austin_dern

When last I reported about my lost camera and Motor City Furry Con we'd had established two important things. First, they had my camera! Second, it was in storage so who knows when they'd find the chance to recover it?

Well. I could manage going to Pinball At The Zoo without a camera and even the handful of things we got to in May without. Mostly local pinball stuff, although this might be the first time I don't have a proper ``what we compete for'' picture of the plaques at pinball night. But we are coming up on things I must have a camera for, and while yes, my iPhone is probably adequate for most purposes I want a camera that's a proper camera.

So I went looking and found a used Panasonic Lumix camera, one very close to the camera I had before my misplaced camera. And I finally have all the pieces I need for it together --- camera, memory card, battery and spare battery, charger, and the data/power cable that connects it to a computer or USB power supply! I even found that my old camera bag, the one used for the previous camera, fits this new one just fine. It lacks a strap --- I'd transferred that to my Samsung camera so that's in the Motor City Furry Con Lost And Found Storage Locker right now --- but the important thing is I can take good pictures and plenty of them. And the zoom on this doesn't --- yet --- get jammed up partway through, putting it ahead of my Samsung.

Now, of course, I just have to explain what I need to take pictures of that made me spend money on this.

We close the month now with something I bet you'd never thought you would see: the end of Kennywood pictures from our trip last year! And what comes up to follow this? Hm. There's so many possibilities ...

Oh yeah, we rented a locker for the second time ever and had to get stuff out of it. Do you see our locker number? Well, it was easy to remember since it was 1054 and I need hardly remind you what an important year that was.

Super Kaleidoscope, the charming circular-shaped building up front with the candy shop inside. It just looks good. You can make out the Old Mill's frontage in the background.

The Goodnight heart, last thing you see before entering the tunnel to leave Kennywood.

They've painted the tunnel with all kinds of Kennywood memorabilia and items, including a replica ticket from nearly a century ago and the reminder to gentlemen after using the washroom.

Looking back at the park from the parking lot.

And here's a panoramic view at the end of the night, to match the one had at the start of the day.

Trivia: The pancreas's name reflects its label as ``pan'' (all) and ``kreas'' (flesh), an organ of all flesh. The name may reflect early lack of knowledge of what it did and was simply there. Source: The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human, Siddhartha Mukherjee.

Currently Reading: The Harvey Comics Companion, Mark Arnold.

Long-memoried readers may recall a couple weeks ago I broke our atomic-clock-based wall clock, the one that uses time signals from WWV to adjust to the current time. The clock itself was and is fine, but the glass plate protecting the clock face from the elements was shattered into so many pieces. More than you're thinking of. More than that.

My father recommended that if there's a place in town that sells stained glass or art glass that they'd likely be able to cut a thin, eight-inch disc of glass. It happens there's a stained-glass/art-glass store so nearby it's even closer than the nearest convenience store. But I kept failing to actually check with them to see if they could do the work.

Today I finally got to doing something about it. But because of another errand, details of which I am not yet ready to make public, I got to the shop just before it closed. They were turning off the lights and everything, and I went back to the car but a guy waiting behind the shop said she'd gone back in, go talk to her.

So, wary that I had interrupted someone's departure-for-the-long-weekend, I entered and explained my need. Without saying a word she turned the clock upside-down, dropping yet another shard of glass out of it. Then took the clock over to a work table and did some measurements, and then back behind a counter. Finally she spoke: they can do that. She gave an estimate of about $20, extremely reasonable, and while it could have been done while I waited if I had gotten there earlier, now, I would have to wait. When could I come pick it up? Tuesday, unfortunately, I'm squeezed between office and pinball league, so we have to wait for Wednesday for the clock's return. (They're closed Monday for the holiday.) But they're going to cut a fresh piece of glass and install it and that seems to be everything we could hope for. Now I just have to stop instinctively looking for the time on the kitchen wall, the one surface in the house where it will definitely not be.

You know where we definitely were, back in July last year? Kennywood. Here's photographic proof.

Jack Rabbit dispatched and making its way to the first drop, which thanks to the terrain-hugging track, is well before the lift hill.

And there's the station. They've got LEDs providing the light of the stars now but at least preserved the shape and color of the neon.

Jack Rabbit's centennial logo, with the nice long ears for the K.

