austin_dern

Pinball At The Zoo, after the tournaments were closed out from us. What's there to say? Well, league regular MAG took home first place in the open-tournament B Division, best player after the top 24 qualifiers (and a couple people who from their high worldwide ranking couldn't play in B). And FAE looked ready to march to an easy first-place finish in the Women's tournament, until in the last game of finals --- Elvira's House of Horrors --- DAZ, a Wisconsin player (runner-up for state women's champion), put up a ferocious 390.2 million points. For comparison I don't think I've ever broken 200 million and that not on a tournament-settings game. FAE was far behind at this point, with something like twenty million points or so. Don't remember; doesn't matter.

What does matter is FAE went on a heck of a run, collecting an extra ball --- for some reason turned on and playable --- before finishing ball three at about 370 million. This was something like twenty million points short, but FAE had an extra ball and, when you've run the game up that high, twenty million points isn't hardly anything. The only way FAE would fail to win the game, and first place in the tournament, is to have the ball drain the moment the ball save expired and what are the odds of --- oh. They did. FAE finished with 381.4 million, second place on the game and the tournament. An incredible run, though, and a dramatic, nail-biter finish.

For us, though? It would be going around and actually seeing things on the floor, which is actually some consolation. I was frightfully interested in this 1930s flipperless game called Chubbie, all about hitting the fifteen (!) coiled posts and then the real scoring begins. I managed to get to hitting fourteen with carefully plunged balls and a lot of nudging, but never more. There were other flipperless or proto-pinball games there too, like the World Series baseball one that's been at past shows, and, you know, really, I can't get enough of that.

Toward the end of show I got really interested in this 1986 Gottlieb game Hollywood Heat, which bunnyhugger aptly dubbed ``we have Miami Vice at home''. At the time Gottlieb was doing a lot of ``we don't need a license if we make our own thing'' kind of game. It's got some fun gimmicks in it, though, including a little subsection of the playfield that all the ball-locking for multiball happens in, and a pop bumper that's enclosed in a case and can only be hit by hitting a captive ball outside the enclosure. For the last game of the show bunnyhugger and FAE and I ended up playing a game and, dear reader, I hit the Grand Championship. Also FAE and bunnyhugger punched me in the kidneys for starting, like, eighteen multiballs in a row. Thing is that captive-ball-to-pop-bumper thing is really valuable if you hit it in multiball, which, sure, I can do that, turns out.

After the show ended --- open finals would continue for a couple hours --- we all drove over to MJS's pole barn for the afterparty. bunnyhugger and FAE and MWS and PCL and I ended up playing a string of games (one person sitting out each) and I ended up doing better against some pretty stiff competition than I had any right to. Also before we left I made them play MJS's Cirqus Voltaire, which is a prototype of the game and has very different rules that don't work as well as the real finished game, but make a lot more sense of the playfield art. I'd love to know more about how that game developed.

We didn't figure to spend the whole night at the afterparty, and we didn't, although it got closer to midnight than we would have expected. And, you know, I kind of enjoyed spending so much time just playing pinball without any expectation past that I might do well on something weird. Should do more of that.

We were at 80s night in pictures last time. We still are.

Just a picture of light and shade on a ghost sign that I liked. This is on the second floor of the Pinball Pete's building; how old the sign is I couldn't say without trying.

Oh yeah, here's bunnyhugger rocking her 80s glasses and her real actual vintage 1980s puffy T-shirt. They don't make them like this anymore.

Evening setting in yet the band continues to bravely play a medley of 80s dance music.

I liked getting this shot of the drum kit from behind.

And then there's all the many pedals of the ... music thingy.

Cleaning up. We get to the end of the night and people whom I trusted were with the event putting away the chess board and the connect-four and all.

Trivia: The United States's Sims Act of 1912 prohibited the shipping of prize-fight films across state lines, although preliminary events and the introduction of contestants --- everything up to the moment the fight began --- could be legally distributed. Source: The American Newsreel, 1911 - 1967, Raymond Fielding. Why such a peculiar prohibition you ask? Well, you know, because the answer to anything in US politics is ``racism'', but how did that come into play? It's because boxer Jack Johnson was doing extremely well winning against white opponents and if you let people see that kind of thing they might start thinking Black people can be as good at stuff as Americans are. (With an assist from Progressives afraid that showing film of violence encourages bad morals.)

