger and I remained with her parents and ate in.

We also made and decorated cookies. This had a fun surprise with an early present for me: a coati-shaped cookie cutter! I had no idea any such thing existed. [profile] bunny_hugger found it on Etsy, and you can see how this is a thing that wouldn't really wait. So we made a small tribe and did our best to color them something like appropriately through the icing and cake-decorating tips.

Despite this all being a pretty basic day --- we didn't even bring our board games, never mind play them --- it did fill up, partly with the fun of having to reset their Wi-Fi every hour. I'm writing this before we go over there for Christmas but I have to say, if that keeps up, it's going to be really majorly not the slightest bit fun. We would go home close to midnight, and try to get some things sorted out before collapsing into bed.

Trivia: About one million Nintendo Game Boys were sold in the United States at its release in 1989; this was estimated to be about half the demand of the product. Source: The Ultimate History of Video Games, Steven L Kent.

Currently Reading: The Definitive Prince Valiant Companion, Compiled by Brian M Kane.

PS: Reading the Comics, December 17, 2019: Mathematics In The Home Edition


PPS: Fun decorations and settings at Casa Bonita.

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Artificial cave with water trickling out it, past the pinata area. There's a ``cave'' section inside that you can explore.


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Bird figure perched high up in a spot that I would have sworn I was photographing in-focus. It's a dark spot and has lots of stuff at different distances, just enough to baffle any auto-focus known to humanity.


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Grown-ups looking overwhelmed by all the personified trees after the end of a little puppet show about going to Casa Bonita.

One of the things we always try to do is get to the Potter Park Zoo's Wonderland of Lights. Usually we get to this in the quiet, slightly down week after Christmas where it takes the edge off the big events being over. This year? We don't think we're going to have time. So we went on Friday evening, after our Biggby and Mackerel Sky visits. [profile] bunny_hugger set her camera battery, which had given up in the afternoon, on the charger and took a bath to rest up. We bundled up and set out, getting to the zoo about 5:30. The show starts at 5:00, but this is still doing wonderfully early for us since we have several years running gone to the show as though it ran until 9 pm. It does not, and has always closed at 8:00. This year, though, that wouldn't take us by surprise.

What did take us by surprise was at the gate the worker gave us a quick guide to what was where. And specifically she said ``the big guy'' was here (pointing to a small building). [profile] bunny_hugger and I tried to parse this before realizing, oh, it's Santa Claus. Coming after Christmas all those years made us forget that he might be around earlier in the season.

The other big surprise, besides that it wasn't so cold as past years when we came closer to New Year's, is that we had time. We were able to walk around the whole zoo, we believe, and see all the light shows they had set up. And besides that could stop into the several buildings --- two of them housing animals, including the lions and snow leopard; another one of them with Santa --- and warm back up. The building with the big cats still had the bench branded Theio's Restaurant, which has been gone --- actually demolished --- a long time now. They took out the ancient Macintosh CRT monitors which had hung above it, though. They still have animal-information signs credited to the Capitol Federal Savings Bank, which last used that name in 1996 and has been part of the Fifth Third empire for twenty years now.

The snow leopard gave [profile] bunny_hugger pause to think of the ancient snow leopard she had seen at the zoo many times over, and to wonder whatever happened to it. We learned in the visitor center: that snow leopard, which we remember them forcing to get up and walk around for its food so it would move at all, died just earlier this year. They do have a new one, though, that we saw in the big cat house.

Having gotten in at 5:30 we had the surprising and wonderful circumstance of having enough time. [profile] bunny_hugger was even able to get a glitter tattoo painted onto her hand, that lasted several days, one of holly berries and leaves. We still stuck around to the end of the night, walking far into the zoo until they turned the music off. We did get out before they started turning lights off. This was great, though, and we'll have to remember next year to get there like 5:30 instead.

Trivia: Following the March 1916 fire which destroyed the classroom building and shops of the Michigan Agricultural College's engineering division, some state legislators proposed moving the school's entire engineering department to the University of Michigan, or even annexing the whole college to the University. Source: R E Olds: Auto Industry Pioneer, George S May. (The proposal to move the engineering division had been in the air but this gave it new vitality.)

