austin_dern

The heat's broken. Here's my mathematics blog for the week. I've figured what I'm going to do for my humor blog and its Tuesday bits for the rest of the month, by the way, but that's a holding action. Let me know if you have a good idea for stuff to review for after that.

• Reading the Comics, June 27, 2018: Stitch Day Edition
• How June 2018 Treated My Mathematics Blog
• Reading the Comics, June 29, 2018: Chuckle and Breakfast Cereal Edition
• Reading the Comics, July 3, 2018: Fine, Jef Mallett Wants My Attention Edition

Plus, for the comics? What's Going On In Prince Valiant? When Does Prince Valiant Take Place? April - July 2018. I didn't before today know there was a specific era for the comic strip. Nice to know.

And now I close out my Casino Pier photographs! Thanks for watching.

Sign I'm not sure I noticed before at the Floyd Moreland carousel. It doesn't reach five rpm but it ought to because carousels are better faster.

Oh yeah, there's the chariot on the Floyd Moreland carousel that doens't have dragons and stuff on it. I should photograph that sometime too, surely!

Support beam to the roof of the carousel room within Casino Pier.

A warning among the tray returns over by the pizza place. Well, I'll take it seriously.

Heading out for the night as what's surely one of the last Musik Express rides reaches warp speed.

And a last look at the Giant Ferris Wheel, as we finally headed out for the night.

Trivia: France's National Convention resolved, the 2nd and 4th of October, 1793, that René Descartes's remains should be interred in the French Pantheon. (They would not be at the time.) Source: Descartes' Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict between Faith and Reason, Russell Shorto.

Currently Reading: A Short History of Machine Tools, L T C Rolt.

So we always get to mid-June and realize we haven't been to Cedar Point yet and that's crazy. June's the best park-going time, since it hasn't got crazy crowds and it usually isn't blisteringly hot. We had plans to set out one Friday, but the forecast of a high chance of thunderstorms made us put it off to Sunday. Sunday we drove in to heavy cloud cover, interrupted with heavier cloud cover. As we got to the park the upper halves of most of the roller coasters were lost in the clouds.

We had just arrived and gotten Parmesean fries and were getting pop. We have the unlimited-drinks plan and it turns out the first time you use it, you're given the option: a souvenir cup or just disposable wax-paper cups? Your choice then locks you in all season. Thing is the souvenir cup is nice but then you have to lug it around all day. All season. Anyway we were getting our drinks when the skies really opened up. I watched, feeling for the poor souls on MaXair, the giant spinning pendulum ride. A ride in the rain sounds like it ought to be whimsical fun, and it can be, if it's made your roller coaster's brakes not be quite the spoilsports. But it can also be sharp cold stabs of pain hitting your face at 50 miles per hour. Probably closer to that for them.

We waited much of the rain out at the drinks stand, or in the Casino where we found even fewer pinball machines working. And then made our way to the back of the park, hoping to catch the French Revue at Lusty Lil's; indoor shows seemed like the best bet. We made it to one, a nice bit of dancing music comedy built on you know how many European ethnicities there are that someone might not realize were not, technically speaking, French, such as Italian or Irish or Spanish?

As we were inside the rains receded enough that we could get to our key interest: Steel Vengeance. This is the roller coaster made out of the bones of Mean Streak. It had just opened in May, then shut quickly as some braking issue was manifest. It was back up to running two trains (theoretically it could run three), and they had let people line up while waiting for the official OK from the weather. We joined the queue just as they reopened the ride and thought ourselves fortunate: we had outlasted an hours-long crowd-shrinking rain and now could go to the choice ride of the season.

So the miscalculation was that yes, maybe nearly everyone was chased out of the park by the weather. The people remaining were waiting for Steel Vengeance. Thus we waited for hours, in a slow-moving line that at least did let us see how much they'd done to tidy up the roller coaster's infield, and to redesign the whole of the ride. And we got the time to read and savor reading and re-consider all the posters they put up that explain the characters they've made for their Old West themed area; the cast list is getting surprisingly big even without the three Japanese Roleplaying Game characters who are the Steel Vengeance roller coaster-chans.

Still, we did get our ride. And it is, ah, yeah. Wow. It's a really good roller coaster. We hate to lose Mean Streak and a true wooden roller coaster for it. But they did make a great ride from it. It's got many of Mean Streak's older tricks, including a particularly choice view and a long stretch of ride that's within the support columns of the ride itself. But it does add about fifty feet of height, ten miles per hour of maximum speed, barrel rolls, and a lot of good solid lateral movement. Well, there's a ride video on Cedar Point's site there; you can get some idea of its style.

So this might have topped our rain-to-rides experience of Roller Coaster Appreciation Night. Also threatened to set a new low in our rides-per-visit record. But with the onset of evening things started to improve. The weather had kept much of the park empty and while Maverick still gathered an hourlong line, nothing else that interested us did. ValRavn, the drop coaster, was even a walk-on, the first time we'd seen it that empty. And we were able to close the night out on the Cedar Downs racing carousel and the Kiddie Kingdom carousel, making for a fairly satisfying night after all.