The new National Historic District sign doesn't have that post-facto correction about when the coaster opened on it. For what it's worth the Roller Coaster Database does think Jack Rabbit's double-dip ``camelback loop'' is a unique feature although ... boy, it sure seems like 'two hills in a row' would be an obvious feature for any terrain coaster.

View from just outside Jack Rabbit of the Racer and, above it, the Steel Curtain scenery.

Racer's new National Historic District sign has been modified to reflect the loss of Montaña Rusa at La Feria Chapultepec. And avoids any allusion to Blackwood's Grand National.

Trivia: In France in 1907 Wilbur Wright --- maybe souring from the bad progress of contract talks --- wrote his sister Katherine that the Notre Dame cathedral ``was rather disappointing as most sights are to me. The nave is seemingly not much wider than a store room and the windows of the clerestory are so awfully high up that the building is very dark'', and after visiting the Louvre, judged ``the Mona Lisa is no better than the prints in black and white''. Source: First Flight: The Wright Brothers and the Invention of the Airplane, T A Heppenheimer.

Currently Reading: The Harvey Comics Companion, Mark Arnold.

This weekend was one of more social obligations than usual. bunnyhugger had one on Friday, attending the retirement party of a friend at the bookstore. Then Saturday came the Celebration of Life for ERR, the pinball league friend who died while shoveling snow back in February.

Despite knowing this was coming we were still fuzzy on details until pretty late on, including just which of a small chain of bar/restaurants it was held in. The one it was actually held in was much easier to get to, even without the construction zones and the post-tornado emergency construction zones. Also not clear: how formally we should dress. I went with ``dark but office-appropriate'' clothes and bunnyhugger wore some pinball gear so people would know how we knew him. It turns out, as would fit ERR, the dress expectation was ``come as you like''.

We were briefly terrified to start when we didn't recognize anyone. But we were greeted by ERR's son, and his mother, and were able to say some nice things about him to them. And then we found a couple of pinball folks, two of whom were just leaving --- we'd learn most of the pinball folks had gotten there earlier; the celebration ran from noon to four and we got there halfway through --- but others who were sitting at a table, near the big display of photos of ERR's life, and we sat with them most of the afternoon.

We both left cards with memories --- mine was less specific, and more about the way ERR behaved at just about every pinball event we ever saw --- and picked up packets of forget-me-not seeds that we really can't grow in our yard. Not enough light. But maybe there'll sometime be a good place to use them.

So all that was a pleasant experience I hope to go a long time without repeating.

A thing we would like to repeat: visiting Kennywood. Here's pictures from our last trip.

Waiting for the Turtle ride. A woman sits down for the ride cycle ahead of us and you get views of the Phantom's Revenge coaster on the left and the Thunderbolt on the right.

And here's a view ahead of the Turtle queue with Phantom's Revenge (in purple) and Thunderbolt (the wooden coaster) behind.

Nice picture here lined up with one of the spacers between turtle cars.

Here's the Phantom's Revenge soaring overhead of the Turtle.

Leaving the Turtle you get this view of the wiring in back of the neon sign and of the Lucky Stand.

And here's the Wishing Well, where there's only ever really one wish to make, for the park to close late today.

Trivia: Samuel Bentham --- younger brother of the economist/philosopher Jeremy Bentham --- was in 1796 made Inspector General of the Royal Navy Yards, and among other things introduced steam power to the Portsmouth docks, putting in machine-powered tools to make the wooden blocks for the typical man-o-war's nine hundred pulleys, and a rolling mill able to make three hundred thousand copper plates a year for sheathing hulls. Source: To Rule The Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World, Arthur Herman. After spending enough time pushing for reform of the Navy Board, Bentham's post would be abolished.

Currently Reading: The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore, Evan Friss.

With the kitchen illuminated again I had the mild burst of energy needed to do some other home repair stuff. The most kneeling-involved one was putting new screws into one of the brackets for the laundry chute. Somehow the old screws had come loose, one dropping onto the bathroom floor and the other dropping out of existence entirely. Ace Hardware had some new screws that, based on the example I had, were compatible in size and length, and it was but the work of a moment to put that back in.

