austin_dern

We got to Pittsburgh by about 9:30, delayed some by construction at the very end that forced us to abandon the satellite navigator and make some hopeful guesses about how to navigate the city streets. Check-in for Pinburgh was at the same bar as last year, a spot it was hard enough to find parking for (really we had to be patient for a spot to open up). This year admission to ReplayFX, the convention, would be granted by an elastic wristband, a great improvement on last year's daily paper wrist straps. Admission to Pinburgh, the pinball tournament within the convention, was by a large badge on a lanyard. Really good design; we liked it.

And then we went to check in. We had, long ago, planned to room with JTK and CVK. JTK had reserved two Embassy Suite rooms at the wonderfully low employee rate, when he worked for another hotel in the chain. Last fall he lost his job with the hotel, but he thought this shouldn't affect his reservation, already made. A few months ago he admitted that he happened to check and found something strange, that instead of two rooms there was just the one reserved. This threatened trouble: MWS is, by every account, a world-class snorer. The sort of person whose snores sound like three trains crashing together. And the trains need CPAP machines. We could not sleep in the same room as he did, and he agreed with that.

Well, but. We'd been at this Embassy Suites before. The rooms are very large. There's, like it says, a suite of rooms. If we had the bedroom and MWS slept in the other end of the living room, several miles away, it might not be too bad. JTK and CVK could sleep on the fold-out bed. We might make this work and oh, two weeks before Pinburgh JTK mentioned that he had a friend who was coming along. And that was just our limit. It was hard enough to figure how we'd manage the morning bathroom situation with five people; with six? Even if that sixth was not going to the tournament and so could try to sleep through five people showering and dressing? No.

We had already reserved our own hotel room, fearing that JTK's reservation would be refused by Embassy Suites on the grounds that he was not actually an employee and hadn't been one for nearly a year now. Or, my suspicion, that he had never made one and was confabulating excuses in the hopes something would turn up. We also had the fear that while rooms in the Embassy Suites are supposed to all be suites, there were rumors of some that were just the bedroom and bathroom, and that JTK might have got one of those instead.

JTK was as good as his word, though: there was the suite, and MWS was able to stay in it as planned, although he had waited until the day-of to cancel his backup hotel room. Conceivably the whole thing might have worked, and our bank accounts would have been larger, had we trusted more in JTK but I just had no confidence at all.

Our hotel room was in the Drury, a reservation which originally belonged to JDO and transferred to us in the last-minute flurry of Pinburgh hotel room exchanges. The clerk at check-in pointed out that we could eat at Condado Tacos, right outside the back door and not half a block north of us. This was tempting and we would get to the tacos-built-to-order place several times over the weekend. But I thought that would be too long a wait since every time we'd visited it the place was packed. I thought we could just go to a 7-Eleven and get something small and simple and fast. The catch is the only 7-Eleven I knew in the area was attached to the Doubletree Inn where we'd stayed last year. I knew the way to navigate there. I did not know that the sidewalk to there was closed for reconstruction. I was not at all confident in my ability to navigate around this. If this seems petty to you remember that we haven't got smart phones so we would have to guess at the downtown Pittsburgh street layout at night and hurry before the 7-Eleven's closing time. (Don't laugh; this one had a closing hour last year. Not so this year.)

So without a better idea we went to the Burger King, which didn't even have a Coke Freestyle machine, but which offered us the chance to get onion rings (me) and fries (bunny_hugger). And have another encounter with MWS, JTK, CVK, and Other Person, who similarly wanted to get something to eat and had no better ideas themselves. It was, at least, something to eat and something to drink and we could get ready for bed, and for Pinburgh, before it was too late.

We had pinball to play in the morning.

Trivia: John Bates's 1836 Directory of Stage Coach Services lists 342 scheduled daily departures from London. 275 of them were run by three enterprises. Source: The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century, Wolfgang Schivelbusch.

Currently Reading: Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919, Mike Wallace.

PS: More picture from that Wednesday, our last full day in Mexico City:

Talk being given inside that mock courtroom classroom. The presentation, as you can see, was about the rabbits of Okunoshima, the famous Rabbit Island of all those viral videos of rabbits swarming people. We had thought the Rabbit Island rabbits, honestly, sad things because they've far overpopulated the available food and will chase down people --- who're feeding unhealthy things like carrots (too sugary) --- because they're starving. But the evidence suggests that the rabbits don't seem necessarily worse off than those in actual balanced ecosystems, except it's hard to be sure because it's hard to do the rigorous science in the face of political complications. It's all complicated and a little messy.

The end of the day, and the conference: we were shepherded back to the bus stop, here, to return to the hotel.

And here's the reception, back at the hotel, congratulating everyone still there for the end of the conference. There's a DJ playing 80s (American) music videos in the background somewhere.

When we last visited Altoona, Pennsylvania, it was to visit two area parks. Tipton, yes. But in the actual heart of Altoona? Lakemont Park, an even older amusement park, one with Leap The Dips, the world's oldest standing roller coaster. The last remaining side-friction coaster, the kind of coaster that predates the 1920 invention of upstop wheels that make it impossible for a car to fly off the tracks. (The side-friction is channels which return a car quickly to the tracks if it leaps off on a dip.) It'd be absurd to visit DelGrosso's and not visit this park, twenty minutes closer to Pittsburgh, with such a noteworthy roller coaster.

When we last visited Lakemont, the park was sleepy, small but puttering on all right. Four roller coasters, one of them a kiddie coaster, and maybe a dozen and a half flat rides. The bumper cars was where bunny_hugger and I had our first, and to date only, emergency-stopped ride (a child began crying, to the point of panic). A pleasant day, especially given the $5 pay-one-price admission.

The park did not open in 2017. Nor in 2018. We weren't sure it would open in 2019. Arguably it hasn't. Where DelGrosso's has had a grand decade of growth and expansion, Lakemont has had a crushing one. The park has had an extinction event, management selling off nearly all the adult rides --- three of the roller coasters and an antique car ride survive --- and replacing much of the landscape with miniature golf courses and basketball courts and the like. They've shifted to being more a family entertainment center, with only a handful of rides and none of the other stuff that makes an amusement park.

It's a sad state, by our lights. It's hard to argue that Lakemont Park isn't just gone, the way Tuscorah Park in New Philadelphia, Ohio, is simply a city park with some rides. The land is owned by Altoona, and there's a covenant that it has to serve public amusement, but covenants are flexible things right up to the point they can be broken. Leap the Dips seems likely to stay reasonably safe --- it's on the historic-landmark registry --- but that, too, could become a museum piece instead of a real amusement.

But what's left? That would interest us? Well, the antique-car ride. Skyliner, a wooden roller coaster relocated from Roseland Park, in Canandaigua, New York, back when Boyer Candy briefly owned Lakemont in the 1980s. (Canandaigua, in the Finger Lakes, is near Seabreeze and Darien Lake and other parks we visited in June.) Leap the Dips. Maybe the miniature golf. We'd want to see these at least. MWS would want to get his roller coaster credits. Skyliner could be his 99th and --- oh, well. MWS doubts he'll ever have another roller coaster milestone, a 150th or 200th or 250th ride; he just can't travel like we do. To have his lone milestone coaster be on the oldest roller coaster in the world? That would be sweet.