Currently Reading: This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong (And Why It Matters), Mark Cooper-Jones, Jay Foreman.

Taking a moment from Pinball At The Zoo to update you on the deer mouse situation. We've still got them. bunnyhugger's plan is, since the garage doesn't seem to be far enough away to stop them, catch the mice and relocate them somewhere with more nature and less of a chance to return to us. Which is challenging since apparently two miles is the minimum distance you need to move a deer mouse to be sure it can't find its way back.

The catch is just set a mouse somewhere and it's probably dead. The less bad way is to give it a halfway house, some base it can use until it establishes a new one. Which means getting a space a mouse can find as an acceptable home while exploring its new climes. And, in this case then, one we can set out in a sufficiently wild place without great loss of time or money. It's easy enough get them; Michaels sells tolerably cheap wooden birdhouses meant to be craft projects and you could drop one off in the middle of the woods and not feel the loss.

But to make the birdhouse a place the mouse considers home means giving them time to see it as something theirs. And so bunnyhugger spent some of this weekend carving air ventilation into a couple plastic storage bins, and setting birdhouses in them, and then waiting for the mousetraps to catch deer mice.

She's as of my writing this caught two, the mother we'd seen earlier and what we assume to be one of her children. We think the child is female and so have the two together. If we're wrong, we're hoping that we'll be relocating the pair before this causes a new litter of mice in our home. bunnyhugger has another cage at the ready too, in case we get some definitely-male mice. But we do still have the questions of how many mice we have to relocate, and are they able to get into the house still? All we can know, though, is that we have to take care of these temporary pets and hope we end up not seeing anything suspicious for a while.

And now, let's wrap up pictures of the Fairy Tale Festival. I took more pictures but they turned out to be mostly boring, things like photos of the tents people were selling stuff from, that help me remember being there but just look like any street fair except on the lawn.

Here's the Turner-Dodge House, which this year did not have an inflatable dragon on the balcony upstairs. Maybe there was one in the ballroom; we didn't end up going inside.

They did expand on the fairy-tale festival by adding a couple scenes of other fairy tales, like the Three Little Pigs here.

Some bits of humor for the brick house. In the distance you can see the remains of the straw house, on a bed of straw meant to protect young grass.

Here's the straw house and a curiously unneeded dig against hippies. In the back you can see a pig set up in a dirt mound with a sign labelled 'Happy as a pig in mud'.

A bunch of witch-themed stuff on a Hansel-and-Gretel-themed place.

There's the front, including a prop kid stuck to the wall.

Trivia: Development work on the paraglider system for the Gemini capsule --- instead of landing at sea it would land on a runway, with an inflatable paraglider deployed in the final approach to give maneuverability --- began when North American was authorized to do so in November 1961, ahead of the rest of Gemini. Source: On the Shoulders of Titans: A History of Project Gemini, Barton C Hacker, James M Grimwood. NASA SP-4203.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Sundays Supplement, Volume 21: 1959, Tom Sims, Bill Zaboly, Bud Sagendorf. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

The Capital City Film Festival is, well, just what you'd think from the name. It's been running sixteen years now, although for no particular reason we've never gone to one of their showings. We have been in our hipster bar when something for the festival got going, but we were there for our own purposes, understand. This not-particularly-intended skipping ended a week ago Sunday when we went to one of the venues --- a church just north of the Capitol --- for a showing of Animal Farm. Sort of. They'd be doing it with a live soundtrack playing, on jazz instruments, a form we've never seen a movie do before. They did the show by stripping out almost all the soundtrack to the 1954 film --- you know, the CIA one --- a process that left the event's composer with a deeper appreciation than he already had for the music, as he talked about in the question-and-answer session afterward that didn't go too badly.

On the way in we happened to see old pinball friends PHD and RED, although we quickly got separated and didn't catch up with them later. (bunnyhugger even missed seeing RED as the ticket-taker wanted to say something to her.)