As we left the park it started to rain again. I went out by the Chaussy, the old, tiny road that used to be the park's access before the building of the Causeway in the 50s. This was maybe unwise, since it was raining heavily enough and foggy enough that the road was hard to see. And it started us off going in the wrong direction for home. But, owners of the McMansions built along the Chaussy have been complaining about park traffic along there. There's rumors that it might be closed to non-resident traffic. Who knows how many more times we'll be able to ride it?

(Yes, yes, what did the residents think when they moved into a house next to an amusement park? But given the park's growing popularity, and the way the season's been growing, I can understand if they feel that what had once been an occasional inconvenient traffic jam was now their lives every weekend from September through early november, and that they wanted to be able to go to and from work and the grocery story and all that in under fifty minutes sometimes.)

Trivia: From the 1650s the Russian government controlled the trade of rhubarb imported from China and exported to Western Europe. Source: Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution, Lisa Jardine.

Currently Reading: A Short History of Machine Tools, L T C Rolt.

PS: A bit more of Casino Pier That Used To Be.

Closer photograph of the former Stillwalk Manor gargoyle, somewhere you can see its chain collar.

Safety sign from the Wild Mouse that survived the storm all right despite apparently having been mis-printed to begin with.

One of the three-faced cars used for the Stillwalk Manor dark ride. At a quick glance you only notice the one face.

I am not sure precisely when I first encountered The Straight Dope by Cecil Adams. I can say where, though, in the county library main building's precious shelves for Dewey Decimal Number 000's, all those factual or would-be factual books. And I can say which: that bright yellow hefty More Of The Straight Dope book, first published 1988, so I must have encountered it pretty new. It was a perfect book for the perfect reader at the perfect time, a blend of both trivia and real information and snarky tone and goofy but still enlightening quiz questions and, yeah, weird, often surreal illustrations. It was fantastic reading, and rereading. I'd check it and its predecessor, the paperback-sized The Straight Dope, out until I finally bought my own copies. I remember vividly reading of the strange and goofy saga of The Oeak Island Money Pit while on the school bus on some field trip on a cool, rainy day.

The late 80s/early 90s were maybe a golden era for those sorts of snarky trivia books. Joel Achenbach's Why Things Are made a respectable-for-syndicated-newspapers version of Cecil Adams's tone. (And introduced me to Richard Thompson's drawings long before Cul-de-Sac could become the great tragedy of modern comic strips.) William Poundstone had a bunch of nice little books promising secret knowledge and trying to test out stuff like groundhog weather forecasts and sports curses and stuff. Books explaining and mostly debunking urban legends came out, feeding alt.folklore.urban. Even the Imponderables guy seemed to step up his game, although it seemed like weak sauce after Cecil Adams going on about the Illuminati or whatever.

The 90s ... really seemed like they should have been better for The Straight Dope than they quite were. alt.fan.cecil-adams (``the brother Douglas never talks about'') thrived. There were new books, including a version rewritten for kids, collected every couple of years. There was a short-lived TV series on A&E. But the books didn't sell as well as the first couple, by reports. The TV series was maybe too early for the Mythbusters audience it should have shared. The usenet group is still there, still doing stuff, much diminished fifteen years after the death of Usenet but at least with some community left. The web site stayed in 1998, comfortingly. Although the advertisements got too annoying to deal with following a slight redesign that brought the page into 1999. (I finally checked and found its RSS feed a couple weeks ago, and added that to my Dreamwidth Reading page.)

And now the column is closed. For the usual reason. Its home newspaper is being sold, victim of the current stage of capitalism in which doing anything well is interpreted as market inefficiency. So it meets the fate of everything, ultimately being sold to a real-estate investment trust that will do nothing so well as to be noticeable. The web site's to remain, and existing columns to stay accessible, and of course nothing can stop the books that already exist from continuing to take up space. And it isn't as though it hadn't done very well for a long while.

But it is a thing ended, and why did we need more of that?

Trivia: National Cash Register's manufacturing had about two acres of floor space in 1890. It had 17.19 acres of floor space in 1900, and 28.55 acres by late 1902. Source: Before The Computer: IBM, NCR, Burroughs, and Remington Rand and the Industry they Created, 1865 - 1956, James W Cortada.

Currently Reading: The Philosophy of Mathematics: An Introductory Essay, Stephan Körner.

PS: Still miniature-golfing.

Parking lot attendant, still practicing. Apparently it's gotten even slower somehow.

Employee door inside the Casino Pier castle, including a long roster of benefits that they can call upon. Many of them are lower-cost admissions to other parks, including Legoland, which isn't anywhere near Casino Pier.

And now here's the pier at night, or at least in evening glow. Notice how the Ferris Wheel is going to warp speed.