Currently Reading: Order, Order! The Rise and Fall of Political Drinking, Ben Wright.


PS: Fun side activities at Casa Bonita.

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Setting up a piñata outside the gift shop for the kids to play with.


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It's broken open!


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So, kids have a successful experience here. Good to see.

Back to another somnolent week on the mathematics blog. It's just been the comic strip watch. I'll have content again someday, I promise. In the meanwhile:

And in stuff that I had to make an effort to write? What's Going On In Mary Worth? Is Iris pregnant? Is Estelle daft? September - December 2019 plot recap.


Now back to Denver. And not another picture of Elitch Gardens! Instead here's ...

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The backyard of the AirBnB where we stayed --- they had a furnished basement --- had this lovely lighting decoration at night. We didn't make as much time for this as might have; in many ways, we should have stayed another day or two and had a little more time to experience ordinary places.


And that closes off one day. The next day in Denver we had two objectives. One was getting to Casa Bonita. This, as seen in an episode of South Park, is ... bizarre. It's the last outpost of a tiny chain of Mexican restaurants that pack in a lot of live shows and spectacles and games and everything. Imagine if someone thought to make Chuck E Cheese, except without any regard for what the overhead costs would be. It would be absurd not to stop in for lunch. The food was fine enough. It was overpriced as food, but after all, you're paying for ... spectacle. You'll see.

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Casa Bonita is, as depicted on South Park, in a strip mall. It's not nearly so bleak as in the cartoon, though. It's much more normal. Still, though: think how much it has to suck if you're a parent and you just want to take your kids to the dentist and not get sucked into this crazypants restaurant theme park.


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Our attempts to find seats in the restaurant. There's like fourteen different levels and so many corners and loops and little hidden areas and, as you can see down there, a piano and someone selling light sabers.


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Live shows, too! Here's a high diver jumping off the 'rocks' into the fountain under the waterfall.


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Also, here's the waterfall. In the middle of a family restaurant. You can see why this attracts preposterous legends. Notice on the right there's a little corner with a table hidden behind the waterfall.


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Looking down over one of an estimated 2,716 balconies at the piano and light saber sale stand again.


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I suppose that on the right is the main floor --- at least, it's roughly level with the performing stage beside the waterfall --- and two levels going up and down from it. There's also the stands where you're supposed to wait to be seated that, naturally, we got lost approaching and came up from the wrong direction.


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[profile] bunny_hugger raising the table's flag, used to indicate that we would like sopaipillas please.


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We were seated on a relatively empty level of the restaurant, possibly because the place was only crowded enough to need it, possibly because we were there without kids so could be put somewhere quiet. Anyway, there's two main levels here and partial elevated floors behind those windows and partial walls. This place must take like four hours to check that everybody's left for the night.


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Where the endless chain of sopaipillas comes from. Also notice the choice to style the place so the spot where they give servers food pickups looks like a free-standing food kiosk.


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Looking back from around the sopaipillas counter on the main eating floor, or at least part of the floor.


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People getting ready to watch the next show. And yeah, there's a moon there, that's nice to see.


Trivia: The Empire Pencil Company reported spending twenty-five years developing its Epcon process to make plastic pencils, introduced in the early 1970s. Source: The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance, Henry Petroski.

Currently Reading: Order, Order! The Rise and Fall of Political Drinking, Ben Wright.

A small casualty of our day at Elitch Gardens: [profile] bunny_hugger's sunglasses. They came from a dollar store and now we had to find a new dollar store to replace them. This took more maneuvering than we figured because I drove right past the strip mall with the Dollar Tree in it, and traffic was too heavy to just turn around in any sensible fashion. But she found a nice pair tolerably close to the ones she liked. I got a pair of sunglasses too, since it had been really quite right that week. My trouble with sunglasses is they come in models that make me look like a cop, or that make me look like a member of Devo. Of course I went for the Devo one. (I jest. I look closer to Thomas Dolby.)

