austin_dern

It was a routine week on my mathematics blog. Until I made a big announcement ... the first of several I figure on for the next month. See if you can find what it was!

• Reading the Comics, May 7, 2020: Getting to Golf Edition
• Reading the Comics, May 9, 2020: Knowing the Angles Edition and gads but my brain insists on seeing that as ``Angels'' for some reason
• I am getting ready for the 2020 Mathematics A-to-Z (hint: it's this one)
• Reading the Comics, May 12, 2020: Little Oop Counts For More Edition

Meanwhile, in looking at old cartoons? 60s Popeye: Little Olive Riding Hood, I'm gonna keep my sheep suit on for this week's peek at a forgotten cartoon.

So yesterday had the last of Lakenenland to share. We would have several more stops for letterboxes, and I think they were all successful. They were all, also, after dark and I didn't try taking photographs. There was one more important stop, though, and that was to eat.

Off to Munising, Michigan, and the place we stopped for dinner: Dogpatch.

Yes, for some reason, this small town in the upper peninsula has a Li'l Abner-themed restaurant, and has since the 60s, offering great things like awesum sandwiches and pizza.

The theming of the restaurant is obvious from up front, in case you're someone who remembers anything about Li'l Abner. Otherwise, it's kinda cryptic.

For example, I know these are characters from the comic strip but I don't know the comic stril well enough to say which. On the right by the way is the salad bar, which was about the only thing on the menu we could eat and even then I'm not sure the soup wasn't based on chicken stock

Oh yeah, here's a view of the salad bar though not what was in it (nothing all that interesting), and ... uh ... some of the Yokums in decoration.

More of that Al Capp art. The sign in the upper right says 'Good .. is better than evil cuz it's nicer', which I suppose is something from the strip.

Now, 'Upper Slobbovia' is a thing I recognize, as that was Al Capp's contribution to the atlas of wackily named awful nations full of foreigners.

A Mammy Yokum figure that's separating the men's and women's bathrooms.

I'm really not sure. I know one running theme in the comic strip was people trying to steal the Yokum's pig so maybe this reflects a scene of that kind of story?

Here's a look toward the front of the restaurant. The significance of the sign for San Antonio, Texas, eludes me.

The menu is written in that sort of Fake Southern As Composed By A Northerner Cartoonist. The foods are all named for comic strip stuff. The number of things made of ham or bacon seems inevitable, yes, but at odds with the strip's regular storyline of trying to keep people from eating their pig.

The other side of the menu which I'm sorry did not photograph as clearly. They gave up on most of the character naming here. Also they have whitefish, because once you get north of 44 degrees latitude every food-serving place in Michigan offers whitefish. You can get whitefish pate at most Holiday gas stations. The Kick A Poo Joy Juice label for the beverages is based on the comic strip, although they don't actually carry Kickapoo Joy Juice pop.

Trivia: In 1927 more smallpox was reported in the United States than in any nation other than India. Source: 1927: High Tide of the 1920s, Gerald Leinwand.

Currently Reading: Love Game: A History of Tennis, from Victorian Pastime to Global Phenomenon, Elizabeth Wilson. And, wow, but this is surprisingly interesting. And about the right level of academic, too.

We had an almost normal-ish thing Thursday. Sunshine had her annual appointment at the animal ophthalmologist's. They offered to let us postpone it until they could see patients normally, but who knows when that would be? So we figured to do it in quarantine style.

This involved first, sterilizing her carrier with a bit of bleach solution. And I got out some of my older t-shirts, or as bunnyhugger accurately characterized them rags, to hold the carrier, keeping us from re-contaminating it. When we got to the center we phoned them, and opened the car's hatch back. They took the carrier and Sunshine in for the examination, and called when there was a report. Which took only a few minutes. I think they were done with her quicker than would be under normal circumstances. I'm supposing they had a lot of cancellations.

So, her eyes are good. At least, they're not worse than they had been. Her cataracts have stayed the same, so we'll carry on giving drops in her left eye. And we've set an appointment for next year, a Thursday afternoon in May about this same time.

It's really weird to have just gotten done a routine bit of business.

We haven't taken her to the vet's for her regular full health screening. They're not doing non-emergency care, not yet, although they are hoping to be able to do some of that soon.

So now let's get back to that drive home. And, particularly, more photographs of Lakenenland since that's an extremely photographable collection of junkyard art.

