austin_dern

Yesterday, as Mother's Day, we spent with the nearest available mother, bunnyhugger's. Not to worry, I did call my mother in some spare time and learn that the church she volunteers for and kind of runs has only got temporary pictures of the new Pope up. They hope to have the official pictures soon. Also she's making progress in her bridge ranking and needs only a few more Masters Points and Silver Points to reach the next level, with the twist being that Silver Points are only available at a couple select events, which fortunately are coming up this month.

But to the parents we were with. bunnyhugger's mother insisted on making dinner, grilled cheese, and while I'd rather she didn't go to that work on a day in principle celebrating her, I also like the grilled cheeses she makes. She's good at getting the cheese melted in a way I'm not. And her father, after interrogating me about whether I'd ever read Modesty Blaise --- having forgotten that he gave me two collections of Modesty Blaise books --- disappeared into the other room a minute and then gave me a third.

He also, on hearing again that we have a spring-based kitchen scale that can measure in either grams or ounces, offered a counter-balance scale that he took out and explained he had just found it recently while looking for something else. He also discovered, from looking at pictures of eBay sellers, that the scale was missing a leg, so while we were out walking the dog, he constructed a replacement out of popsicle sticks or something. And then, after that, decided he didn't like that and made a new set. I reflected how we were probably fortunate that he didn't have a 3D printer.

After dinner bunnyhugger got out the new campaign roleplaying game, from the designer of Mice and Mystics. This is Aftermath, animals working on a colony and their own side projects in a world where all humans have mysteriously vanished, within the lifetime of a guinea pig. The catch is that the designer of Mice and Mystics has not the slightest idea how to explain his rules. The always slow parts of playing your first couple rounds were even slower and more confusing than should have been. Not helping matters is that, for example, some of the cards you're dealt have a little shield on them, and the more defensive characters have a symbol on their character card with a little shield on them. So how do you defend against an attack? Is it based on what shields you have and can put together? No, it is not! And there's other little ``do you know how to communicate with people?'' design issues, for example that the symbol for ``range'' for ranged weapons means different things for players and enemies.

After a couple go-rounds and some false starts we were getting the bugs worked out and almost had our first encounter done. But also by that time bunnyhugger's mother was anxious that we get going lest I get to bed too late for work in the morning (I got to bed on time) and her father was anxious lest we not eat overly large slices of key lime pie. So we ended up ditching the session, I'm confident one round of play before beating at least the first page. Hopefully we'll get it together for next time we play.

And that was our Mother's Day.

New event on the photo roll. What's the next thing we did? You'll get a strong hint from the establishing shot here ...

As the picture of bunnyhugger putting on sunscreen tells you, it's an amusement park trip! But what amusement park is there even in frame, much less one that has an escalator at the parking lot?

There it is, well down the valley: Kennywood! Phantom's Revenge is the tall coaster on the left; Steel Curtain, the non-operational roller coaster on the right.

And yes, I tried doing a panorama of the valley from our position in the second level of parking lot.

We didn't remember the escalator to the parking lot. Turns out no, they replaced the ski lift --- which we never saw operating but which was, in principle, a Kennywood ride you didn't need to enter the park to take --- after 2019.

Did I mention it was a Saturday and those are always busy days at amusement parks? Because it was a Saturday and that's always a busy day at amusement parks.

There's the carousel sculpture that's been the signature element of the entrance of Kennywood's chain's amusement parks --- as of when this photo was taken. Since then, the Kennywood chain was bought up by Dollywood's owners, so who knows how things have changed?

Trivia: Jack Pepper (1902 - 1979) was a juvenile comedian who worked vaudeville as a fresh-faced college boy singing a falsetto ``St Louis Blues''. He worked in movies starting in 1929 (Metro Movietone Ruvue #4) and continuing through the 1970s in minor parts. He also had bit roles in seven of the Hope-Crosby-Lamour ``Road'' pictures. Source: The Encyclopedia of Vaudeville, Anthony Slide.

Currently Reading: The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts, Silvia Ferrara.

When AnthrOhio wrapped up last year with the declaration they were moving to a new hotel, I'm not sure it came with the news it was moving to a new weekend. We did learn about the move to a late-April weekend months ago, though, and were mildly irked that it would be coming so soon after Motor City Fur[ry] Con. Also that it would be coming in the late-middle part of the term. With bunnyhugger having Monday classes we'd have to drive home after closing ceremonies, not even sticking around for the Dead Dog Dance, to have a chance of getting her in bed in time. Or cancel classes, something she's most reluctant to do for mere fun.

And then came Pinball At The Zoo. This, the biggest tournament in Michigan, is always sometime in mid-to-late April and what do you know but it was set for this past weekend. As in, the same weekend as AnthrOhio. So we were stuck with the question of what would we miss, the furry convention that, despite outgrowing the cozy, intimate convention we loved, is still our favorite; or the pinball tournament that's so exciting and fun and social and competitive and that's become one of the Pro Circuit events where some of the best pinball players of the whole continent converge.