I also picked up a couple brackets to re-mount the kitchen cabinet shelf. But in examining the shelving I discovered these are adjustable shelves. There's regularly spaced holes all set to have little tabs poked in. One had been replaced by a metal bracket, but the others were pieces similar to the plastic tab that had finally broken. Turns out Ace Hardware has replacement metal tabs for this so I figure to go back and pick some new ones up. They have some that seem to promise holding a weight of up to 44 pounds, so ... uh ... 176 pounds seems like it should be enough to hold our second-tier dishes.

While examining things generally I made a discovery about the lights over the bathroom mirror. bunnyhugger had thought the fixture was irrevocably broken. But when I got the very late-50s/early-60s plastic cover off, I found that the fixtures worked fine. Three of the four bulbs were burned out is all. I got a four-pack of new bulbs and put them in and it's now very pleasantly bright. Washing the outer layers of dirt off the plastic cover helped too. Seeing the room lit up in bright yet heatless light I ... wondered if I should have got the 5000K 'daylight' bulbs instead of the 2700K 'warm' bulbs. The 'warm' lighting looks more like what we would have had there, but if the mirror lighting serves a purpose it's so see our skin in as neutral a light as possible so ... hm. Well, we can reconsider it when the bulbs burn out in (with normal use) 13 years or (with our use) in 143 years.

While doing that bulb-changing I also took the covers off three other ceiling fixtures, in the hall lamps and the guest bedroom, and discovered one of the CFL bulbs in the guest bedroom had been burned out. So replacing that with the incandescent no longer in the bathroom fixture we have a guest bedroom a fair bit brighter, for what that's useful for. (It's where I keep my dresser and clothes.)

I also got some topsoil, to try levelling out the divot in the ground next to our driveway that turns into a small tidal pool every time it rains. bunnyhugger noted we should probably put some gravel down, though, and she's right, so I guess I'll be hitting Ace again soon. More on this as it comes to pass.

We draw nearer the end of our short day at the Ionia Free Fair, but we're not there yet. Some more night photos:

Zero Gravity, a Round-Up, always one of my favorite rides. Note that at no point in the Round-Up's ride will you experience Zero Gravity. Indeed, if at any time during the ride cycle you did experience anything but elevated gravity, it would be a catastrophic failure.

Here's a less arty picture that still captures its lights in the same color phase.

And here's what it looks like from on the ride. The Zipper, which we did not ride, is in the background on the right.

Looking down into the center of the Round-Up ride. It almost looks like a roulette wheel.

Ride's over; folks getting off here. I like how the door looks like this portal in the otherwise unbroken wall of mesh and padding.

People not quite gotten off the ride, or who are already on for the next ride cycle, with the Zipper and Moon behind them.

Trivia: Sulfanomide, the first important broad-spectrum antibiotic, was developed and patented by I G Farben in 1909 as a dye. Source: The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World From the Periodic Table of the Elements, Sam Kean. The sulfa craze in the late 30s when the patents wore off resulted in the United States's elixir sulfanilamide mass poisoning in 1937, and from that the empowering of the Food and Drug Administration to oversee the safety of foods and drugs.

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

So, uh, ever have one of those days where you wonder if you maybe accidentally crossed a vengeful spirit? Or at least annoyed one with moderate capacity to do mischief? We're maybe not at a dangerous point but we certainly have questions.

So the big one is that Thursday our kitchen light stopped working. Turning on, particularly, but it's hard to think what else we'd have it do. We did some grumbling about how recently we'd changed the halogen bulb in there --- bunnyhugger thought it was only a few months; I thought it was a few years. In fact, based on my whining about it on my humor blog, I know the bulb burned out last summer, so closer to her recollection than mine. It had also burned out in 2020, so it's not our imagination that these are burning out faster since the old bulb had lasted since no later than 1999.

Friday, after failing to find our old stock of bulbs --- turns out the last one had been used in 2024 --- I went to Meijer and found they didn't have one, so I went to Lowe's and they did. Not that it mattered: it turns out the bulb is not the problem. The fixture is. Or the switch is, although since it's correctly showing the amber glow when in the 'off' position I think that's less likely. I guess there's a possibility the wiring between switch and fixture is but I really hope not.

Anyway the need is to call an electrician, and I have so far forgotten twice to do that before the office was closed. Maybe tomorrow.

