austin_dern

The snow that, we assume, killed ERR has almost melted.

This as we get into a streak of above-freezing days, at last. And as seasonal; lows above freezing are a little above average but not worrisomely above, the way December was. Just as we were getting into this seasonally appropriate warmth the kids in the house next door built a couple snowmen. They were great and barely lasted a day. I guess the snow was too cold to play in earlier.

Also on Monday there was some kind of work being done with the water main on our street. This I learned by unhappy surprise when I went to the bathroom. And had my hands all soaped up, too. Liquid soap but that's still gooey and unpleasant to have, and what would I do to get it off? Fortunately, here, I'd had less tea than usual in the morning, and still had most of the kettle on the stove. It was even still warm enough that rinsing in it wasn't frightful.

They got whatever the water problem was fixed after maybe two hours, and hey, now there's a patch nearly ten feet long by four feet wide on our street that's been repaved this half-century! Very slightly sorry there wasn't a bigger water issue.

Dollywood. Which will run out first: my pictures of our Monday there, or the month of February? It'll be a close-run thing but ...

The sign is correct: there's fun ahead. But almost all the fun is behind. This is us rushing to the last ride of the night, on Lightning Rod, because I screwed up and got us lost trying to find Big Bear Mountain. Lightning Rod's a fine coaster and I'm glad we got another ride on it but we didn't get near enough of Big Bear Mountain. Or anything else, really, but still.

The underside of Lightning Rod's launch station, giving you a vague look at the brakes and the spot where people toss their hair scrunchies.

After our ride; I think we got a front seat. Here's a ride operator grabbing and putting away the travel mugs of the people getting the final ride of the night. The Lightning Rod staff has special garage-mechanic-themed uniforms.

And the tail of the train for that last ride of the night. I think the person here might have been asking for her travel mug back.

Looking out at Jukebox Junction from the exit path, by night. The neon or LEDs Styled As Neon do look good.

Here's what it looks like on the ground. The Lockers have a weirdly 70s-science-fiction typeface for the theme of the area.

Trivia: In 1857, the year after Cleveland began drawing its water supply from Lake Erie, Clevelanders used eight gallons of water per person per day. In 1872 they were using 55. Source: Down To Earth: Nature's Role in American History, Ted Steinberg.

Currently Reading: Why War?, Richard Overy.

Friday night, wondering whether it might be less bother to just stay home and not, we went to RLM Amusements for our second tournament in a two weeks and our third in a month. This would also be the launch party for the new Dungeons and Dragons pinball machine. This would also, because people kept showing up, turn out to be the largest regularly-scheduled pinball event in Michigan history as far as anyone can tell: there were 64 competitors. Only some Pinballs At The Zoo and Babies Food Festival contests have had more competitors, and those are all multi-day events encouraging people attending some larger event to drop a couple scores in.

Also there: a preposterous amount of food, mostly desserts, including someone who'd decorated a large white cake into a pinball machine. This was an amazing piece of food art, reproducing very loosely the Dungeons and Dragons game layout with things like flippers made of cylinders of frosting, pop bumpers made of Oreos, and playfield lights made of candy corn. It was so beautiful people were terrified to cut it open and eat it, although someone overcame that fear before the night was out.

Not to spoil things but: I played lousy, winning only six games of the fourteen played in qualifying, and only two of them with actual good scores. Granting one of them was excellent, getting High Score #1 on the Alien pinball machine they somehow have. bunnyhugger played lousy too, winning only five games, although in a rare mercy we were never put up against each other. She did get the chance to play JTK, our pinball and amusement parks friend, although I only saw him in-between rounds.

There were consolations. Particularly they had so much stuff to give away in door prize drawings. bunnyhugger won a Dungeons and Dragons Essentials Kit, which her first impulse was to put into the door prize pool for her own upcoming D&D launch party. Her second impulse was, hey, what if we played this for fun ourselves? I won a velvet bag with dice inside. bunnyhugger's name was also called for a second prize, naturally when she was in the middle of playing a game, but that was because they failed to remove people's names once they won a prize, so that was just an innocent mistake.

Still, with all that, around 11 pm we were looking to head home because we'd fallen short of the threshold for moving on to the 32-person finals. And yet ... people kept dropping out because they did not want to stick around until the 3 am or whatever it would take for playoffs to resolve. (They would finish about 5:20 am.) It finally reached the point that people with a mere six wins were eligible, though the five of us still hanging around would compete for the one playoff spot remaining, and on Paragon. And yet, guess who got it, while bunnyhugger glared and asked, seriously?