It also couldn't be. While Lakemont has opened, if you call it open, Leap the Dips still has not. The park keeps insisting they're working on getting it open, but it wasn't and there was nothing to do about that. We did tell the ticket-takers, you know, if you just let us we'd push the train car up to the top of the hill, and they chuckled, as if every roller coaster fanatic hasn't told them the same joke dozens of times this summer.

The Leap the Dips station was out there, in the open, not roped off or anything. There was just the ladder leaning against its tallest level, with the wood structure partly painted. We could go up to the track and even touch it, or touch either of the cars set beside the track. We refrained from actually sitting in them, since we don't want to make life that hard for the staff. But, you know, we looked and we thought about it.

And that was our looking, longing, at things that might be. We did some looking at things that used to be --- pointing out, for example, the building that used to be the arcade where we found a Star Trek: The Next Generation and an Iron Man pinball game. Or roughly the locations where, before there were tennis courts and miniature golf, there had been a Toboggan roller coaster (sold, possibly scrapped). We bought tickets, for a couple of Skyliner rides and a miniature golf round.

Skyliner was also diminished from what it had been. This was not the fault of the park's extinction-level event. It was instead the fault of an accident at Idlewild Park, in Ligonier, about an hour east of Pittsburgh. On Rollo Coaster, a 1937-built roller coaster, an adult rode on the inside, with the kid on the outside, and the kid fell out of the train on one of its turns. This prompted an inquiry into park safety and nearly every Pennsylvania park has added seat belts to its rides. Rollo Coaster had no seat belts, nor even a restraining bar to lock down; just a bar to grab on. The ride is not so violent that this should be dangerous, if someone who's too big to slide out of the one open door slot isn't seated right next to it. But to explain that a seat belt really isn't needed for most wooden roller coasters? Especially classic older ones? Knoebels is confident in this and willing to maintain the point. Other parks? Not so much.

So Skyliner had new seat belts, which the ride operators seemed resigned to making us wear. MWS and bunny_hugger sat in the front row. I sat in the second and only as the train left the station realized I could have taken the back seat. It's as well that I didn't. As we left the station I spotted a wild cottontail rabbit, grazing by the fence between the park and the Altoona Curves' minor-league baseball stadium, and could bring their attention to a rabbit who'd gone off hiding by the time our ride was finished. Also the ride was a bit rough and it might have been too much in the back seat, which is typically the roughest ride on a train. Skyliner is a great ride for air time, and the seat belts cut some of that down ... but, they can't defeat the ride, especially since my sense is the ride operators don't take them seriously. It is a wonderful roller coaster and if it's running rough, well, it's amazing Lakemont can make it run at all, these days. And so MWS logged his 99th roller coaster.

We didn't go on the Antique Cars ride; we like these kinds of rides but it's just not that important to us. We did look at the Little Leaper, a standard-model Allan Herschell Little Dipper kiddie coaster. It'd be a silly 100th for MWS, but he did look over at a group of people just leaving the ride. He thought they might have been adults. At least teenagers. After a while we was convinced they were kids. He did eventually ask the ticket-taker, just to be sure, that this was for kids only. bunny_hugger doesn't remember for certain whether they told him there was a weight limit or a height limit.

The park has got, now, two miniature golf courses. One of them occupies the space that used to be a half-dozen rides. We had our choice and went for what's clearly the more juvenile of them. The more mature and probably challenging course just looked standard. The other course --- well, it's named Rabbit Hole Mini Golf. Each hole has a name, something like ``Raccoon in the Corn''. The holes have obstacles made up to look like Pennsylvania fauna and flora, and each hole comes with a plaque explaining some aspect of Pennsylvania wildlife. How could we resist? Most of the holes are pretty fun, too. The plaques may be debated --- it's nice to hear ``the Eastern raccoon is one of our most intelligent wildlife species'', but after all, there's no meaningful way to compare intelligence between species.

Many of the holes are great fun. There was one wild moment, a fishing-theme hole, on which MWS hit his ball not hard enough to get up the steep ramp (to the boat). His second try, his ball went missing and he supposed it got stuck in the ramp mechanism. I peeked into the hole, to find the ball had landed there in a belated hole-in-one, and accused MWS of humblebragging. He swears he had no idea. Later, bunny_hugger, who had a lousy round, did get her ball stuck in the ramp mechanism.

Some of the props were simple plywood boards clamped to stand vertically. This seemed like an invitation to vandalism. Already the fisherman's pole had been broken off, and this for an attraction that just opened earlier this summer. Another hole, the catfish hole, had one fin on the catfish broken off, turning what would be the intended and very hard shot --- through the fish's mouth --- into a mere choice and the one you should avoid taking. So the plywood stuff seems like a curious design choice. Maybe it's economical, or more easily repaired than something more solid would be.

We played the last few holes quickly. It was getting on 7 pm, which we figured was when we would have to finish, take our last ride on Skyliner, and head for Pittsburgh. It's hard for me and bunny_hugger to play swiftly, but we did. The last hole --- the 18th, rather than a 19th --- had one of those holes that's supposed to always drain no matter what you hit, and MWS's ball failed to drain. He had to reach through the fence and nudge it.

I rode in the front seat for our second and final Skyliner ride, no less wonderful even if we didn't see any rabbits around. And, while MWS was in the bathroom, I dashed over to get some more snaps of Leap the Dips from the other side. We would leave too soon to photograph it in the best twilight light, but we were there at all, and that's something.

Trivia: Cyrus W Field's 1882 Washington Building, at 1 Broadway, was the first twelve-story building in New York City. Source: The Epic of New York City, Edward Robb Ellis.

Currently Reading: Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919, Mike Wallace. I know it seems like I've been reading this forever, and I have, but it's like 1100 pages and I'm finally more than halfway through!

PS: So now the final full day, one that I spent mostly at the UNAM campus with bunny_hugger, whose talk --- the reason we were in Mexico City at all --- was that day.

Lecture hall getting ready for the keystone address (not bunny_hugger's) that day. You can see how academia in Latin America looks completely different to what you get in the United States.

Quick glimpse back; people were still getting organized and filing into the lecture hall.

One speaker had to address the crowd over the Internet and so we had the traditional several minutes of people trying to get the tech to work.