And then, eventually, we realized that it was also Easter weekend, a day --- often a weekend --- that we always spend with bunnyhugger's parents. There's no inherent conflict in going to Pinball At The Zoo, which ends Saturday, and to her parents for Sunday. But there's a compelling conflict going to central Ohio and mid-Michigan for the same day.

We did a lot of thinking out what was the less bad thing to miss. We finally chose to miss AnthrOhio, for me for the first time since 2012. We'd be glad for Easter with her parents. And we'd be glad for attending the least replaceable pinball tournament of the year. As long as we did well enough.

No pressure.

Now let's have a bit more 4th of July fireworks from the City of Lansing and from outlying territories.

On the left, I think, the city's fireworks. On the right, the fireworks of whatever town is north and west of Lansing. I'm going to say ``Delhi''? That sounds like a town that exists.

Here's a meteor seen just at the limits of sensor range while in warp.

Dutch angle! Fireworks local (on the left) and distant (on the right).

And here's the city or possibly the ballpark fireworks getting to the grand finale!

More finale, but this time so you can see colors and the shape of the cloud.

And this is no fireworks. This is traffic, cars driving back from downtown. We stuck around a good bit after the show because we figured why rush home.

Trivia: A conventional break-bulk cargo ship of the mid-1950s would typically require 150 or more longshoremen working for at least four days to unload and load a vessel's cargo; using $2.80 as a basic longshoreman's hourly wage, this implied over $15,000 in stevedore charges for a typical port call. Source: Box Boats: How Container Ships Changed The World, Brian J Cudahy. For perspective, that's more than a contestant might win on a whole episode of The Price Is Right --- when they would play for the full half-hour show --- of the time.

Currently Reading: Slime: A Natural History, Susanne Wedlich. Translator Ayça Türkoğlu.

PS: What’s Going On In Olive and Popeye? What’s this wrestling story going on? January – April 2025 finally, finally gets its turn.

So, big thing happening in pinball this month was Pinball At The Zoo, in Kalamazoo, but before that was the Lightning Flippers women's tournament that bunnyhugger organized and ran and competed in. This was made as an unofficial launch party for Pulp Fiction, the newest yet retro-styled pinball machine at our local barcade. Eight people attended, meaning there could be two groups of four playing for a nice satisfying pinball experience, although one group being put on Pulp Fiction every round (the other got put on a randomly chosen game) meant that, by luck of the draw, bunnyhugger played it four rounds in a row.

And then in playoffs came that dreaded moment: I had to make a ruling. This because bunnyhugger had a problem with the game she was playing (Pulp Fiction) and she can't very well rule on herself fairly. Arguably it's only a little more fair to have me ruling on her, although in this case the ruling was pretty near pro forma.

The trouble was that one of the flippers got out of alignment, so that it was coming down to more nearly horizontal than to sloping downward when the flipper button wasn't pressed. We lacked any way to fix that so I had to rule: the game had failed catastrophically and it would need to be replaced by a randomly drawn other game. This would end up being James Bond 007, and in the next round, Star Wars. Luckily, RED --- who maintains the games there --- was around, or came back (he'd been at the bar earlier and I thought he had left, but maybe was wrong) and fixed it up for the last round.

The change of games hurt, though. bunnyhugger had come in first place three of the four times she'd played Pulp Fiction that day, and while she was in third place on her last ball she was in good shape to take second place. On James Bond, though, she finished last.

And then a day or two later she realized I had made an understandable mistake in my ruling. She had called me over for the malfunction on ball three, after players one and two had already finished. Player one (KEC) had a lower score than anyone else and so had a fourth-place finish. Part of the standard International Flipper Pinball Association rules set (which we use as the basic template) has it that if a game is pulled for a catastrophic malfunction, then only the players whose position is not yet determined should play the new game. So the replacement James Bond should have been only three players.

It's a natural mistake; the circumstance where that rule comes into play are rare. And if we suppose that the three people who should have played James Bond finished in the same order, and that the other two games finished in the same order, then it wouldn't have made a difference in the finals. bunnyhugger would have taken third place by a slightly higher margin and KEC would have had a slightly lower last place, but the standings would have been the same. Still, annoying to get it wrong.

Despite the Taco Tuesday incident bunnyhugger's father did not burn down his house or my car, so the 4th of July we were back in Lansing and walked out to see the fireworks. Or maybe something else ...

In the park were a couple people filling up Chinese lanterns, which let us see just how you do launch them and also that they're way bigger than we thought.

Seriously, I'd have put the lanterns at like a foot tall and it's four feet at least. Note the firework of a distant land just past the tree line.

Here's one ready to be released.