Totally metal! A Lakenenland sculpture that evokes a skull on a pole.

I'm guessing this ghost peeking out from the trees was made for Halloween.

So here's a sailboat stuffed full of kitchen stuff and a traffic light and a model car and a miniature mailbox. So, you know, a TGI Friday's in a box.

Springy aliens in a cute little flying saucer!

And here's a concert in the park.

Nice to see Bubo from Clash of the Titans has a retirement home up north.

All right now bunnyhugger feels attacked.

The Tasmanian Devil next to a giant arrow seems like a scene from a cartoon I can't remember.

Draw your fursona riding this challenge.

Oh yeah, so I guess the artist behind Lakenenland has political opinions. Here the United States is being split by a wedge of Economy/Jobs, Heath Care, Education, Iraq, Taxes, Moral Values, and Terrorism. The hammer is RTW (so-called ``Right-to-Work'') and being driven by disgraced then-governor Rick Snyder. It's dated November 2, 2004, so as bunnyhugger pointed out, the Rick Snyder (elected 2010) stuff was a later addition.

And here's a weather-machine slot-machine. I don't believe that it worked but we didn't dare try the handle.

The Tin ... Tiger ... Of Oz? I don't know. The later books in the series got weird.

``Lost? Which direction is north? Remember! Bowling balls always grow on the north side of a tree.'' A wonderfully surreal little installation that any city park would be proud to have.

I'm sorry, I don't understand what message this 'Genuine North American corporate greed pig' eating America and leaving droppings on an 'Average American Worker' is trying to communicate.

Similarly I expect this statue, dated December 20, 2017, showing a great figure 1 holding a plaque reading 'Lunch $, Family Vacation, Dream of owning my own home, Heath Care, Education, Infrastructure, Middle Class', pointing at a little girl and saying, 'Take off your shoes, I want them too!' means something.

More political art: the Phantom 506 sailboat. And what does that signify? ... Just a moment and we'll see.

Trivia: The Prudential Insurance Company, founded in Newark in 1875, was the first significant firm to offer life insurance to industrial workers. Source: New Jersey: A History of the Garden State, Editors Maxine N Lurie, Richard Veit.

Currently Reading: Lincoln's Constitution, Daniel Farber.

Ready for my report on a story comic? At last? Let me tell you What's Going On In Prince Valiant? What are those women doing with bats? in the February - May 2020 update.

So with this we get to Monday, and the day we drove home. We did not drive straight home. instead we stopped, often, at locations reported to hold letterboxes. This made for our most fruitful day of letterbox-finding ever --- I think we got ten altogether --- but also meant we got home astoundingly late, like, 4:30 am Thursday late. It was worth it. So here's a slice of what that looked like.

The living room area of our AirBnB, photographed the last day of our visit. The whole area was far more room than we could have used. I sat in the sofa some, but with nearly a full week there we didn't even touch all the furniture.

The breakfast nook area which we did use (notice my messenger bag sitting on the stool there, and our picnic basket on the table and cooler on the floor). Also, for a while, I was afraid I'd left our Mi-Fi device here. I had not; I'd left it in the glove compartment of my car.

Even more rooms in our basement AirBnB rental. The open door is the bathroom which included a sauna shower.

The bedroom, which really would have been all the room we needed. The alarm clock being along the wall opposite the bed meant it was easy to check the time at night.

Our first stop, and our first attempted letterbox, was in this park at the opening of the Keweenaw Waterway. That lighthouse there? It's the one we had seen turn on at the end of Sunday night. It's at least a half-hour driving to get from White City Park, across the way, to where we were for this photograph, though. Maybe an hour.

Boats tied up at the Portage Entry park.

Our second letterbox stop: Canyon Falls and Gorge roadside scenic area. The letterbox clues would lead us down the whole path, as the box's planter wanted us to appreciate the area.

Miscellaneous plants in some nice shafts of light through the woods.

The Sturgeon River seen through the plants.

The river runs through these nice great flat stones, so the place looks faintly like a wild Modernist city park.

Where to find Mark Trail? There's got to be a clue around somewhere.

The river has some spots where the water turns brown. I'm not sure if this reflects metals or tree bark in the water tanning it.

Here I take a low-angle shot, using the long-exposure 'waterfall' mode in my camera and that for once gave me a nice ghostly sheen reflecting the water. Yes, that's some kind of ratchet wheel stuck in there.