A more serious bit of mayhem? While I was in the dark kitchen to get a pop I heard the horrible sound of plates falling. Very careful opening of cabinet doors revealed ... they hadn't? But then what did happen?

On closer examination, it turns out one of the braces holding up the middle plates shelf gave way, and the whole shelf dropped ... onto the extended straw from a travel mug that's a little too awkwardly sized to actually be used and that, for want of a better idea, we'd left on the bottom shelf. This turned out to be a magnificently lucky placement since the shelf had maybe a half-inch at most that it could drop, and while a few things were out of place, nothing was damaged. I unloaded the plates and cups and stuff onto the stove top, for now, and got a couple replacement brackets from Ace that I didn't find time to install today.

Still, very weird to have the bracket snap like that, and in weird circumstances where it's all basically fine.

Less weirdly cursed and going back a week or two, but two of the screws fell out of the hinge on the laundry chute, so that needs replacing. I got some screws that seem to be about the right size from Ace as well but again, didn't have time to deal with it today. ... This makes it sound like I'm just sitting around letting things fall apart but in my defense, doing things is hard.

Anyway, back to something not cursed: the Ionia Free Fair and the art exhibitions.

Now and then you see pictures that sure seem like bunnyhugger might have taken them, but she didn't. Here's just a merry-go-round that I assume is one of those in Holland, Michigan, but going to check for sure would be a tiny bit of work that I could avoid by just waiting for bunnyhugger to see and tell me.

And this is not a picture of our Athena angrily nesting; we didn't have Athena yet --- in fact I think she wasn't even born yet --- and the picture is by someone else entirely.

The fair had a special Christmas theme for this year and artworks fitting that theme were gathered separately, also making it a little hard to be sure you'd seen, say, all the ribbon-winning pictures for a category like 'Profiles' or 'Pets' or something. Anyway, through the windows behind you can see the Sun has gone nova. Whoops!

And then here's a cabinet of cameras. Note the boxes of film on the top and the bottom shelves.

And here's a little living-room display. I don't know if it was a specific art installation or if it was just to add to the Christmas theme of the --- wait a minute. Computer, enhance.

Oh yeah, your traditional Christmas setup featuring a newspaper from the middle of July. (I am genuinely curious why, of all the possible newspapers to set there, they picked this one, other than that I suppose it's easy to find reprints of this particular issue.)

Trivia: The word ``halibut'' derives from Middle English words ``butte'', meaning any of a number of flatfish (including flounder and halibut), and ``haly'', a form of ``holy'', reflecting how it was commonly eaten on holy days; thus, ``halybutte'', evolving into ``halibut''. Source: Webster's Dictionary of Word Origins, Editor Frederick C Mish. Dutch has the cognate heilbot, and Low German heilbutt; Norse also has heilag-fiski, ``holy fish'', and Swedish ``helgeflundra'' and Danish ``helleflynder'', both meaning ``holy flounder''.

Currently Reading: Force: What It Means to Push and Pull, Slip and Grip, Start and Stop, Henry Petroski.

Oh yeah, taxes. After a fearsomely long pinball tournament Saturday bunnyhugger asked if I knew what other burden would eat her time up this weekend. I said yes, and she was not satisfied that I knew what it was. I had refrained from saying taxes, mostly out of the small nagging fear that she was thinking of some other burden and then I'd just be ratcheting up the schedule pressure. But no, it was the taxes she was thinking of.

After getting the last form needed --- my student loan tax information --- she started work on whatever web site it is she punches these things into and then spent a couple hours ready to punch the computer. Mostly over things like somewhere in there one of my mutual funds has some investment in some foreign country and the dollar in capital gains there demands some new form be filled out.

And at the end of this we got ... the result that we owed four thousand in federal taxes. Ah, but at least we ... also owed five thousand in state taxes? The federal thing was alarming enough but at least we could track down why that happened: from a quick check with income tax estimators I wasn't getting nearly enough withheld for federal tax. State, though? That made no sense; our income was nearly the same as last year and we got a modest refund from the state of Michigan last time around. An angry review of things found the problem, entering the state tax withheld on the wrong line of the form. With that fix we were left ... still owing the federal regime a lot, but at least the state was back to owing us a couple hundred bucks.