It's Thursday, so you know what that means. It means I disappoint bunny_hugger by interrupting the narrative of our lives together to recount the stuff posted to my humor blog the past week. For example there was all this:

• Everything There Is To Say About Pool Safety, last week's long-form nonsense essay.
• Today’s Excuse For Why I’m Running Late On Everything and the thought of being there when an influential decision is made.
• Statistics Saturday: Top Songs For Each Day Of The Week, a music guide.
• What’s Going On In Alley Oop? What’s With The Alternate-Universe Alley Oop? May – August 2019 with special guest star: Plato. Also the Labyrinth and alternate timelines.
• What I Can’t Stop Thinking About Today, with Kennywood content.
• With The Revised Rise Of Digital-Life Persons, put up when I realized what the punch line was for an otherwise cute little bit of microfiction from a couple weeks ago.
• Expanding on Few Words, just some silliness.
• Everything There Is To Say About Procrastination, this week's long-form nonsense.

I did eventually turn around, in the Bosque Tlalpan, and start walking back down the trail. I'm not sure just when in my pictures I did. But the stuff here is from that return leg.

Some building deep in the woods with a purpose I could not discern. It's apparently not being closely watched most of the time.

And a nice spot in the forest. I never would find the extent of the trail up the hill, but now you've got a good idea what it all looked like.

Local squirrel as seen from down below, close to the start of the trail.

It's possible that one of the Mexican grey squirrels has noticed me. Look at the twist on those feet.

Black squirrel also noticing me and none too happy about it.

I belive this is a different black squirrel but you can see how popular the area is. I wonder what it is attracting so many to a spot near the food stalls where people converge?

Woman disregarding the signs ordering people not to play dice with the squirrels.

Another squirrel having some fun with a peanut.

Strrrrrrretch.

One of a bank of food stalls at the entrance of the park.

Near the entrance of the park was that museum; it's devoted to local culture. Here's the stage, which I caught in-between shows.

Looking back from the stage --- see the rows of audience seating --- and looking to the paintings and pictures on both floors. I quite like the style of balconies here.

Trivia: In organizing its Arizona Territory the Confederate Congress made no provision for the territory residents to organize their own constitution; it could only frame one on applying for statehood. Source: Look Away! A History of the Confederate States of America, William C Davis.

Currently Reading: Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919, Mike Wallace.

PS: The Fall 2019 Mathematics A To Z Is Looking Good so I'll be ready to take subject nominations soon.

It was hot at Knoebels. Really hot. Low 90s at least, maybe mid-90s. We had to get something to eat, and drink, and before the heat and surprise intensity of Tumbling Timbers got us sick. Happy to say, Knoebels has food. Lots of food. Lots of quite good food; they routinely win awards for park food. As the park is free parking and admission, it's not absurd to just drive to the park to eat lunch. We'd figured to eat here anyway; this was a good moment for it. MWS stopped at one of the stands offering some barbecue-based lunch. bunny_hugger got some pasta dish, I think, and regretted not getting the burritos or vice-versa. I got a hoagie from the Dexter's Deli stand.

Dexter Raccoon is one of the two sidekick mascots the park's picked up this decade, accompanying Kozmo Chipmunk. They even have a charming little book in the gift store, expansion of a story that used to be on their web site, about how Kozmo discovered the injured and lost Dexter after the 2011 Flood and found a place where he could be. The story's so odd that I wonder if they did find an injured young raccoon after that flood. Why, if they were just making up characters, not just make him female and get, you know, a girl mascot? ... And by the way, they got a girl mascot the past year or two, a fox whose name I could not remember. It's Piper. Kozmo and Dexter wear their names on their shirts. Piper doesn't get such consideration. They also have a mascot for their Halloween event, Hall-o-Fun. This is a ghost with a jack-o-lantern head, and that character's named Creeper. ... Anyway, no, I didn't go to Dexter's Deli out of an interest in raccoon solidarity. I figured a hoagie would be a good lunch and was right for me.

After lunch we got back to the serious roller coaster riding, resuming with Twister. This is another Knoebels moment, the (mirror-image) reconstruction of Mister Twister, from the Old Elitch Gardens amusement park in Denver, closed in 1994. Think of the attitude of a park that serves the Wilkes-Barre population basin, reconstructing a beloved roller coaster from Denver. Twister opened in 1999, a fact we didn't think of until seeing the 'Fabulous & 20' birthday banner hanging from the launch station. There wasn't any line, either. bunny_hugger and MWS took the front seat and I went in the second row, thinking belatedly, I should have tried the back seat.

We were circumnavigating most of the park. We went past one of the many creeks, this one with swans worth looking over. And past the Crystal Pool, the great swimming pool which opened in 1926, and is probably why Knoebels is anything rather than just a campground area today. This was certainly drawing in a lot of the crowd and keeping them from the line ahead of us.

To the front. One of the food stands is The Loaf, and it's basically your corrugated-steel building except that the roof and sides are shaped and cladded to look like a great loaf of bread. I mention this because we spent time trying to work out whether the name 'LOAF' on it was rendered in fast-twinkling light bulbs or whether it was just reflectorized discs swaying in the sun. It took us a long while to come to consensus and even then we weren't perfectly sure until sunset, which proved it was reflectors.

We got to the front of the park for Impulse. This is Knoebels's newest roller coaster, their major steel one. And it's ... you know, it's not a bad roller coaster. It just lacks that odd quirkiness that seems distinctly Knoebels. It's a vertical-lift ride very like Hydrus at Casino Pier, or Untamed at Canobie Lake Park, or Tantrum at Darien Lake. Not the same model as these, but the similar kind of ride, with the great lift directly into the sun and then a great many twists and turns and loops over a tight footprint. It's a brand-new ride, the kind of thing you could just go to the manufacturer (Zierer, Josef-Wallner-Straße 5 Deggendorf, Bavaria) and buy. It doesn't have lore, which is its only flaw, and that only a flaw for something at Knoebels where we want everything to need a docent. My ride photo came out looking pretty good. bunny_hugger's face was hidden behind someone's hand. We didn't buy one.

Our next ride was Kozmo's Kurves, which is their kiddie coaster that they allow grown-ups on. It's a little thing, with one real loop and a ride cycle of three circuits on the train. It replaced the loved High Speed Thrill Coaster, which had served this role for 53 years. Kozmo's Kurves runs over the canal for a boat ride, and we saw a good number of boats going past that. And though a small ride it can still surprise people with its intensity and ability to bash knees in. We saw by one of the support legs an adult's baseball cap, lost for the rest of the day. Also the high-water mark for the 2011 flood.

Did I mention it was hot? It was hot. We stopped for some frozen lemonade and while drinking that saw Kozmo, the mascot in suit, being driven somewhere. He wasn't near us; he was just strapped in to the back of a golf cart-like scooter. We don't know if that was just to get him across the park to a scheduled show or whether when it's in the mid-90s and sunny they have the mascots do as little standing and walking as possible. We wouldn't see Dexter or Piper or Creeper.

