austin_dern

The next county fair I could be roused from my slumber to attend was the Calhoun County Fair, the one we used to visit with bunnyhugger's parents before they stopped going to fairs. bunnyhugger again had a bunch of pictures entered this time and again under-performed in ribbons. Some pictures with similar themes or compositions to hers took in ribbons, at least, and that's confirmation that she was thinking along useful lines even if these particular ones missed.

Speaking of missing: there was a strange secondary display, mostly photographs of architecture, at the opposite end of the exhibition hall from where the normal pictures were put. The implication is they got too many photographs to fit them all together, but these were set up on a movable panel that was within reach of passers-by, and there was a big gap in the middle of the panel where no pictures were. And --- this was distressing --- bunnyhugger could not find one of her pictures. One she'd entered for architecture. When bunnyhugger counted her pictures there were only nine on display, not the ten she had dropped off. Had someone stolen her picture? Or what?

I, ever the optimist, said maybe the picture did get lost, or mis-filed --- she had dropped it off while the person taking pictures was busy and people were not following directions --- but that in that case, they'd have it Sunday when entries were to be picked up, either in the photo hall or at the main office. And sure enough neither of those was correct. The picture was just missing. And this might be a significant one since, as far as we could find, nobody took the second place ribbon in architecture photos. If her picture won, and was somehow stolen, ribbon and all? ...

Well, when she picked up her prize check it didn't list any second place for architecture. So she told the person overseeing returning photos that the picture was missing and the person seemed insufficiently worried about the possibility. On top of a year of suspiciously few photographs getting ribbons to have a possible prize-winner go missing was brutal.

So to the punch line. It turns out bunnyhugger had miscounted, or misremembered, what she had entered, and there was no missing photograph. Not of hers, anyway. There is still the mystery that there was an unsightly gap in the photos on the panel, and no second-place ribbon anywhere that we could find. It's possible some poor other soul got their second-place photo swiped. But it didn't happen to bunnyhugger.

Back to the fair, though, and what we saw during the actual day. It would not be true to say we mostly took photographs of ducks. But they did have the duck pond filled, with water and waterfowl, and we happened to be there at the golden hour with gorgeous shafts of light and shade across them. So we took a lot of pictures and bunnyhugger will likely be entering some of them in next year's county fair.

Also we got an old-timey photograph. This because they had an old-timey photograph booth, an attraction that apparently used to be common at fairs but that bunnyhugger doesn't remember ever seeing before. She'd met the booth owner when she dropped the photos off, though, and was delighted. The booth is old but the fair company only just recently got it and you can see, and smell, how the booth and equipment and all were very old.

When we went to get pictures there was a family in there, a bunch of people having what seemed like a merry time, but taking forever. And then it turned fowl, somehow, with the parents upset that the kid didn't have the right look on his face in any of the pictures taken, and what could they do to fix it? Either get everyone back in costume or nothing, is the answer, and the photo booth people finally gave up and gave them their money back, plus the photo print, rather than deal with it further. We, meanwhile, just got our picture --- me with my long hair does well for pretty near any photo of a crazy-looking old timey guy --- and didn't realize until after that bunnyhugger had her eyeglasses on. I didn't think it wrecked the photo any --- even in oldey times people had glasses, and it's not like the fake money in the bags of loot was the dimensions of pre-1920s cash. It will not surprise you that the moment bunnyhugger's father saw the picture he asked about the glasses.

We had got there a bit earlier than we had the Jackson County Fair, and the Calhoun County Fair was open a little later, and we had time to get a decent number of rides in. And also to snag four elephant ears, to bring to bunnyhugger's parents and have as a late-night snack.

And now with pride I bring to you the end of Saturday during our Halloweekends trip last year. Ah, but don't worry, there's still two more days of amusement park to share in photographs!

The path of Siren's Curse not just shown on a sign but illuminated. Looks all tangled up, doesn't it?

This is not the Celebration Stage but rather the ... oh, I forget the name. Back near Gemini, where they have a stage promising heavy metal and something something scary clowns that sort of thing.

I took a few minutes to ride Windseeker and did not get stopped on the ride, but I did get this picture looking up the tower.

And here's Windseeker in the background of Wild Mouse. Also, mice with their phantom masks for Halloweekends.

A photo of the Giant Wheel from almost dead on the side where it can divide the land behind. GateeKeeper is the roller coaster in the far background.