Today I got in touch with my employer to get a W-4 revision in, and sat back to ponder how many people are just having ChatGPT fill in a tax form that looks plausible enough. And how many of Stretch Muskrat's whiz kids are replacing actual audits with ChatGPT reviews. Better to not ponder such things, I suppose.

Some much happier things to look at right now, instead. Indiana Beach on our anniversary trip last year and something special ...

A surprise and delight! bunnyhugger had bought a boardwalk brick for us, a couple years ago, and had waited anxiously for word that it had actually been installed. Well, it was, and she used the cover of looking at the funny bricks people had sent in --- ``Lance Young: Better than a Disney Brick'' or ``Levi Busch, Roller Coaster Tycoon'' for example --- to draw me over to ours.

OK, now this is the Flying Bobs ride formerly of Coney Island of C-town, Ohio. The thing I identified as it earlier was the Musik Express and I'm a little surprised bunnyhugger didn't correct me beforehand.

Nice view of the lake. There's a couple rides that project out over the water so you can get a view of the shoreline like this.

And here's the shoreline from a little higher up. This must have been from the swings ride, although I wouldn't have been photographing while the ride was in motion.

From the swings ride looking back at the Crow's Nest, a gift shop and a food stand.

That gorgeous late-afternoon light leaks into my camera.

Trivia: From 1934 to 1992, some 2,015 FDIC-insured banks failed. 1,260 of the failures were from 1985 on. Source: History of Money, Glyn Davies.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine Sundays Supplement Volume 15: 1953, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

PS: Were you wondering What's Going On In Flash Gordon? So are you covering Flash Gordon again? Yes. In the linked essay I cover December 2024 through February 2025 on Mongo. Why that date range, and when will I bring things up to the present (April 2025)? ... You'll see.

While bringing groceries in I noticed something exciting among the vestibule clutter: a red umbrella on the ground. I was already writing the story of this happy discovery --- my lost umbrella, with the lost camera attached to it --- and how much sense it made, if this fell out of whatever I was carrying in while the house was blacked out and we didn't see afterward because it was just a bundle of shoes and boots down there?

The opening tells the story. It wasn't my umbrella, it was bunnyhugger's red umbrella. My umbrella and my camera remain missing.

I guess if anything this answers the question of whether I should buy a new point-and-shoot or deal with the increasing crankiness of my old camera. But where can you even get a point-and-shoot camera anymore?

Can you find one on my humor blog? Because if you can you're going to surprise me. What I can find there, from the past week, was this:

• MiSTed: The 72 Hours Saga, Part 33
• March Pairwise Brackety Contest Thing: Immanence versus Vanadium
• Statistics Saturday: Some Things You Might Know About Rutgers and Whether That Is Normal
• March Pairwise Brackety Contest Thing: Indifference versus British Children’s Shows
• March Pairwise Brackety Contest Thing: Hotels versus Specificity
• What’s Going On In Rex Morgan, M.D.? Did Kelly’s Mom order a guy killed? January – March 2025
• March Pairwise Brackety Contest Thing: Ominous Beeping versus Not Intending Puns
• MiSTed: The 72 Hours Saga, Part 34

Since that finally finished off a big amusement park trip you know what to expect next on my photo reel: ... an amusement park trip. This one, on our anniversary, the 30th of June. But as a preliminary to that we went to see ...

The Logansport (Indiana) Carousel's building, there to house an extreme rarity: a Gustave Dentzel carousel and a working brass-ring game.

Our first view of the carousel, in a relatively new building to house it well and keep it safe. And with nice chairs all around to sit and admire the ride.

The carousel in motion. It's interesting that some of the outer horses are posed as leaping, or at least rearing back. I'm used to thinking of that row as standers only.

Ride attendant loading up the brass rings, in the arm. If you grab one, you get a free ride!

Animals racing past in front of the band organ, which I think is a modern Stinson machine but I don't know and don't seem to have a photo that answers unambiguously.

As happens with these older carousels, it's a national historic landmark.

I'm curious what motivates the banning of balloons from the ride.

The full list of carousel rules, so you know what's required and what's forebidden.

We got four tickets, two rides each. I believe the back side of the tickets were blank so we didn't photograph them. Also note the sponsor-brick walkway.