And up we go! Some of them needed a couple tries to get going, but they're easy to re-catch and re-release if needed.

There goes one into the sky that was actually darker than this.

Better idea of how dark it was at the time, with one lantern released and three more getting ready to go.

Trivia: Andrew Carnegie donated the funds for 7,689 church organs. Source: The Uncyclopedia: Everything You Never Knew You Wanted to Know, Gideon Haigh.

Currently Reading: Slime: A Natural History, Susanne Wedlich. Translator Ayça Türkoğlu.

I think I've mentioned that our pet mouse doesn't build nests so much as lairs. Well, after the last time bunnyhugger cleaned her cage she didn't rebuild her volcano-like mound of litter. Instead she retreated to the Angry Dome, a small elevated dome reached by a vertical tube, and we worried that all her building ambition had been destroyed along with her previous lair.

It wasn't, although she apparently took a while to find the rebuilding energy again. After a week or so she started gathering the litter from around her cage into one corner, and it's kept on getting bigger and bigger. Now it's back to the full mountainous lair, enough litter that she could walk on a slope from the cage floor up to the plastic shelf hanging four inches up. And she keeps finding more to move up; there's a small hill of litter forming atop of the shelf, too. She's also very happy that we've tossed in so many toilet paper tubes as she's got a lot of concealed subways to get around places.

Also, she's had a side project. We had gotten this hanging stick of chewable treats and finally remembered to hang it in her cage. She loved this immediately; we could count most any time we wanted on seeing her at it, standing up, showing her fluffy white belly for all to see, as she chewed at the lower-hanging pieces. And the wood, which she weirdly enjoys eating. And then as she ate the lower-hanging treats, standing up on her tip-toes. And when that was gone, hanging from the bars of her cage so she could get at it, sometimes with just a single front- and hind-paw holding her in place.

She's finally finished the treats on the stick, but she still enjoys eating the stick so that's something. And I saw yesterday morning she's started dragging the stick from where we hung it --- not too near her lair, so she could have the challenge of climbing up to get it --- over to her lair. I don't know what she's planning to do with it but I'm eager to discover her plans.

And now? More fireworks photos that I swear aren't all the same picture as every year!

Now here's some fun, two fireworks going off and the view in bunnyhugger's camera.

I am amazed I held the camera steady long enough to get both the fireworks trails and the clouds illuminated by what was left of the setting sun.

This doesn't look like much but I like the faint, subtle streaks of color from it.

Now we're getting back to your normal fireworks photo. I think this is with the fireworks mode so the shutter was open a long while.

Are we near the Grand Finale yet?

There's the Grand Finale.

Trivia: The Buffalo (New York) Municipal Airport, built in 1927, marked a departure from most (American) airport terminal design of the time: the building had a crisscrossing scissors-style floor plan, with five separate entrances, and a twenty-by-twenty foot waiting room. The design evolved from the terminal's placement at the intersection of two runways, which was hoped would eliminiate excessive taxiing and provide air traffic control with a good central point from which to work. Source: Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World's Most Revolutionary Structure, Alastair Gordon.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 58: Let Us Look To Lettuce, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

And now, sad to say, we come to the last of our holiday activities. This was going to the Night Lights drive-through at the Michigan International Speedway. bunnyhugger had been there already this season; she went to the 5K run back in mid-November. Early for a Christmas thing but they couldn't have it later and hope for decent weather when they didn't have cars driving through.

We got off to a late start because of a real actual grown-up type interaction. A friend from pinball league had invited us to dinner with him and his wife, and we couldn't make that without missing Night Lights. We renegotiated that to hanging out a little in the afternoon, and it was a fun time that also introduced us to the take-out options of this place in town that sells hipster waffles. It was all great fun and we were glad doing it and are just scared we'll have to have them over to our house now.

But after that, and a little bit later than we expected, we got back home, made a bunch of popcorn, put it in a big grocery bag that turned out to be the only bag capable of holding all that, and drove the hour-plus down to Brooklyn, Michigan, home of the Speedway.

bunnyhugger offered several times to take over the driving through the Speedway, so that I would feel more free to take photographs, since she'd already had the chance to take all the photographs she wanted back in November. Kind, but after all, I can stop the car and roll the windows down anytime I want. I think I took fewer pictures this year than last, but I haven't gone and actually done a tally of them. We'll know when we see how many pictures of out-of-focus lights I post around here up in ... oh, let's say May.

The number of light displays grew this year, both in the free area (mostly sponsors) and in the paid admission. The most prominent new features were rows of tulip lights plus a couple of Dutch girls to tend them, and a fairy-tale section that offers such Christmas-relevant displays as The Three Little Pigs. I don't understand the link there, but I like it. Also near the front of the section is a friendly-looking toony wolf, something closer to a Cookie Crisp mascot than a Big Bad Wolf. The section that's dinosaurs and dragons and sea monsters hanging around Christmas is still there, too, so don't worry.