Well, we survived the emotional rigors of the Variety Show and got back to our room to pack things away without any of the real performers jeering us and chasing us off. Good progress, that. We unwound some and maybe made coffee (it seems sensible, I just don't remember in detail) and realized how close the convention was to its official ending. So that brought us back out of the nice cool dark private place in time to check in on the badge-collection thing. The Sunbathers team to which bunny_hugger was assigned was getting creamed by the Stargazers, which she attributed to of course how much people who would not take pineapple on pizza outnumbered those who were fine on it. This was the confound question used to assign people to morning or night teams, and we didn't yet know that there was a basically even split between people. More important, though, is that some of the badges which bunny_hugger had fairly earned by her activity had run out on the table. Either not enough were made, or people had taken the souvenir pieces without really deserving them, or whatnot. But she had missed some, including at least one that she had seen on the table the day before. She hadn't taken it then, as she hadn't earned it, though she expected to unlock that achievement.

We entered the ballroom, for Closing Ceremonies, in time for the last few mad-scramble minutes of the Charity Auction. That's the point where some random-meme token that the extroverts among staff and the lead of the performance track produces a bidding war that's utterly alien and daft to anyone who didn't follow its development. (``We have a bid of FOUR HUNDRED DOLLARS for Uncle Kage's BOX OF RIPPED-UP MEIJER COUPONS --- will anyone give 425?'' ``FIVE HUNDRED!'') AnthrOhio broke the ten-thousand-dollar mark in its charity fundraiser, for the horse rehabilitation and adoption group Last Chance Corral. They didn't quite reach it during the end of the charity auction, but there's always a bit extra money tossed in during Closing Ceremonies, and there you go.

The usual routines of Closing Ceremonies --- thanking everyone, bowling over the speaker for the charity with the presentation of funds, the promise that there'd be a con theme announced soon --- got broken up with an actual organized and thought-out sketch. With celebrity guest BoozyBadger, rising from the audience where I'd had an obstructed view of him to put things in motion. The premise has to do with the box-head owls or whatever their name is exactly.

Those come, if I'm not mistaken, from the convention's Frankenfursuit event where, each year, participants get like three hours and a room of materials to build any kind of fursuit. It's a fun idea I should try sometime, if only because of its great underlying message: that any creative thing made is better than a creative thing planned but un-made because of fear of how it'll turn out. The parameters of the event make ``oh lord this is hideous'' completely forgiveable. And a lot of the results are not bad, honestly. The box-head owls are ... uh ... well, they're attempts at bird heads and they are a little hideous in that gloriously, embraced-ugliness way. I guess they're coming to be an icon of that part of the convention; at least one of the heads was on display at Hospitality repeatedly over the weekend.

Back to the premise: the owls were declaring they had, with BoozyBadger's help, managed a corporate takeover of AnthrOhio and would be running the show now. They had figurehead con chair Ed Hyena 'tased' and dragged off stage, with the revelation that next year's theme would be Corporate Takeover.

Which, I'll admit, struck me as a narrow topic. Kind of a closed improv prompt. On the other hand, the convention did a great job making the 'Barks and Recreation' theme run through the convention's decoration and events and activities. And they introduced it in an interesting way that started out the telling of a story. It's easy to imagine next year the gang getting together to save the neighborhood rec center, like in all those 80s movies that were less numerous than references to them would lead you to think. Hm.

The convention adjourned. We left our feedback and people started dispersing. We looking for dinner, passing up the grease truck in favor of the nearby Skyline Chili's. There we again passed that Continent Movie Theater and its weird roster of five-years-ago movies. Also it was late enough in the day the lights were turned on, at least the lights that worked, so we saw the 'Content Movie Theater' sign. This would be so corny a bit of symbolism in a short story that it solidified our fascination with the place.

Back at the hotel there was time for the usual end-of-convention stuff. More people seemed to be hanging around the common areas than before, possibly because New Hotel had better lounging space for it. Possibly because there were just that many more people. We finally saw the cork message boards, although nothing was posted to them. Beside them was a flyer for the Foam Flinging Frenzy, calling it by the old name of the Atomic Battle of Doom. The last bits of food being eaten, or carried off, from Hospitality. A mildly attended Dead Dog Dance. We got into fursuit (bunny_hugger) and Kigurumi (me) and danced a while. And then one time we took a break, resting a bit in the former headless lounge that had already been cleaned out, and then walking around the main floor to come back and find the dance had evaporated in our absence.

Karaoke was going on, though, at least officially. Syberfox had a modified set this year, one that not just provided the words but had a visual cue as to when words should be said. This is a great benefit for people like me who more or less know that there is a beat to songs, but can't really do much about that fact. Unfortunately there was nobody there; we sang to each other, appreciating how much the new system improved the songs even without any hint about how to modulate one's voice's pitch.

That got interrupted when a couple young furs poked in, looking for staff. They'd noticed a woman in the lounge, asleep and not responding to anyone, with an opened, partially emptied water bottle beside her. Apparently nothing sinister, it turns out; she had just dozed off in public after a busy and hot weekend. But that did leave an unhappy while where bunny_hugger and I baby-sat karaoke equipment while the con staff had to figure out whether something we never imagined would happen at our convention had happened.