And a minimally arty shot, looking out the archway over Wild Mouse's entrance at the Giant Wheel behind it.

Trivia: The on-orbit deployment of the Galileo probe was initiated, six hours 21 minutes after launch, by Atlantis mission specialist Shannon Lucid. Source: Mission to Jupiter: A History of the Galileo Project, Michael Meltzer.

Currently Reading: Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic, Simon Winchester.

The Saturday after our return from the Most Extreme Mid-Atlantic Parks Tour there was a traditional annual local event we hadn't missed. This was the Fairy Tale Festival, over at the Turner-Dodge House. We'd been there a couple years running, and once again missed FAE, who always gets to the place earlier than we do. We didn't have much time for it, unfortunately. bunnyhugger had a women's pinball tournament to run in the late afternoon, so we had to duck out early, and given the struggle of getting me to rise while there's still morning our time was sharply limited.

So between our late start and early departure I'm not sure if the event was substantially different. It felt smaller but that's surely because we didn't go into the Turner-Dodge House this time around. That's always an extra charge but they also have the rooms and sometimes decorations and events in there. They had the habibi dancers performing outside --- in past years they've been in the third-floor ballroom --- so the thing we were most likely to stop and watch a while was outdoors anyway.

As usual there were a number of vendors selling the sorts of fairy-tinged convention dealer stuff. A lot of them admired bunnyhugger's jackalope costume, one that she's used for a couple of fairy-themed or Halloween events before, and was easy to wear and also put away ahead of the pinball stuff. People loved it. We did think a little about the kid a couple years ago who was sorry to leave bunnyhugger in her wyvern costume, and how her mother had promised bunnyhugger would be there next year. We don't know if we ever saw the kid again.

And arguing for the fair being larger: they had more props this year. They'd set up a bunch of little displays with fairy tale themes. Mostly the Three Little Pigs, as they put up a sign near some straw-covered sod reading ``Hippy Pig Straw House - Demolished Due To Wind Damage'', and a ``pork barrel (of bricks)'' beside the sign ``Future Site of Brick House''. There was also a stick house, or wooden boards anyway, which seems like a reasonable house for normal purposes. They also put a pig figure in a small heap of upturned ground and the sign declaring ``happy as a pig in mud'' beside it. There was also a Candy House, a cardboard thing with giant decoration candies plastered over it.

I hope the houses and all are signs of the event growing, and that they'll have more of this sort of thing next year. It's fun going to a spot to walk around fairy tale and fantasy settings.

And now, Halloweekends Saturday! Which started with our traditional visit to the Merry-Go-Round Museum.

bunnyhugger riding on the dog, on the Merry-Go-Round Museum's operating carousel. We always get at least one ride and it happened they were starting one just about as we arrived; you can see another rider behind her.

Here's the dog considering the pig (go on, guess the pig's name) and other riders. You can see how busy it was; we've often had rides alone or all-but-alone.

Here's a cool skeleton riding an inner-row horse.

Here's a less-cool skeleton riding on the chariot.

Here's a picture form the inside of the rabbit that's, sadly, for kids only; it's too small for adults to ride.

Peeking underneath a horse, while bunnyhugger photobombs another picture.

Trivia: After its December 1903 flights the Wright Brothers disassembled the damaged Flyer and packed in crates for shipping home to Dayton, to be rebuilt into an improved model. Instead Wilbur and Orville built an entirely new airplane, and the 1903 Flyer stayed in wooden boxes in a shed for years. Source: First Flight: The Wright Brothers and the Invention of the Airplane, T A Heppenheimer.

Currently Reading: Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic, Simon Winchester.

I must once more beg off writing up the European Vacation in order to tend other matters of great importance. Please enjoy more pictures from the Fairy Ball, though.

We poked back around the woodland trail in full darkness.

Here's the sort of path we were following by night.

And here we emerged onto the Court of the Fae, illuminated only by the overhead lights.

The Moon Grove looks even more remote in portrait mode.

They had something or other going nearly all the time, with the drawback being you couldn't avoid missing a lot of stuff.

Fairy lights in the darkness doing a very good job of being the trail.

Moon Grove as the wedding dancing was going on and, you can see, they were bringing out the light sabers!

Meanwhile here's a woman demonstrating fire dancing moves.

That's an exciting event!