After we made the drive a modest bit away from our AirBnB hosts, there to ... no, not Lakeside Park. Lakeside Park turns out to be in walking distance of the place we stayed. We went to Casa Bonita.

If that name sounds faintly familiar you likely remember it from this episode of South Park. In it, Cartman obsesses with going to this crazypants-sounding Mexican restaurant that has, like, a fake cliff with divers and comedy gorilla acts and a haunted house and little flags you raise to get sopapillas brought right to you and all that, and to get there he plots some plot and ends up with like two minutes to take in the whole thing before federal, state, county, city, and local police carry him off to Punchline Jail. So it turns out the place is real and basically like you see in the cartoon.

The cartoon makes Casa Bonita out to be this shining castle in the midst of pawn shop squalor. Not so, really. It's in a strip mall, in a block of strip malls, mostly surrounded by fast-food and fast-casual dining. Next to the Casa Bonita is Adventure Dental Vision and Orthodontics, the place for parents to bring kids to the whiniest dental appointments of all the Rocky Mountain states. The experience has to be like going down to the Joann Fabric next to the Chuck-E-Cheese, only maybe four orders of magnitude higher, since Casa Bonita is so much bigger and weirder. Next to the dental place is another Dollar Tree. We had no idea. We were expecting Flash-animated pawn shops.

The frontage of the place is kind of a Mission-style tower, fair enough. The interior is somehow large enough to fit about fourteen baseball stadiums inside. The hype material says the place has a staff of three hundred and I find that entirely believable. Maybe even short-staffed. You enter through a long switchback of queues, implying just how crazy the place must get when every kids' birthday party in the county is going on at once. And place your order at the cashier. There's no getting in without ordering an entree, which runs about US$15. You can get cheaper and, probably, better Mexican food (this was about as good as we expect in [profile] bunny_hugger's parents' small mid-Michigan town). But, jeez, you're supporting the hiring of like three hundred employees here. It's cheap for that. The food's prepared right away and set to you on cafeteria trays. This is probably helped by the menu being pretty streamlined and simple. There's three vegetarian options, if they take the meat out of the prep of one of them.

The interior of the restaurant is this twisty maze of passages. Some lead to event rooms and we started out following one of those to some kind of family affair. Our mistake corrected we wandered around trying to figure out if we just seated ourselves or what, when a maitre d' came over and promised to lead us to the right table. I think we got into the main floor by the exit path or something like that.

The seating area is about eight hundred thousand different levels, some of them small enough to seat just two tables, some of them big enough to seat an elementary school class party. There's many different levels and paths and corners and inlets, some of them secluded inside gazebos or tucked behind half-walls or even features designed to look like caves. This place must take forever to check that everybody's cleared out at the end of the work day. There must be so many teens who figure a great stunt is to stay in after-hours.

From most of the seating areas on the main floor you can see the stage. And there, every 15 minutes, there's some kind of show. It might be a comic gunfight. It might be (at least when we were there) this comedy bit between a host, an ``animal trainer'', and his gorilla that oh sure he's got in control. It might be a show of trick diving, as there is indeed a thirty-foot waterfall and small pool built into the center of the place. Other times of day there's parades and pirate shows. Advice we got was that Casa Bonita takes about three hours to quite fully see, and yeah, that's about right. Just the shows alone are maybe an hour and a half until you've seen the day's routine.

The comedy shows are not subtle, dense, fast-paced wordplay. They're designed to be appreciated by semi-feral packs of kids watching from 75 feet away and partly obstructed by palm trees. So, you know, we loved it. But we were also going in to see a crazypants Mexican-based restaurant/theme-park hybrid. Just want to manage expectations for what you see. The diving is stunning, since it's diving but it's also into what looks like a terribly enclosed space. I suppose it's not really any more enclosed than the diving show at any amusement park. That there's cave wall settings and tables of people eating all around it makes it look more perilous, is all.