One thing we knew about Knoebels and looked forward to was pinball. In the main arcade they had the Stern Star Wars, Game Of Thrones, a Theater of Magic that might well be the one we'd played our last visit, and the remake of Monster Bash; in a bar/secondary arcade they had a Twilight Zone. MWS noticed the Game of Thrones still had the default scores on its high score table, so suggested playing that. Now, Game of Thrones, the pinball, has been out a couple years. But it had just about two weeks before gotten a major new code update, one that completely changed the strategies and made the game as fresh and exciting as when it was new. Knoebels had the new code. So consider that: they don't just have pinball. They don't just keep their pinball in good shape. They were right on top of software patches that, objectively speaking, they could install at their leisure. When we got to Pinburgh I would play a Game of Thrones that pointedly did not have the new code installed. That's the kind of attention to even the boring little maintenance stuff that Knoebels will offer.

Would you call it a good omen for Pinburgh, the biggest pinball tournament in the world, starting in two days from this, that on his first game on this table in a location he'd never visited before, MWS became the grand champion, winning a bunch of credits? How about that on her second game, bunny_hugger became the grand champion? Or that on his third game, MWS became grand champion again? Would you call it a bad omen that my first game was ... pretty good, but nothing spectacular, nor high-score-table-worthy, and every game after that worse than my start? Well, who believes in omens anyway? By the end of the day the high score table was entirely bunny_hugger and MWS (more MWS than she) and the two dollars we'd put in to start had turned into very many games, with a bunch left to onlookers to play.

We did check in on the other pinball location, and played a ball-rolling game some, with just a short pause while one of bunny_hugger's balls somehow leapt above the plastic cover. We still have no idea how that happened. Didn't play Twilight Zone, though. We didn't think we should spend the whole day playing games that, after all, we could play back home too.

Beside the main arcade is the Grand Carousel, one of the park's centerpiece rides and the one that still has the Brass Ring game. MWS agreed that it was foolish to hurry past that in the rush for the last roller coaster at the park. Also he didn't know what we were talking about with the Brass Ring Game. I know that actually grabbing for the brass ring has almost vanished from amusement parks. People blame insurance companies. I suspect insurance companies are a convenient minor villain; the brass ring, after all, demands another ride operator and a steady expense in replacing lost rings, and with most parks having gone to pay-one-price models the expense hardly makes sense. But I thought the game, the thing being referenced in talk about grabbing for the brass ring, was still current.

So the ring game, as we explained to MWS. During the ride a wooden mechanical arm will reach out and dangle rings just within arm's reach of the riders of the outer row of horses, the ones that don't rise and fall. You get one chance every rotation of the machine to grab a ring. Grab the one brass ring and you win a free ride. Grab one of the many steel rings and you get a steel ring to return at the end of the ride. Knoebels, which still offers rides a la carte, gives you the $1.75 in tickets that a new ride would cost. MWS took to this game right away, and his first ride got, I think, eight of the ten rings he possibly could have. I started out great, collecting rings up until the next-to-the-last go-round. bunny_hugger had a similarly great record. None of us got the brass ring, nor would we all day. Which was a small disappointment. In each of our past visits bunny_hugger had gotten the brass ring at least once. This time around she only got one from the souvenir Carousel Shop.

The Grand Carousel still has the sign out front, beside one of its four, count 'em, four band organs, which says it used to be at a park in Rahway, New Jersey. At the legitimately interesting museum within Carousel Shop, they have the bill of sale, from Riverside Park in Piscataway, New Jersey, a completely different central Jersey city. I have no explanation for this phenomenon.

But on to the last of the roller coasters, if you call it one. The Roller Coaster Database changed its mind and a couple years ago started listing it as one. This is the Black Diamond, a dark ride, the car puttering around a mining-theme ride. It goes through several levels, past daft coal miners and an explosion down into a surreal netherworld and the collapsed remains of Centralia, the famously abandoned town that's near enough to Knoebels. The abundant scenery, some of it animated with the train's movement, makes it feel more like a haunted-house ride. But if you just looked at the track you'd agree this is a roller coaster, even if it's not a very big or fast one. The ride used to be in Wildwood, where it was a gold-mine-themed area, since somehow every amusement park can do Old West stuff. At Knoebels it's been localized. bunny_hugger and I love it. MWS seemed to find it okay, possibly because it hasn't got a patch on the sorts of dark rides of a Disney park. He was cool to riding it again later on, but acquiesced, and said that he enjoyed it a good bit more the second time around, maybe now that he knew what kind of ride to expect.

It was about 4 pm now, and we had been at the park just over five hours, and we had gotten to all the roller coasters plus one of the two carousels. We had something like six hours left in the day, with all that any of us hoped to do yet being to ride the other, Stein-and-Goldstein, carousel; to play Fascination; to get some birch beer soda pop; and maybe pierogies or a sundae or something. Not that the only point to an amusement park is checking off objectives, but when you do have a place you can't get to often --- for MWS, possibly not get to again at all --- having the highest-priority things done is this great relief. You don't need to worry any longer that you're using your time badly. You can just let things happen.

Trivia: In 1269 England's King Henry III gave to Queen Eleanor the sole custody of London Bridge, for her personal use. Source: Old London Bridge: The Story of the Longest Inhabited Bridge in Europe, Patricia Pierce.

Currently Reading: Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919, Mike Wallace.

PS: Reading the Comics, August 16, 2019: The Comments Drive Me Crazy Edition, mostly about the Gregorian calendar, which is extremely me.

PPS: More of the playground area within the Bosque Tlalpan.

And here's an actual hopscotch board (and the long chain is there in the background still) along with ... uh ... a touch-tone dial? (No.) I don't know what kids do anymore, sorry.

The retaining wall and path into the playground area, as seen from below.

And, oh, now, what's this? (Look dead-center. You can't possibly make it out but trust me.)

Somehow my mathematics blog has moved Reading the Comics posts out of Sundays lately. What's gone there instead? Miscellaneous stuff. Here's the past week's writing:

• I Got Arithmetic Wrong, And Learned Something About Writing based on nobody noticing a mistake, and why nobody would notice, other than that nobody actually reads what I write.
• Reading the Comics, August 9, 2019: Venn Diagrams Edition which has to be like the fourteenth time I've used this edition title but what am I going to do?
• Reading the Comics, August 10, 2019: In Security Edition in which one comic strip gave me like fourteen things to discuss and the other comics were just there.
• I Plan To Do A Fall 2019 Mathematics A To Z pretty soon, so, watch this space and all that.

And my story comics update? You'd surely like to know What's Going On In Alley Oop? What's With The Alternate-Universe Alley Oop? May - August 2019. in plot.

With that taken care of, let's follow me back into the Bosque Tlalpan.

Well, hi there! Local bright red bird nestled in the trees.

Moving back along here's a partial wall of posts, some of which have fallen, and protecting ... I don't know what.

You knew I had to get around to a panorama shot soon. Here's an attempted view uphill, to a summit I would approach but never reach.

And now a mysterious blue-wrapped box high up in one of the trees. I have the impression it was some kind of scientific instrument, maybe measuring the bugs in the area, but I can't say where I got that impression from now.

Chalk writing on the ground. It photographed poorly. My recollection is that it had some kinds of instructions about a running race held over this course that I hope was going downhill.

And now the Zona de Comida, the funniest part of the course! One of the handful of locations I was certain could be reached, based on my review of the park maps.