Swinging the flames around some.

Yes, there's fire-swallowing.

And some dancing with the fire.

Trivia: Two of the final projects of Terry Toons were Saturday morning cartoon pilots: The Ruby Eye of the Monkey God, a jungle-adventure cartoon, and Sally Sargent, about a 16-year-old secret agent girl. Source: Terry Toons: The Story of Paul Terry and his Classic Cartoon Factory, W Gerald Hamonic.

Currently Reading: Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, Keith Houston.

My humor blog has been another week of Robert Benchley and some very slight other stuff. Also a joke based on a thing bunnyhugger has been facing. Want to read all about it? Here we go.

• MiSTed: The 72 Hours Saga, Part 46
• Robert Benchley: Isn’t It Remarkable?
• Statistics Saturday: MacBook Computer Case Colors
• Robert Benchley: Do Dreams Go By Opposites?
• Robert Benchley: My White Suit
• What’s Going On In Gil Thorp? What’s the problem with Clambake? April – June 2025
• Robert Benchley: Wear-Out-A-Shoe Week
• MiSTed: The 72 Hours Saga, Part 47

And now let me share a normal amount of pictures from the Fairy Ball last year.

Swordfighting at the Moon Grove! I don't know if this was merely a demonstration or if it was actually for some prize.

Much like a small convention they set up things like palm-reading booths and some vendor stations.

Some of the many signs made and not yet put up even as the event was under way.

This was a small circle very useful for navigating. The bike stand is on the right, with the Moon Grove below.

bunnyhugger examines the entry arch. Note the Christmas lights --- the fairy lights --- to line the path inside.

bunnyhugger composing an ode to the entryway.

Drum circle that was going on as we went to walk the path through the woods.

There's the drummers on the right; I can't tell what's going on in the background. Hidden behind the trees was a crepes truck, though.

And here's the walkway. Those probably aren't actual ghosts draped up in the woods.

This seems like an unproductive bridge until you remember it's probably a lot of fun to ride a bike over.

Following the fairy lights through the woods here.

And we came out the path near the Moon Grove where, it happens, the wedding ceremony was going on, with the exit right behind, like, everybody. So, we stayed back rather than intrude, and maybe appeared as blurry visions in the background of other people's pictures.

Trivia: Greenland ice core studies indicate that between atmospheric lead levels rose from 0.5 parts per trillion to 2 parts per trillion in the first century AD, reflecting Rome conquering Britain and mining the island's lead. Source: Molecules at an Exhibition: The Science of Everyday Life, John Emsley.

Currently Reading: Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, Keith Houston.

Getting back now to Plopsaland De Panne. Though we were about an hour into the park's day when we finally entered they still had an opening celebration dance thing going with costumed characters --- a mime, a couple humans in marching-band-style outfits, a chef, bees --- dancing, some on elevated podiums, some just out in the open square. Some posing for pictures. They also gave us a park map that we didn't use as much as might have been maximally efficient, but we're trying to not hyper-optimize our parkgoing. Makes for better trips. Also the maps they gave out were nice things, decent quality paper with a thicker stock for the cover. If that weren't good enough we also found they had them in the gift shop at the end of the day so we were able to bring home both the map we actually used and a pristine map as souvenir.

In wandering around looking for roller coasters we found scenes to baffle us, a statue of a T-shirt-clad clown holding out his hand. Or a blue rabbit in cargo jeans folding his arms but looking way too friendly to be pulling an attitude. We assume this means something to the locals.

One of the first things we found past this was a plaque about Meli Park, the place which Plopsaland kind of overwrote. The historical plaque was in Dutch and French, neither of which either of us reads with any confidence but we could make out some pieces that seemed to make sense. In this area they had a couple pieces from the Meli Park existence, most notably a sleeping giant statue, but also a couple smaller figures of a queen bee, some statues of characters fishing or stuff like that, souvenirs of the former park, things like that. Having seen this bit of the past preserved we wanted more, of course, and we would take the rest of the day looking to see if we could find hints of the old park under the current one.

Also an early discovery: a coffee vending machine. Turns out the reason we never see coffee vending machines at any other amusement park is that Plopsaland has them all, spaced as much as one minute's walk from the next one over. Yes, it does tea and cocoa too. I can't swear that soup is not offered. Having finally found an amusement park that had the abundance of coffee she's always wanted, bunnyhugger went on to not actually get any, pretty much because it was never the right moment for it.

