austin_dern

Yeah, sorry, I don't have it in me to write about anything still. Here's Eclipse Day photos, bringing my Giant Wheel ride to an end.

From slightly lower down here's the E-Calypso. Can't tell if it's in motion; it was bright, once the sun was back.

Looking out roughly north, to the Wild Mouse, Windseeker, the Breakers hotel and in the far distance, Magnum XL 200.

And here I just got a picture of one of the other cars and the people behaving themselves in it.

Peeking out over the edge to see MaxAir, the Lakeside Refreshments that are always, always closed, and some of the backstage areas behind the midway games. You can also get some idea of how vacant the parking lot was.

Here's MaxAir midway through its swing. In the background you can see the Blue Streak coaster.

Oh yeah, on the other side of the car there's ... well, Lake Erie looks nice, doesn't it?

And here's a look straight down from about the top of the wheel.

Less straight down but looking out toward E-Calypso, the Himalaya, and in the upper right corner Snoopy's miniature bumper cars ride (the covered building) and the rest of Planet Snoopy beyond that.

So if you want to calculate exactly what time of day I took this picture, here's your shadow lengths for you.

Looking roughly west, to see the roller coasters (left to right, roughly) ValRavn, Millennium Force, Top Thrill 2, Iron Dragon, Corkscrew, Steel Vengeance, and Magnum.

Back on the ground! The Grand Pavilion had its entrance covered with constellation art, here.

And this is just a nice view of the Matterhorn, with the young plants readying for the year.

Trivia: A story in The Christian Science Monitor during Woodrow Wilson's incapacity claimed the Supreme Court was willing to issue a write of mandamus directing Vice-President Thomas Marshall to act as president. It is not clear where the Monitor got the claim from; the Supreme Court does not have original jurisdiction in cases like this and it was not clear whether (in the pre-25th-Amendment days) the issue of presidential inability was something courts could decide. Source: The Year We Had No President, Richard Hansen.

Currently Reading: who am I kidding I might never read again.

I apologize for punting again on writing up our Halloweekends visit or explaining more about our new rabbit but yesterday we had a pinball tournament (bunnyhugger won B Division, story to follow) and then something taking up today (story to follow) so please instead take some more pictures of Eclipse Day:

bunnyhugger packing up her gear as the Moon continues its work of leaving the Sun's direction.

Finally, something to eat! Some eclipse cakes from the Grand Pavilion that kind of melted in the heat of the still-obstructed sun.

Astronomy types having fun with their gear and the waning hours of the eclipse. We were there through to fourth contact, that is, the point where the trailing edge of the Moon leaves the disc of the Sun.

Slightly wider view of the astronomy types. In the background you can see the camera gear of news crews. In the farther background you can see the new spire for Top Thrill 2, weeks away from opening and closing for the year.

A view we couldn't have had before the Grand Pavilion was built: looking through the Giant Wheel past the Kiddie Kingdom carousel through Raptor (the green roller coaster with the loop) to Blue Streak (the wood roller coaster with the little hat building seen in the middle of Raptor's loop).

They were taking cards for a Time Capsule so I did a quick little sketch that would surely baffle people decades from now if anyone were to remember there was a Time Capsule. (They're almost certain not to.)

Still, no reason there can't be someone at Cedar Point 75 years from now, right? Here's where they were passing out cards --- the front is for saying who you are and what you're thinking about; I used the back to draw Austin hugging BunnyHugger --- and collecting them.

Scenic backdrop in case you wanted to be photographed in front of their Total Eclipse logo.

Back to rides! Here the Wild Mouse gives up its passengers to that cat who's definitely not Tom and Jerry's Tom because he's Herman and Katnip's Katnip-colored.

Nice steep angle looking up to the Wild Mouse platform.

There's seven cars, one for each of six mice and one cheese car. Ziggy's up front here and Chase, who insists he's the head mouse, is coming up behind.

Another bit of eclipse trivia. I didn't see any of the beads but there was a lot to look for at the moment, you know?

Trivia: In 1972 the Auto Body Association of America declared astronauts Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt honorary members for life, following their ad hoc repair of a dust-blocking fender on the Apollo 17 lunar rover. Source: Across the Airless Wilds: The Lunar Rover and the Triumph of the Final Moon Landings, Earl Swift. Swift notes the organization, or at least its president, was in Neptune City, New Jersey, which in this context I'm sad to say was named for the ocean god rather than the planet. Also I was sad about that when I was a kid, too.