There's this cute hanging sign on the outside of the building.

Slightly better view of the sponsor bricks. Apparently a Holiday Inn/Super 8 motel franchisee supported the project.

And here's a picture of the ride as centered as I could do by hand. ... I could have done better.

Trivia: In the public meeting of the New York City Board of Electrical Control on the 16th of July, 1888 --- the first public hearing about the dangers of alternating versus direct current --- George Westinghouse noted that his company and licensee Thomson-Houston had installed 127 AC stations, 98 of them operating and a third of the operating ones having already installed, and no Westinghouse central station had yet had ``a single case of fire of any description''. Meanwhile, of 125 central stations for the Edison company there had been numerous fires, including ``three of which cases the central station itself was entirely destroyed, the most recent being the destruction of the Boston station'' and among customers a fire destroying a Philadelphia theater. Source: Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World, Jill Jonnes.

Currently Reading: One Heartbeat Away: Presidential Disability and Succession, Birch Bayh.

Our coffee table broke. This isn't too surprising as it was never much of a table, one of those things held together with hex keys that now and then I tightened back up to not wobble. But something happened a couple weeks ago and one of the legs broke clean through, so that it couldn't be used as a table anymore.

After a short while as living room clutter and then a short while as clutter in the garage I realized a role for it. With the legs taken off it fits very neatly underneath the sofa, filling up about two-thirds of the frontage that Athena had used to squeeze underneath and start biting the lining. With the help of a couple empty cardboard boxes I could slide material underneath that keeps her from squeezing under and that she hasn't got the dexterity or strength to move out of the way.

What we'd really like is to have the space underneath used as storage, if anything, but until we can find under-sofa boxes the right dimensions this will do something. It makes our bunny cross.

We were done with Kings Island, but there was a C[ something ]ti institution we had to visit, especially because our last trip (in 2019) was constrained so that we couldn't have gone there. That would be ...

That's right, Jungle Jim's, home of the Kings Island monorail. There's also stretches of track long enough that a train could plausibly run, but this isn't it.

It's a great, overgrown attraction, but it's also an actual supermarket too.

Haven't even got in yet and we've seen a monorail and a Rhinestone Rhino. You know it's going to be something else.

And a point of historic interest: the stones in the building were granite paving stones from C-town's public landing, the Ohio River dock people knew as the entrance to the city. Normally I'd have focused on the plaque to make it easier reading but given the stones are the attration, there we go, giving them attention. Jungle Jim's bought the stones and used them for the building.

And now here we are, seeing the cheeses of various nations: Germany, Ireland-and-Australia, England, and Gouda.

Did I mention Jungle Jim's had pinball? We had heard it had pinball when we last visited, like a decade before, but we hadn't been able to find it. This time ... we found it. Two games, and we can't swear there aren't more we failed to see.

The wall art behind Jurassic Park is curious because it's not taken from any specific pinball, but it is informed by what pinball machines looked like in the 70s.

Photograph from the inside looking out, so you see what the plastic doors look like affixed to a normal structure. Though it's obvious how the trick works it's still very effective and there's a feeling like you're stepping through a magic portal as the port-a-potty structures train you to expect a small enclosed volume and going into a corridor feels like a violation of the rules.

One minor point of weird publicity is Jungle Jim's bathrooms. Besides the one for photographing that I bet small kids make terrible mistakes on there's the ``portable restrooms'' that are, in fact, the doors to real, spacious, and clean bathrooms that have actually won awards.

Anyway here's bunnyhugger getting Detroit Rock City to rock.

Moving on. Here's some of the candy shelves and say, do you see what's caught my eye there?

Yes, it's Elvis, an animatronic salvaged from the old days of Chuck E Cheese, and doing his show every five minutes, without any hints of The King catching fire. Also there's one of the penny press machines to the side.

Trivia: The word ``reverie'' first appears in English in the mid-14th century meaning ``wildness, frolicking, revelry'', the word derived from the Old French reverie (``revelry, wantonness, wildness''), from rever, meaning ``to revel, to rave''. Meanwhile ``rever'' first appears in the early 15th century meaning ``merrymaking, boisterous partying'', derived from the verb revel, ``to make merry'', from the Old French reveler (``to make merry''), from the Latin rebellâre, ``to rebel, to make war''. Despite the similarity in their initial meanings, and their sounds, they are not related. Source: Semantic Antics: How and Why Words Change Meaning, Sol Steinmetz. Steinmetz doesn't speculate but I wouldn't be surprised if reveler didn't get some currency from being mistaken for reverie.