We were a little annoyed at the start of the day because rain came in, and while the forecast was correct that it wouldn't last, we also didn't have any kind of rain gear and the park didn't seem to have a lot to do that was under cover. We huddled near some midway games until the rain let up enough we could make it to their grand carousel. This is a double-decker, the sort of carousel we know from Freehold Raceway Mall and Morey's Piers and that La Feria Chapultepec had, all nice enough but your basic thing. Surrounding the carousel was art and sculptures of characters from, again, we don't know. One of them seems to be a chef named Albert. One that we saw a bunch was a tall skinny guy with a dog that had kind of a Dagwood Bumstead-and-Daisy thing going. Don't know.

But this brought us to the first roller coaster we found, the aptly named ``#LikeMe Coaster''. If I understand right it's a teens-and-schoolteachers show that also features some kind of karaoke-TV-show component. The queue is through a high school-themed set, labelled 'SAS School Aan De Stroom', and it has got pretty good-looking School Hallways and lockers and even doors that, thanks to wide-screen TVs set up inside, have stuff going on through the 'windows'. The #LikeMe Coaster itself is a small thing, one of those kiddie coasters that never gets too far off the ground and that confounded expectations by never bashing our knees worth mentioning.

We figured to get next to Roller Skater, the closest roller coaster to this one. But the line was weirdly long, and bunnyhugger nominated that we pass it up in favor of the park's most renowned roller coaster. So we did. We went looking for The Ride To Happiness, By Tomorrowland.

While you wait to learn what the heck that's all about please enjoy more of the fairy ball.

Signs at a crossroads. The Apothecary was the first-aid station and probably where you'd get any administrative-type care needed.

Here I am following bunnyhugger; I'd hoped to get a nice tracking shot of her in the woods and it doesn't quite work.

The Court of the Fae! And a bunch of mysterious mounds whose purpose we failed to guess on our own.

Giant chess set laid out as a trap for mortals. Behind it, and above, is the throne that the fairy court would sit at.

They made several convincing-enough giant mushrooms out of beanbag chairs and wooden spool tables.

Here's the Court entering, ready for opening ceremonies.

Trivia: In May 1931 Proctor & Gamble's Neil McElroy broke the in-house prohibition on memos exceeding one page to write a three-page suggestion that the company appoint a specific team to manage each particular brand, what are now regarded as brand managers. Source: The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge.

Currently Reading: Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, Keith Houston.

PS: What’s Going On In Gil Thorp? What’s the problem with Clambake? April – June 2025 as I went back and did research and learned I completely misunderstood a character's behavior and then was left with new questions about well why did that happen that way, then?

Happy anniversary, dear bunnyhugger.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hope the riders have their seat belts on though this.

And here's the Ferris wheel at some speed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thursday was the second and last day of the conference, and the course of events was pretty much what I described already. The most noteworthy thing besides the meals being set up better was a neat address about how the animal rights movement had changed in the past fifty years, conveniently broken into two phases, roughly 1975-2000 and 2000-present. The first half was dominated by the idea being introduced to public debate and, it seemed to me noteworthily, a focus on the importance of stopping animal suffering. The second half has seen a shift in focus to topics like how animals can experience joy and we should value that. bunnyhugger's presentation got a mention here, although just as an example of the sort of work done on this line of thinking.)

The finale of the conference was supposed to come a little past 4 pm, and we hurried thinking we might be late, only to sit through the last ten minutes or so of a presentation --- in French --- that was itself running long. At least we had good seats for when the closing remarks, including a good bit of hope that Peter Singer would be able to visit Rennes 2 for the 60 Years On conference, came on. (He must have heard that from everybody.) And then there was a little more hanging around, some desserts, the conference staff collecting all the name badges for some reason. Peter Singer walking around with his orange backpack like he was just another student taking a gap year. We didn't stick around to the very end of the gathering, but we were probably on the latter side of things.

Annoyingly we had more time Thursday night but less to do, since Le Grand Huit was doing exclusively some private event. We also were not quite hungry exactly but also not quite not. bunnyhugger found we were close to a franchise of a Belgian fast-food place named Quick and I thought I might get cheese fries or something like that, maybe a pop.

