austin_dern

Friday we saw a movie, in the theater, for the first time since March 2020. Not without hesitation and uncertainty, of course. But we got our bivalent boosters about three weeks ago, and we were going to a matinee, and to a movie we figured would have a small audience even at its peak. So, wearing our N95s except to toss popcorn in our mouths seemed like a tolerable risk.

The movie drawing us out of our protective shells was a documentary. Boblo Boats: A Ferry Tale, which subtitle did not quite shake bunnyhugger away. It was about the steam ferries which used to shuttle people between Detroit and the Boblo Island Amusement Park, from the 1910s through to the park's death in the 90s. And, particularly, about the small group of true believers who think they can salvage the boats and return them to service.

As you'd imagine it's not easy to repair two very large boats that are out of service and their story was largely one of little bits of progress halted by hassles and occasionally catastrophe. Mostly shortages of money or volunteers. Sometimes of space; getting a cheap dock for a 200-foot-long boat that draws 16 feet of water is not easy. And sometimes actual catastrophe, as in a couple years ago when one of the ferries caught fire and all the wood structures burned. (The hull and the engine, metal pieces, survived, allowing the documentary to ask the Ship-of-Theseus question without saying Ship-of-Theseus.) Also they had some part in the movie Transformers: Age of Extinction, not mentioned in the documentary.

This focus --- on the ferries, and particularly the vexed restoration efforts --- and the shortness of the film created some lacunae. I don't remember any mention of the commissioning of the ferry boats in 1910(L), for example, or why two large ships were built rather than, say, six medium-size ones. (I'm guessing saving on staffing.) Nor was any mention made of the boats' unsafe reputation, or the near-riot that was one of Boblo Island's late-80s/early-90s curses. Or of Boblo Island's decay; I think the only mention of the park's decline was an interviewee talking about the last year, where under new management people started coming again because they heard the park had been cleaned up.

Getting some very welcome attention was the Boblo Ferries' role in civil rights history: in June 1945 war worker Sarah Elizabeth Ray was kicked off the company-sponsored trip to the amusement park, and (through the NAACP) sued the transportation company for racial discrimination. The transportation company (registered in Canada) sued Michigan on the grounds that anti-discrimination laws shouldn't apply to them. The Supreme Court was in its brief window of seeking to expand civil rights, and it set a precedent against discrimination. It's credited, not just by the documentary-makers, as a precedent for Brown vs the Board of Education.

THe serious focus ends up being the people behind the project. As you'd imagine they're a quirky set. They're mostly interviewed separately and as the narrative unfolds we hear about people leaving the project abruptly. It's hard not to suppose that someone who would buy a hundred-year-old ferry with the plan to restore it and do a something might be difficult to get along with. We don't learn that directly, though, I imagine because the documentary-makers have to not be slugged (or sued) by any of the participants.

Afterwards bunnyhugger came to understand the real story --- since the boats' story is as yet unresolved, both struggling to be restored --- was of one of the participants, someone who was strangely her. The man --- sharing her brother K's name --- was not just an amusement park, and specifically Boblo Island fan. He had an elaborate HO model set of an idealized Boblo Island, with working toy models packed far beyond what the actual park could ever be. Somewhere in the background --- unexamined in the documentary --- were carousel animals. In his backyard he had the children's Turtle ride from Boblo Island. And ... he had a fursuit. A mascot costume, representing the Boblo Island Bear. I wasn't clear whether this was the original costume or a modern reconstruction; it looked quote good. But anyway the real narrative of the documentary seemed to be more about whether he would return to Boblo Island, to see what remained of the park (not much) or the McMansions built over its corpse.

It was all quite interesting and we're glad we were able to see it. If I seem to be harping on lapses in the documentary it's because I got to thinking about it, and what it did and didn't say. It's a good documentary that has you thinking over what you've learned afterwards.

And now we're coming to the end of the Lake Ontario Loop. We drove from Rochester to, first, Niagara Falls, since we hoped to spend some time on the Ontario side and we weren't committed yet to just what we'd do but you probably have an accurate idea what we did. But compare your idea to the pictures, if you don't remember what I already described a couple months back.

The curious strip mall in which our hotel resided. Bon-Ton's been gone for years and Sears? Who has a Sears anymore? There was also an Arthur Treacher's somewhere in town, but I didn't get a picture of it.