Currently Reading: Images of America: Lake Shore Electric Railway, Thomas J Patton, Dennis Lamont, Albert Doane.

Before leaving for Halloweekends I asked bunnyhugger if she'd had the mail held, enough times that she was ready to throw the mail at me. But she had, and good thing too as it turned out we had packages coming not quite all the time we were away, but close to it.

The current head of the Post Office is a Republican corporate hack, but I repeat myself, and when you put a corporate hack in charge of things their mission is to degrade it to the point it can be sold off for parts. After our mail hold began on Thursday bunnyhugger got the notice that a package had been delivered. This after we'd reasoned that it would be the same letter carrier delivering packages as regular mail and surely he'd have seen the hold notice. Perhaps he would have; we came home to about a day's worth of slightly rained-on mail in our box. No knowing whether that was from Thursday, Friday, or Saturday, though. Our package was not there when we returned, and so we concluded someone stole it.

Meanwhile she got an e-mail that another package had been held for pickup, owing to our mail hold, but not tracking information or specifics about what post office or mailing facility held it. There was also at some point a warning of another package that had gone out for delivery but was sent back to the Detroit sorting center because of the mail hold. I may have some of the details of this wrong but trust me: there is no way to tell and no way it matters.

Come Monday, we did not get the big bundle of held letters with the mail-hold request receipt rubberbanded around it. Nor did we get any packages. Tuesday, however, I came home to find many packages slumped against the side door. This included the Monday box (from my parents) which had been held somewhere without delivery instructions, the Tuesday-or-later box which turned out to have come from Lansing itself, and the Thursday box which we had supposed was stolen after sitting on the porch all weekend. Also something else that I forget what. Point is, everything that was supposed to come, came, but not in any way that makes sense. Still, probably good that we didn't start calling the postmaster to holler at people. Yet.

... Did I mention that two weeks ago bunnyhugger's parents got a card she sent them for Thanksgiving 2023, by the way?

Enough of the delayed mail. Here: enjoy delayed pictures of the Eclipse at Cedar Point.

bunnyhugger fiddling with her gear, trying to get the camera set up before totality sets in.

Remember how much brighter A Totality Of Fun was in the first pictures of the event here? That's how much the park's lighting had dimmed. I think by now they'd stopped running rides, as well, so people could focus on not seeing the sun.

I wondered about that airplane there. Hope the passengers were on the right side to see the eclipse out the window.

Darkness coming to the entry plaza. You can barely see the bathroom anymore.

bunnyhugger has her tripod more or less set up and has eclipse-filter paper strapped over the lens, so we're ready.

Here she's juuuuuuust checking. On her shoulder is a cute little seagull plush with a magnetic pin so you can put it on your shoulder and have it stick there as long as you don't walk fast or lift your arm for any reason. It sits on our fridge now.

And ... oh, uh, there's a woman running to the bathroom with about two minutes before totality.

bunnyhugger can not believe someone's going to miss totality for the chance to pee. (Yes she can.)

Here's darkness rolling in on us!

I loved the strange way the cloud cover looked as darkness came from the center of the sky rather than the horizon where it ought.

We're almost there, it's just seconds away from ...

At last! The Sun races across the sky hoping to evade the hungry Moon dragon!

Trivia: Besides being Canada's first astronaut, Marc Garneau was the first Canadian to be capcom; he served as capcom for seventeen Space Shuttle missions. Source: Canadarm and Collaboration: How Canada's Astronauts and Space Robots Explore New Worlds, Elizabeth Howell.

Currently Reading: Miscellaneous comic books.

With it being late October it won't surprise you to know we went to Cedar Point for a Halloweekends trip. You might even expect we went for the full four-day weekend since they're open a partial day Thursday and a full day Fridays now. This is not to surprise you any further about that. But I have a pretty full schedule the first two days of this week so I haven't got time to really get into the narrative.

I'll tease things with an incident that happened while driving down to Sandusky, though. Getting off the Ohio Turnpike I paid my toll (five dollars! I remember when I wasn't sure if it was $3.75 or $4.00) and started rolling off, trying not to hold up traffic, when my tire bumped the concrete island and there was this crunching noise that brought bunnyhugger to full alert. I had bumped into the curb surrounding the toll booth hard enough that it damaged my hubcap. I'd expected it was broken; turns out, it was broken off entirely. So, about six months after getting one missing hubcap replaced, I have a new missing hubcap. There's probably somewhere I can just buy replacements.