Looking back at the slightly ragged intersection of trails by the picnic area and bathrooms.

And here's a look at one of the walls, and the steep drop to ground beneath, and the trees that grew to match that.

The wall and path here leads to this picnic and playground area.

A swings ride at the playground area which has the looks of a giant holding out their arms. It reminds me of one at Tuscorah Park in Ohio.

Children's maze within the play area.

I don't know what this is but enough of the names are foods that ... I have no idea what's going on here.

Trivia: NBC ensemble singers (there were about a hundred of them) of the early 1940s would typically earn about %0 for each broadcast, including $24 for rehearsal, $18 for the show, and $9 for the West Coast repeat. Source: The Mighty Music Box, Thomas A Delong.

Currently Reading: Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919, Mike Wallace.

Oh, something I should have gotten to before starting on Pinburgh, so I'll fit it here. We went to the circus. We learned there was a circus when we saw coupons for kids attending beside the cash register at the Asian grocery. (We get ramen and a surprising number of vegetarian snacks there.) It promised a water circus and, we learned, one with no animal acts. It'd be at the county fairgrounds. Not in a permanent fairground building, either, but in a tent they set up, in your classic circus style.

To our disappointment, they asked no photographs or movies be taken, so you won't be seeing slightly blurry, weirdly-lit snapshots here in a year and a half. But on the other hand, we weren't distracted by glowing rectangles held in our way watching the show. We got the cheap seats, which weren't very, far in the back, right underneath an air-conditioning vent that would be much nicer if it were about ten degrees warmer. It was blowing fast enough that some people behind us lost some of their popcorn to the zephyrs. Not for long, though. And none of the seats were bad: the stands were set up nearly all around the circular stage, with good viewing lines from nearly everywhere. Also we could spot a handful of people in the audience who, like bunny_hugger, wore shirts reactive to the black lights on stage, which made them these great sparkling bits of orange in the background.

The show was the sort of wonderful spectacle we hoped for. A pair of clowns served as the emcees and anchors, mostly with comic sketches, and with a couple burlesques of the stunts. And the stunts were great, mixtures of contortion and strength and some that just seem foolhardy, such as walking on the top of a 15-foot-wide wheel that's itself held at the end of a 25-foot axis, rotating up and down.

What makes it a water circus is the stage, which opens up the platforms to reveal that it's above a water tank. The outermost ring of the platform rises up and can drizzle a curtain of water. Which itself has those high-frequency pulsing LEDs which can create patterns in the water so that, for example, a performance might be surrounded by the illusion of fish moving around.

As promised the show has no animals, but --- it has got an elephant. And a tyrannosaurus rex. These are performed by puppets, the same sort of quite large wireframe sculptures with operators out in the open, where they won't be noticed, as we saw in the stage presentation of War Horse. It was great and I'm surprised they only brought these out for the one sketch, just before the intermission. During intermission they also sold chances to come up and pose with the 'animals' and if we weren't hurrying to the bathroom we might have considered it.

It was only in town three days, and packed up and left, leaving behind only a piece on the local news with footage from the circus's own promotional video. No cameras, you know.

Trivia: Hershey set up a Home Guard to protect against German sabotage during the First World War. The guards, factory workers, were not allowed to carry arms. Source: Chocolate Wars: The 150-Year Rivalry Between The World's Great Chocolate Makers, Deboarah Cadbury.

Currently Reading: Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919, Mike Wallace.

PS: Exploring more of the Bosque Tlalpan.

Another view of the path I'd go walking up. Much of it loked basically like this, a path with rock wall on one side carved through trees.

A side path, possibly a social trail, through some wispy evergreen-type trees.

An intersection within the paths. I like the play of light and shadow here, especially that the darker patch is up close.

The last week of July and first weekend of August saw us go to several amusement parks and Pinburgh, so you know what's coming in these pages for the next like eight weeks. The run-up to all this was our usual sort of preparing-for-a-major-trip excitement and stress and hollering about whether anything was going to be ready. The evening before our departure, as she was watering plants, bunny_hugger stood at our goldfish pond, watching and looking for the ones we recognized.

One was missing.

It was one of our two biggest fish --- we've chosen Magnum as the name for this one; the other is Gemini --- and one of the few survivors from the original thirteen we got in 2013. Though our pond isn't very deep there is space for a goldfish to hide, especially in the dim light of evening, but ... his body's like eight inches long, and bright orange. He's not that hard to spot. But the pond was netted, and the net hadn't fallen in or anything. Predators, particularly raccoons, could get at the pond, yes, but how could they get at a goldfish and put the net back?

Finally we saw among the rocks at the edge of the pond a terrible little spot of orange. A goldfish trapped, buried under a rock somehow. We both watched it, thinking first of what could have happened --- did a rock somehow fall off the edge of the pond when Magnum was nearby, and crush it? How did the rock come to a stop, though? --- and then of how bad it might look underneath. We hadn't definitely spotted Magnum in a few days. His corpse could be torn open, worm-eaten, moldy ... all kinds of horrors.

And then I noticed the flash of orange still visible was his mouth, and it was fluctuating. He was still breathing water.

Now we got to emergency mode. We got a five-gallon bucket and filled it partway with pond water. And gingerly lifted the rock, revealing that Magnum was ... stunned, barely mobile. And had this terrible nasty gash on his dorsal area. His fins seemed to be intact, but he'd clearly scraped something terrible, we infer in the panicked thrashing about a goldfish will do if caught between several rocks.

We rushed Magnum to the Preuss, the pet store in town. They specialize in fish. They have a fish specialist on staff. They've housed fish before, that one with the golf ball size bulge in her abdomen. They'd be able to say how dire things were. While waiting for their fish experts Magnum seemed to be rousing, as if now that he was free he was already getting his strength back.

Their verdict was that Magnum was badly scraped, but not seriously injured. He didn't seem to have an infection, so if we could put him in quarantine for a week or two, maybe with some antibiotics, he should be in good shape. And, you know, any other week we'd be very able to keep a fish in quarantine. But we were getting ready to be out of town for eight days. That's all right: they were able to keep him in a quarantine tank, with antibiotics, and house him until we were ready to pick him up again.

They estimated the fish kenneling would cost about $10 a day, plus a bit on top for the medicine. The people in the aquarium section said we could pay when we liked, right then or when we picked the fish up. At the register, they said we should pay when we picked up Magnum. This ended up fiscally wise: when we did pick up Magnum, they seemed unsure about just what to charge. Rick Preuss, the owner, happened to be there and prescribed $3 a day for the ten days, plus $10 for the medicine. We have no idea how an estimated $100+ turned into $40. I have the hypothesis that they have a nominal price, but they give us a break because we are being so diligent about caring for our fish. Remember that they gave an extra week of care, gratis, for the fish with the ovarian cyst. (That visit we had prepaid for, come to think of it.)

And as for Magnum, who did not die?