We were indeed close to it, although I managed to make the walk a needlessly longer one by going way too far north to start and getting us closer to Minimarche than we needed to be. Attempting to compensate by going over a block or two and then back down a road that wasn't precisely parallel succeeded, though, as well as letting us see a couple of nice bookstores and gaming shops and all that were closed but looked like fun places to hang out.

The policy of having giant touch-screen ordering menus has reached Rennes, France, and in this case it was actually not that bad since it meant we could look over the menu at ease, and use the [EN] button to read it and order in English. The only mistake made was that I touched the button to 'pay at register' --- I swear I thought I was going to pay at the screen --- and so I had some fumbling with the cashier, including not being completely sure they were even going to start making our food until we paid. Anyway, decent enough cheese fries. We saw they had some stuff that looked good, mozzarella sticks and something else (maybe a vegetarian burger?) that were unavailable, with the menu screens covering the pictures of the items with 'Victim Of Their Own Success', I guess indicating they were sold out.

So we had a slow night, a chance to get to bed a little early, make sure we were ready for tomorrow and the trip back to Paris and then on to Belgium. We'd could do that.

And now, some more Calhoun County Fair pictures for you.

Just checking that it's not a carved wooden horse. (I kid, although she might have been checking what kind of plastic or fiberglass it was made from.)

And just like that we have a dark sky and rides by night!

Here's much of the midway, including the drop tower and the Ferris wheel.

And here's that junior caterpillar ride.

Caterpillar looks a bit horrified at being ridden. Hope they get over that.

The balloons ride looks nice here.

Trivia: UPA cartoon studios' first television productions were a series of eight 60-second commercials for Ford Motors with Doctor Seuss. Source: Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons, Leonard Maltin.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 64: Olive Oyl's Dilemma!!, Ralph Stein, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

My friend with the search for Parisian pinball arcades did get me to look at Pinball Map, just in case there were any in Rennes. It turned out there was a venue, Le Grand Huit, with a half-dozen pinball games and just on the other side of the train station from us! And in what they listed as a barcade. As far as I could tell from the web site it was a bunch of converted warehouses or something with a variety of amusement and arcade attractions put around. They even had a couple vintage fairground rides, although the hours when they were operating were vague. Pinball map suggested the pinballs here were new, or at least were first noticed just a couple weeks before we were in town. This would be a great place to spend the long evening after the conference ended Thursday! Except that the venue was closed for a special event Thursday. We had to go Wednesday evening, when we'd only have a couple hours, or else not go at all.

So and with rather too few coins in our pocket we set out and I led us confidently through roads that seemed a lot closer together in online maps. I was just getting worried we'd gotten lost, thanks to some construction on the south side of the Gare, when we reached a new corner and saw the big sign pointing to the new entrance! Perfect!

The collection of stuff at Le Grand Huit feels a little like What If Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum ran a barcade? It's not so crowded as a Marvin's thing would be, but it's also got more space than Marvin's old holdout-of-the-mall-food-court space would have allowed. They had some stuff that it sure looked, in the photographs, that adults might get to ride, including a swings and maybe a carousel that looks like a solid mutt of different mounts put together, but we were there by like 9 pm and they had long since stopped running rides for the day. The place has a couple salon carousel gondolas as dining booths, and has one carousel elevated, rotating eternally, passenger-less, fifteen feet above the dining floor. It's a pity to have a carousel be unusable for riding but it is also a heck of a thing to see it from that angle, without the platform always underneath. They also have a robot bartender, a coin-operated mechanical arm that the web site claims once did industrial manufacture stuff and that now will make a drink for you, but only on the weekends, which we were as far away from as it was possible to get.

And then, yes, pinball, two tables put next to each other beside the robot bartender, almost a normal arrangement, and four tables put way off (but near the actual bartender), radial spokes around a center pole beneath a canopy. It's an unusual but attractive arrangement. And the choice of games was ... wow. Weird. They were all old games, and not as some venues might have representing pinball's diversity of eras (electromechanical, early solid state, late solid state, dot matrix, LCD screens). No, they were all games from about 1989 to 1992, a range so tiny it seems like it must have been an aesthetic choice, but what was the aesthetic? It kind of smells of ``someone was given €15,000 and told to make it weird''.