This sign explaining the red pine was one of several marking various trees. The explanation of the red pine that English explorers mistook it for Scotch pine from Norway makes me tired every time I read it.

Another of the many small waterfalls in this park; this was near the end of what we could access without doing serious hiking.

And that's it for Mark Trail, everyone! Good seeing you.

Trivia: An English judge ruled in 1743 that killing an impressment gang member was a legitimate act of self-defence and could be done without legal penalty. Source: To Rule The Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World, Arthur Herman.

Currently Reading: Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend, Joshua Blu Buhs.

I've taken to walking around town, as a nearly daily bit of exercise. Today, I walked from home all the way to the Frandor shopping mall and back, looping around a couple of spots including the Jersey Giant sub shop and the Big John Steak and Onions sandwich shop that I would sometimes drive to for lunch. It took more than an hour to do the whole loop, but not that much more than a whole hour. It's surely good for me, but also it's stunning to think that so many places are becoming walkable range. At least when it's not raining or snowing or bitterly cold. Still it's a pretty poor tradeoff for all this ruin.

So that's local news. How about the other end of the state, the Keweenaw Peninsula during our last evening there back in August of 2018?

Our Sunday evening: White City Park, a beach. And, a century ago, an amusement park, one of many styled after the Columbian Expo's midway. There's no trace of the park, of course, which is not to say we didn't look.

Like, for example, we somehow got the idea that the roller coaster would have been somewhere around what's now this grove of trees, and might there be one of the foundation pillars still around, a cylinder of cement otherwise doing nothing? ... Not that we could tell.

The park is at the end of Portage Entry, the river/canal system leading to Portage Lake and Houghton and all that. Here's the breakwater protecting this corner of the park from the waters of Lake Superior.

A date of August 24, 1928, carved into the breakwater concrete. Which means it was built after the amusement park was closed. But was built around the same time as our house.

Walking out along the breakwater. And you can see this is an actual, legitimate beach, even though it is on Lake Superior.

Also that someone's lost their flip-flops in the cold but clear water.

Here's the lighthouse at the end of the breakwater.

Here's the useful instructions to get the fog signal going, in nice big print so you can ... find ... the instructions ... in the fog?

Looking back from the lighthouse to the park. It's something like a half-mile from this point to the land. Now and then I felt like, oh, boy, this would be a bad spot from which to slip and fall into the water.

More of the miscellaneous signage explaining the lighthouse, including the warning that I should not be this close to it without earplugs. Well, it was a nice clear evening.

bunny_hugger models for this candidate for my album cover.

The other possible album cover, again featuring bunnyhugger. I think it's the less interesting shot but it does give a better view of the structure under the waterline.

People in the distance enjoying their boat recreation, or 'boatcreation'.

Suddenly a flotilla of Price Is Right boat showcase winners sailed past!

They zipped right past the lighthouse, pretty close to us.

And the waves they set off were interesting enough we both had to photograph it.

Trivia: The British imported 181,545 pounds of tea between 1650 and 1700. In the next half century they would import forty million pounds. Source: Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants, Wolfgang Schivelbush. Schivelbush allows that these numbers are approximations, which is good because I'm a bit suspicious that when you count smugglers it wasn't 40,000,005 pounds of tea.

Currently Reading: Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend, Joshua Blu Buhs. So the University of Chicago Press each month offers one free e-book (their pick, not yours) and one month this was the option and I, having been a kid in the 70s, of course wanted a book about Bigfoot. It's slightly double-crossed me, though, by being a legitimate academic inquiry into Bigfoot and related phenomena and what they mean about culture and cultural expectations. Blu Buhs puts it clearly in the preamble: Bigfoot is real, even though he doesn't exist. Really enjoying the book and the e-reading experience is ... not ... awful, I guess?

The Ann Arbor Art Fair has cancelled. We haven't gotten to it in years, it's true; it's usually been at too busy a time of year for us. But it was a chance to see the streets of Ann Arbor even more impassable than usual, this time with people showing off paintings, photographs, crafted projects, everything. It's the first time the fair's missed a year.

The fair was scheduled for the 16th through 19th of July. And this is getting ominous: the state's second-biggest pinball event of the year is Fremont's Baby Food Festival. That's so far still scheduled for the 22nd through 25th of July. I'm not confident that we're going to have big events like that again, that early, though. Heck, I'm not confident we're going to have the small monthly gatherings of the regular Fremont pinball stuff, and that's only gathering around twenty people.