Also still there: two raccoons! They, and two squirrels and two rabbits, are part of a display leading up to a Noah's Ark. You know, from the famous Christmas story about the flooding of the world. Look, we already had penguins playing basketball with a hoop on a candy cane, I can't make all the logical connections for you.

We were almost surely not the last people to drive through Night Lights, which was on its last night of the season. We got in when there was still a half-hour to go, after all. But we were certainly among the last people, and we went a long while without someone else overtaking us, so who knows? Their not-too-high-power FM station transmitting Christmas songs didn't fade out until we'd been on the road a good fifteen, maybe twenty minutes, and at that it came close enough to the half-hour we weren't positive that they hadn't just switched it off for the close of the night.

With that, there's not much else to do for Christmas besides take it down.

But now, in my photo reel, there's continuing the train ride around the part of Camden Park we spent less time in to do.

Here's the last turn of the log flume, just before it ascends to the greatest height for the second and bigger splashdown.

Train chugging along against the wilderness. On the left sure looks like a onetime service road that's more of a trail now.

More of that far end of the park, with the Tilt-A-Whirl as seen from the train. The Paratrooper is somewhere around here too.

And here, through a break in the forest, we see ... the swan boats ride at Michigan's Adventure?! How does that happen?!

The park has a miniature golf course that we'd have loved to have played except it was closed. Turns out they're renovating the course and here I got a little view of the renovation being done.

Turns out changing out the astroturf is done about like you would imagine.

Trivia: In 1812 Rhode Island's general assembly voted to not allow the state militia to be called into national service for the war with Britain. Source: Rhode Island: A History, William G McLoughlin.

Currently Reading: Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum, Leonard Susskind, Art Friedman.

For the events I describe below to be wondrous you must understand both bunnyhugger and I hold PhD's, demonstrating our ability to think deeply and seriously about a subject.

So. Back on Christmas Day I realized something I had not received, and had not thought about putting on my wish list: the Peanuts page-a-day calendar for 2025. I always want the Peanuts page-a-day calendar, whatever the year is, and while I often think to put it on my wish list and, usually, bunnyhugger get is there have been a few times I forgot to list it and nobody thought to buy it for me. And I did not want to put bunnyhugger --- always and needlessly worried that she isn't good enough at gifting me --- through the agony of punishing herself for not getting the calendar for me.

First time, then, that I had the chance I drove out to the mall and found at the bookstore that ... they were completely out of Peanuts calendars. But the calendar shop did have one left (at least without looking in back), and at 50% off, so all's well.

Except that when I got home bunnyhugger saw what I'd been vague about going out to get. Because she had gotten the calendar, and before Christmas. She just hadn't had time to wrap it and had left it at home when we bundled up everything she was going to wrap at her parents'. She had thought this all right, though, because she could wrap it up and leave it as a surprise gift under the tree for New Year's ... if I hadn't spoiled it, and if she didn't now have a second Peanuts calendar of no use to anyone. It'll spend the year in her office, more or less.

Stave the Second. So every year the American Coaster Enthusiasts publishes a calendar with pictures, often, of roller coasters we've ridden or hope to ride, and I give it to bunnyhugger. Except this year they kept not having the calendar; as late as ten days before Christmas they didn't have it in their store. I thought seriously about using my pictures to print up my own calendar, a counterpart to the carousels calendar she makes for herself every year, but I never found time for it. Just as well, too, because shortly before Christmas they did publish the calendar. It wouldn't arrive before Christmas, but that's all right. I could wrap it up and set it under the tree for New Year's, as a late surprise gift.

When she found it --- and she had found another late surprise gift for me --- and opened it she froze. She had been checking the ACE web site just that last night, and saw that they had the calendar for sale and that they had announced its sale very late, and that she hadn't gotten it for this year and ...

Well. She had been ready to buy it but thought she should hold back and make sure that I hadn't actually bought it after all. So we avoided having a double calendar mishap.

Stave the Third. New Year's Eve we again spent in. We switched the TV to Dick Clark's Ryan Seacrest's Chuck Dick's Charles Dickens's Rockin's New Year's Eve, then switched the receiver over to DVD to watch (most of) A Muppet Christmas Carol. (We didn't quite finish before midnight and had to resume). When we switched back to the TV we saw them, preposterously, claim the time in New York was 10:45 pm. And, weirder, they kept the off-by-an-hour mistake going, even after a commercial break. I could only imagine how they were getting roasted on social media for this. We kept checking our clocks to make sure we hadn't somehow misunderstood something but there we were, 11:48 by our clocks when the TV claimed it was 10:48, 11:55 by our clocks when Ryan said 10:55.