The most normal games they had were Lethal Weapon 3 --- a slightly annoying game but one you can still find in tournaments --- and The Party Zone --- I've never seen this in tournament play, but it's a fun one. Also Riverboat Gambler, which you never see places. Gilligan's Island, which has some of the best integration of the theme into a game ever but that doesn't have much depth of gameplay, and has a little pranking move where you can give all your opponents points that makes it a courageous choice for tournament play. Surf N Safari, a water-park-themed 90s Gottlieb game so it's kind of fun but also not well-balanced a table. And ... Class of 1812.

Class of 1812 is another early-90s Gottlieb game so it's a little ramshackle in its design and rules. Its theme is that you're at the graveyard, digging up a comical-horror family, each of the major areas corresponding to one of the family you're recovering. Yes, there is a rapping granny. The most delightful piece, though, is that when you start multiball, which the game gives you eight billion chances to do, it starts playing The 1812 Overture. And after one round of the famous theme it goes back and starts over, only this time with chickens clucking the tune out. This is why people love the game, even though like nobody has it (The Pinball Arcade has it in simulation, though, and it's worth it). We had to play that.

So we did. I had an okay game; bunnyhugger nearly broke ten million, a great score. We played again and while I did better, she did better yet. She got a replay score at least once; I got a match, and we got to play another round. For only about three games each we were doing very well. For a time on our last game I started thinking one of us might reach the high score table but it turns out it started somewhere north of 35 million points, well beyond us. But for only a handful of games in a completely new venue? We had little to complain about.

But we had less change, our euros now exhausted. We thought a bit about getting a drink from the bar, and more change, and playing on ... but ... it was also getting closer to a time when we should be responsible and get to bed. So, regretting that the venue was closed for a private event Thursday when that would have been perfect for our needs, we made the sad way back to our cozy hotel.

Had enough rabbits yet? Of course not, but we will run out of Calhoun County Fair rabbits soon. In fact ...

Another Californian loaf looking suspiciously at me.

Rabbit conference threatening to get out of hand when one rabbit has the insight: you can just step on the others!

Rabbit wondering if anyone else knows about this ``just step on them'' move because it will change everything!

Here's a chicken stunned by the stepping-on action.

This kid was proud of his chicken and wanted us to take pictures of him with them and did not care that neither of us knew the other and we'd never get pictures to him. So, here, in case you have a google face alert going. I think it's a pretty good picture at that.

Here's one of those rare chickens that can lay an egg through their own bars, which is what gets you best-of-class.

Trivia: New York City radio station WEAF (later WNBC, now WFAN) aired its first paid advertisement in August 1922; by late 1923, the National Carbon Company sponsored the Eveready Hour, promoting its batteries. Source: Wih Amusement For All: A History of American Popular Culture since 1830, LeRoy Ashby.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 64: Olive Oyl's Dilemma!!, Ralph Stein, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

Now to Wednesday of our trip, the midpoint, and the start of the conference. We needed a moment to re-acquire our bearings, but it's pretty easy to get from our hotel to the University of Rennes 2 campus --- it's right on one of the metro lines --- and from there, while I set off in a wrong direction, bunny_hugger figured out where to go, and we acquired a companion who was also going to the same conference, which was in the same building it'd been in a decade ago.

I meanwhile had to buy my admission since I'd failed to do that ahead of time, and they would only take cash, so I'd had my first experience with European ATMs for the trip getting some folding money. This meant I went to the conference without a badge like everyone else had, and I held on to my receipt just in case I was challenged, which I never was. And bunny_hugger didn't even get to keep her badge, which ordinarily becomes one of those conference souvenirs, just like a furry con would do but with even worse art. In this case, no art at all. Nor any hint of academic affiliation, which on the one hand goes to the ideal of all being equal citizens of the Republic of Letters, but on the other hand means you might miss that, say, this person you're talking to is that person, the one with the paper you keep assigning your students.

Peter Singer, of course, gave the keynote address, and he took the historical approach of how the idea of animal rights moved from a fussy thing that Margaret Dumont-esque dowagers fretting over other people's dogs to a thing where everyone agrees we should have chickens that at some point in their lives get to see the sun, though not necessarily to live more than six weeks. So, you know, some cheerful news, some depressing.

Then it was on to the sessions, with two or three tracks most of the time, with each session room giving all their talks either in French or in English. bunny_hugger had the good fortune to be the first speaker in the first session in the first room listed on the schedule, although that does not mean Peter Singer stopped in to review her work.