That teased, now, let's get back to Eclipse Day at Cedar Point so this entry can be tagged Cedar Point for multiple reasons:

The community coloring sheets were subject to people putting in their own whimsy, like this happy-looking gator peering out from somewhere among the tracks of ... I'm going to guess GateKeeper?

And here folks have added their own Charlie Brown and a couple Snoopys hovering in space above Top Thrill Dragster 2. Pretty good Charlie Brown and a respectable set of Snoopys.

The news has arrived! They weren't going to miss the eclipse if they could help it.

Here's crews setting up on the balcony of the Grand Pavillion building on the Boardwalk. I don't want to tell them their business but they're pointing those cameras north.

Well, maybe they're getting some B-roll footage of Wild Mouse. They'll probably find the eclipse when it comes to happen.

More cameras all pointing north. You can see Magnum XL 200 (not operating) in the background.

Also look at that pristine beach with like no footprints on it.

Also suspiciously few seagulls on the beach. I guess they're all getting their work done before the eclipse.

The Sun, as seen through a light layer of clouds that were just enough to give us a sunbow! That's exciting.

Gear set up here from Spectrum News 1, from whatever the heck Channel 19 news is, and from JJ's sandwiches.

Looking out from the balcony at GateKeeper, doing its part of handling a lot of people passing through quickly. GateKeeper's great at that.

And here's the DJ, at that moment playing to very few people in the dance area. She had a 1970s-grade shiny miniskirt on.

Trivia: About 38 percent of meteorites landing on Earth are chemical matches for the Flora family of asteroids, of which 13 thousand members are known. The largest, 8 Flora, is about 180 kilometers in diameter. Source: Asteroids, Clifford J Cunningham. (It was, as the name suggests, the eighth asteroid discovered. It's probably the asteroid that causes the trouble in MST3K pilot-episode film The Green Slime.)

Currently Reading: A couple of comic books I picked up a couple weeks ago. Don't worry about them.

Still waiting in pictures for the sun to disappear, April 2024:

The edge of the world! Or the edge of Cedar Point's eclipse event, anyway, with nobody allowed past those fence posts ... you'd think ...

Another eclipse factoid that turned out to be quite true; it's amazing how cold it got so fast.

Looking out along the midway at Raptor, one of the majority of coasters that wouldn't be open for a month yet. Also those trees at top of the picture; we don't usually see them that bare and if we do, it's because of Halloweekends and a chilly autumn, which this was very much not.

The Length of totality is one of those fascinating things that reveals how complicated the Earth-Moon-Sun thing is. This eclipse would have about four minutes' totality and it did seem a little like down-selling their own event that the next really long eclipse would be the July after this.

Some of the Kiddie Kingdom rides. Turns out they were disassembled for winter safekeeping and not yet put back together.

bunnyhugger gets a picture of her favorite rabbit on the Kiddie Kingdom Carousel.

Here's what she looks like riding it, except for not being in motion yet.

The paw of the rabbit mount that I rode, showing off how rabbits don't have paw pads.

bunnyhugger's rabbit. I'm not sure I had before paid attention to the front paws being different colors.

And what the heck, a look up at the underside of a carousel animal on the ride. As long as it was a day we had time to putter around like this.

And here's the Kiddie Kingdom carousel building enjoying its unusual spring working day.

One of the Kiddie Kingdom rides running was this spaceships ride.

Trivia: Ptolemey is recorded as having made two attempts at working out a map projection, an ``inferior and easier'' method and a ``superior and more troublesome'' one. The ``inferior and easier'' is a classic grid mapping. Source: On the Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks, Simon Garfield. (Wikipedia says there were three in his Geography, but maybe his comment was made when he was only partway through his work. In any case none of the actual maps he'd drawn survived and everything we know about it is from text-based reconstructions.)

Currently Reading: The Life of Lines, Tim Ingold.

Timeless as the totality seemed, it still ended pretty fast. After we saw enough of the crescent sun back to be sure the rest was coming, we fiddled with the tripod some more to discover what the levers and dials we hadn't understood would do, learning information we're sure to have forgotten by the next time we need them. Then we packed it all up and set it in the car, to return to the park, not sure it or anything would ever feel quite the same.