Karaoke never got going again after the interruption. Partly from the small size of the event by then, and partly the hour. Partly because someone else brought in a bunch of virtual reality gear, and this was one of the few remaining available convention spaces where it could be set up. Setting it up seemed to take forever, but again before I knew it there were people playing what I think they dubbed Drunken Bar Fight. Not sure if that's the actual name or a mere description. But the premise is just that, your character moving around spaces unsteadily, much as you do when you're wearing a helmet and holding video game gear and you can't see the real world and there's cables leading everywhere and people are yelling you're about to crash into something. In-game you go punching people or throwing them into things. These things may include other people.

Watching it, and laughing at people who were stumbling around an imaginary bar punching people while flicking them off (simultaneously, in ways that would shatter finger bones), I thought of the early days of video games. Where there wasn't really a game, just a demonstration that a game could be made here, perhaps. Also that the rig, as it was, made an Atari 2600-quality brilliant use of its own limitations. It might be impossible for a person to move in any sensible way in virtual reality rigs as they are; fine. If they're playing drunken characters --- well, then, they should move so badly. Great thinking. Didn't have any desire to play the game.

We went upstairs so bunny_hugger could change out of fursuit, and get her marionette back. By the time we came back the game had changed. They were playing a surgery simulator instead. In principle cool; in practice, well, maybe someone who paid attention to the instructions would do something besides race to kill the patient. It all left me more convinced that virtual reality was ready to do something interesting. But that nobody had come up with any game ideas for it yet.

With the hour getting past midnight even these last bits of the convention were contracting, and getting quieter, and we yielded to the hour. We did a last check of the common spaces, looking for people we could promise to see next year, and went back to our room, to pack and to sleep.

Trivia: Samuel Langley's experimental engine for his Great Aerodrome aircraft had, by the end of 1902, weighed 187 pounds and could produce 45 horsepower. Source: First Flight: The Wright Brothers and the Invention of the Airplane, T A Heppenheimer.

Currently Reading: The Philosophy of Mathematics: An Introductory Essay, Stephan Körner.

PS: Golfing behind Casino Pier.

Kind of cavernous interior to the pirate-themed miniature golf. There's several holes within the structure.

And looking back outside we can see: the guy's still practicing. We can hear it, too.

Looking from the miniature golf course out to Casino Pier, of which only Hydrus is really visible. Also one of the shoreside hotels that would be happy to stay in 1962, thanks, if it may.

So signups for the variety show didn't happen Friday night, or maybe they happened somewhere else, or maybe they did happen inside a pocket universe visible only to a select few members. No idea. But Sunday at 2:00 they were to have rehearsal. So we went up to Draconis and I said, while we don't have an act organized we have puppets and could do whatever puppeteering they needed done. And I was thinking of songs we knew well enough that I would feel comfortable doing Puppet Karaoke with, such as Sparks's ``Let The Monkey Drive'', in case the audiovisual people could get a playable copy in time.

He was happy to bring us in, along with everyone else who brought an act or possible act to the show. Before I quite knew what I was doing --- and I still don't know what I was doing --- we were behind the stage, trying out a couple puppets behind the stage curtain. AnthrOhio/Morphicon hasn't had a puppeteering track in years. But when it did, the puppeteers were prominent enough that a stage and proscenium was made in the PVC tubes for setting up the stage backdrop. And the convention, having the PVC tubes for a workable backdrop, wasn't going to replace them just because there were no puppet acts for a couple years. So here we were, part of the variety show, mostly because it was too much work to make it hard for us to be there.

Draconis's plan: we would just be there and drop in, commenting on the show as we felt like. This is in some ways an excellent plan. First we only had to do what we felt like worked. Second puppets being snarky almost always plays well on stage. Third, I have the sort of riffing humor that can work well for this, deadpanning something weird and preposterous.

So here's the ways it was not an excellent plan. Some of it was our own fault. bunny_hugger had her peacock hand puppet, great for stage work. It's just a head, so the face is large and can be easily seen moving around. But me? My only puppet is a life-sized guinea pig. From more than a few feet away it's a fluffy ball of no discernable motion. What we should have used was the sea serpent hand puppet, again just a head, but one that's big and easy to see from afar. We had lost that, though; it would turn up only a month later, in a compartment of bunny_hugger's duffel bag we would have sworn we'd investigated.

The next-best was a full-body Chinese dragon. If I kept him sideways then his mouth would move enough to read from the audience, hopefully. It would also mean I had to perform sideways. Which might be for the best. The tech guys only had one microphone to spare for bunny_hugger and me. My standing sideways would have me face the microphone; she had to turn her head or hang a little sideways.

Another technical problem: we couldn't see what was on stage. When the real puppeteers were there they had cameras set out front and a monitor in back, which makes it possible for the puppet to look at anything on-stage. Eye contact matters so much. And it lets the puppeteer know if their head or arm or showing. bunny_hugger was short enough not to fear her head popping up. My head, though? Was a few inches taller than the base of the puppet stage, but there's a good chance it would still be obscured from the audience. If my hair was still as black as it used to be even that might go unnoticed, but I've got enough grey that I might be picked up. Couldn't get any opinions about whether I was visible standing, though, so much of the rehearsal was a quest for chairs that I could kneel on, to be low enough I'd be sure not to show, but high enough not to wear out my arm.