And yeah, seriously. So, after a brief false start (one more person left and so two six-game-winners got to playoffs) we started the first three-game round of playoffs. Which were not required to include the Dungeons and Dragons game, fortunately, as it started suffering some mechanical problem that took it out of action for several hours. I quipped to RLM about how could anyone foresee it being impossible to get a group together to play Dungeons and Dragons, a crack bunnyhugger liked and that we think other people didn't understand. In RLM's case, possibly because of trying to manage a crazy huge tournament threatening to run forever.

I squeaked through the first round, despite the person picking games choosing Baby Pac-Man, the video game/pinball hybrid that RLM keeps in these tournaments because a couple people who like it really like it, wrongly. This one I got second place in, though, thanks in part to getting some tips and a basic strategy guide after complaining about the game last week on Mastodon. Also in getting lucky; two of the players were in striking distance of my score but blew it in the video game portion.

Still, between that and a win on Captain Fantastic --- an Elton John-themed electromechanical, and on which two of us broke the 100,000-point barrier, I made it into the second round, with only two rounds to come after that. The second round saw me thrown into the briar patch of Genesis, where I resumed my usual winning ways on it to put up more than two million points. Which took only second place because player one somehow managed to put up three million points, the rotter. But between second places on Genesis and Flash Gordon I was about where I want to be. If you land second place in every game you're all but guaranteed to move on in this format.

All the more exciting, the four of us had split the standings the first two games so that everyone could plausibly move on, making the last game as meaningful as possible. We played Alien, for my second time that night, and while I was as good at finding the shots as I had been earlier when I put up a high score table-worthy game, I couldn't play the modes worth anything. I got third place, just short of moving on. I would finish the night in a tie for 17th place of the 64 competitors and you know, I was good with that. Besides, it was already 1:30 am and we wanted to get some food and go home.

Once home we discovered that bunnyhugger had left her purse, with her wallet, her house and car keys, and her Switch, behind. I called RLM who was of course still there and established that the purse was there, and the other guy we knew from Lansing was not, and no, he wasn't figuring on happening to pass through Lansing in the next couple days. So, Saturday, I drove back, picked it up, congratulated RLM on having had such an insane event (he finished in second place), and caught up on a bunch of podcasts that had been clogging up my iPod. So all's well.

Next week's tournament probably won't be so massively overpopulated. But we all thought the 55 people at the tournament week-after-state-championship wasn't likely to be repeated either, so, who knows?

You know what is well, though, and known? More Dollywood, finishing the train ride.

Here we certainly are circling the Country Fair section; their elevated swings ride in the background. I don't know how serious the Yard Limit sign is, but there is a maintenance shed near there.

There it is! They have a second engine for the train, which wasn't running during our visit.

Here's that soap-bubbles Roadside Attraction, seen from behind. Also again seen without bubbles.

And we're done! We're off the train here. I forget what this building is, but it's pleasant-looking. Might be a small performance space.

Here's the Country Fair carousel, lit at the wrong exposure value for the circumstances.

Got that fixed. Here's the carousel again.

Trivia: Benjamin Livermore's mid-19th-century typewriter had only a half-dozen keys, each of which produced a straight line, with the superimposition of impressions used to build up each letter. Source: The Wonderful Writing Machine, Bruce Bliven Jr. Which, you know, that is an ingenious way to solve the problem of getting all the shapes you need without a too-complicated key mechanism and just imagine what computing would be like if that had been the system we settled on. There is something Apple Newton Handreader-like to its production though.

Currently Reading: Why War?, Richard Overy.

So, Dollywood. How about seeing a bit more of the train ride? Thought you might enjoy that.

So as you maybe guessed yesterday (I'm writing this before yesterday's even posted) the guys with a flock of Roombas were prepping the drone lights show. The red coaster in the nearest background is Big Bear Mountain and this is the far end of Wildwood Grove.

Huh, the mountains are smoking again. That's funny.

This picture misfired but I like the way it misfired, like it's getting an amusement park photo from the 80s or something.

Oh hey, got a nice view of Big Bear Mountain here.

And here's the train ahead of me blowing a bit of steam as it makes the big loop at the top of the mountain. Or as far up as it gets, anyway.