Also the music resumed, after what seemed like the DJ having a disagreement with someone about what they were going to be doing and when. The thing that stood out to me was playing some song where the refrain was about being like a ``total eclipse of the sun''. We didn't know what it was. I guessed it might be some nerdcore thing what with how much it talked about the eclipse. But I wasn't sure; the production was a little too ... not nerdcore, and the lyrics I could make out were doing non-nerdcore things like using metaphor. Turns out this was a Don McLean song, ``Total Eclipse of the Sun'', which I hadn't heard before but which had only come out in 2018. It explicitly references the eclipse of 1963 which would be the one made famous by Peanuts.

Something we did need to do was eat; breakfast was hours and a lifetime ago. The Boardwalk Pavilion was less crowded now but still had Cedar Fair's usual chicken-oriented meal. We went to the upstairs, getting pop and some eclipse-themed cakes that we took out onto the patio overlooking the park. The free seats were just behind the roped-off area where Detroit TV news was filming, and where people with telescopes and cameras were doing serious astrophotography stuff and listening to radio timers counting down to fourth contact and everything. This was compelling watching and we kept listening to the point that our cakes started to melt, the frosting on top became a mess a little too sticky for the napkins we had on hand. This wasn't all that long, maybe ten minutes or so, but it tells you something of how warm it was despite the eclipse.

And we returned to riding. The notable one here was the Wild Mouse, which was up and running again and had a line that wasn't any too bad. We missed the cheese car, which park legend already says gives the best spin, but that's all right. We'll get it again someday. (We still haven't ridden all six mice.)

Toward the end of the day we split up, remarkably. bunnyhugger wanted to take photos with her film camera. She hadn't dared risk the eclipse to that --- digital was safer on every count --- but just to see what Cedar Point looked like on film? And better, on the weird color-shifting film that she's only this week brought in to be developed? Irresistible.

I was up for that, but I wanted to do something bunnyhugger will do only once in her life. That's ride the Giant Wheel. (bunnyhugger will probably ride the giant Ferris wheel if they ever announce it's to close or be moved from the park, but until then why invite trouble?) But I don't have such reservations. I think this is also going to be the year that I ride Windseeker, alone.

I could not ride the Ferris wheel alone. The park insisted someone else ride with me and this ended up being a man and woman whom, fortunately, the eclipse had given us a many-faceted thing to talk about. They had good pictures from their cell phones. Hrmph. But they'd had a wonderful time, and I had too, and it was grand soaking in the sharing of new happy memories.

This is also where I learned about the VIP package for people willing to walk onto the top of ValRavn. I had seen people there and assumed they were park employees or something. I also learned that Top Thrill Dragster's new incarnation, Top Thrill 2, was doing test runs. And so it was; I saw the cars going up the new tower and back down again. The ride was not open, of course --- it was far outside the Boardwalk area reserved for the event, and they weren't done testing --- but we could imagine how in only a few short weeks, this ride would be going.

Top Thrill 2 has already stopped, the ride halted for an indefinite time while Cedar Point rejiggers something or other that's not running like they want. New roller coasters always need a shakedown.

By the time my ride was done, and I had found bunnyhugger, it was already the 6 pm close of the park. We'd had a weekend full of everything we could have hoped for, other than White Castle Impossible burgers, and we were ready to set out, get them on the drive, and be home by like ten or eleven, even if we diverted to bunnyhugger's parents to pick up our pet rabbit.

We would divert to pick up our pet rabbit. We would not get White Castle burgers: by the time we got to the one in Ypsilanti, they were done selling Impossible burgers for the night. Also we would not be in by ten, or eleven, or even midnight.

This because of --- remember that warning sign about Eclipse Traffic? I didn't think anything of it Monday all day, since, after all, we didn't encounter any noticeable traffic going into Ohio and it's only as many people coming out as would have gone in. Plus, we were driving back hours and hours after the eclipse was done. When we reached the I-75 exit of the Ohio Turnpike and saw every car in the world stopped for that, well, I just thought it was weirdly heavy and probably reflected some nasty accident or something right off the exit.