After Pinburgh, when we returned to the store and saw Magnum again, they thought ... mm. Well, that another week or so in quarantine wouldn't hurt. His abraded scales were healing, but that takes time. If we could set up a tank and give him some Melafix he should recover enough to return to the pond safely. Really they figured he could be put in the pond and given Melafix, which is mildly antibiotic and doesn't harm healthy fish. But our pond is about 1300 gallons and there's no buying enough Melafix for that.

So we set up one of the stock tanks we use for the winter as a quarantine tank. We only filled it to about 25 or 30 gallons, using several buckets of pond water to provide any kind of bacterial base. We had not had a water filter put in the pond, to soak up the bacterial culture. This is something we're going to have to correct, since there's no guessing when we'll next have a fish emergency. We were risking a serious case of New Tank Syndrome, that sudden explosion and crash of microorganisms in a newly-set-up tank. We didn't, though, thanks to the pond, which was able to give five or ten gallons of water to change out every day as needed.

Melafix, by the way, smells like one of those soaps that's a little too nice and vaguely scary to actually use so you just set it out in the guest bathroom and hope. I like it.

So after a week of this? Magnum seems to be recovering. Even to have scales growing back, or at least starting to. He has seemed noticeably bored, possibly because we didn't go capture another goldfish to be a companion in quarantine. But we seem to have come through the emergency tolerably well. And now we aren't going to have trouble telling Magnum and Gemini apart, at least not for months.

We are very lucky bunny_hugger insisted on so closely inspecting the goldfish before we set out for Pinburgh, though.

Trivia: The astronomer Christopher Clavius wrote six treatises explaining the reasons behind and supporting the logic of the Gregorian calendar. Source: The Calendar: The 5000-Year Struggle to Align the Clock with the Heavens --- And What Happened to the Missing Ten Days, David Ewing Duncan.

Currently Reading: Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919, Mike Wallace.

PS: The park's vast, and downhill. I finally got there.

Entrance proper to the Bosque Tlalpan, with the CDMX logo that identifies stuff of the Mexico City government.

Warning sign at the park: do not play dice with the squirrels.

Furthermore, do not trade guitar picks with the squirrels. Also I didn't notice at the time, but do now: above that, the warning to not hook up an elastic band to a tree and use it as one of those hilarious comical weight-loss gadgets you saw in old cartoons and sitcoms where someone gets shaken up a lot and that's supposed to make them thin somehow? You would have thought that one went without saying.

Baby Food Festival, 2019. Once I was knocked out of the Classics tournament I could return to putting my own scores up for Main. In not a single case did I improve any of the scores I'd done the Saturday or the Thursday before. But I could at least warm up and get a feel for how the games were playing that day.

My doing this came to a stop when the Women's Finals began. bunny_hugger had figured this division her best chance at bringing a medal home. It's a good calculation. Only four people would compete in the three-game finals, but she had spent almost the entire tournament as the top-ranked woman playing. She was squeaked out in the last hour by MKS, who put up a runaway game of Aerosmith, but still. bunny_hugger just had to not finish last.

The first game: Breakshot, one of the few games from Capcom Pinball. The game was a mid-90s attempt to make a game with an electromechanical-style layout --- no ramps or subways or anything --- with modern game elements, like multiball, an animated dot-matrix display, audio instructions to the players, and distractingly gratuitous sexism. Does the backglass need to feature ice dropping out of a woman's glass into her breasts? Does the screen need to sometimes show this scene, animated, complete with the woman shaking after this? It's a curious choice for the Women's Division, given nonsense like this, although the indefatigable KEC, who heads the Grand Rapids Belles and Chimes league, specifically asked for it. If you can ignore the breasts it's a decent game.

bunny_hugger has a lousy first ball and was in a foul mood. What could I do? I advised her: this game is, basically, an electromechnical. Play it as if it were. An electromechanical game has two important things: first, send the ball up to the top of the playfield. Second: let the ball do its business. You shouldn't be messing with it. bunny_hugger starts doing this. It works. She has a great game, taking first place with twice the score of MKS, three times the score of KEC, and four times the score of ZJH.

The second game is Whirlwind. It's a very hard late-solid-state game. It should be easy, if it were possible to make either ramp shot, but it's not, so it isn't. bunny_hugger has overcome her hatred for this through experience, learning some of how to manage this touchy game. Also from realizing the playfield is very close to what you'd get if you flipped that of Funhouse, her favorite game, horizontally. It's not a runaway game here: the lowest score is ZJH's 1,156,010. The highest is 1,814,850. bunny_hugger has it.

At this point bunny_hugger is assured a medal. She's guaranteed to get at least second place, and that only if she comes in last while MKS also comes in first. The game is Aerosmith, on which MKS put up the best score in qualifying. This is a game that should be fun, but isn't, because so many of its shots are instant death. But bunny_hugger has had a good weekend with this too. I haven't told her what she has to do to win the gold medal, lest that add to the pressure on her. Nobody has a great game: ZJS, the first player, puts up 4,373,190. KEC, playing second, rallies to 28,004,560. bunny_hugger scores 11,705,730 and I am relieved because this means MKS's finish is irrelevant. MKS puts up 8,863,090; it doesn't matter.

bunny_hugger takes home the gold medal, in the Women's tournament, adding to her pile of hardware from the Baby Food Festival/Meijer State Games. KEC finishes just ahead of MKS; MKS had more second-place finishes, but a first-place finish is worth that much. ZJH finishes in fourth place, after coming in fourth all three games. It's rough, but she takes it well.

So back to qualifying, and the wait for Main Finals to start. And here they are! And ... oh, that's a power flicker. There's a heavy rainstorm coming through. The power never goes out, but we do make jokes about it. And think about the poor Baby Food Festival, since the torrential rain has to be destroying the big event. And this is not the first time rain has smashed the Baby Food Festival since we started attending its pinball events. The Special When Lit facility is too far from Main Street for us to see things, or to pop over and hang out at them. But we can see that it's impossible to see the cars in the parking lot through the rain, and we can deduce what's happening.

Well. Main Qualifying ends, and to my slight surprise I rate the Pro Division, the top sixteen players. To her greater surprise bunny_hugger does too. Either of us making the final four would secure our positions in the state championship this year. Making it past the quarterfinals would put us in good shape.

My quartet: AJH, running the tournament; JB, recently come from Lansing to play altogether too well; myself; and JH, a woman I don't know. It's easy to suppose a person you don't know is lousy at pinball, but that's never wise to do. After all, she made the top sixteen.

Our first game: Aerosmith. It's still a tough game, but I've been playing it pretty consistently well at the SWL facility this past month. I have my first inconsistently bad game, and come in last. All right. The next game: Spider-Man. I'm less reliable on this game, but I've worked out the essentials. There's two multiballs that it's easy enough to start, even with the game on its advertised Hard Settings and with the slightly-shorter-than-design-spec Lightning Flippers. (The flippers have this lightning-bolt pattern on their top side.) And if you hit the Sandman target, right in the tempting center of the playfield, you get a mode started and a mode plus a multiball is usually a good day. I ... have an okay day, putting up 35 million points. JB puts up 51 million. AJH, 52.8 million. AJH is already sure to move on to semifinals. JB is the safe bet. But I can move on if I win the last game while JB finishes either third or last. AJH takes first place, and JB second, which is almost the opposite of what I wanted. They'll move on. I'm out of the tournament, tied with JH for 13th place. AJH goes on to win the tournament; JB, to take third place.