Really like the way steam clouds look even when it's 140% humidity.

Now I'm no train expert but I really feel like we should be on the tracks, not just near them.

Heading back down the mountain now. There's a couple views of Tornado hidden behind those trees.

And here we get a quick look at Mystery Mine.

And now here's a Big Bear Mountain train at one of the local peaks as the sun tries setting behind it.

Mere seconds later and the train's almost out of view and we have a different idea of what the track looks like.

Now a more ordinary-looking picture of Thunderhead.

Trivia: When married, in 1839, Charles Darwin had a marriage bond of £10,000, some £573 in the bank, and £36 in petty cash. When he died in 1881 his will showed capital holdings of £282,000. Source: The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations, Jacob Soll. William Darwin apparently ribbed his father ``did you ever expect to be worth over 1/4 of a million?'' which is surely the gentlest ribbing possible.

Currently Reading: Barcode: How a Team Created One of the World's Most Ubiquitous Technologies, Paul V McEnroe.

And then near the end of the workday bunnyhugger texted me with awful news. I was braced for a catastrophe with some beloved amusement park or ride and it was, in fact, worse.

ERR, one of the Lansing Pinball League members who became an old and indispensable hand roughly twelve seconds after learning there even was a league, died. From what information we have it appears to have been a heart attack brought on by shoveling snow, which is shocking on every count, not least that our experience is he had an abundant heart that was reaching out for the whole world, snow included.

It's especially hard to believe that we knew him barely over two years; his first pinball event was the 2022 Silver Balls in the City. He quickly found the league to be a friendly place and very well-set for his outgoing, inviting energy. More than once he roped people who were just hanging out in the bar into playing in a pinball tournament, and I don't remember offhand any of them taking up pinball as a new hobby, but a lot of people had experiences that are mostly fun if longer than they had realized would be. Still, it is good to have someone who'll welcome you into trying something you didn't know you might do.

bunnyhugger intends to hold a charity tournament in his honor when we can find the time and know who his family believes he would want to benefit. It's all very weird to imagine, though. This is the first time we've lost a friend from the pinball world. There've been a few acquaintances who died (like KOZ) and people we knew as celebrities who did (like Lyman F Sheats or Python Anghelo), but it's never before been personal.

Not the day I was hoping for.

Also: between when I wrote this and when it posted the Deep Tracks channel played Ray Davies's Kinks Choral Collection cover of ``Days'', which is unfair.

Well. I'd had Dollywood pictures ready anyway, so, how about seeing them.

Dollywood has shops, of course, and one of them is a candle shop. We were fascinated with the boot candles but, of course, have not the slightest use for one. Pictures are plenty.

It looks to us like they still make candles on-site there, the way Cedar Point did until their candle expert died a couple years ago.

They also (as Cedar Point still does) have 'blank' candles you can dip into any coating you like.

Here's a couple (Easter?) bunny ... uh ... I think they must be soaps, as there aren't any wicks to make them candles.

And nearby that is the glass-ornaments shop. Here's some nice glass bird orbs.

And some smaller figures, much like bunnyhugger has enjoyed collecting. Those are lemurs in the upper right corner but I understand your excitement too.

Trivia: France's King Louis XIV awarded to Jean Marius, inventor of the folding pocket umbrella, a royal privilege, giving Marius a five-year monopoly on making umbrellas. The fine for a knockoff was 1,000 livres, something like US$50,000. Source: The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafés, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour, Joan DeJean.

Currently Reading: Barcode: How a Team Created One of the World's Most Ubiquitous Technologies, Paul V McEnroe.

bunnyhugger in the first round of playoffs. She was put in a group of four for your classic PAPA-style playoff, three games and the top two point-getters moving on to the next round. (Winning a game got you four points, second place two points, third place one point, last place zero points.) One of the players, ALX, is new to tournament play --- the International Flipper Pinball Association doesn't list him having anything before four weeks ago --- and, must admit, he looked it. The other players in her group were MEW and AES, women she who intimidate her or worse, get in her head.

MEW has over the last year become a power player, making it into state finals in open and winning or coming in highly in a lot of high-value tournaments. AES, a more average player, meanwhile bunnyhugger feels beats her all the time. This is the power of selective memory: according to their IFPA records, they've been trading off the higher finish in both open and women's only tournaments with remarkable consistency. The last time either of them finished higher than the other two tournaments in a row was January-February 2024. Admittedly, AES finished higher both times.