The most amazing thing to us was that they counted down the last minute of 2024 not in Times Square, but rather at a party in Puerto Rico. It felt weird breaking tradition like that but we both admired the courage of choosing to broadcast a different event for once. We again were imagining how many extremely angry white men were tweeting about this and how many very boring thinkpieces were being composed. But there it was, and we celebrated the new year together.

After finishing the last reel of A Muppet Christmas Carol we saw the most preposterous thing still on TV: crowds in Times Square. Yes, not everybody leaves right away, but it still clears out pretty fast, what with it being cold and people having to wait in little designated boxes for like eight hours if you want to be in the good spots. There was no way in the world that the place was still packed 25 minutes after midnight. And Ryan was still going on about the end of 2024 going on here.

Have you got this figured out yet?

What we finally realized, nearly an hour into the year and this strange phenomenon, is that it's not that New York City had moved to Central Time. No, instead, while switching the TV to Dick's Ryan's New Year's I must have accidentally hit pause, and the DVR paused. When its 60-minute buffer filled, the DVR resumed playing, having the minutes just right --- so we didn't suspect the problem was our viewing --- while the hour was off. And, uh, I guess neither of us had reason to suppose that Puerto Rico might not be on Eastern Time, so that wasn't any hint to us either.

So, yes, neither of us were able to work out from hints like ``ABC would not be an hour off on the New Year's Eve time and would not show Puerto Rico instead of Times Square at midnight Eastern'' that the problem might be our DVR instead of the world.

Now we're enjoying more of the day at Camden Park and I hope you are too.

Here, we're back on Big Dipper for a ride. The previous train's just left and is climbing the lift hill here.

Looking out from the station we see the Hawnted House, with no line to speak of there. You can see the park's entrance sign in the distance on the right there.

Peeking a little more southward where you can see the carousel's building on the far right.

Train coming back to Big Dipper, and the ride operator's working the brake levers.

A building off at the edge of the park. The maps suggested this was some kind of museum that, naturally, we'd want to see, but the maps appear out of date. The buildings were closed up although some stuff inside them suggested they might be used as walk-through haunted houses in October.

The closed building above is at the far end of Big Dipper. Here's Big Dipper seen from that side. It's a bit startling that there's no fence or anything blocking people off from the structure, which includes parts where the track is within arm's reach.

Trivia: Venice's Arsenal, the giant shipyard opened in 1104 which gave western Europe the word, derives its name from the Arabic ``dār șinā'ah'', meaning ``house of construction''. Source: The Riddle of the Compass: The Invention that Changed The World, Amir D Aczel.

Currently Reading: Archaeology, January/February 2025, Editor Jarrett A Lobell.

We try to get to Crossroads Village between Christmas and New Year's, and that left us with the choice whether to go Friday or Sunday. Friday we'd have to leave after work, losing us at minimum an hour and a half of time there; the village closes at 9 pm like it or not. Sunday we could have got there at the village's 4 pm opening, but as it was the last day of the operating season we'd have no backup in case something went wrong. Or, as it happens, if the day was pouring rain, getting a needed inch-and-a-half to two inches dropped on us. It happens we chose to go Friday, sparing us the choice of driving out there in awful weather to a place that might not have even opened.

Our adequate-but-short time was cut even shorter when I managed one of my rare wrong turns driving there, just at a moment when bunnyhugger had unknowingly turned off the turn-by-turn directions on her phone. So we ended up driving well past our exit for a good ten minutes or more before I finally asked where were we. While we discovered some interesting features in the area, including more neon signs than we knew were around, this ate up a lot of time we'd hoped to spend puttering around and maybe looking into buildings. While we hadn't expected to have the time to see the live show in the opera house, my mistake made it impossible to catch the Frosty Follies this year.

The most curious change at Crossroads this year: the cafe up front didn't have any food at all. No burgers, no nachos, but most stunning no doughnuts. They still sold coffee and cocoa, out of large carafes, but nothing else. We think they consolidated all their real food service items into one building that we almost never get to, although we didn't have time to investigate.

The other most curious change: they had a little canvas tent set up with a new vendor this year. The village is all century-plus-old buildings, with a handful of exceptions like the carousel building that at least tries to look vintage. This was just a canvas tent set up, or as I referred to it, the ``historic shopping village''. Inside were, first, some kind of small jet engine blasting enough heat to melt Europa, and second a huge number of 3D-printed toys. Puppets and marionettes and posable figures, done with lots of points and considerable articulation so you could pose your noodle dragon however you like. It was extremely hard not to buy something and we were maybe saved by figuring, oh, we can come back later and then they closed moments before we got back to them.