Well, back to the stamp sand, and other features around Gay and another town in the area.

Looking from the shoreline back. I'm not sure whether this is a tree that washed ashore or something that, somehow, grew to substantial size in the sand before shoreline erosion caught it.

Looking at a dock to the northeast of the stamp sand beach. Someone's grilling or else their car is on fire.

The erosion of the stamp sand beach produces this great cliff-face look. It even has an imitation of sediment layers. Maybe it's actual sediment layers reflecting times they used different veins' ore.

Oh, another of those big bug friends hopped a ride on bunnyhugger's camera bag.

A broken-down tree poses for the cover of my album. It really looks like a deer with antlers on the left there. Compare to bunnyhugger's version of this scene.

You'd think that sea glass (well, lake glass) would be easy to spot on the beach given how uniform and grey the sand is. It wasn't, though. The most glass we saw was here, with what looked like a shattered mason jar, lower right. It seemed more like the remains of a picnic or drinking party than anything else.

There are a couple of retaining walls along the stamp sand beach, which probably had significance to the factory at some point. Now they just make the topography more interesting.

Town sign, and what sure looks like an exhausted sign warning to not steal the thing. It's also a fair bit higher than most town-identifying signs are.

One of the houses has set up a couple miscellaneous historic artifacts, like this, ``Shipwreck planking and anchor chain found in the lake bottom from Captain Wolf Larson's ship, The Ghost''. Also, ``Captain Wolf Larson of The Ghost'' sounds like the hero of some 1930s serial adventure comic.

And so here is the civic institution that you knew had to be there. Do you want to say what it is? Go ahead, I'll wait.

Correct: it is the Gay Bar. Which is your normal sort of town/neighborhood bar, except that it sells a greater variety of merchandise than, like, Stober's in Lansing does.

And inside we found pinball! The Game Show pinball is a great and favorite one, but, it had an extra pinball inside so the game kept insisting we plunge two balls into play, then ended the turn when the first ball drained. By plunging the right way you could put one ball into play and have more or less the correct game experience. The Terminator 2 was in good shape except that the screen was off, so we had no idea our scores. The sound was turned up to register at 5.2 on the Richter scale, so at least we could hear game instructions and didn't have to rely on display cues.

Having seen the sights of Gay, we drove to nearby Lake Linden, which had closed for the day because it was like 5 pm on a Sunday already. Here, though, is a window display in town.

The Lindell chocolate shop, you can see, is noteworthy because it was a hundred years old and while the shop has been through different phases, like pharmacist's and lunch counter, it's always been someplace where you could buy candy.

The great tile curtain in front of the store. I miss this sort of inset entrance, not least because it gives you half a chance to bundle up before heading out into the weather.

And here's the place, and a view of town. We'd long missed lunch, unfortunately, and even if we hadn't, we'd missed pasty day.

Trivia: Holy Roman Emperor Otto II died in 983, at the age of 28, from a fever and an overdose of medicine (four drachms of aloe) to treat it. Source: A History of Venice, John Julius Norwich.

Currently Reading: Miscellaneous Harvey, Marvel, and other comics. This includes ones I had bought in recent years figuring to get around to reading and hadn't before. Also includes a recent reprint of some Bud Sagendorf Popeye comic-book stories, which are interesting. Sagendorf's daily Popeye strips would usually come up with a pretty good premise, shuffle it around some until he got bored with it, and then end with the most anticlimactic moment possible. But in comic book form? ... He ... gets to a disappointing ending sooner, but it reads mostly better somehow. Except that the first of the stories here requires Wimpy to be working implausibly hard at his scheme.

I filled out another week on my humor blog, which you'd know from your friends page if anyone follows it. Or from your RSS reader, if you follow this feed. Or finally perhaps you waited patiently for this summary of what was happening:

• Some Things To Say About Flying A Kite Or Kites which was last week's long-form piece and which makes sense to me anyway..
• One of those odd stray thoughts about a piece of music you remember well.
• Statistics Saturday: ‘Yes' Cover Bands, Ranked which is one joke, but won't take too long to read.
• 60s Popeye: Not much, What's News with yous? as a cartoon turns out to have unsuspected depths.
• Observed while kind of watching the Star Wars movies today one of those little thoughts that's delightful when you have it and I don't know if anyone else could care.
• What's Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? Why is the Phantom punching terrorists? February – May 2020 A plot recap.
• Statistics April: How That Month Treated My Humor Blog A lot of people read my humor blog last month, because I had that guide to what Paas tablets were what color.
• How to Shake Hands which is this week's long-form piece and is sure to be helpful when the crisis is passed.