And then there's the major problem: my character had no definition. Was this dragon smart? Dumb? Snarky? Innocent? What kind of jokes does he make? ... All right, so maybe he can just joke the way I would in person; who's going to know? But do I interact just with Draconis? Through Draconis? Do I interact with the performers before or after their bits? And how much do I interact with bunny_hugger's peacock and not worry about it all?

Still, bunny_hugger and I had some nice casual banter before, including some nice talk about the peacock's train and riffs on train wrecks and the like. And we had some nice stuff with Draconis right before stage time where he'd say the puppets had to get down and hide before the show started. This turned into some nice bits of poking up and hiding away before he could react. Sometimes I was too slow; sometimes I was fast enough. I felt good about that.

Also bunny_hugger had to duck out for a few minutes, an hour in, to attend the raffling off of copies of the Photosynthesis game she'd played Saturday. She worried somehow that this would be a problem for the rehearsal, which was deep in trying to figure out who was going where and who needed what on-stage. She didn't win a copy, but the raffling off went all weird in a complicated way that I'm sorry to have missed. (People who had entered weren't there, disqualifying them, and it took a few draws before someone was found. And then one of the absent people who'd been drawn turned up.)

And so how did the actual show go?

Um. Well. I'll call it stage fright or inexperience; I don't talk enough in-character while puppeteering. But I started out with mouth movements on the puppet that just had nothing to do with what I was saying. That smoothed out over the course of the performance, at least. The emcee noted bunny_hugger's peacock having a clearly female voice, making some gag about assuming gender identities and presenting as male and I felt myself dying.

bunny_hugger did well, with her vain peacock able to bring the conversation around to his impossibly gorgeous, but not actually existing, train several times. Good routine. Nice, easy patter. I recognized that she was trying to set me up too, since we'd had some riffs about her train and train wrecks in rehearsal. But I couldn't think what it was, and I couldn't think of somewhere to go with the lines fed me.

And I flopped. I can fault some technical points on this. The lack of video particularly; I had no idea where anyone is. And I'm bad at interrupting conversation at the best of times. Without any visual cues about what's going on, I was incredibly hopeless, and just presented a Chinese dragon hanging around in his own little zone. But the lack of character really sank me; even when I got the stage or the emcee gave me an opening, I wouldn't have anywhere particular to go. And when I did have somewhere to go, I improvised the way I write humor pieces. Which are kind of long and convoluted and weird. I needed shorter, simpler, and clearer.

But. Here's the important thing: a poor puppeteering performance is better than none at all. And having done what is surely my worst-possible, I feel more confident in future work. The biggest problems are easy fixes. Have an appropriate stage puppet. Go in with a clear idea of what character I'm playing. I've listened to 800 godzillion hours of old-time radio comedy; I can just do Mel Blanc's Happy Postman or Bert Gordon's Mad Russian or even someone anyone might have heard of the last fifty years. Lay out rules with the emcee about when I should jump in. Figure out any kind of schtick (``if you say a food word the dragon pops up and demands dinner''). Anything a puppet does five times becomes funny. It doesn't have to be good to be any good. It just has to exist.

I can imagine how to solve the can't-see-the-stage problem too. bunny_hugger and I have iPods; we could set up a tripod with one out front, and Facetime with ourselves in back. It won't be a great view, but it's surely enough to work out whether we're looking at anything at all on-stage. And what's the chance that the hotel's free public wireless would go down during the show? Such is surely un-possible.

So for all that went wrong, I feel great about the chance of doing this again. If they won't throw us out just for talking about the possibility.

And a footnote. Sometime while we were backstage in rehearsal, Boozy Badger --- that lawyer who discovered furry fandom after some Sovereign Citizen nonsense last year, and within two weeks was headlining AnthroCon --- turned out to be there. He did some question-and-answer stuff, including one with bunny_hugger's peacock. Sure, I knew of him; you can't be on Furry Twitter and not see stuff where he's talking running past you. But I didn't know him, or know that he'd be there. And so now I had the odd experience that I'd technically been on stage with this new furry celebrity, but I still had no idea what he looked like, and he had no idea I was there. Just a remote awareness that there was someone besides that peacock in the puppetry window. This all felt weird.

Trivia: The ancient Icelandic calendar set the summer misseri (six-month-long season) at 26 weeks and two days, and always began on a Thursday. The winter misseri was the rest of the year. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.

Currently Reading: The Philosophy of Mathematics: An Introductory Essay, Stephan Körner.

PS: Casino Pier, and particularly, its carousel.

Dedication plaque for the Floyd Moreland carousel. I admit not knowing who the people are or why their memory is the target of dedication.