Her presentation really engaged people, though; she got a healthy number of questions and all from people who were excited to learn about something they'd never considered before. She's the person to describe it in summary, but here's my attempt, and understand that she's got your obvious objection addressed, or will by publication time. It grows out of the question of what, specifically, does someone lose by dying? Yeah, ha-ha, the answer is ``days of life'', but, what is the point of those days of life? If it's just getting up to eat, poop, and sleep again, what's having more of that doing for you? (Not talking here about days of rest; talking here about an unending series of days just like that.)

In the 1920s by Moritz Schlick proposed that the purpose of life was play, by which he means things you do to accomplish them, rather than to carry on existing another day. This covers a wide range of things, including work you enjoy doing even if it supports your eating habit. But at heart, like, why read a book? Because you enjoy reading a book. Why join a softball league? Because you enjoy softball. Why run on a wheel? Because it's fun to run on a wheel.

And here's the insight. Animals play. More, we've been discovering, all kinds of animals play, not just the classically smart ones like apes and crows and dolphins. Bees play, something bunny_hugger had found in the scientific literature and that really fired imaginations. And so, if play gives human life meaning, what does play give animal lives?

The other paper in that session had the charming title ``What Would Miffy Do?'', Miffy here being that cute bunny from Dutch picture books that gets confused for a Hello Kitty character. This was about the challenge of how to justify making decisions on behalf of animals who, after all, can't express their preferences, even if they could understand decisions being made about them. We have models for that which work, more or less, for humans lacking full capacity for judgement. So extending that to animals seems like a reasonable stretch.

Back now to the Calhoun County Fair, which we visited on the last day of that fair.

Yes, these aren't just bales of hay, they're bales of hay so good as to get extra-special complicated ribbons and in one case a plaque. I'm glad I don't have to judge what makes a best-of-show-worthy sheaf of alfalfa.

Which is not to say that I'd have any idea how to judge the prizes for, like, ``old hardware store calendar''. Note the old Polaroid in the middle that apparently didn't get anything.

And here's some arts, including the raccoon watercolor that gets a first place.

Now on to the rabbits! Here's one of the many Californians that look rather like Penelope.

And here a nice old white rabbit invites us into their schemes.

The guinea pigs, meanwhile, don't see why they should have been brought in on any of this.

Trivia: In a meeting on the 4th of March, 1953, about plans to overthrow the government of Iran, US President Dwight Eisenhower wondered why it was impossible ``to get some of the people in these downtrodden countries to like us instead of hating us''. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles conceded that Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was no communist, but, ``if he were to be assassinated or removed from power, a politcal vacuum might occur in Iran and the communists might easily take over'', with dire consequences for world oil production and the world's strategic balance. Source: Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawai'i to Iraq, Stephen Kinzer. Raising the question: has anyone ever tried going back in time to divert the Dulles boys to, like, painting landscapes or something instead of screwing up the world completely? Maybe let's give that a try one we get the Hitler thing resolved?

Currently Reading: Mission to Jupiter: A History of the Galileo Project, Michael Meltzer. NASA SP-2007-4231.

When I finally roused myself enough to get up, on the day that should have been our Nigloland visit, it was already like 6 pm. bunnyhugger was getting consoling texts from the friends she'd dared tell. (We wouldn't tell our parents until we got back home.) About all there would be left to do is take a walk --- bunnyhugger was not going to abandon her daily task even for this --- and find dinner. For the walk we wondered if we were allowed into the Parc du Chateau, past the gate behind the hotel. I said I'd seen people going in earlier in the day and as I watched again some more folks went in, so we would follow.

This let us have some time exploring the grounds of the hotel which, as mentioned, used to be a working windmill, on a small river. There were a couple buildings that looked like they were probably once the mill owner's home and maybe a guest house. There was also a fence blocking off fields and other houses, we assume from land being sold to other owners. But the parc itself was this pleasant garden, a chance for us to walk around in mostly shaded paths on a none-too-hot evening, looking at the water and this little boat dock(?) underneath a shelter so you went into a tunnel to get down to the water surface, like some fantasy novel. Also a couple large decorative pools with the water turned off, unfortunately, as they looked great. Some statues, classical stuff like cherubs and Venus and the like. We also could see people dining outside, overlooking the water wheel (fixed in place, as far as we could tell) and the river (changing).