Sunday of our Keweenaw 2018 vacation we went to a couple of things. One of them was the upper peninsula's most clickbait-y town.

There it is: the Historic Town of Gay. Named for Joseph E Gay, a mining official who we assume had something to do with the establishment of the town, which had a stamp mill to process copper ore.

The town's historical museum, which started out as the town's school.

So that little covered patio has figures carved into most of the wooden supports, such as squirrels and owls and the like. And, here, a raccoon.

The back of the raccoon pillar. Not all of the pillars have back sides to match their fronts.

One of the (few) homeowners is a bit of a character and decorated his house with stuff like this. Which I took a photograph of because there is the same joke on a mock road sign in the men's bathroom at Marvin's Marvellous Mechanical Museum.

And here is a first view at the thing bringing us to Gay: the smokestack that's the most noteworthy thing remaining of the stamp mill, which crushed ore down into bits of copper (valuable) and everything else (sand).

Though Gay is an unincorporated township that doesn't mean it can't have the civic services you'd expect, and that they don't all read kind of like your podcast hosts are going off on a thread that's funny but is maybe in dubious taste. So anyway, here's the Gay Fire Department. ... Yes, you may be wondering about the existence of a particular institution; all I can say is, you'll see.

And here's the entrance to the big attraction: the Mohawk Stamp Mill, or what tiny bits remain of it, with the most prominent being its 265-foot-tall smokestack.

This looks friendly! Also note the crow silhouette decals because the town of Gay is going through its 15-year-old goth girl phase.

bunnyhugger, using the surveying option on her camera: 240, 250, 260 ... yep, 265 feet tall.

There's the much-awaited picture of staring up the smokestack. 265 feet is about 80 feet taller than the space shuttle stack was, but a hundred feet shorter than the Saturn V.

Some of the factory remains leading to the smokestack. bunnyhugger said the orange fencing around this was new since her last visit, a dozen years before, which reflects either the degradation of the place advancing or people just getting more worried about people prowling over stuff like this.

Trivia: European adults born between 1770 and 1820 were, on average, measurably shorter than previous generations. Source: An Edible History of Humanity, Tom Standage. (Standage doesn't say just how much shorter, and than which generations.)

Currently Reading: Pogo's Double Sundae, Walt Kelly. So here is the special thing about it: with this, I have emptied my Mount Tsundoku. This was the last physical book that I had acquired with the intention of someday reading. Now? ... I have a bunch of comic books, actually, including a whole bunch of Richie Rich, Royal Roy, and Top Dog comics that a friend sent me for reasons mysterious to me also. And some electronic books. And a couple of carousel magazines that I had bought, but those were with the intention of supporting the Merry-Go-Round Museum and reading Rapid T Rabbit's column more than anything else. So we'll see what runs out first, that heap of stuff and my reluctance to read e-books or the libraries not loaning out anything. Or, of course, me reading any of the many perfectly fine books that bunnyhugger has and that I am welcome to enjoy.

PS: How April 2020 Treated My Mathematics Blog, my usual readership review for that blog.

ReplayFX cancelled today, finally. We expected it. They're rolling our Pinburgh tickets over to next year, which is great for us since we won the time lottery and got tickets in the three-second window of availability.

This is unfair to everybody who didn't happen to refresh their web browser on the correct page the moment tickets were available, and it's not fair to the people who decide between February 2020 and spring of next year that they'd like to try Pinburgh. I would expect, without thinking too deeply, that maybe one or two hundred of the thousand people who had tickets for the 2020 tournament will want to cancel or not do 2021 at all, but even 200 cancellations won't fill the already-existing wait list of about 500 people, never mind take care of more people.

(Pinburgh has resisted raising prices to reduce demand to the 1,000-person capacity of the tournament. This I believe is for ideological reasons, to keep the tournament from being even less accessible to poorer people. And that's fine. But it needs to go to a lottery for tickets. Giving tickets to the people who happen to hit the right moment after 12:00 on Sale Day is unfair to people with slower Internet, or who have poor typing skills, or who need, say, a text-to-speech tool on their web browser.)