Here's Niagara Falls, Ontario, and particularly Clifton Hill. We only had a couple hours to not get home too riotously late, but the spectacle was grand to see.

Oh, now, what's the significance of a roller coaster on top of a building? Hmmm ...

And here we are looking over the falls. I loved the look of the procession of people walking up the long trail into the sea foam.

More people seen on the United States side of the falls, at the bottom of the elevator.

There's some of those hikers enjoying being wrapped up in dampness.

Trivia: The legate Robert de Courçon, who in 1215 gave the new University of Paris its first statues, proposed establishing a council to eliminate usury from the Christian world. Source: Gold and Spices: The Rise of Commerce in the Middle Ages, Jean Favier.

Currently Reading: Squaring the Circle: The War Between Hobbes and Wallis, Douglas M Jesseph. Have the strangest feeling I've read this already but the last checkout date is before I moved to Lansing so it's probably nothing?

Back in October the Wharton Center at Michigan State University put tickets on sale for the travelling company of Cats. The pandemic was still there, of course, but the ever-rising rate of infection seemed to have petered out. It might be thinkable that three months out we might even be at an end, especially if a booster for the general public were approved and we could wipe the disease out. And so we got tickets for the show. The Thursday show, which bunnyhugger thought likely to have the smallest crowd. Just in case.

As you know, western society decided to go ahead and have as much Covid as possible. By the time of the show, daily infection rates were six times what they had been in October (and, today, they're eight times). Forcing us to decide what to do about our tickets.

The Wharton Center set out its rules. Everyone attending had to show proof of vaccination or a negative Covid-19 test. Everyone in the building had to wear a mask. We were vaccinated, of course, and boosted. We have N95 masks. We ... decided to go, after all.

The first reassuring thing was getting to the parking deck, a structure that could really use a few more direction signs from the road. The deck we entered on wasn't crowded at all, suggesting that the place might not be too busy. And it wasn't. bunnyhugger had bought cheap seats, in the back of the auditorium. The whole upper deck seemed to be maybe one-tenth full. Even the main floor seemed to be only about one-quarter full. And people were generally good about mask discipline. Think of being in a place where people understand that a mask needs to cover your nose. It was like that.

We, sitting in the center of the second-most-distant row of the theater, were looking over the cards they gave us in lieu of programs, as a pack of five or so young women, some wearing cat ears, shuffled in. They came up to right next to me and seemed embarrassed to have the seats next to ours. bunnyhugger and I were both readying, as best we can given our knees, to get up and give them space when they shuffled down a few seats instead. This was all probably inevitable.

I'll talk about the show as an experience tomorrow. The closing thought is the one anyone's forced to deal with after doing anything, to wit, was this a good idea? We seem to have come through without getting infected, and haven't got notice of being exposed if they're still trying to report known exposures. But it has been a good two weeks of thinking, is this ache just an indignity of age or is it the first symptom? Am I tired because there's been no source of simple joy for 22 months now or because those women had the virus? The moral luck seems to have been with us, this time.

And it's really hard not to feel ... look, we've been good. We have sacrificed over and over and over. We couldn't go see the Sparks Brothers in theaters. Couldn't see Encanto in theaters. We'd have to cancel pinball league five days later when the daily infection rate would have risen fifty perfect (and I don't have hopes for the league night set for the 25th). I'm not sure Motor City Furry Con will happen in any tolerably safe form in two months. We deserve something that could be nice and pleasant and fun before we go back into a long dead time.

Almost done with the Potter Park Zoo's Wonderland of lights here. I'll be on to other lighted stuff soon.

A couple more lovely splashes of color against the night sky. I'm not sure what the building in the center is, but it is the one with the light-wrapped fence around that I shared a couple days ago.

Here's that set of incandescent bulbs, on the right, reflected in the ice atop that pond, along with the LED set beside it.

And now that it was less crowded we went into the bird house, where we saw a bunch of creatures including these which are not birds. They also had an empty enclosure that one little mouse had colonized, and which we watched scurry around getting things and bringing them back for a comfortable while. There's no photographing a tiny blur at that distance through the glass, though. Sorry.