It's probably not weird that I hadn't seen the movie before, and only slightly weird that I've never read the book. This is when I learned the movie was animated by Halas and Batchelor, who also animated some of the Gene Deitch Popeye cartoons of the 60s, so I was thrown by recognizing their style only not in ``picture moves like one out of every three seconds''.

So the movie, famously, alters the end of George Orwell's downer of a story, resolving with the Animal Farm animals deciding the time for revolution has come again. I can't say it doesn't fit the logic of the story, though, especially since I got to live through the late 80s where that kinda actually happened, with stunningly less bloodshed than your average revolution.

So it all made for a good experience and I'm more interested in seeing the original movie as it actually appeared. Might even read the book sometime. I certainly felt smart identifying all the allegorical elements in the movie (you can't tell me the pathetic showing of the farmers trying to retake Animal Farm isn't mocking the Allied invasion of Russia in 1918) and given the book is such a favorite choice for high school classes they can't be that much harder to pick out in the actual text.

Now, let's enjoy some pictures of Idlewild.

Comic foreground asking you to picture yourself on the Lincoln Highway, which Idlewild is. You might dimly recall that so is Dutch Wonderland.

And here's Rollo Coaster, one of the few roller coasters built in the 1930s. It's a really good terrain coaster, hugging the landscape for its fun.

Since our last visit the park had (because of an accident) replaced its old cars with these, that have seat dividers, lap restraints, and even side restraints keeping hands away from trees. When we last rode it, the train had nothing, just a bar to grab onto if you felt unsure.

We'll get back to Rollo. Here's the carousel, (one of?) the last Philadelphia Toboggan Company original-build carousels.

There's the rounding board with an eagle icon on top.

Here's the historical landmark plaque and one of the three PTC Shield horses on the ride.

Trivia: In the October 1678 issue of his Le Mercure Galant newspaper editor Donneau de Visé observed that ``in the past two years, two colors have come into existence'' and that ``this is something that happens very rarely''. One of the colors was straw; the other, Prince, some manner of near-black with hints of midnight blue and crimson fire. Source: The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafés, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour, Joan DeJean. The color Prince was consistently written with a capital P. It seems to have faded out of common parlance in the 18th century and fortunately there's no trouble searching the Internet for ``Prince color''. Oh.

Currently Reading: Michigan History, September/October 2025, Editor Kristen Brennan.

It's been cold this winter, which you could say about most anywhere in North America this winter. It's got us thinking about how the first weekend in freaking October we went to the beach and had a perfectly pleasant day. But to my point, it's been mostly hanging out between 0 and 10 Fahrenheit and if that weren't pleasant enough, we've been getting a fresh snow, a dusting to a half-inch, most every day. Usually right after I've gone out and brushed the snow off the sidewalk and as much of the driveway as still clears anymore.

So what has mildly annoyed me has been that the city never got around to plowing our street. We're a tertiary road, meaning they only get around to plowing us once every three major storms or so, and you understand them not going crazy over every little quarter-inch snow refresh. But you'd think they'd eventually have a light enough day on the main roads they can get the neighborhood streets, right?

bunnyhugger tells me no, and why not. Turns out Lansing, like a lot of northern cities, has a shortage of rock salt this winter. (Never mind that the standard formulation doesn't do a lot of good when it's this cold this long; it'd still do a little good if we could get it on a sunny day.) Apparently the southern states bought up all the rock salt this year for some reason? Like, I get MAGA states wanting to screw the sane people but that's a lot of money to put on the line for a prank that only pays off if it's a really snowy season. There's some dots here I'm not quite connecting but there's probably a confusing article about it on web site that calls their articles ``thinkpieces''.

Anyway this apparently connects to the conscious choice not to plow the side streets. There's a layer of ice down there, underneath the ever-refreshing snow, and annoying and slow as it is to drive on slush it's safer than driving on ice. Remove the slush and you remove the thing that makes people naturally drive slower, so in the absence of a clean street, this is the next-best thing. It's clever and I should admire the clever but I'm also really tired of it being this bitterly cold for this long.

Back to Kennywood. With very short lines for Exterminator we went back around a couple times and once I even photographed what was in the queue.