So. MEW had the pick of all three games. First one was Jim Henson's Labyrinth and, as it was playoffs, RLM started up the live-stream to share with the public. MEW often commentates on these streams so perhaps for that, or perhaps to show off the new Labyrinth, RLM put the stream on that game. Nobody knows much about Labyrinth; it's from a boutique manufacturer and as often happens the grammar of the game is all weird. MEW either knows something or got lucky as she put up 35 million points, an easy win. But bunnyhugger put up six million points for a safe second.

MEW's next choice was Space Shuttle, the solid-state game that saved Williams Pinball in the 80s. Here MEW's usually deft touch failed her and she bottomoed out, coming in last and giving ALX his only point of the round. But AES had two great and one okay balls, taking the win. bunnyhugger took second place again. She would move on if she beat MEW, or if she finished at least one position ahead of AES.

The game: Getaway, luckily a game she knows and likes well enough and that she's played well several times that night, including in head-to-head competition. It also plays enough like the specific table at our local hipster bar that her reflexes are basically right for it. (Not perfectly. The other players all used this trick of letting the ball drain right away and let the ball save launch it back; this is a way to make progress to the next gear. Our home game has historically always had too short a ball save period for this --- it was pretty near useless --- so we would never try that.) She had a solid first ball that left her, MEW, and AES pretty near tied for the lead. (Poor ALX was outclassed.) MEW blew up the second ball, and the third, finishing well over 200 million points. But AES finished her last ball at only about 77 million, and bunnyhugger at 55 million could fairly reliably catch that, and have to do a playoff against AES to move on to the next round.

But, and to the shock of the commenters first and then us sitting around the table watching the stream a few seconds later, her last ball saw what should have been a shot up the left orbit to start multiball fail, and ping out of play, leaving her in third place. She was knocked out and AES took a second win in a row against bunnyhugger.

She cursed out her bad play, of course, but the fact is there really wasn't any bad play. The worst you can say is her second ball on Getaway was almost a house ball, but that happens to everyone sometimes. And she might have been better off, that third ball, shooting the Supercharger, which would have given her only something like eight million points but still, that's a good bit of the gap she needed to make up, and it's always easier to play when the gap you're trying to make up is smaller.

MEW would be knocked out the next round. AES just squeaked through the next, winning a tiebreaker to make it to the third and final round. She didn't win --- RLM did, with DOM taking second --- but, well, maybe next time. Just getting into playoffs is good, getting through a round would be great, getting into finals would have her well-set for the year to come. We'll see what happens.

The drive home was slow, partly because she accidentally left her travel mug behind and we had to return for it. But also because the snow had arrived, and it wasn't extremely heavy but the roads were slow --- I felt comfortable at about 45-50 miles per hour the whole ride home on normally 70 mph Interstates --- and now and then someone passed us, sending my windshield too near a whiteout for my liking. bunnyhugger's too. Had the forecast been clear that this would be the driving conditions, we likely wouldn't have set out.

Next Friday RLM's supposed to have the Dungeons and Dragons launch party, which is supposed to highlight the new game in the tournament in some way. It seems optimistic to suppose they'll be able to get everyone together to play Dungeons and Dragons the same night.

Now please enjoy some more pictures from the Wildwood Grove area of Dollywood, only this time by day.

Here's a view of the Big Bear Mountain tracks, seen from beneath a waterfall that runs (was built?) in front of them. Somewhere way past that is track for the train, too.

And now here ... well, in back you see the twists of the Big Bear Mountain coaster. But what about this little track in front? Are you thinking, as we were, Moose! Moose! Moose on the Loose?

Your thinking is correct! Much like at Darien Lake and at Festyland they have a steeplechase-style track with a single-rider car, in this case with a bear theme. It doesn't share as relentless a string of puns and recitations of ``Moose! Moose! Moose on the Loose!' as the ride at Darien Lake does, but the ride operator who sees you on the return has several good lines to toss at you.

Here's the station, with a bear ready for me to go out and you can see a bear coming around a curve returning someone. There's a lot of nice little scenes to look at along the way; it's a scenic ride, not a thrill one.

Then, here's a bunch of hoppy frogs. I bet this would have been one of my favorite rides as a kid.

From Wildwood Grove you get this view of both the Mystery Mine up front and the Wild Eagle coaster, behind.