Ah, but bunny_hugger? She's in a four-player group with BIL, MSS, and MKS again. The first game, Time Fantasy, one that everybody but me knows how to play. bunny_hugger has her first outright lousy game of that in a while, putting up a score I could beat, and comes in last. The next game is Congo, a high-scoring game on which bunny_hugger can confidently put up a billion points, a score which would have won this round. If she were playing confidently, which she is not. She puts up 247.5 million, just barely squeaking out MKS at 246.9 million. BIL wins, assuring his advance to the semifinals. bunny_hugger could still advance --- she's in literally the same position I was after two games. She would have to finish in first on the third game, Surf Champ, while MSS had to finish in third or fourth place.

bunny_hugger plays this old and irritating electromechanical first. She finishes with 56,150 points. MKS is player two, and finishes with 62,700, finishing bunny_hugger. BIL has a lousy game, 34,270. MSS finishes at 43,000, the third place that bunny_hugger needed him to take. Had bunny_hugger had a very slightly better ball, at any point in this game, she'd be moving on. And instead, we're both out of the Baby Food Festival/Meijer State Games main tournament.

MWS has a lousy first round also, three third-place finishes that leave him tied for 11th with bunny_hugger. KEC has a one-game playoff against SAL, missing the chance to advance and taking 9th place. BIL gets to the semifinals, but can't advance, finishing in 5th. MKS makes it to semifinals too, but gets a third and two last-place finishes, leaving her in 7th place.

Now things get nasty. bunny_hugger was in a foul mood after losing this chance to get back in the state championship race. Had we been on main street she could have gone to the fair and remembered that there's other things in the world. But we're out of walking range and, in any case, nothing would be open until the rain was passed (which it was getting to doing). Me, I went around playing games to enter the next Fremont Monthly Tournament, figuring the best I could do was improve my chances for a tournament that wouldn't be worth as much as this, but would still be something. But it's hard not noticing how much that's just consolation.

And we had an alternative plan. After all, Fremont is just like a 20-30 minute drive from Michigan's Adventure. We, with MWS, had talked about going to that park and riding roller coasters if we got knocked out early. We had done this two years ago. But we checked the park's operating hours and discovered it was closed, presumably after the rain blew through. And JB was counting on us for his ride back to Lansing, so there wasn't anything to do but hang around the site of our failures until he was done. He made the final four.

Trivia: In the French Occupation Zone of Germany during 1945 the total harvest of bread grain was less than half what it was in that area in 1938; of potatoes, about 56.6 percent the prewar harvest. Source: Germany 1945: From War to Peace, Richard Bessel.

Currently Reading: Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919, Mike Wallace.

PS: Oh, yeah, I'd promised to let you know What's Going On In The Amazing Spider-Man? Is Spider-Man ever coming out of reruns? May - August 2019 plot recap here for you.

PPS: Our Monday in Mexico City bunny_hugger was back at the conference. I went walking. Come with me, won't you?

Curious elevated cross structure that was beside the bank adjacent to our hotel (in the background). It was just attractive enough I wanted to remember it.

And peering from the road leading to the hotel, and bank, back in the hotel's direction.

Reverse angle. There was a lot of traffic, including a fair number of officially licensed taxis, and it felt fairly anxious to be walking around all these cars moving to a pattern I didn't understand. This doesn't come across at all in a still photo.

Saturday of the Baby Food Festival bunny_hugger and MWS and I drove out to Fremont again. We got there as the day opened for the last couple hours of open qualifying. The Classics finals were to start just after noon; Main, just after 3. At some point in the day would be the Women's tournament, which worried bunny_hugger who didn't want to choose between competing in that and competing in one of the other, open tournaments. The women's tournament offered the best chance for her to win a medal; the open tournament, the best chance for rating points that could get her into the state championship.

I went to the Classics games. I had several strategic reasons for this. I was still rated, barely, for those playoffs. So I wanted to know how the games were playing. Also, I hoped to better my standing; other people would arrive in the last three hours of play and they could knock me down. Also, by being on a machine, I could keep other people from playing a game that knocked me down. bunny_hugger, ranked above me in Classics, played Main games, trying to make sure she made it in.

Well, we both did, in Classics and in Main. She went in to Classics as the #10 seed, and me at #11. For the first round this put us in a pairing we wholeheartedly dread: playing against each other in a four-player group in the quarterfinals. Best of three games. Our opponents: PH, who's Michigan's state representative for the International Flipper Pinball Association and who'll decide where the championship will be; and SAL, a regular to Fremont tournaments who's in the finals quite often. The top two finishers will go on to the semifinals.

Our first game: Time Fantasy. This is one that reliably stumps me and that I only finally got one good game on that Saturday. It's themed to the shroomer art that guy in high school was always drawing. If you can shoot this Time Tube shot, you'll win. If you can't, you won't. Everyone else has known all weekend where the shot is; I haven't. Well, SAL finds that shot. This game, the rest of us don't. I manage second place with one-ninth SAL's score. bunny_hugger has one-tenth his score, for third place. PH comes within three thousand points of bunny_hugger's score but doesn't beat it.

The next game is Eight Ball. This is another pool game, with a noticeably non-licensed Fonzie on the backglass. It's a game we all love. There's fifteen targets corresponding to you know what. These set the base bonus. Then there's a 'candycane', a little U-shaped feature with a long leg, which builds the bonus. The strategy of this game is to shoot the candycane. Or just not lose the ball, which is a challenge. Except for SAL, who puts up 335,880, the eighth-highest score anybody recorded on that game the whole tournament so far. PH takes second place, and bunny_hugger third. I have a lousy game, my first lousy game on this table all tournament, I think.

At this point SAL is mathematically guaranteed to move on. PH, bunny_hugger, and I are all tied. Whichever of us beats the other two moves on. The game: Mystic. This is a crazy bonus-heavy game; if you can knock down a lot of drop targets in the first ball, you'll win. But the ball launches into the pop bumpers, and they launch it out of the pop bumpers to a drain about 150% of the time. I've spend a lot of the tournament testing it out and figuring how to avoid those sorts of instant drains. I'm sure everyone else has too. We do not show this knowledge. If you avoid instant drains you can expect a score of 200,000 to 500,000 on Mystic. SAL finishes last, with 37,420. PH just barely squeaks him out, at 37,900. bunny_hugger has a better but still mediocre game at 68,850. I have a better but still mediocre game of 75,420. I'm the other person going to semifinals, and bunny_hugger is free to go back to putting in qualifying scores for the Women's and the Main tournaments and complaining that I always do better than her, which I do not.