This may look like nothing, but that's why I photographed it: there used to be a bunch of old, 60s(?)-era industrial machinery here, part of the theming of the waiting area for the Exterminator (which has a premise that mutant rats have taken over the underside of the city or whatever). It looked likely to have been donated from Westinghouse or someone and I can't think any good reason to take it out, especially to replace it with nothing. It's not like it had to do anything besides be there.

But they did leave a couple pieces! Whatever those industrial equipments are, plus a new TV screen replacing the old tube TV that carried a local news anchor's reports about the mysterious things at the Kennywood Power Company.

See this guy? This guy's the ride operator. Do not disturb this guy. Okay? Why do you want to disturb the ride operator anyway? What's this guy doing that you want to disturb them?

Noticed that the Carousel Burger building now had a National Historic District sign on it, explaining a little something of its history. The building used to house the carousel but it's getting on a century since it last did.

Also a memorial tablet we don't remember ever noticing before, even though it apparently dates to 1928. McSwigan was one of the people that Pittsburgh Railways leased Kennywood to in 1907 when they got out of the amusement-park-operating business. McSwigan died in 1923.

bunnyhugger noticing that good-looking carousel over there and saying ``Hey there, horsies!''

Trivia: 46 BCE, when Julius Caesar reformed the calendar, ended up with 445 days: a Mercedonius of 23 days (a common intercalated month put near the end of February) and two extra months of 67 days total inserted between November and December. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.

Currently Reading: Michigan History, November/December 2025. Editor Amy Wagenaar.

Today was my department's holiday party, held again at the nature center near home where we'd gone in the summer. This time there was way more snow on the hill leading up to the building. Turns out the stairs were on the other side of the building. bunnyhugger had to work --- it's a class day --- so there wasn't any chance she'd attend.

So I got some store-bought hummus and brought that, being one of a handful of folks who didn't make something. Other people made, like, this Croatian bean soup or this pumpkin pie-based dessert. Or fried cheese-and-jalapeno balls. You know, Christmas food. The vegetarian options were a little thinner on the ground than back in summer but I could make the difference up in cheese balls.

And there were games, with the centerpiece being Holiday Jeopardy. As often happens with attempts to make a trivia game at home the questions were a bit sloppy. The date of the first known New Year's Eve celebration? Like, how do you define that? The office know-it-all asked by what calendar, and the exasperated question-writer just said ``the Gregorian calendar'' which added confusion since they were looking for ``second millennium BC, Babylon''. A little squabble erupted over ``the number of ghosts in A Christmas Carol''; I'd offered four, which was exactly what the question-writer wanted. The other team's head protested that Marley is the only ghost, as the others are spirits of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet To Come, with the database guy trying to make a distinction that a ghost has to be someone who's deceased. I've never heard this before. So I lobbed a know-it-all grenade into things by pointing out what Marley shows Scrooge an unknowable number of ghosts wandering the Earth. Our team kept the points.

In the White Elephant gift exchange I came out of things with a white ... duck? ... nightlight thing. You switch the thing on and turn it on and it stays on until you squeeze it again. It's cute, but receiving it exhausts all the use that I would have for it. Some folks got cutting boards, which are less merry, but would have fit in my lifestyle better.

And then a bit of pure weirdness wandered through the building. So there's this local furry, name of Elyon Badger, who's mostly putting up signs around town proclaiming he's running for Congress and scaring the bejeebers out of the worthless Republican holding the office. Well, he was walking around the nature center with a photographer and some people with portable lights and his fursuit head. I assume it was taking photos and creating bundles of content for web consumers. He asked if he could cut through the building on the way to other scenic spots and, sure. They also used it as a spot to warm up some.

Will it surprise you to know that Elyon Badger was dressed in a top hat and carrying a cane, to the point the first people who saw him said that is a very dapper-dressed man out there? Or that he was wearing a purple suit, like he was Willy Wonka? We had at this point no idea who this was or why they were doing any of this. I walked over and spotted his collection of pride flag pins, and started to suspect things, before I finally saw he had an Elyon name badge for some reason. So, now I've seen the guy.

So, that isn't how I expected the party to go.

Back to Dolancourt, pictures that we'd have rather had at Nigloland but instead had at ...

Small river running through the hotel's grounds; this was needed for the mill, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were also used for transportation.