For dinner we had two choices, hunger or the hotel. There wasn't even a convenience store in town. So I put on one of the shirts I wear to work, and figured to wear to the conference, while bunnyhugger put on the blazer she figured to present in and got extremely nervous about dropping food on herself. It turns out the restaurant, though offering two- and three-course meals that looked like what you expect from a fancy French restaurant was much more generally chill than that. We saw people there in if not jeans and a t-shirt and least not much more dressed than that. (Those were outliers, though, and most people were at least dressed up a little bit.) We didn't need to worry, possibly because anyone in town who didn't want to drive to eat out was coming here.

The one serious drawback to the meal was it wasn't vegetarian. There were individual vegetarian pieces --- including the Avocado Toast appetizer --- but for the main course it was something an animal had to die for, and we accepted that, resolving not to tell anyone at the conference this. (Not that anyone asked or would be likely to.) I had my first meat-based sausage in years and in a sauce so creamy that I'm still tasting it three weeks on. And then dessert was more wonderful yet. bunnyhugger got an ice cream, but served within some sort of bread shell that soaked it up spongelike without overwhelming the taste or feel of the melting ice cream. Me, I went for the more basic plate of local cheeses, and I wouldn't be sad to have a plate of cheeses for every dessert. Or main course. Really you could pretty well sum up me by just putting up a sign, ``Bit more cheese''.

After a good while including after-dinner coffee they ... didn't seem to be bringing us a bill, which, sure, is the non-American-restaurant way. I had noticed several other people leaving simply by departing the table so figured that was the thing to do; there wasn't tipping and they knew what room to charge it to, so there. So after some assurances that we weren't dining-and-dashing we got up and walked slowly back to our room and then had some worries that we had done the wrong thing.

Well, on the hotel bill there was a charge for about what we estimated the dinner would cost, although it wasn't billed anything obvious like ``dinner'' or ``meals'' or ``restaurant''. It instead had a name of something like ``floor charge'', and google translations managed to make the purpose of that charge even more vague and ill-defined. It's been a couple weeks now, though, and we haven't heard any trouble, and they certainly have our e-mail and credit card information so we probably got away with it all right.

After dinner ... you know, strange as it may sound, I wasn't quite ready to go to bed. I got my camera out. I wanted to walk some, and alone, and I ended up taking by night the walk we'd hoped to do that morning down to Nigloland, to look at the gate and just ... be alone with my thoughts about this accident.

I would not stay alone. While walking along the long fence of the park someone stopped his car to ask if I needed anything. I told him no, I was fine, we just had come for the amusement park and found it closed and I needed to be sad. This he understand, but he did tell me the park would be open Saturday, which, yes, but I'd be gone by Saturday. I thanked him and he left. (We spoke in English, after the first sentence or two. I had actually thought out ahead of time what I might say if someone stopped by me, and I think I had the basics of it ready, except that in my mind I was saying dimanche [ Sunday ] instead of samedi [ Saturday ].)

The second time this happened I had basically the same conversation, and I guess it says something about the population of Dolancourt that a person taking a walk at like 10 pm on a Monday [ lundi ] might draw two cars stopping to ask if I needed a lift.

And that's how the day that should have seen us at Nigloland ended.

Now in photos let's look again at the Calhoun County Fair, as the day was ending but there was still plenty of Fair left ... we thought.

Here's the Wiggle Worm, which I believe was a junior caterpillar ride. Also there should be grown-up caterpillar rides again.

First picture of the carousel, and you can see bunnyhugger getting snaps for her 2025 calendar.

Somehow this angle makes the canopy lights look like there's more than there are, and arranged more randomly than their actually strongly-symmetric arrangement were.

Hey, Sea Ray was a fun pinball game, I didn't know they turned it into a swinging ship ride!

Turning around again to face the carousel and at least a couple horses with the distressed/wide-open mouths meant to suggest they're straining for their speed (which at like five rpm is respectable).

Some of the landscaping the rides operator puts up to give the place the impression of a more permanent park. Which suggests they pick up this mulch after the week is over and bring it to the next fair.

Trivia: Mexico City has more than five hundred streets named after Emiliano Zapata. Source: The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal about Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power, Dierdre Mask.

Currently Reading: Mission to Jupiter: A History of the Galileo Project, Michael Meltzer. NASA SP-2007-4231.