A small disappointment was that the Ferris wheel wasn't running. It can't have been the weather; it wasn't raining and while it was cold for the first time in several years' visiting it wasn't brutally cold; it was just a little below freezing is all. I'm guessing it was staff shortages. On the bright side, the carousel continues to run at its factory-specified six rotations per minute, so fast that it becomes a thrill ride. For the first time we sat in the ``nanny chairs'', the bench behind the row of kiddie horses. We were not expecting that to be such an intense experience, by the way. Actually being on horses is less disorienting than just sitting still on a bench at that speed, which gave us some of the centrifugal force of being in a Himalaya or other speed circular ride. Strongly recommended and I swear even the full-size chariot isn't this intense.

So our day wasn't as much as we had hoped for. That's all right. We were able to get important things like the kettle corn, and to stop into a shop that I swear has been closed for several years to find some vintage candy and some old postcards they were giving away free. (Unfortunately ours got crumpled while in the jacket pocket.) We also found (in the main gift shop) a cute token, a fridge magnet with a bunch of alleged ``hobo code symbols'' that we were able to give a friend who's deeply fascinated by hobo culture and who was thrilled out of all proportion by receiving this.

On the train ride through the festive lights displays they didn't play many of the novelty Christmas songs we're used to, like ``My Rusty Chevrolet'' or ``I Sure Do Like Those Christmas Cookies'', but at least I heard the latter playing out in the open from a distant speaker while were making the long walk from back of the village to front at the end of the night. (bunnyhugger, who somehow has ears less adept at picking up songs barely-audible-above-the-ambient-noise, just took my word that this was playing.) We could have used another hour but we did pretty well with the time we had. And, as mentioned, Sunday was nothing but rain so we could not have done much better.

Back to Camden Park pictures from June, now, for pictures of their other must-ride ride.

Camden Park's other historic wooden coaster, the children's coaster Little Dipper. Or Li'l Dipper; documentation is ambiguous. The Roller Coaster Database notes that the ride is claimed to have been built in 1961, but it doesn't appear in aerial photographs dated 1967. But the photo might be misdated, or the ride might have been relocated. Anyway, the important thing is it has the most important piece of any roller coaster: a curved loading station.

It's a basic double out-and-back coaster. Here's the train making its return loop. It isn't a very tall roller coaster; if it's 25 feet I'd be surprised.

Train returning to the station.

Here's what the station looks like. There's a log flume station to the left there. It looks like a couple rides hidden off from the main body of the park by a vast wall of asphalt.

I don't know why the operator had to go walking around the infield for something but the ride was, of course, shut down until that was cleared up.

View of the operator's booth. While there aren't the big pull levers like at Big Dipper, they do have those nice rotating switches to control the brakes and stuff on this coaster.

Trivia: On the 25th of September, 1690, Boston publisher Benjamin Harris --- who had fled London after being jailed for publishing sedition --- published the first edition of the first American newspaper, Publick Occurrences Both Foreign and Domestick. This was also the last edition as the governor and council of Massachusetts suppressed the paper. Source: An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power, John Steele Gordon.

Currently Reading: Archaeology, January/February 2025, Editor Jarrett A Lobell.

Our usual plan for Christmas is to go to bunnyhugger's parents and spend a couple days there, along with her brother and (often) his partner and play board games and watch some Christmas specials and eat far too much. This was going to be spoiled a little bit by scheduling. bunnyhugger's big end-of-the-year pinball tournament needed to be Thursday if ever, and that meant we couldn't stick around the 26th. Also I needed to work the 26th; I surely could have taken the time off but I didn't think to ask for it. But between that, and the need to get some Christmas shopping and wrapping done the 23rd, meant we couldn't leave before the 24th and we would have to leave the 25th. We did miss out on some of the holiday routines, most importantly watching specials --- no Charlie Brown, no Emmett Otter, no Scrooge --- but we did find time for important things like eating far too much.

It didn't help that we got off to a later-than-planned start, a combination of needing to sleep after everything that was going on, making the last attempt at getting fish in for the year, getting the bird and squirrel feeders topped up, and other little chores getting the house ready to ber let alone. Also catching Athena for her first trip to bunnyhugger's parents and meeting the space that she'll go when we're out of town for a couple days. We were a little concerned about her being in a place with a dog and a cat --- there's fair reason to think she had bad experiences with them when she was living on the streets --- but, well, you know the kinds of neurotic dog bunnyhugger's parents attract. Their cat meanwhile wanted nothing to do with anything and spent the whole time we were there being as inaccessible as possible.

In the hopes of saving some time and giving bunnyhugger's brother and mother the chance to do something besides food prep, they didn't make food this time. Instead we got Chinese food, picked up from ... well, a town twenty minutes away, because it turns out there's none in the small but still college town bunnyhugger's parents live in. This was a great choice, though, providing us with a lot to eat and somehow not actually any more time for doing things. We did well in the Fortune/Not-A-Fortune game, though, with the cookies mostly providing actual fortunes. bunnyhugger's father got one cookie that had four slips of paper inside, two fortunes, one not, and one marginal. (Some ambiguous thing about it being a time you could take a trip or something.) Mine promised I would do better in real estate than in stocks, which is unambiguously a fortune of some kind. I note that this fortune does not promise that I would actually do well in real estate or poorly in stocks.