Looking back at the hotel grounds. We had Chambre 1, on the first floor way back near where those steps are. The towels hung on the railing are ours.

Stepping here into the slightly feral park on the grounds.

I liked the relief carving on this planter on the bridge.

There's the part of the river leading back to the mill, and the waterwheel. I could see in the breakfast room the mechanism, but without going and checking I'm going to say the photograph didn't come out at all.

More of the riverbank. On the left are steps to get down to the water level.

Trivia: Mathematical physicist John Couch Adams, one of the two men who predicted Neptune's orbit from calculation, was first educated as a child by local schoolmaster Mr Sleep, whose advertisement promised he ``challenged any man in England for Calligraphy, Stenography, or the Mathematics''. Source: In Search Of Planet Vulcan: The Ghost in Newton's Clockwork Universe, Richard Baum, William Sheehan.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 78: Irma th' 'Ermit's Youth Lotion, Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

So, the good news: the Lansing City County unanimously voted this week to declare us an ``LGBTQ+ Welcoming City'', passing a resolution condemning all violence, harassment, or intimidation against the community and reaffirming the right for everyone to live freely and safely in the city. It's also resolved to protect gender-affirming care, to prohibit the use of city resources to interfere with people seeking that care, and to develop pro-LGBTQ+ ordinances and policies. It's a good declaration, the sort of thing you need to be a healthy community.

The bad news is why they were moved to make such a resolution, even past the criminal behavior of the disgraced national government. I'm hiding that behind a cut because you can imagine what might have gone on, but not why it's something that comes to me specifically.

But, a small and better thing now. One of the members of our pinball league had been changing into dresses partway through, or after, the night, and this past week asked the league standings to reflect their new name, going from a male-coded to a female-coded name. Yeah, no trouble; it wasn't any work updating the spreadsheet for that, and calling her by the new name when drawing up groups for the night. And, goodness, but she was so grateful that we could be normal about this. It feels great right up until you examine why someone would think it worth saying how nice it is you call them by what they say is their name.

We're now getting into late November in photos and you know what that means: the eating holidays!

We had Thanksgiving at bunnyhugger's parents', so I'm sharing fewer pictures than usual to not give out too much of their lives like this. But here's the spread as we were getting ready for dinner. You understand why we brought A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. I forget why we brought the disc of 70s Charlie Brown specials, though. Maybe to have a backup copy of Thanksgiving.

Dinner started with potatoes!

Back home, Athena was curious what all this fuss was about.

She looks good loafing on the ground.

Or maybe she's decided there's something else she wants to do?

Yes: she wants to get underneath the sofa. She did not at this moment, nor for a while to come, but it's in her thoughts.

Trivia: ``Inane'' first appeared in English around 1662 as a serious term meaning ``empty, void'', as in the formless void of space; the word was borrowed from the Latin inānis ``empty, useless'', and often used as a noun meaning ``infinite space'' that century. Source: Semantic Antics: How and Why Words Change Meaning, Sol Steinmetz.

Currently Reading: American Scientist, July - August 2025, Editor Fenella Saunders.

So earlier this summer we joined another pinball league. And it's another one in Lansing. We're not cheating on our own league. Someone who had been to a couple of bunnyhugger's events and was impressed wanted to start his own league and did so at a bowling alley on the west side of town. We joined up because we want to encourage pinball playing and it's nice to go to pinball events we have no responsibility or expectations for.

The sad thing is that for all we talked it up during Lansing Pinball League events people weren't biting. A couple of players came out, including the guy who maintains the pinball machines, but there were never more than six people attending at once, and one time there were only three of us there. It's hard to say why there wasn't much attendance. That there are only a few games certainly counts for some; when we started there were seven tables, and four of them were duplicates of games you could play at the Lansing Pinball League's regular venue. But three of them were not, and the bowling alley offered conveniences the regular venue doesn't, like air conditioning that actually cools the place. Also a nice cozy vibe without being crowded, since the games are compactly placed but with only at most two groups playing there's neither crowd nor distance.

On the other hand, it is a place you can't just walk to, not if you live downtown or on the Eastside, and I can understand feeling it's not worth it to get all that way out and just play Rush, But Not As Nice As The One At The Barcade. (It probably is as nice when you're used to how it plays.) And that the league started during the summer lull in Lansing Pinball League events can't have helped, since we had few chances to talk it up. We even had the bad fortune to miss the first two nights because we were out on road trips.