Trivia: When Iowa applied for territorial status (granted in 1838) it sought a re-surveying of the border with Missouri, which had been intended (and was specified in the Missouri constitution) to run on the ``parallel of latitude which passes through the rapids of the river Des Moines'', but which as surveyed (in 1816) had curved northward on the east end (along the Des Moines river). Furthermore, there are no rapids in the Des Moines river. Source: How The States Got Their Shapes, Mark Stein. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled (in 1849) that there was no way to know what was meant by the Des Moines rapids but the curved line had been recognized as the border for so long that it should stay as that.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine Volume 53: Pturkey Island, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly, Editor Stephanie Noelle.

Last night we made our return to RLM Amusements for one of their weekly tournaments. We hadn't been able to get there a couple weeks running, because of other committments, but this looked like a perfect chance except for the winter storm advisory. A storm that would be starting in earnest around 11 pm would drop three to five inches on us and a similar amount on Grand Rapids, out where RLM Amusements is. However, as the week went on, the forecast snow kept starting later and later, and with a forecast of the snow not reaching a 50% chance of starting before 11 pm it seemed like maybe it'd be okay to go after all?

As with the previous time, qualifying was fourteen head-to-head matches between a randomly drawn pair who hadn't played each other before and on a randomly drawn machine. bunnyhugger and I both took losses our first round, an annoying start. But after that? I settled into a nice little winning streak, taking four wins in a row against players who, must be admitted, weren't playing very well. But that's all right, since a convincing win counts as much as a squeaker does, and I wasn't putting up very good games anyway, except for one Iron Maiden that I managed to pull out at the end. For a while, I was sitting on top of the rankings and though, wow, even if I just play 50/50 the rest of the night I'm a shoe-in for the playoffs.

Dear reader, I did not play 50/50 for the rest of the night. I lost the next five rounds in a row. I began to make a comeback, with wins on Jim Henson's Labyrinth (not his personal game, understand; the pinball machine just entered production last year) and on Genesis. That Genesis, though ... now, the weird mid-80s Gottlieb game Genesis is one of my pocket games, something I can almost always pull out a win on, and something I play extremely well. While I did win, it was not a good win; it was a bare minimum win, squeaking it out at something like 250,000 points, and if I can't put up 300,000 on Genesis you know I'm playing rotten.

Next round I was put on Baby Pac-Man, the weird hybrid pinball and video game and I got stuck against someone who kind of knew how to play; he managed to clear one whole board of the video game which is astounding. (Baby Pac-Man's maze does not have energizer pellets unless you do well enough on some deadly shots in the pinball game, and the monsters --- and Baby Pac --- all move faster so the maze is very challenging.) And, like, all the points of the game are in clearing mazes; the pinball is good for getting energizers and fruits, useless unless you gather them in the video game. I managed what was probably my best-ever Baby Pac-Man game, clearing like three-quarters of a board, and that might have beaten anyone except this guy who somehow knows how to play it.

And then my last round --- moot, as I had too few wins to make the playoffs --- was a loss, and on Torpedo Alley, a late-solid-state game I usually don't have three instant drains on.

What of bunnyhugger, after her first-round loss? I plan to tell you of that tomorrow.

Today, though, I plan to show you some more Dollywood pictures. Tomorrow too.

I assume that, this being February and me being in Michigan, texting DWPARK to 41274 won't get me any special offers anyway. But it's nice of them to invite me. Kids, this is what we used before there were QR codes on amusement park signs.

Looking up at the Firechaser Express launch station. I'm sorry not to have waited for the train launching. Still, this picture more than anything else loks like a screen grab from Roller Coaster Tycoon.

Your average walkway at Dollywood. Note how hard the misting spray is working to cool down anyone, because it was somewhere like 180 Fahrenheit out there.

Now here's that giant metal eagle statue previously seen by night.

Another angle on that eagle; it's quite broad and a natural thing for people to photograph themselves in front of.

I think I took about this same photograph by night before of Wild Eagle and of the Firechaser Express station from the other side.

Trivia: A 1523 decree issued at Nuremberg complained that over a hundred tons of ginger and two thousand tons of pepper had come into Germany from Lison alone, and that ``the king of Portugal, with spices under his control, has set ... prices as he will, because at no manner of dearness will they rest unsold among Germans''. Source: Food in History, Reay Tannahill. Tannahill doesn't say if the decree specified what time frame this was in, but it can't have been more than a quarter-century since the first Portuguese expedition reached India.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine Volume 53: Pturkey Island, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly, Editor Stephanie Noelle.