After dinner and even after dessert, and after ragging on bunnyhugger's father for not living up to his promise of a fire in the fireplace, we once again failed to coax bunnyhugger's parents into playing a game of Betrayal at the House on the Hill. The original edition, though we talked up the Legacy version. I ended up being the Traitor this campaign and we ended up in a haunt that ... seems to have been inadequately play-tested, if you can imagine. There was an important element where we had to move a person and it wasn't at all clear how to do that and, in fact, whether I could at all. Although my play was --- if I may say so --- quite clever, I made a mis-step that, combined with a weird series of bad dice rolls, made me lose.

And after that ... well, bunnyhugger had to work more. She hadn't had time to wrap nearly anything, and we had brought not just the gifts she was giving but also our big canvas bag of wrapping supplies, a thing that impressed all her family. It was a nice Bed, Bath, and Beyond purchase years ago so if we ever break this one we're in trouble. But her wrapping things when everyone else had gone to bed was our least-bad option and it forced her to another late night up alone, just this time in a different house than usual.

And now, the last day of the year, the last pictures of Kentucky Kingdom from our trip back in June. Makes you think, doesn't it?

We headed back for the main body of the park, on the rumor that some rides there were still running. Here's a snap of a small river underneath the Roller Skater that we saw on the way.

This is Scream Extreme, which spins the riders in a circle and rises up so they're spinning at, Wikipedia says, 25 miles per hour, some sixty feet in the air. That ... sounds less extreme than you'd think. We've been on carousels that are faster than 25 miles per hour, although shorter than sixty feet off the ground.

Well, all the rides were shuttered so there was nothing to do but walk back to the car through ... sunny, cloudless skies.

Here we are back at the park entrance and, again, does this look like a thunderstorm is going to hit the park soon?

You can see why with skies like this they didn't want to leave the park open for the twenty minutes or so left to the end of its normal operating day.

bunnyhugger can't believe this is the end of our day already. Ah, but at least we got out ahead of the extremely light rain that eventually drifted around.

Trivia: Ray Bolger was billed in vaudeville as ``Rubberlegs'' Bolger. Source: The Encyclopedia of Vaudeville, Anthony Slide.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 52: There's a Hole in the Bottom!!, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle. So after like a year of Popeye searching in vain for his Poppa, who's gone off hiding so far as to chop up navigational signs and pretend to be a mermaid to decoy everyone, Poppa just shows up on Yapple Island talking with Popeye's Mom like it's nothing and he explains it as he changed his mind and on the one hand, that's an incredible anticlimax even for the most anticlimactic story strip ever and on the other hand, yeah, that's his character all right. Nailed it.

Christmas tree shopping. And chopping. As usual we went the weekend after Thanksgiving weekend, getting to the Tannenbaum Farms a little after noon when the place was so busy you'd think there would be nowhere to park, and yet we always do find somewhere. We were a quarter-hour late or so; bunnyhugger's parents had already arrived and bought the first pre-cut tree they saw, and they haven't as of this writing, to my knowledge, said how they think it isn't drinking and they bought a bad tree. So there's traditions being kept.

One tradition not kept: the little shop up front didn't have any doughnuts to go with hot cocoa, just (homemade) cookies. That's all right but when your stomach is set for doughnuts, you know what getting cookies is like. bunnyhugger got the last of the chocolate chip cookies of the bunch. I got an oatmeal raisin, or as bunnyhugger quipped, ``the worst cookie''. I like oatmeal raisin but I understand people feeling disappointed.

Also disappointing: they didn't have any Scotch pines. Or pines of any kind. The person giving directions said they were cleaned out this late in the season. We know that Thanksgiving was as late as it gets since the Republicans went absolutely nuts back in 1939-41 (check out Alf Landon's going off calling ``move Thanksgiving one week up'' Hitlerism). But it doesn't seem like it's that late. Maybe someone made a bad call about what to plant ten years ago, or however long it takes trees to grow up.

We ended up hunting around Concolors and Frasier furs, and were able to find a couple trees that, having just their lights strung on them as of this writing, are doing nicely. bunnyhugger's parents came back to see our house and meet our new rabbit, and so her father could inspect the wall repairs. This spun into bunnyhugger making some ramen for a late lunch for everyone, and then before we knew what happened they were leaving for home.

But that's the basic story of our getting our trees for this year.

Afterward, I popped over to the Quality Dairy and got some doughnuts for our coffee break.

Anthrohio Sunday began with me getting up early for the inflatables meet-and-greet. Ready to meet some inflatables? Take your shoes off and put any sharp objects off to the side and look at this ...