Currently Reading: One Heartbeat Away: Presidential Disability and Succession, Birch Bayh.

A couple years ago my parents gave bunnyhugger a Christmas present that both she and I could use: a jigsaw puzzle, but one of space exploration. This puzzle is a pretty good one-poster guide to the things that have taken people into space: all the booster rockets and planes, all the capsules (including the X-15, which got high enough to bring people into space, and is why the B-52 Stratofortress which launched the craft is included), all the space stations, and all the spacesuits worn both inside craft and for spacewalks/moonwalks. White Knight/SpaceShipOne also get an appearance.

After politely thanking my parents for this we then pretty much forgot about it because bunnyhugger is much more the jigsaw puzzle fan while I'm the one who has any chance of telling Salyut 7 apart from Almaz 3. But, with a bit of down-time between puzzles and noticing this puzzle was a mere 500 pieces --- she's more into your thousand-piece one --- she figured, why not give this a try?

This ended up being a collaborative effort. She found and placed in (almost all) the border pieces, and then, after some encouragement, I went and tackled what seemed like the hardest thing. This would be the many not-quite-repetitive pieces of the International Space Station and its solar panels. The scale they used made the pieces not quite align with the jigsaw cuts, so if you looked at them you could work out which piece went in which column of solar array, but bunnyhugger was not looking forward to that mass. Meanwhile, I kind of was.

Over the past week I had more time to work on it, as well as a couple of tedious work problems that made it nice to step over and do something simple, and with a clear direct reward: a tiny bit of Soyuz 7K-T came together! So that was fun. And the poster had a lot of shapes easily recognizable to me, so I kept putting pieces in. bunnyhugger felt bad she wasn't doing enough of the puzzle, as though recreation had minimums.

So yesterday it came to an end, with bunnyhugger dropping in the last two dozen pieces, saving for me the very final piece. In a day or two we'll probably break it up, and it's too soon to guess what the next puzzle will be. Or if bunnyhugger will invite me to drop in pieces if I'm going to take that much at a time.

Today in photos we leave the neighborhood of Dollywood; can you remember at all what came next? You might be surprised by the pictures of it ...

A couple more pictures from the sun room of the Super 8. Tis is looking straight out across the road. There was a helicopter tours attraction there that bunnyhugger didn't notice, and was glad, because the thought is terrifying and ridiculous.

Oh, and this was across the street and we never stopped giggling about the STUF. Anyway, our next thing ...

... was a stop at Buc-ees, actually, but I somehow didn't take pictures of that including of their beaver statue outside. But we drove up to C-town and made an evening visit to Kings Island. So, surprise! No pictures of the next thing we did, but we're right into the thing after.

It was a Tuesday evening but we got a pretty decent spot, not far from the front gate. So, with fresh sunscreen applied we were ready to see what it was like inside.

This is a boring picture, yes, but understand: we visited Kings Island just days before the merger between Cedar Fair and Six Flags that would create the new ... Six Flags Entertainment Company ... and I didn't know how fast they'd replace the company credit underneath the park name.

And here's the entrance, with Kings Island's reflecting pool and their Eiffel Tower somehow photographed so it looks like it's in the wrong proportions. I don't know how that happened.

Trivia: From the 1890s through 1920s modern-living advocates pushed for houses with more readily accessible nature, so that the weather could be appreciated: sleeping porches, sun parlors, large windows, courtyards, and stucco exteriors for American bungalows. Even the term ``bungalow'', taken from India, suggested tropical enjoyment rather than year-round uniform medians. Source: Cool Comfort: America's Romance with Air Conditioning, Marsha E Ackermann.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 54: Napple or Yapple, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly, Editor Stephanie Noelle. Sims and Zaboly overestimating how whimsical it is that the residents of Napple Island call apples 'Napples' while the residents of neighboring Yapple Island call them 'Yapples'. Also how good a story it is for Popeye's Mom to insist her Yapple Pies are better than Roughhouse's Napple Pies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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