And this week? My humor blog? It had a lot of comic strip content. I hope that does you some good. Plus, I mention a very suspiciously active day of content extraction. Here's the highlights plus everything else:

• MiSTed: The 72 Hours Saga, Part 26
• Upcoming Animation Studio CinéGroupe Releases Ranked by How Much You Think I Made Them Up
• Statistics Saturday: Tony Danza Roles playing a guy not named Tony per year
• Is this the last Candorville? Is GoComics breaking everything? And what about Funky Winkerbean?
• Statistics January: Okay, if WordPress wants me to share statistics
• What's Going On In The Phantom? Why is Tony DePaul telling the Phantom Origin Story in detail? November 2024 - February 2025
• I Have a New Reaction
• MiSTed: The 72 Hours Saga, Part 27

Another day at Dollywood, another day of Dollywood pictures. Hope you're getting inspiration for how good your Roller Coaster Tycoon parks could look:

A long wooden aqueduct that I believe is part of the pan-a-bag-of-dirt concession; there's also a waterwheel somewhere along the way. It also serves as a natural divide between areas of the park which probably justifies putting so much material into a prop.

I don't believe that biplane flies anywhere.

This miscellaneous sign, describing what woods to use for what part of wagon construction, hangs outside a bathroom.

We're lucky we weren't visiting the Bright Sunshiny Day roadside attraction back during the storm! It would've been confusingly ironic.

Here is something I didn't know about, a bald eagle sanctuary, with a couple dozen eagles who can't be released for one reason or another. As you see, they're protected by a small version of that weird mesh Q tossed in front of the Enterprise but only in the first season.

This was the largest number of bald eagles I'd seen at one time ... until ...

Look at that! There's no less than ten in this one picture and I wouldn't be surprised if I'm undercounting.

Besides the eagles they have a number of other birds. Many of them are used in a show that we had just missed. Here's an African Pied Grow, if you don't parse the typeface correctly.

A bunch of, I assume, purchased commemorative bricks in front of the building. I'm assuming the 2008 Eagles were a local high school or college team and I guess they had a decent season?

Here's a turkey vulture that bunnyhugger wanted to pay special attention to, but there was something terrible coming ...

Yes, they were already closing up! Though it wasn't past 3 pm, I think, the birds had done all their public shows for the day and were being given their privacy.

I sure hope that's not filled with real mayonnaise as that would be quite the waste.

Trivia: By the submission deadline of the 30th of November, 1845, the British parliament had received eight hundred projected railway plans, seeking a capital of £258,009,000 (the Railway Commission estimated in 1847), close to the annual gross domestic product, with another 514 schemes that were not able to complete a proposal and promised to resubmit in the 1846 season. Source: The Age of Paradox: A Biography of England 1841 - 1851, John W Dodds. This does not count railway acts already approved during the mania.

Currently Reading: To Touch The Face Of God: The Sacred, the Profane, and the American Space Program, 1957 - 1975, Kendrick Oliver.

First, let me share a story comics recap and answer your questions like What's Going On In The Phantom? Why is Tony DePaul telling the Phantom Origin Story in detail? November 2024 - February 2025. And then, since again, not much has been happening, here's a double barrel of photographs. Here, from our Monday during that trip back in June, our full day at Dollywood.

The start of Monday, our full day at the park! So here's the usual picture of my car parked.

And then here's the rain. It came suddenly and it looked pretty nasty but fortunately only lasted ... maybe a half-hour or so.

So here's the end of the parking lot. We're not even to the metal detector yet.

Here, finally, we get to a little sanctuary, the metal detector booth, with an overhang where we could not be too wet for a while. There were some kids bouncing around in the puddles because kids don't mind being soaked to their skeletons.

While we were stuck here I noticed the security scanner device. Note how it's helpfully highlighted the baby carriage that the agent could only have seen by looking. Also, I'm unnerved that the device was at 26% power and it was barely past noon.

Finally the storm let up enough that we ran a little closer to the entrance and the bathrooms. Note the Doggywood building, where you could kennel your pet for the day.

Finally we got into the park, with the storm receding, and could try and wring ourselves out a little bit.

Also, we could eat: Dollywood's famous cinnamon bread. It's very good.