The tables have little flags on foot-tall wooden masts, to raise if you need a server for anything. Refills on sodas or, for adults, margaritas. Or, for dessert, which can be anything but is going to be sopapillas. In principle, unlimited sopapillas that are, indeed, fresh and hot and incredibly good. We naively thought the moist towelettes brought us with the first pack were to make sure we had clean hands before diving into the finger food. The sopapillas are served with squeeze-tubes of honey. You see where our horrible mistake comes in now, I trust.

While the dining floor is vast and labyrinthine it is not the whole of Casa Bonita, somehow. There's a wealth of attractions beside that. I've riffed on it growing into a theme park and while that's overstating it, it has got a lot of the things you might see in a theme park's midway. A caricature artist. A snack stand. A puppet theater that put on a weirdly plotless show about how of course one dinosaur didn't forget the other's birthday: he was going to Casa Bonita with him! A pinata, for kids to play around. A walk-through haunted house (well, haunted cave) attraction that was not quite too small for me. And that does end with you walking into a dragon's mouth.

An arcade, too. Mostly Skee-Ball, redemption games, and video games. We wondered if there might be pinball. Hoped, really. Then we realized if it had any pinball game it would be the South Park pinball. Casa Bonita has wholeheartedly embraced this one episode of the show, with Cartman dolls stuck in places he was seen on the show, and references to the show all over the place. We had to wonder whether they knew about the episode ahead of time or whether there were some hurried calls between staff the day the episode dropped. ... Anyway, so we realized if they had any pinball at all, it would be the South Park game, which was rushed out when the show first came on and who knew how long this cartoon with the obscene Colorforms would last. And then realized that absolutely under no circumstances would that pinball be here. Casa Bonita is a kids' place. There is not a single thing, including the sound made when you've dropped a quarter into the game, that's kid-friendly about the South Park pinball. And indeed, there's no pinball machines there. Too bad.

There is a lot of place here. We spent nearly three hours and we think we at least laid eyes on it all, but that's hard to be sure about. I mean, we found not just a passage behind the waterfall but that there were multiple booths there, for people who wanted to eat somewhere they couldn't see the shows? Hard to be quite sure. Maybe just space because it sometimes gets that busy. And still more stuff. Penny-smashing machines. Kiddie rides, horses and donkeys and trains and stuff. A ``Treasure Room'' in which you can venture up to the chest full of prizes and withdraw a bulk-mix candy. It's so delightful. Is it ridiculous? Yes. Is it worth getting to? For us, absolutely.

I have no idea how they can fit this floor plan into a strip mall. Nor how they can possibly do enough business to maintain the staff they need. Which is probably why this is the last Casa Bonita of a chain that at one point very nearly reached half a dozen instances. Some of their merchandise still listed them as being at Denver - Kansas City. I don't have any reason to think this one is in any particular danger.

Trivia: The 1933 invention of the filleting machine made redfish worth catching. By 1951 redfish represented about 70 percent of all fish landed in Gloucester, Massachusetts (home of Gorton Foods). Source: Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World, Mark Kurlansky.

Currently Reading: How To Read Nancy: The Elements Of Comics In Three Easy Panels, Paul Karasik, Mark Newgarden. Which I had been looking at even before the new writer made Nancy briefly Internet famous. The writers seem to be coming to the strip from an art-critic background, as opposed to a comics-critic background, so the perspective is a little weird and they just assume I have any idea what Formalism is about (so far; when I get to a second chapter they might explain terms common to the critiquing of art in ways that ignorants like me can understand and that expert readers will know to just skim over).

PS: I Don't Have Any Good Ideas For Finding Cube Roots By Trigonometry, so there's limits to just how brilliantly brilliant and clever I can feel about last week, but I still like what I did.


PPS: On to Storybook Land's thrill ride!

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The house of bricks from which the Three Little Pigs sing about not being afraid of the big-bad-wolf, you know, just like in the iconic Disney cartoon.


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And here's the Three Little Pigs, each holding up a symbol of their house-making ability. It looked like the same model used for the pig at Bowcraft Park.


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A closer view of the watering-can building that as you can see also sells Italian ice.