ReplayFX/Pinburgh 2021 is scheduled for the 12th through 15th of August, 2021. Which is a relief to know, really. There's an academic conference in summer 2021 that we might conceivably go to, and that might have interfered with Pinburgh. But that's set for the last week in July. The academic conference is in Australia, and ... well, nearly two weeks is a bit tight to refresh and re-set from a flight around the world, but it's doable. Here's hoping the world is in shape for us to do it.

Enough of 2020 and 2021. What about 2018, and the Keweenaw Peninsula? What was going on on that bluff anyway?

So what we had here was a pack of ham radio operators. There was a contacts-race event going on, trying to make contact with as many people as possible. For that sort of event, the higher you can get your antenna the better, and so the top of a mountain, or at least a 700-foot-tall hill, is pretty good.

While we walked around we could hear the strangely-modulated timber of voices, altered by their bounces off the ionosphere, and saying things about QRO (``should I increase transmitting power'') and the like.

Handful of ham radio operators and one of the radio dishes that's set up there.

Temporary antenna set out and pointing a bit over the horizon. If I'm making out maps right, this is pointing roughly west .

Not some ham radio gear! This is a small solar-powered weather station that's a permanent fixture.

And now? We see how close I can get to the edge of the bluff without alarming my precious bride.

Looking out over the forest. Notice there's a little spot where the trees have all died off. This maybe reflects some recent change in the water table? Hard for an amateur like me to know.

The bluff comes to some pretty dramatic edges, and only your good sense keeps you away from them.

Still, I couldn't get enough of looking down on the forest like this. When we got back to our temporary home, my toes got all cold and wobbly.

bunnyhugger has had about enough of me getting near the edge. I have too.

A closer look at that patch of dead forest.

You knew I would try making a panoramic photograph, though.

bunnyhugger looks to the edge of the world and disapproves of my having got that near it. Also you see how far you have to go down the slope before you're actually at a dangerous spot.

Wildlife! We found whatever the heck this bug is; it was at least an inch long and fairly noisy.

Here's a nice look at the side of the bluff.

And peering down the side of the bluff to, at the bottom of the photograph, the protective wall at the end of that part of the overlook.

Trivia: During the Renaissance a fine Venetian-glass mirror cost more than an old-master portrait painting. Source: The Essence of Style: How the French invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafés, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour, Joan DeJean.

Currently Reading: The Men Who Loved Trains: The Story of Men Who Battled Greed to Save an Ailing Industry, Rush Loving Jr. It is so weird to hear the coal industry held up as the cash cow that will keep any railroad which serves it healthy. Seriously. Also it's amazing how many times railroad executives will say something in a cabin that turns out to be broadcast over the entire vehicle's intercom and that screws up something. OK, maybe this only happened three times, over a quarter-century, among a half-dozen significant railroads but still, it's a heck of a leitmotif.

PS: In Our Time podcast repeats episode on Carl Friedrich Gauss, a heads up to something I had nothing to do with creating, but that I did listen to.

What's been happening on my mathematics blog this past week? This stuff, which is more or less the usual:

• Reading the Comics, April 17, 2020: Creating Models Edition featuring a Far Side strip.
• Reading the Comics, April 25, 2020: Off Brand Edition in which I talk a bunch about fractions.
• I forgot to ever post this magical short story plot which is, literally, just me sharing a Magic Realism Bot tweet.
• Reading the Comics, May 2, 2020: What Is The Cosine Of Six Edition and all the comics for this week, read.

And in cartoon-watching? Take in another episode of 60s Popeye: Not much, What's News with yous?

Now for some prowling around the Keweenaw Peninsula, as it exited in August of 2018. We went to a bunch of places this third full day up there.

The snowfall gauge! The Keweenaw Peninsula sees a lot of snow, and they keep track of the cumulative totals here. The record, 40 years on, was the 390.4 inches that fell over the winter of 1978-79.

And the all-time low was a mere 161.1 inches, you can see here, which is ... really not at all that low. How about the 2017-18 winter? How much was that?

25 feet. So you see why the Michigan Tech students are famous for putting on a winter carnival with carved snow sculptures and all that. There was a latterbox near the snowfall gauge, but we failed to bring the clues to it, so we went on.