Quarterfinals. I'm in a group with MWS and JB, who had first-round byes, and MSS, who along with BIL advanced from the other quarterfinals group. Our first game: Mystic. Where, oh goodness but we do not have good first balls. I have been happy the last several Fremont events that I haven't had the ball ping out the bumpers to an instant drain. I have that happen two balls now. MSS is having a good game, but everyone else is playing lousy. MWS only has 40,240, which I could certainly beat on one ball if the ball weren't heading out the right outlane. I shake the machine, trying to get it under control, and it tilts, wiping out a bonus of maybe a couple thousand points.

JB also has a lousy game, beating me by a couple thousand points. I don't know just what my bonus was when I tilted, but it's possible had I not tried to save the ball, I'd have beaten him on this game. But who would expect him to not be able to save his last ball either?

Game two. Surf Champ, an electromechanical which was not one of the qualifying games but was allowed into finals. It's got exactly the theme you'd think from the name. The game is hard; you want to drop the ball into a scoop that just has no good angles. You have to shoot the ball up in that rough area and hope. MWS knocks the game out of the park, putting up 124,800 points. I have always struggled with this game and after a couple house balls that I couldn't touch manage to get 45,840. A weak score but maybe okay if oh well, there goes MSS, edging me out, 52,370. Well, if JB doesn't have any kind of good oh, he put up 81,970.

At this point I'm eliminated; there's nothing I can do to move on. JB is all but eliminated; he would have to win the last game to move on. Our finalgame, then, is Knockout. This is another electromechanical. It's a boxing-themed game. It's a simple game: get the ball on either flipper and shoot it up the orbit to the top of the game, and repeat this forever. It's so simple you'd think I'd be any good at it. My usual game finishes about 50,000 points. A couple times I have ever reached 100,000. Everyone else has put up games above 150,000 at one time or other and I don't know how. MWS has a terrible game to start, putting up 21,190, something even I can beat. Me? With nothing to play for? And all I could possibly do being spoiling JB's chances of moving on, or forcing a tie to move on? I have maybe my second-best game ever, putting up 102,480. MWS is chagrinned, but he can take it. When MSS puts up his 99,380, he and MWS are assured to move on. JB has a 40,760, my usual score. MWS and MSS go on to finals; JB and I tie for 6th place in the Classics tournament. Had I not tilted away my bonus on Mystic, and everything else been the same, I'd have tied for 5th place instead. Had I not tilted away Mystic, and had I kept Surf Champ going a little longer, I'd have forced a three-way tie for the two finals spots.

Finals are on Surf Champ, then Mystic, then Knockout again. AJH wins the first game and takes second in the other two, giving him first place for the tournament. MWS has a third-place, a first-place, and a third-place finish. This gives him second for the tournament. MSS has two last-place and then a first-place finish, which gives him third place for the tournament. RLM, the last of the competitors, has a second-place, a third-place, and a last-place finish, putting him in fourth place for the Classics tournament.

None of this was consolation to bunny_hugger. But there was still the Women's tournament, as well as the most valuable one, the Main tournament. It's also disappointing to me, but then this was my best finish in a Classics tournament since 2016. Which is odd; I have the mental impression that Classics is my terrain, and the record just says no, it is not. It turns out I just like playing them.

Trivia: In February 1667 the Navy Board reported (to the Duke of York) that it could no longer contract supplies, as they had paid out only £1,315 out of the £150,000 already due. They also owed sailors £ 930,000, of which they had paid £ 140,000. Source: A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game, Jenny Uglow.

Currently Reading: Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919, Mike Wallace.

PS: More of what bunny_hugger and I saw at the Cuicuilco Pyramid together.

Honking great plant of some kind I'm not sure that's growing in the ``moat'' around the pyramid.

Cactuses and other plants growing near the ``moat'' around the pyramid.

And here's a look at the pyramid from the side that lets you see how deep the ``moat'' around it does get.

I still haven't hit the big crash on my humor blog. That's the day I run out of time to write stuff and post stuff. This past week, I had all kinds of content to consume, such as:

• Everything There Is To Say About Eclipses, last week's bit of long-form silliness.
• With The Rise Of Digital-Life Persons, a humorous bit of microfiction that I just yesterday realized the correct punch line for, and I'm torn on whether to go back and edit it to add that or just leave it as is.
• Statistics Saturday: Songs You Didn’t Realize Are Answer Songs, a useful guide.
• What’s Going On In Judge Parker? Who’s Judge Parker’s jailhouse friend? May – August 2019 a recap of a plot-heavy comic strip.
• About the new fridge and a peek into a coming regular Dreamwidth/LiveJournal post here.
• Popeye goes after the Golden Fleece, more 60s King Features animated ... good(?)ness.
• Thinking Again About The Cool Months, my short little goofy wordplay stuff.
• Everything There Is To Say About The History Of Technology Companies, this week's bit of long-form silliness.

And there we go. Now let's enjoy the last of my pictures of La Feria!

Cóndor sculpture peering over me while I look up at the ride in motion.

Cóndor returning to base for us to get in our last ride of the night.

Exiting the park: the sculptures and the giant grasshopper statues, the things we first saw when the taxi took us to the park in the morning.

Looking up at Quimera from outside the park. I love the brilliant roller coaster track against the dark sky.

And one quick final look at my ride wristband.

And with that ... we're done with our amusement park visits from Mexico City. The next day, a Monday, bunny_hugger was envious of my having seen a real, if small, Mexican pyramid and she took the day to see it with me. So let's see what that looked like.

But first ... we cross the highway, using a pedestrian overpass. This was to get somewhere to eat. The highway design struck me as so much like that of expressways in Singapore that I felt a strange homesickness at this.

The shopping mall opposite the highway from our hotel. This might seem a bit Americanized but, don't worry: they had a Carl's Jr too. Yes, we ate at the IHOP, but it was mostly ironically. We managed to eat and all that without anything going too terribly wrong, except for where the server asked my preference for this or that, and I had no idea what either thing was so I tried to just say ``yes'', on the theory that I should at least be agreeable.

Walking down to the pyramid. This is a bit of public park area in the interchanges between highways. It evokes a bird at least.

And the ground beside the large, abstract bird sculpture in this public area. It looks as though it's wild, natural terrain, although it's hard to suppose that they built highways like this around that without disturbing the land.

And here we are! Back at the Cuicuilco Pyramid, looking up the long climb.

And a look at the start of one of the nature trails around the pyramid. I'll try not to repeat too many of the pictures I've already shared.

Trivia: BF Skinner's ``Project Pigeon'' scheme used, ultimately, three pigeons to guide a missile, the hope being that any one pigeon getting off track would be corrected by the other two. Source: Superdove: How the Pigeon Took Manhattan ... And The World, Courtney Humphries.

Currently Reading: Peanuts Dell Archive, Editors Whitney Leopard, Chris Rosa.

PS: How July 2019 Treated My Mathematics Blog, the belated but needed review of my readership there last month.