Then we got to our exit, for US 23 north, and ... how extremely slow it was. And heavy. Traffic came to a stop now and then, yes, but more often it was moving at something like 20 to 30 miles an hour, on a road normally going two to three times that. It took me a very long while to sink in that this wasn't a small-scale thing owing to construction or an accident or something. This is because of everyone in Ohio trying to get to Michigan that evening. bunnyhugger checked her phone and found that the traffic substantially cleared up past I-94, up at Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti (and also the road to take to get to western Michigan).

So, after far too long --- we had got nearly all the way to Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti anyway --- we diverted from US 23 and took goodness knows what roads back, at least to fail to get White Castle and then to get past I-94. And, eventually, home, going back to normal stuff like bed and work and our rabbit and everything like that. And thinking over about how that all happened.

But enough of the eclipse, I hear you grumbling. What about the Gilmore Car Museum and that freaky-looking electric car in bumblebee yellow? Are we going to get any more views of that? Yes, yes we are. Consider:

So yeah, here's that 1980 Comuta-Car electric vehicle, which looks like nothing so much as a Cybertruck with dignity.

So why did the two-seater Comuta-Car not take off, besides selling for four thousand bucks in 1980 (about what a Honda Civic would cost you) and having a range of almost forty miles and top speed of forty miles an hour and, oh, wait, I think I'm hearing it now.

So the museum is not just the one building. It's many buildings, with themes. For example across the way on the left is the Lincoln building, based on a specific Lincoln dealership, and on the right a Franklin ``dealership''.

Anyway here's your classic old Cadillac runabout. How many cars these days you see give you a tonneau? Nah, you have to bring your own or do without.

Here's the start of the tail fins for a 1962 Cadillac; they continue the next room over.

But you do have to love that classic LaSalle dashboard, with simple dials and a bold lettering style and a clock that I am sure never, ever once had the correct time on it. (Ask your parents. For some reason dashboard clocks never worked and we were all fine with that?)

Trivia: There is more time --- 365.24237 days --- between two March equinoxes than --- at 365.24201 days --- between two September equinoxes. Source: The Calendar: The 5000-Year Struggle to Align the Clock with the Heavens --- And What Happened to the Missing Ten Days, David Ewing Duncan. (Using the Earth's orbit of the year 2000 as reference. This year's numbers will vary slightly.)

Currently Reading: Your Pinball Machine: How to Purchase, Adjust, Maintain, and Repair Your Own Machine, B B Kamoroff.

PS: What's Going On In Judge Parker? Did 'Ann Parker' kill that guy? February - May 2024 is the article, but a lot of grumping about the story is what I wrote. Enjoy?

Total Eclipse of the Point saw only a small segment of Cedar Point opened, but enough for a couple hours to spend there. The first few days a park is open are notorious for operational issues --- mostly, everyone's out of practice --- but we didn't notice any serious issues with the operations. The only hang-up was that the Wild Mouse stopped several times over the day, sometimes long enough that people applauded when it started running again. But that's also something endemic to new roller coasters, and at not quite a year old Wild Mouse is still new.

And there was a treat at Wild Mouse besides that it was up and running most of the day. Outside the ride are panels showing each of the six mice. For the day, these panels had eclipse glasses on.

The park had some educational stuff set up, with posters explaining things like Bailley's Beads and shadow bands and such. Near GateKeeper also was set up a huge table with a craft project, a dozens-of-feet-long coloring-book style rendition of their Total Eclipse ... logo, and the crayons for people to color in. Many of the adults (bunnyhugger included) took on themselves the task of coloring in the fiddliest boring parts of the outlines, leaving the easier and more fun segments for the kids who were sprawled out over the project.

Most of the midway games were not up and running. There were a couple, though, offering eclipse novelties. These were even set up as play-until-you-win games, ring-bottle tosses and the like, which makes it just a purchase with a game attached. We didn't get to any of those but bunnyhugger did see and buy one of the novelties. This is a tiny plush of their Steve Seagull character. (In the past couple years Cedar Point has started marketing a doll based on the seagulls who are happy to snag fries, or whatever other foods you have. They've gotten a Squishmallow of Steve, which bunnyhugger has, fries in beak; there's also trading buttons with the theme of Steve photobombing the regular button.) The novelty here is that the doll comes in two parts, with a small magnetic base that fits under your clothes so this Steve sticks to your shoulder. Not well enough to endure a ride, no, but well enough to walk around in. Steve has, back home, become part of the small collection of things attached to the fridge and I'm sure he'll get some other outings.