And the dedication plaque for the Floyd Moreland carousel that actually names Moreland, and I don't know what's dedicated here that wasn't also dedicated above. Also the lettering on this 1986 plaque seems somehow decades worse than the one of the other plaque, the date of which I don't know except that it has to be from after March of 1996.

The carousel horses that bunny_hugger and I rode on our first trip to Casino Pier, and that we try to ride every time we revisit the place.

Had a week on my humor blog that I'm basically happy with. If you skipped it and its RSS feed, here's your last chance for many of these to be called to your attention.

• Some Astounding Facts About Summer, last week's major piece and all about the season some of us are in.
• There Is No News About Our Rewards Program, a follow-up.
• Statistics Saturday: Acceptable Answers To The Question ‘How’re You Doing?’ part of my service to the community who needs small-talk counseling.
• What’s Going On In Alley Oop? What’s With All The Time Travel Suddenly? April – June 2018 and yes, the plot may not be moving fast, but it is moving logically enough.
• Thinking About The Afterlife In Ancient Greek Mythology in which a conversation with bunny_hugger turns into my movie pitch.
• The 41st Talkartoon: Admission Free, a cartoon that jumps the tracks and seems like it's like two years out of synch with history.
• Oh Yes, Something Remarkable About Summer that didn't make last week's major piece because I didn't write it before then.
• In Which I Missed My Chance To Park On The Street After 2am but found out about it because I actually read the advertising-wrapper.

And now let me share some of the pictures of Casino Pier because I took a lot of them and I need someone to see them.

The Musik Express! Which I believe is a new instance of the thing, replacing one destroyed in Superstorm Sandy. Love that backdrop airbrush art.

Speaking of backdrop airbrush art, here's the side drop for Pirates Hideaway.

Paint job on one of the kiddie car rides updates the van to a reference only 49 years old.

Swinging chairs ride that's another survivor of Sandy.

Dizzy Dragons ride, again a survivor of Sandy. bunny_hugger and I rode this on an earlier visit and did indeed make ourselves too dizzy to continue. But, you know, you get the chance to be in a fat dragon belly, who's going to turn that down?

All up and down the boardwalk are Kohr Custard stands. I'm not sure I had noticed this bit of puffery based on the Chicago World's Fair before but who can turn down graphic design like that? And seriously; I love the typeface and love the industrial picture.

And the stuff going on at one of the restaurants along the boardwalk. Seems exciting I guess?

Oh, so that's where Russel Mael and Jane Wiedlin were hoping to go! ... And apparently they've moved north a quarter-mile since the Funtown Pier fire.

Peeking back at the Floyd Moreland carousel, with a better view of the ceiling.

Trivia: The word ``worry'' derives from the Old English ``wyrgan'', meaning to strangle or throttle, or to choke on food. It first appears in Middle English as ``worien'' to mean ``to kill by choking, to strangle''. Source: Semantic Antics: How and Why Words Change Meaning, Sol Steinmetz.

Currently Reading: Models of Spatial Processes: An Approach to the Study of Point, Line, and Area Patterns, Arthur Getis, Barry Boots.

PS: In Which I Learn A Thing About Non-Euclidean Geometries and it is literally a thing, but still, that's something.

No time to write yesterday or today; been doing that annoying work stuff that's taken up precious hours when I could have been talking about the Bunnies SIG. Should be back at normal stuff tomorrow, all going well. Meanwhile, have a lot of Casino Pier, please.

A look at the Casino Pier viking figure, and the whole of Hydrus, just before we rode.

The chair lift that runs the length of Seaside Heights, more or less. We haven't ridden it. But it survived Superstorm Sandy just fine. Apparently.

Return leg of Hydrus, as seen from the back of the launch station.

A train --- well, the car; I guess you need at least two together to make a train? --- of Hydrus getting ready to launch.

bunny_hugger is next! All set for the next ride on Hydrus. Its station is a bit elevated from the main pier; you can see the ramp up it on the right.

Looking north, through the return leg of Hydrus, and to the beach past that.

After its vertical drop, Hydrus is all about the twists and turns. Here's the train in the midst of one of those overbanked turns.

You exit Hydrus from within its infield; there's this little covered walkway to guide folks out.

And the next train, stopped and ready to get back to the station, as seen while leaving Hydrus.

Trivia: The 1927 Ford Model A was made of about six thousand parts; building it required the rebuilding or refurbishing of 16 thousand machine tools and the buying of four thousand new ones. Source: Ford: The Men and the Machine, Robert Lacey.

Currently Reading: Models of Spatial Processes: An Approach to the Study of Point, Line, and Area Patterns, Arthur Getis, Barry Boots.

Like I warned Friday, it was a slow week on my mathematics blog because I was so busy living and didn't have time to write. But here's what I did write:

• Reading the Comics, June 13, 2018: Wild Squirrel Edition
• Reading the Comics, June 16, 2018: No Panels Edition
• Reading the Comics, June 19, 2018: Don't Ask About The Hyperbolic Cosine Edition

And meanwhile in the story strips ... What's Going On In Alley Oop? What's With All The Time Travel Suddenly? April - June 2018. (Also, really, smarter time travel.) And that takes me back to Casino Pier.