Commemoration of the founder of the Lake Superior Safety Fuse Company, which dammed the river nearby. The factory was destroyed by fire in 1957.

A view from the side of the waterfall underneath the dam.

What's left of the dam, and the water coursing over the edge.

Fuller view of the dam, the waterfall, and the start of the river beneath the falls.

Wooden arched pedestrian bridge that runs next to the highway bridge I was on.

And here, well, a bunch of people just go walking along the falls, more confident in their ability to get back up than I am.

See? They have no doubt that they'll be able to get back to somewhere with, like, plumbing.

There was at least one woman in the bunch, too.

Fossil signage: the branding of Michigan Bell, an Ameritech Company, implies a posting certainly before 1999 (when Ameritech was bought out by SBC), and quite likely before 1993, when Ameritech replaced the Bell System logo and deprecated the name of the state telephone companies.

Trivia: England recovered three thousand fewer convictions for crimes in 1844 than in 1843, and five thousand fewer than in 1842. Source: The Age of Paradox: A Biography of England, 1841 - 1851, John W Dodds.

Currently Reading: The Men Who Loved Trains: The Story of Men Who Battled Greed to Save an Ailing Industry, Rush Loving Jr.

Yeah, so a bunch of gun-toting yahoos stormed the Michigan legislature yesterday, hoping to terrorize the state legislature into letting them go to TGI Friday's NOW NOW NOW. It's embarrassing, certainly, and pathetic. Also, it hit the local news badly enough to worry my father, who called to ask if we were all right.

Our house is near the state capitol, yes, in reasonable walking range. I haven't gone down there and back for one of my daily walks, as it's a bit far to go without a stopping point. But that's still several miles, and while you could get to our house from the capitol making only one turn, there's a lot of streets that an angry mob would have to go down before they'd find us. So we're reasonably safe from the plague mobs. Still. Sheesh.

On to happier thoughts, he said with more than usual sarcasm. After the mine we went to Calumet, the small town nearby. If you have ever heard of the town, it is for one thing, photographed below.

What remains of the Italian Hall. On Christmas Eve, 1913, the Italian Hall hosted a party for strikers and their family. Someone at the door called out, falsely, ``Fire'', starting a panic.

At least 73 people died. At least 59 of them were children.

The hall remained in place until the 1980s, when it was finally torn down. The archway of the entrance, which was the far left side of the building, is all that remains. Plaques commemorating the event are attached to what remains of the column.

Plaque commemorating the persons known to have died in the panic. There were several families that had several children murdered, and some that ha d at least one parent and child killed.

A view from behind the park that's been made from the site.

Who called out ``fire'' to start the panic is still regarded as a mystery: was it one of the pinkertons hired by the wealthy mine owners to crush the unionization drive and who had already taken the chance to shoot labor organizers, or was it one of the parents of the five dozen murdered children? Who can possibly say?

Something a bit more lighthearted here, now. Here's a different roadside park where we had stopped to find another letterbox. This one was successful; we found the box almost immediately.

Lovely little rock island of flowers at that park.

What it looks like to letterbox: bunnyhugger doing the paperwork for our find. The box of freezer bags is something we got at a supermarket in town. They're good ways to make sure the paper journals don't get water damage. We eventually donated all the bags to needful letterboxes.

And another park, searching for another letterbox! This one at a small neighborhood park with a WPA-era stone battleship.

The battleship rises from the ground level, getting eventually high enough that you could probably take a pretty impressive tumble from the bow.

And, you know, it's just in a neighborhood. It's like the little playground at the end of our street, only far more cool.

Looking at bunnyhugger and my car, from shockingly far away, considering.

bunnyhugger on top of the battleship, taking some ranges and preparing to open fire.

The other centerpiece of the park is this stone replica of the United States shield. It's, clearly, seen better days; the colors are pretty badly faded.

The battleship, and my car beside. This is such a weird set of things to see. We did not find the letterbox.

Trivia: In 1935 Detroit's Ernst Kern stores created a Prep Club of high school boys, in order to give merchandising advice to the store's Varsity Shop. Source: Service and Style: How the American Department Store Fashioned the Middle Class, Jan Whitaker.