The cinnamon bread stand is right next to where that kites ``roadside attraction'', which looked particularly brilliant in the ultraviolet-rich overcast sky.

Here's a little gazebo stage we passed just in time to catch a performing trio, part of the Smoky Mountain Summer Celebration.

You might think the kid in the middle looks like he's eight years old. No; he's twelve, I think. Or was. But yeah, he'd just joined in performing a year or two before and was quite good at it.

We ended up sticking through the whole show, forming part of the nucleus of the audience, although we didn't buy a CD.

Trivia: In the fourth inning of a September 14, 1900, baseball game, Jack Doyle, George Davis, and Make Grady of the New York National League team (which would become the Giants) all stole bases against Chicago during Pink Hawkey's at-bat. There may be earlier instances of a triple steal. Source: A Game of Inches: The Story Behind the Innovations That Shaped Baseball, Peter Morris.

Currently Reading: To Touch The Face Of God: The Sacred, the Profane, and the American Space Program, 1957 - 1975, Kendrick Oliver.

Yesterday, I made my debut as a pinball commentator on a Twitch stream! One of the new regulars at our local league got seriously, hard-core, into playing pinball and combined the enough-money/job-that-needs-a-hobby-away-from mix into building up a camera rig. The original intent of that, he tells us, was recording his own play so he could get better at it. But then, if you have the camera rig, you can stream, so why not stream? So he brought the camera rig to the last couple pinball events at our local hipster bar. And then this time he also set up a separate camera and got wireless microphones so he could set up a commentary booth.

So, with the women's pinball club having its monthly tournament he brought out the full gear, including an iPad set up to the side as a telestrator, and after some false starts got it running. And, soon as I was free, called me over to join in as second chair.

How'd I do? I'd give you a link to the feed but I don't actually know which stream it was. After a bit of warming-up I think I got tolerable at nattering on with reasonable relevance, and keeping my gaze somewhere near the camera, though it's hard to resist looking at the computer screen with its live feed of, you know, the actual game. But my voice was muffled, partly because I was wearing both an N95 mask and a cover for that. It got better over the course of the stream, as I got more confident in enunciating, and also as I had to take off and reattach the microphone and ended up with it closer to my voicebox. In the future I might wear a KN-95 to comment instead, or might attach the microphone to my mask.

Also for future streams: sound balancing. There were three sources of sounds for all this. There's the commentators, there's the pinball game being played, and there's the ambient music of the bar. That last is beyond our control and, apparently, beyond anyone's control, because the bar plays whatever's on at about 5.5 on the Richter scale. Mostly this is okay because it's 80s New Wave songs and I'm not going to be tired of that, but it does mean that games near one of the bar's speakers are hard to hear.

The commentators booth --- actually the long table --- was far enough from any bar speakers to be okay. But on the stream it was mixed much lower than the game-and-bar audio were, so that even at my clearest my voice was lost under the game noise and stopping the world and melting with you or whatever. The people on stream didn't have any chance of hearing me ramble on.

The experience was nice enough, and I got the hang of drawing something on the telestrator without looking too distracted early enough. The guy's planning to bring the rig to pinball league Tuesday although since I'll be playing in league --- and he will too --- I don't know there's any place for a commentator. So it goes.

Now, we're getting nearer the end of the night at Dollywood, and you know what amusement parks do for early-summer nights?

Here's the Mystery Mine again, by night, under either the moon or a very high streetlight. I love the colors of light cast upon the ride, though.

And here we go! Fireworks! They had both fireworks and a drone show; the drones did some nice stuff like a butterfly that flexed its wings but it's fireworks that really interest us. The drones we can put up with as making it easier for parks to justify their fireworks budget.

Rollercoaster (1977) in Sensurround!

And here's a better-focused view of a firework behind the track of Mystery Mine.

Bigger and more exciting fireworks going on and you might see a mesh of lights rising up beneath it. That's the drones.

Here's the drones taking on the look of a spiral galaxy while one of the Mystery Mine trains zooms by. Sorry the photo is so out of focus but it's more interesting motion than those adjacent to it on the photo roll.