The league season ends this Tuesday, and I don't know if there's going to be another. And there was, evidently, some quarrel between the venue and the pinball machine router; at the last league night three of the games had been taken out and who knows if they'll ever be replaced. I hope the organizer hasn't lost heart.

And now the end of my pictures of Marvin's from the November visit. We had at least one more to say farewell so, don't worry. You'll see the Cardiff Giant from both angles again.

Back on more Chuck E Cheese figures here.

Around the top of a little coin-op carousel ride in Marvin's is this rounding board with a Sanders Carousel Company label.

And back on bunnyhugger! So I was totally wrong when I thought that league finals were December. They were November, and here's bunnyhugger taking her first place, B Division, trophy, the same award she won our first season at Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum. But that first award was a mug; this one's a trophy. And this she got after winning that Attack From Mars game she was putting money into in yesterday's photos.

bunnyhugger in focus thanks to a flash photo, and people hanging around at the end of playoffs.

The door there's to Marvin's office. I like that you can see Pinball Row reflected in the mirror beside.

bunnyhugger enjoying the glory and the loneliness of a triumph.

Trivia: The control car on early Zeppelins was designed to land on Lake Bodensee, near Friedrichshafen. This is why the inhabited cabin is called a gondola. Source: When Giants Ruled The Sky: The Brief Reign and Tragic Demise of the American Rigid Airship, John J Geoghegan.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 73: Loch Mess, Clotland, or, Messy Business in the Loch! Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.`

One of the regular things in my group at work is a monthly potluck, which is just like what it sounds like. Usually there's some specific theme. But for the August potluck the organizers wanted to do something extra and make it a picnic, like, finding some space away from the office where we could all go and have fun for hours instead of actually working. They chose the Fenner Nature Center, which is what it sounds like. It's very close to our house, actually in walking distance, and yet I'd never been there. bunnyhugger hadn't been there in ages.

As it was off-site folks were invited to bring their spouses along and so this would be bunnyhugger's chance to meet the people she's only known as tinny voices overheard on my Teams meetings. And they got to know her as more than just someone who does pinball and amusement parks. They also got to know her as someone who makes Coronation chicken salad, which I had asked if she'd be willing to do. (This also caused us to learn that the canned meat-free chicken I'd gotten earlier was not from the local health food store like I would have sworn, and it took a while to find where exactly it was. Turns out it was at Meijer's.) bunnyhugger worried that people weren't going to like the quartered sandwiches, and I swore people would too. My Indian coworkers, who recognized it right away, were big fans and a half-dozen people particularly told me how they liked it. I like it too.

There was a good bit of just hanging out, eating, wondering what the custardy-granola pie someone made was and why we can't always be eating that all the time. And some other general activities too. A plan to do Jackbox games fell apart because it turned out there wasn't a central screen available at the building we'd used. Instead, we played some cornhole (bunnyhugger and I losing to my Indian coworkers in a closer match than seemed possible when they had a pair of three-point shots early on) and, later on, Euchre and even later, Uno. The last I got roped into and while I failed to win, I at least tossed out reversal cards when it was really funny. Also did you know there's a Uno card to ``toss everyone's cards in a pile and re-shuffle and re-deal them''? Me neither. Adds quite some chaos, especially as one one a guy had that as his final card and had to play it, thus keeping him from winning.

Toward the end of the afternoon that kept trying to rain bunnyhugger did her daily walk around the grounds of the nature center. She found a particularly interesting piece of park history. For years the nature center had a couple bison, for not much good reason. The nature center attempted to move the last surviving bison to a zoo, but Lansing locals got incredibly whiny and so the last bison, Elvis, had to live out his days in an enclosure there. This is all warmup to say that she discovered, on her walk, that Elvis's old enclosure was open, and she could walk through this curious piece of Lansing nature-center history.

(She found at another visit that the pen was open again, supporting the idea that it's now a regular part of the walking trails, and not that she saw it on a day they had failed to close the door.)

And now in pictures, something at Cedar Point I've never shown you before!