Speaking of fries, we did wonder what food at the park was going to be like. Mostly it was closed, with only the Boardwalk Pavilion open. And there we learned that our season passes were not good for food or drink purchases. (They did offer a discount on merchandise, though, such as the magnetic Steve doll or a hypothetical t-shirt.) The main restaurant on the first floor was badly overloaded. There were snack stands on the second floor, though, offering moon pies and eclipse cakes and stuff like that, which we would end up eating at. Also selling pop.

I think it was while we were atop the Pavilion, seeing how much space had been reserved for people (including news crews) with serious cameras, that we first looked at the sun through eclipse glasses and saw the sun was chipped on one side. The eclipse was really happening, and we could see it.

Fooled you all with the talk about pinball tournaments and amusement park trips. The next thing on my photo roll was our trip to the Gilmore Car Museum so please be ready to see a lot of picture of cars you'll never know anyone who owns!

Going inside. The place turned out to be larger and better-furnished than I expected. You see what a substantial building just the entrance center here is. You can maybe notice how elaborate the brick work is, decorative touches authentic to the early-20th-century era that reflects most of the cars inside this particular building and that an architect of today would probably do without.

Here that cartoon kid from the Fallout video games encourages us to get a museum map. Fair enough; there's a bunch of buildings to see.

They call this exhibit Supercars but I don't remember any of these from any Gerry Anderson show.

I think we all remember this vehicle from the Monopoly board piece.

This may seem like quite a lot of patents to be bragging about on your car frame but please remember that in the early days of auto companies the only revenue stream was suing each other for Selden patent violations.

Either the heavily-patented car from the previous image or possibly a prototype for the George Pal Time Machine.

Trivia: In 1877 --- five years after Western Union implemented a system to transfer money by telegraph --- it was used to send almost $2.5 million in 38,669 separate transactions. Source: The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's Online Pioneers, Tom Standage.

Currently Reading: The Diplomacy of the American Revolution, Samuel Flagg Bemis. Sorry, the book mentioned John Adams's ``umbrageous'' experience wirg Charles Gravier de Vergennes and my goodness how have we not done more with that word over time?

When we got up, Eclipse Day, besides finding breakfast I also found my house keys. They were in the pocket of my messenger bag, where I had set them; I just usually put them in this deep pocket instead. That was a nice minor anxiety relief; not that I thought it likely that my anonymous keys, lost somewhere in Ypsilanti or Maumee or Sandusky, would let someone divine their way to our house in Lansing and rob it. Just that it would be a hassle to make do with one set of keys on Tuesday until I could get them copied.

The hassle we anticipated: reading that traffic was going to be unspeakably bad everywhere near the path of totality. Our hotel was in Sandusky but still a good twenty minutes or so in normal traffic away from Cedar Point. We allotted an hour to get there around the park's opening of noon and, what do you know, it took like twenty minutes to get there. I suppose everyone in Sandusky figured they had a good enough view of the sky.

And the sky was looking beautiful and clear, the forecasts of a two-thirds chance of clouds notwithstanding. The perfectly clear skies of noon would not last, but the change wasn't that important. By the time the eclipse started there'd be a light haze, which would have spoiled our view of the transit of Mercury, but there isn't going to be a transit of Mercury the same day as a solar eclipse until July of 6757.

As we approached the park we saw the place decorated with signs and posters for ``Total Eclipse of the Point''. The name's inevitability did not keep bunnyhugger from protesting that ``Total Eclipse of the Park'' would preserve the sound of the original lyric. She's right, but Cedar Point has been using ``The Point'' as a nickname too long to switch to ``The Park'' for a day. The employee at the parking lot scanned our printed-out tickets (I'm still old-fashioned enough to trust holding on to a piece of paper instead of to the phone, the presense of which I tap my pocket to check every 75 seconds), welcomed us to the event, and handed us a parking slip to put in the windshield, a bright red page with a Cedar Point logo and giant E that will someday be a souvenir whose origin we don't remember at all. With Cedar Point selling only a small number of tickets, and our getting there early, there were few parking spots taken, and we got one right up by the fence between regular and Premium parking.

bunnyhugger wondered whether she should bring in her sunglasses and I quipped that no, today she would not need them. The logic of my joke did not prevent me from putting on sunscreen, though.