And this is what it looks like! A bunch of really big inflatables, full up, with people approaching and taking pictures with them and all. The pink dog here kept deflating and I'm not sure if that was because of a problem or because the owner was trying to leave early.

A couple dragons and a skunk here. Also you might be able to see a sign offering a chance to try out an inflatable suit. I didn't sign up for one. This time.

This large sea dragon you were allowed to climb on the back of and either ride bareback or lean back and enjoy the ride on the biggest air mattress you've been on! Except you'll probably slip and fall off because it turns out to be very hard to hop up with enough energy to get up there but not so much energy you can stop.

More accessible was laying on the paws or underneath the mane of this Chinese dragon that goes on considerably far back. Young kids, being possessed of mountain goat powers, would leap onto its back and climb up the fifteen feet or so before someone came over to get them down before they hurt themselves, as if you could hurt young kids with energy.

Here's your buff werewolf inflatable toyfriend looming over you.

And here's a very accessible inflated alligator that anyone could sit or lie down on.

Trivia: Processed cheese is mainly cheddar cheese pasteurized at 70 Celsius to deactivate the fermentation bacteria. Adding about 2 percent disodium phosphate emulsifies the cheese, keeping the butterfat from separating. Source: The 13th Element: The Sordid Tale of Murder, Fire, and Phosphorus, John Emsley.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine Volume 49: Look Out, Lummox!! or Who Slew Hillary Hee??, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

bunnyhugger's birthday was our next big event; it was also, you may recall, Election Day. I had voted early at the community center nearby and got one of those wolverine-tearing-his-shirt stickers. She voted the day of, with a lunchtime wait that wasn't anything to speak of, somewhat surprising me; we both expected a higher turnout. Well, that wouldn't hint at anything bad, right?

I had the day off, because Election Day is now a state holiday (in even-numbered years). More, my state-support job actually forbade me to work; every byte of traffic on the state government's computers and VPN was to be devoted to critical services and to election support.

So we went to Bronner's Christmas Wonderland, for what's become a tradition on her birthday, started in 2016 and ... you know, maybe this isn't the best election-year tradition we could have. (Obviously we didn't go in 2020.) The last couple years has been on the weekend and that's just when Bronner's starts getting its Christmas crowds in. For a Tuesday, though? Very few people there and very laid-back, all quite comfortable.

We had one important goal here, getting an I-love-my-rabbit ornament customized to our new rabbit Athena. This was easy to do, and beautifully done; the customizer wrote out Athena's name in maybe an even more beautiful semi-script than any of our other rabbits have gotten. We also got a couple other customized ornaments. One for bunnyhugger's brother and his fiancée, celebrating their first full year in their very own home. Another for my parents, who've moved to a new apartment again. This one's a congratulations on your new apartment ornament --- a door --- that I had their names, but certainly not the date or the address, put on. They'll be moving again in a couple years.

(Seriously; my mother has declared that when she turns 80 they're going to have a serious talk about whether they can continue living on their own, and on their own so far from any other family.)

Beyond that, though, the day was one of wandering around more Christmas ornaments than you would imagine there are, and yet somehow they don't have one for letterboxing. (Though it happens we didn't see the geocaching one this year.) We also peeked into the theater where they sometimes show movies about the history of Bronner's and discovered ... oh, they have a collection, an enormous number of Precious Moments figures. Not just Christmas-themed ones but every kind of moment that could be precious in porcelain. Also a display of the steps in making such a figure. Also some other collectible-doll figurines. Also nativity scenes from around the world which you'd expect more from the place. While we were looking around another couple came in and mentioned how they were glad someone else was appreciating all this, the museum that we didn't know was there. Besides the figurines were also a bunch of things from the early days of Bronner's, like their first cash register and the early catalogues from when they were more about sign painting with a side line in Christmas decorations.

We were there until Bronner's closed, but that was not the end of our day.

Now back to happy days of April and Pinball At The Zoo, not quite finished yet in my photo reel:

Lower playfield of Caveman, an early-80s attempt at reviving pinball's fortunes by --- well, you'll see what they came up with here.

Yes, it's one of the attempts to combine pinball and video games; good pinball play gets you more video game time.

But I mostly like the 80s-breakfast-cereal-box art style of the playfield figures.

Here's a dinosaur in the center right part of the playfield. Looks friendly.

Here's another 1930s game, Stoner Manufacturing Company's Chubbie, from 1938. I couldn't resist.

Here's the playfield. How many times can you hit all fifteen targets? Which, note, are not pop bumpers; the ball just bounces against each light as driven by gravity. In several games I managed to complete the set zero times.

Trivia: In 1820 Rochester, New York was not quite ten years old and had a population of three thousand. By 1827 it had about eight thousand people. Source: Wedding of the Water: The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation, Peter L Bernstein.

Currently Reading: Some more comics.