Currently Reading: Guardian of the Great Lakes: The US Paddle Frigate Michigan, Bradley A Rodgers.

bunnyhugger's father sent her an Easter card. A fancy one, since he's fond of that. He sent it the Monday before Easter. It didn't arrive. It should have arrived around Holy Thursday or Good Friday, a stretch when we didn't get any mail at all. Her father kept asking, eagerly, if it had gotten there yet, which just made her feel worse. She despaired of it ever arriving, and this set off some of those stupid quarantine-fueled arguments around here.

Finally, though, three weeks after it was sent, it ... still had not arrived, and I conceded that whatever the problems the post office was having, the card had been too long and it wasn't arriving. I am always optimistic about stuff finally working, but I have to draw a line somewhere. The card was unusually thick, as her father likes sending pop-up cards that are much thicker than normal, and I allowed that would slow things in any circumstance, and these circumstances more. But it shouldn't throw the mails too much to have a greeting card the thickness of, like, three greeting cards.

Today, the card came, with no explanation for the three extra weeks it spent in transit from a place an hour's drive away.

It's quite a nice card, too, featuring an intricate pop-up figure that unfolds into a rabbit holding a new-painted egg.

Up for more story comic plot recaps? I can tell you What's Going On In Alley Oop (Weekdays)? What's with the aliens at the pyramids? in the recap of February through April for the weekday continuity.

Now, though? Let's get down and into a copper mine that's been closed since World War II. (It had really closed in the early 30s, for the reasons you might expect, but the demands of the wartime economy and, I trust, cost-plus contracting made the mine briefly viable again.)

Riding the bus into the adit, a horizontal tunnel into the mine. When the mine was operating the tunnel was only something like five feet tall by three feet wide. Michigan Tech mining students in the 1970s expanded the tunnel as part of their mining studies. I am embarrassed that I didn't ask the obvious question: what grade did they get?

The docent for our tour. I have no knowledge of his name or past, but he had the air of the professor who always gets nominated for best-lecturer in the student newspaper's rate-my-professor survey, even considering he's not an easy A.

My most challenging shot! And a piece of lore I had heard about for decades: inside the adit is a classroom that mining engineering students at Michigan Tech would sometimes use. It's no longer in use, and the bus did not stop for photos, but I was looking in the right direction and had a good enough shutter speed to catch a look at a decaying blackboard and some of the uncomfortable desks once used.

The thing about a cave is that it gets a lot of water, which is pretty impressive when you think that picture from the cog railway looking very far down on the river/canal. Anyway just look at how damp the ground is.

Showing off some of the old mining equipment here. In the background on the right is one of the drills which made for a great improvement all around in getting rocks out of other rocks.

To the right of that drill, the docent shows off a hydraulic power drill that, if I remember right, was one of the factors that lead to the massive 1913 strike.

The vein of copper ore dropped off at an angle of fifty-something degrees relative to the horizon. All that open space was, two hundred years ago, copper-bearing ore.

And it goes up and up and up. In the highest parts, the first ones mined, you can --- at least in person --- make out the traces of pickaxes and the parts of rock dug by hand. Around here the docent fielded the question from someone who wanted to know if it was true they were going to put the state capital in Calumet, the nearby town. The guy didn't even get through the question before the docent shut it down. There was never any prospect of the Michigan capital being in a tiny town with unbearable winters, especially given that statehood came forty years before anyone knew there was ore worth mining.

More caves, and more water; what looks like a precipitous fall in the center bottom there is reflections in the dark. Which is quite dark, by the way; the docent did take a moment to turn off the lights so we could experience an amazing amount of darkness, and quiet apart from water droplets falling.

We get out of the way for the other tour's bus to come along.

Back out again! ... That's either a kid or a heck of a perspective trick.

Looking at the controls of the cog railway, as we get ready to return up the hill.

The train just backs its way up, so we get another view of looking, compared to our seats, up at the ground.

Back to the new, circa 1920 hoist house.

The mailbox! Which is this little thing in the back of the hoist house and I'm delighted that they have it there. Also that they have the little flag for the mail yet.

The end of the hoist house and the start of an adjacent building that was roped off, its purpose, a mystery to us.

Trivia: In the New England Hurricane of 1938 the high-water plaque on the (Providence) Rhode Island Hospital Trust Building, marking the high-water mark of the New England Hurricane of 1815, was submerged under three feet of water. Source: American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put The Nation To Work, Nick Taylor.

Currently Reading: The Lost Tribe of Coney Island: Headhunters, Luna Park, and the Man Who Pulled Off the Spectacle of the Century, Claire Prentice.