Now here's those Indiana Beach photos I had planned to post last night for you:

The Musik Express at full speed, more or less. Also with the lights on, so you can judge how those eight-pointed stars with the two points missing look.

And Falling Star, which is near the Musik Express, also by night. The background star neither rises nor falls.

Near the entrance to the Hoosier Hurricane. Also Rocky's Rapids, the main drop of which sends water splashing onto the walkway here. It hadn't been raining that hard, there just had been that many boats. Makes the place look nice and cinematic, though, doesn't it?

More of the cinematic street lighting outside the roller coaster and log flume.

And now the real fun begins: the Fascination parlor! Small crowd, unfortunately, and we only had time for a couple of games.

bunnyhugger is ready, though. You see the five-by-five grid of holes; the objective is to cover rows or columns --- or if the game calls for it, other patterns --- as in Bingo, by rolling a rubber ball down the lanes.

Trivia: In the 1950s Famous Studios offered employees five dollar bounties for good punny cartoon titles. Source: Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons, Leonard Maltin.

Currently Reading: The Diplomacy of the American Revolution, Samuel Flagg Bemis.

So as mentioned in my excuse yesterday we were at Cedar Point for the eclipse. The park hosted a special ``Total Eclipse of the Point'' event, with tickets that our season passes weren't valid for. bunnyhugger had leapt on the chance for them when they came out and from there we had just to hope the clouds wouldn't be too heavy. The morning was beautiful and almost cloudless, but as totality approached a light haze rolled in. Fortunately, not too much, and through the park-provided eclipse shades you couldn't even notice anything.

We set up just outside the park's entrance, with bunnyhugger putting her big digital camera and its nice long lens with a shielding foil wrapped around it. I stuck to the camera I've used for almost all my pictures for seven(?) years now, occasionally putting the park's eclipse shades over the lens so I could take a blurry, unfocused picture of the sun. My camera has been getting more dodgy about zooming and auto-focusing lately and maybe I should have gotten it fixed before now. (And if that weren't enough I dropped it on the concrete a few minutes before totality, although it seemed to survive all right, far as I could tell.)

For much of the approach of totality it was just a sun that, through the shades, had less of itself in there. But in the last couple minutes the skies darkened, but around the zenith, staying bright on the horizon, in a way you never see in the world. Then totality came and everything felt strange and different. It was gorgeous. The Moon looked like it was hanging weirdly in the sky, like it was defying physics. It wasn't, of course, but you never see the Moon against something of similar visual heft in the sky. The corona looked three-dimensional, like it was a thing I could hold.

bunnyhugger snapped a number of photos, figuring out among other things that she needed to turn her exposure way down. It was still on the too-long shutters appropriate for shooting through the protective screen. I did take a moment to demand her attention, to kiss her, but we were so excited and dazed and all that I missed her mouth to start. Also as promised, the seagulls yelled at each other and flew in from the shore to roost and the temperature dropped with a speed we didn't know could manage. And still the sky hung there, shade and light all in the wrong places.

And then there was this little pinpoint of brilliant light and totality was over and we had to cover up to look at the tiniest sliver of the sun again. And we just coped with this feeling of having been through something so momentous and so massive and so different that we couldn't quite express it. We'd spend a lot of the first minutes after totality talking about that, and keep coming back to the feeling from there. I don't think we have it processed yet and I'm not sure we ever will. I keep coming back to feeling staggered that I was in a line connecting the Sun and the Moon and Earth. What are the odds of that?

Now I know what you're wondering is did I get pictures? Yes, I did, and let me share --- hosted on my humor blog so I know it'll work even as LiveJournal, which semi-eptly serves all my photos for both LiveJournal and Dreamwidth, struggles --- my best photo of totality. You ready?

Nailed it.

bunnyhugger has considerably better photographs, aided by her having a better camera and a tripod and having prepared by reading tips about eclipse photography that she's sure she forgot but something probably stuck anyway.

I'll have a full report of our eclipse trip soon --- the end of the Women's North American Championship Series pinball trip has to come first, then Easter, then Motor City Furry Con, if I'm going to stick to chronological order. But I did want to get some thoughts down when they were nice and fresh and on everyone's minds.

Trivia: In its heyday the A&P took in about ten cents of every dollar spent on food in the United States. (This at a time when Americans spent about three-tenths of their income on food, more even than they spent on housing.) Source: Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America, Michael Ruhlman.