Pirate's Hideaway: the only grown-up roller coaster remaining from our first Seaside Heights visit. It had been, back then, enclosed under a roof. And it had a photo booth, so we got an on-ride photograph that bunny_hugger keeps in her wallet.

And the superheroic mouse statue that used to be beside the Wild Mouse, the first roller coaster bunny_hugger and I rode together. The Wild Mouse has moved to California. The superheroic mouse that's no clearly identifiable intellectual property has relocated to beside the Pirate's Hideaway.

Unidentifiable bear-based statue that's near one of the car rides on Casino Pier.

Panoramic view of the approximate vicinity of Funtown Pier, destroyed by fire in 2013 by wires damaged in Superstorm Sandy the year before. Rebuilding has been ... sluggish, to make it sound faster than it has been. But here it looked like some actual work was going on? Maybe?

More of the construction going on that maybe might turn into a new amusement pier? Or just building a couple shops on the boardwalk to help us forget there used to be FunTown Pier there.

bunny_hugger taking pictures of the work in progress near what used to be FunTown Pier.

Sign for the Sawmill Express restaurant, which is a fun tease for the place. We thought about eating there but ended up moving on instead.

And like it looks, activity around the FunTown Pier location. In the background there's one of two Three Brothers Pizza places along Seaside Heights/Seaside Park's boardwalk. We would find a third Three Brothers pizza place in Ocean City.

I don't know, going home with beach sand on you is part of the thrill, I thought.

Trivia: Between March 2000 and December 2001 roughly $7 trillion in market value was lost from the NASDAQ exchange. Source: How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities, John Cassidy.

Currently Reading: Models of Spatial Processes: An Approach to the Study of Point, Line, and Area Patterns, Arthur Getis, Barry Boots.

The fursuit parade was set for Saturday noon, mercifully a normal hour and one we could reasonably wake up in time for. As expected they gathered in the ballroom, the Main Events room, so I saw bunny_hugger disappear into the mob of fursuiters and then tried to guess where there might be a good spot to watch. There wasn't a published parade route that I knew about, so I had to take my guesses based on where they seemed to be setting up security and places to shoo folks away from. I settled on a corner between hallways outside the ballroom and turned out to be exactly right.

The parade didn't just go past that spot; it would, somewhere down the line, turn around and back around. I thought this indicated the parade route would be prone to collapsing in chaos as people who were supposed to turn left saw, dimly, through scrim and slight openings, people moving to the right and made the reasonable assumption. I was right about this, although less right than I expected. Fewer people were confused than I expected. The parade ran about seven minutes and I guess had something like 179 suiters in it (according to Wikifur). That's almost more than the convention had total attendees in 2006.

What I didn't see was people gathered for the group photo shoot afterwards, although I followed the parade out the door to try and find them. Eventually I met back up with bunny_hugger, who explained the group photo shoot was done at the start, indoors, in the ballroom. Likely a good way to make sure everybody at the parade was in the photo, but it did spoil my chances at blurry photographs of people moving in front of bunny_hugger. She also described how they went through the dealers room and that it was some strange sort of tent. This didn't make a great deal of sense to me, but I hadn't seen the dealer's den yet, and she has utterly lousy vision while in suit.

Also while photographing the parade, I discovered the battery door to my camera had broken. The tab holding it closed went missing somewhere. I've got the battery door masking-taped shut now; it's not ideal, and it does make me wonder if I need to look into new cameras. Entropy con again.

After all this we did go to the dealers' den. It had rather more space than the Old Hotel had. Admittedly it'd be hard for a place not to. And I understood what was meant by it being in a tent. The room was, it looks like, some sort of enclosed patio, with heavy tarp walls that could be rolled down to protect against weather or, in this case, shoplifters. I assume it's for events like wedding receptions or dinners where you'd love to have people enjoy the outdoor air, but don't want to be left out in case the monsoons arrive.

Still, there was more room. And more people offering things. We didn't quite find something compelling, including not finding someone to add to bunny_hugger's sketchbook of the pair of us. (Meanwhile I go into my eighth year of going to furry conventions again without any idea what a good sketchbook theme might be.) We did get to talking with a pair(?) about the new room, and how yeah, the space was great but sales were slow. Possibly because the dealer's den was at the end of a hallway past the main ballroom, and so off the line of traffic. Possibly because it was a hot day and even with the air conditioning and fans in the tent it was warmer than just hanging out inside.

I bought one of the guy's 3D-printed badges, something like Certified Furry Trash. bunny_hugger couldn't believe that I did that. But I got it to add to the bin of candy and dollar-store trinkets for the Raccoons and Procyonids SIG. That there was a ``prize worth ten dollars'' inside would become part of my promotional spiel. I made no attempt to grab it when we did tip open the bin because it's really so not my thing.