Sooo, the Sky Ride. This past Halloweekends I took a bit of spare time to ride it, while bunnyhugger did her daily half-hour walk.

Looking out on grease trucks from the platform.

And here's the sky chairs! I probably ended up in the green. Doesn't much matter. I was always amazed by the mechanism that let these things work, as a kid.

A view of Corkscrew and of the rides graveyard from the Sky Ride platform.

And we're off! One of you can't imagine how many pictures I took of stuff looking down. Over on the right is ValRavn and beyond that the Marina gate.

Some other sky chair photobombing my picture. Cadillac Cars is the ride behind all this.

Trivia: In 1779 the Continental Congress established the Treasury Board, to oversee the national government's finances, with two members of Congress and two outside members, plus an auditor general keeping records anad accounts. In 1780 a Congressional committee reported the ``Demon of Discord pervaded the whole Department'' and recommended scrapping the board, replacing it with a single individual (which was done). Source: The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations, Jacob Soll.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peeking underneath a horse, while bunnyhugger photobombs another picture.

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

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

When I got home yesterday from getting some stuff from the pet store and the hardware store I had news for bunny_hugger. She'd wondered when the Joann Fabrics in our local mall would close. The answer: 55 minutes. We dithered a small bit about whether to go; would it be just depressing, or might we get something useful like really cheap Easter egg dye kits or bolts of fleece or stuff?

We got there to learn that they didn't have any fleece left. Or Easter egg kits. Or almost anything, really; they did well at keeping the store open until they ran out of stuff. All the remaining merchandise was on two small shelving units up front, and most of that was decoration letters. If you need a box of Z's, we could set you up, except that Joann's is now closed for good and all. Someone working the tiny remaining stock was urging people to buy boxes of toothpicks with lobster or shrimp cutouts atop them. We're not sure why anyone would get these at all, even if, as she observed, they won't spoil. I had the feeling this had turned into some minor silly retail obsession, waiting to see if anyone would ever take any of this.

We also wandered around the shelving and fixtures, where another employee was doing her best to find some piece of hardware we would take home with us. Apparently some of the thread spools are also a good configuration for storing Hot Wheels cars, in case you have a hundred-plus Hot Wheel cars that need storing. But we don't, nor anything close to that. Some of the pegbord-with-bin shelving seemed like it might be useful in our basement, if it weren't too big to fit in our basement.

And yet as we were leaving I noticed they had boxes full of pegboard racks, like, the metal or plastic rods that stick out and you can hang stuff on. So we got a box of that, for five bucks, and have the promise of organizing more things in our basement and garage if we ever get to that. I also, maybe foolishly, bought a couple boxes of some silicone sheets that are meant to be pressed around mugs or other ceramic things. I don't know what to do with them but have the feeling there's probably something decorative we can do. bunny_hugger sees in them mostly a thing we'll have to get rid of at some point. I suppose either will do fine.

And that was our last Joann's visit.

Now to what I hope was merely the most recent Kennywood visit, drawing as you can see nearer its close.

Almost at The Phantom's Revenge's station and this gives a view of the exit queue. (Also the entrance for people with mobility needs, like the guy in a wheelchair coming up the other way.)

Lanes to get your seat for the ride. Note there isn't that automatic gate that keeps you away until the operator decides you may approach.

That gift shop again, now seen by night. Also showing off the Small Fry's, that place where you can get the same fries as at The Potato Patch but with less of a wait. And yes, per Kennywood: Behind The Screams, it is based on the entrance to Wonderland at Revere Beach, Massachusetts. (Yes, if you looked at that link, you saw an 'Infant Incubators' building inside Wonderland. Early 20th century was weird.)

Sitting at the top of the reflecting pool in Lost Kennywood, looking out over a beautifully clear sky and the Black Widow swing ride.

Over that way's the swing ride. Oops, accidentally got a tiny bit of a view of bunny_hugger in there. Sorry, won't do that again.

And here's how the pool looks by early night.

Trivia: Charles Babbage invented a mechanical time clock in 1844. Source: Time's Pendulum: The Quest to Capture Time --- From Sundials to Atomic Clocks, Jo Ellen Barnett.

Currently Reading: The Harvey Comics Companion, Mark Arnold.