Trivia: Lord Palmerston's first term as British Prime Minister ended in February 1858 when he was defeated in an effort to strengthen the laws against foreign conspirators. Palmerston's move was in response to a demand by French Emperor Napoleon III, who was acting against the assassination attempt against him by Italian republican Felice Orsini. Source: The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848 - 1918, A J P Taylor. (Orsini had tried to assassinate Napoleon with a bomb made in Britain, and while Napoleon III supported Orsini's cause to a surprising measure, he didn't want a habit made of this sort of thing.)

Currently Reading: To Touch The Face Of God: The Sacred, the Profane, and the American Space Program, 1957 - 1975, Kendrick Oliver.

So before this continues you have to promise: you won't share a word of this with my father, all right? Because it would break his heart and you don't want to do that for a kind old man.

The sink. When last left, I'd broken the hot water shutoff valve and a professional plumber came in to replace it. And judged that he couldn't get the old faucets off so there was nothing to do but replace the old, broken sink with faucets rust-welded to the ceramic. With bunnyhugger's agreement I went sizing new yet cheap sinks. As you might expect for a vanity 33 inches wide --- you can find premade ones 30 or 36 inches wide, but never 33 --- the size was weird too, a couple inches bigger than almost everything in stock at Ace, Menard's, or Lowe's. Except for one, which, happy to say, was also the cheapest. We're happy for that not just for money reasons but also because we intend to do the big bathroom renovation in the coming year, after the big plumbing renovation.

And, sink replacement. My father was extremely happy with the prospect that I'd do something as plumbing-complex as replacing a sink. In principle, this isn't actually complex: unfasten the sink from underneath, pry it up, drop a new one in place, and reconnect everything again. Sinks are extremely standardized in pipe sizes and relative placement and where they aren't, it's in things like the service lines to the faucets that flex and can be easily fit to place.

But after the fiasco of my faucet replacement, my heart wasn't in it. I scheduled a plumber's appointment and we got him coming in a week ago Thursday. In the late morning, luckily away from any of my online meetings with coworkers. Also, awkwardly, about the time that bunnyhugger (who'd had a later night) got up and needed to use the lone bathroom, which was out of commission. (We probably could have asked the plumber to clear out a minute but at that point he'd been in the house long enough to make it awkward that she hadn't been obviously around all along.) She made it through with her dignity intact.

And not a couple hours later we had a brand-new, gleaming white sink with chrome faucets, something looking better than it ever will again. And it's so good. The water turns on, and off, easily and completely. The basin's more rectangular than the oval we'd had --- I couldn't find the shape of sink we used to have --- but it also seems a little deeper, and between the depth and the smoother flow --- no half-broken semi-rusted aerator turning our water flow turbulent --- I'm even splashing less water around. If you can imagine me leaving the sink not looking like an otter was playing there.

It's more than a week now and the novelty and smoothness and delight of it hasn't worn off. And, gads, it's so amazing how it is to first, have a longstanding problem solved, and so good it feels to have something be solved relatively easily. There's no spinoff issues, no side effects, just, things dramatically improved. Who knew that could happen?

And now I bring you pictures, as we get to the newest roller coaster at Dollywood:

And here's that promised roller coaster. At least, part of the entry, which has a theme of trying to find the big bear rumored in the area. Thus the sign promising the hint of a bear. The claw scratches remind me of those on Rougarou's sign, at Cedar Point, but that's probably because claw scratches all kind of look alike this sort of thing.

Big Bear Mountain roller coaster passing by a nice little hill.

Here's the queue, our longest wait for anything our whole one-and-a-half-days visiting. Even so the queue area wasn't filled up, testament to how lucky we were with the whole trip.

Part of the waiting area is a bunch of stuff about the big bear sightings and signups to go on the search for it and also reminders that you shouldn't be doing this for real, leave bears alone, they got enough problems.

Despite the sign pointing to the bear, they wanted you to go that way too.

And here's finally the station; there's a train just about to leave. And it's got headlights, to match the ride's offroad-vehicle-expedition kayfabe.

Trivia: In the 1761-62 sea trials of John Harrison's H.4 chronometer, sailing from England to Jamaica, the clock lost only five seconds on the way out, a navigational error of only one and a quarter nautical miles. Source: Time's Pendulum: The Quest to Capture Time - From Sundials to Atomic Clocks, Jo Ellen Barnett. Barnett says that including the return leg the clock lost not more than two minutes, and thirty miles, but doesn't say how much more. The phrasing does make it sound like the trip out got lucky.

Currently Reading: Infinite Cosmos: Visions from the James Webb Space Telescope, Ethan Siegel.