Trivia: In 1875 the International Telegraph Convention, in St Petersburg, recommended telegraph rates be set per word, replacing the twenty-word ``telegraphic units''. Source: The Power of News: The History of Reuters, Donald Read.

Currently Reading: Pierre-Simon LaPlace, 1749 - 1827, A Life In Exact Science, Charles Coulson Gillispie with Robert Fox and Ivor Grattan-Guinness.

PS: Some Progress on the Infinitude of Monkeys, featuring a comic strip! Also an excerpt from the book I'm reading.

New Year's Eve brought us of course back to Kalamazoo for MJS's pole barn and his last-tournament-of-the-year. At least that's what we did in the world where right-wing leadership was not determined to make the pandemic as long, miserable, and murderous as possible. In this world --- well, tried to think of what we had done past New Year's Eves. Most of them were pinball events and there was one where bunnyhugger was sick, but we can't account for one. If only either of us had kept some kind of daily journal of our activities. Too bad.

The day did not go without pinball, though. While there haven't been any sanctioned pinball tournaments since mid-March, and won't be until --- who knows? --- Matchplay still runs challenge tournaments. So bunnyhugger challenged me to a best-of-seven series on our two pinball machines, the Tri-Zone which came back to life this year and the Flip Side miniature game bunnyhugger got for Christmas two years ago. I lost the first game, on The Flip Side, because I'm no good at the miniature table and that's that. But Tri-Zone I'm good on. And bunnyhugger even gave me some wins on Flip Side, with one game of the house balls, and another game in which I just squeaked out a win on the tiny bonus.

The main entertainment for the night was one of my childhood's tradition. In the late 70s for reasons unknown WABC in New York City showed Yellow Submarine as their New Year's Eve entertainment. I've had the DVD for a while and we'd never got around to watching it. This was our chance. It was the first time either of us had seen it in years --- decades for me --- so it was almost as good as wholly new. And filled with surprises, such as that King Features Syndicate had a hand in the production. The same King Features Syndicate that gave the world 91,258 disposable Popeye cartoons earlier that decade. Who would have imagined? It's just ... you know, such a wonderful, ridiculous, loopy thing, full of lovely amiable plotlessness interrupted by the occasional disjointed segue into a song. We haven't watched the DVD extra explaining the making-of. It's maybe more interesting to speculate about, like, what forces came together to keep any grownups at King Features or at the studio from saying no, you need to have more than one thing that fits with another thing in this movie. Or was everyone sure that it made no difference what they filmed, people would watch anyway, the way they made Elvis movies? But also, like, how tightly were the background artists or the crowd animators directed? Were they just given a loose theme and told to go wild, or was someone giving them guidance into just how to make it look disorganized? There's no way to learn except by trying even the slightest bit.

After that I started making the late dinner --- bunches of appetizers, miniature egg rolls and mozzarella sticks and the like --- and we watched Dick Clark's Brand Rockin' New Year's Eve, seeing more of it, and listening to more of it, than we would any normal year. We overall maybe ate too much, and bunnyhugger stayed up later than she really wanted, but you know? We only get so many chances for a thing like this.

Next big photo-worthy thing in my camera roll? Black Friday, 2019, when we went to the VFW for its traditional day-after-Thanksgiving show and charity drive. Some pictures, mostly of backglasses:

A 2,120,000 score on Gottlieb's Marble Queen, a game from 1953. One of at least one marble-themed pinball games out there!

Marble Queen's playfield. Note that by 1953 they hadn't figured where to put the flippers exactly. Also up in the center there's a gobble hole, which will end your ball but maybe give you 500,000 points, or a special when lit.

Lucky moment on Sky-Line (Gottlieb, 1965). They had a couple games with some animation in the backglass; when the score rolls over a hundred points (you can see the scoring reel trying) the elevator door slides open to show some hilarity within.

Gottlieb's 1961 Flipper Parade with a slightly gruesome cannonball gimmick in the backglass.

I guess they're all toy soldiers. Playfield for Flipper Parade; the flippers are about where they are on any modern games, but there's no inlanes leading to them. Are we having Zippy the Pinhead yet?

Bally's Dixieland, which is from 1968, don't let the score reels fool you. More fo that Christian Marche artwork.