I forget what we did for lunch. At least once we went to one of the grease trucks that was out in the parking lot --- out where the fursuit parade left the building --- as I remember our lining up for crepes and bringing them back to hospitality to eat. There were a set of grease trucks there over the weekend, and that they were was one of the things we talked about with the guy at the Greymuzzles panel. Apparently since the end of Furlaxation Con he's gotten into the grease truck business and might have made a bid to be one of the vendors this weekend had his schedule allowed. They didn't have the Korean barbecue truck we'd so enjoyed at Cedar Point the year before, but that's all right. Not everybody can have that.

Trivia: Before 1848 Chicago had an ordinance prohibiting railroad depots within the city limits. Source: The Story of American Railroads, Stewart H Holbrook.

Currently Reading: Terrytoons: The Story Of Paul Terry and his Classic Cartoon Factory, W Gerald Hamonic. I mean, I appreciate Hamonic's thesis that people are so quick to underrate the Terrytoons that they don't actually watch them, and that's unfair. And it's fair to point out that Knighty-Knight Bugs, the Bugs Bunny cartoon that did win an animation Oscar, is a pretty weak entry and probably not as good as the Terrytoons nominee that year. But it comes across as a weird ... not quite sour grapes, but something along that line. So is arguing that, like, a Disney cartoon where Pluto spends a lot of time sniffing around being all inquisitive is charming, yes, but hasn't got jokes doesn't counter the argument that Terrytoons tended to not be so funny.

PS: Reading the Comics, June 16, 2018: No Panels Edition as my strip-reviewing productivity drops off again. Argh.

PPS: And how's things hanging at Casino Pier?

bunny_hugger sitting beside Casino Pier's seated clown on the bench and throwing a sign to feed the suspicion of our pinball friend MWS that we're secretly Jugalos.

Casino Pier hasn't got souvenir maps, not so far as I can tell. But here's a photo of the pier map for anyone interested in re-creating the place in Roller Coaster Tycoon. I can give a more close-up shot of stuff if you really want to know.

Viking statue standing beside the Ferris Wheel.

Still recovering from the trip and too overscheduled to get to writing up AnthrOhio's Saturday. I hope to be back on track for Friday. So here instead are pictures from ... not quite our next thing from our fifth anniversary trip, last year. The actual next thing had been visiting the Silverball Museum, but that only has a couple of pictures, most of them pinball backglasses, and I like having them but there's not so much interesting stuff or things to build narratives around about those. So here's the next thing, then.

Panoramic view of a wide, empty parking lot, with bunny_hugger at the edge, fiddling with her phone. But why is this an important place?

Because it's the municipal parking lot at the entry to Seaside Heights, New Jersey, where we spent our first real date, and where we formally became engaged, and where we spent our fifth wedding anniversary, in such perfect weather as this.

Part of Seaside Heights's charm is older, Midcentury Modern buildings and signs and stuff like that kept in fine shape yet. It's not as extreme or as awesome as Wildwood, but it's such a charming place to look at anyway.

Green line down the middle of Boulevard, if I'm not mistaken. I trust it's a festival thing.

Much of Seaside Heights as we fell in love was wrecked in the Superstorm Sandy, or in related incidents such as the fire that destroyed Funtown Pier (attributed, I understand, to wiring damaged in the storm). But there's also smaller things that change. We had stopped in this convenience store for pop on our perfect-date day in 2008 and here ... well, it's not there anymore.

But then we got finally to the Boardwalk! This is the view south, to Seaside Park and where Funtown Pier had been.

bunny_hugger peering north, toward the truncated-and-rebuilt Casino Pier, from about the same spot where we'd first laid eyes on it.

One of the local seagulls, in the four-tone deluxe livery.

Oh, and some redemption prizes that totally look not at all bootlegged, right? Anyway, what kid doesn't dream of going to the arcade weekend after weekend, slowly accumulating their tickets, until that glorious day that they can take a heaping pile of receipts up to the counter and come back home with a 12-inch electric skillet?

Trivia: Only 60,000 of the 800,000 shares in Ferdinand de Lessep's Panama Canal company were purchased at its initial 1879 offering. Source: The Path Between The Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870 - 1914, David McCullough.

Currently Reading: Terrytoons: The Story Of Paul Terry and his Classic Cartoon Factory, W Gerald Hamonic. OK, but seriously, look at this Wikipedia-grade heap of words in one alleged paragraph:

Tom Morrison also contributed plots and ideas on a sporadic basis. During this period Terry and Foster's ideas tended to make up the lion's share of each story. While the head of the department was John Foster, it was Paul Terry who was active as the headman making all final approvals on scripts. I Klein had returned to New York City in April 1940 and started his Terrytoons career about two weeks later. He got the job after he brought along a reel of his animation which he had completed in Hollywood. Terry offered him a job and then the two chatted about some laughs Klein received from an animated cartoon that he had seen the night before at a movie theater. The cartoon was about dinosaurs and cavemen and Klein described some of the gags. Terry listened to Klein with an amused smile.

No, I'm not sure which department Foster was the head of. I think it was story, but ... ? ... You know? I feel confident about the research and the granular facts, even if the citations are often people's interviews done by other animation historians in the 60s and 70s, but there's just no narrative here.