``Surfers'', a 1968 Bally game that's not sure whether you can say a word as casual and slangy as ``surfers'' without protective quotes around it.

The balloon bonus you get from lighting and collecting some elements on the table and offers a second way, not specifically tied to the score, to earn replays. The weird groove under the flippers there is because they're zipper flippers: the right target will cause them to zoom together to where there's no gap between the two.

Someone at Bally in 1979: ``Flash Gordon license? Why would we pay for a Flash Gordon license?''

Lower playfield of Voltan Escapes Cosmic Doom, and a lower playfield that's pretty near your spoof of late-70s pinball games.

Trivia: John Glenn was the official representative of the astronauts at the funeral for John F Kennedy. Source: First Man: The Life Of Neil A Armstrong, James R Hansen.

Currently Reading: Christmas: A Biography, Judith Flanders.

Saturday we went to a drive-in. The Capri, down in Coldwater, which was showing a double feature: The Nightmare Before Christmas and Hocus Pocus. The first we've seen a bunch of times, the second we'd never seen. A pop-up drive-in in town was also showing Nightmare, but just as a single feature, so we decided to go for the full experience instead. Plus, who knows how much longer the Capri will be open this season? It would be a bit chilly, but going this late in the year has advantages. For one, the bill could start about 7:45, two-plus hours earlier than a midsummer show. That and the shortness of the movies meant we were home by midnight, a novel event.

Nightmare, now ... I guess I haven't seen in the past decade. The second-biggest change in my impression of the movie is that, oh, yeah, for a musical animation it doesn't really have any songs, does it? It has a lot of music but almost all of it is kind of tuneless. (Also we learned that Jack Skellington has different speaking and singing voices; who knew?) Even when something has a tune (``Kidnap the Santy Claws'') do you remember any of the lyrics?

The biggest change is, uh, yeah, the Oogie Boogie Man is not a good look. I guess Halloween Town has to have a villain who's actually scary or else the end of the movie ... comes ten minutes earlier? Did we actually need this plot thread? But he does end up pushing just a couple too many old-racist-stereotype buttons. I'm willing to accept it was accidental, the result of, like, figuring he should evoke the Cab Calloway Betty Boop cartoons and needs a good jazzy/boogie-woogie soundscape and such. But mixing that together without mindfulness, especially with making his gimmick being crooked gambling work, just stumbles over the line in a way that I'd like to think we wouldn't do now, or wouldn't do if there were a non-white person in the writing room. I feel like, for me, this doesn't spoil the movie yet. But it does mean what should be an exciting climax is instead awkward and embarrassing and, you know, did we really need this to finish Jack Skellington's story?

So while he's the centerpiece of Halloween, Jack Skellington is not the Mayor of Halloween Town. So, who's the mayor of Christmas Town? Santa's obviously the center character there but is he the mayor? Is Father Christmas? Someone else? Also, that rabbit that Lock, Shock, and Barrel abduct by mistake: the Easter Bunny, or just a red rabbit who happened to be in Easter Town? Also, did they actually return him? (I vote they returned him, on the grounds that if they didn't, we'd see a follow-up joke about that.)

And hey, imagine a version of the story where Sally ever talks about something that isn't one of the two guys in her life. Also, like, did Sally and Jack know each other before the movie started? I had had the impression they didn't, but watching the movie again I'm not sure.

Really, though, what does the story gain by having the Oogie Boogie Man in it?

On my mathematics blog I'm Using my A to Z Archives: Riemann Sum, which is different from the Riemann Sphere mentioned last week. Promise.

So we're not done with Lakemont Park yet, for all that there's only a few things there.

Gosh, I didn't remember the loading station being this curved. Best of like four attempts at taking a panoramic shot here.

Walking down the exit ramp and getting a look at the lift hill, and the second turnaround where it goes out and back again.

Looking back at the main turnaround and a glimpse of the go-kart track that wasn't being used.

Oh well that's nice, we're welcome to things. I believe that off to the right was where the Toboggan, the tiny carnival-grade roller coaster they had last time, used to be.

The park has got a couple miniature golf courses and we were obviously drawn to this one.

... OK, whose great idea was playing miniature golf? The course and its props were new that year, though.

Most of the holes were themed to some mid-Pennsylvania wildlife, or plant life, and offered some facts that might even be true. Not sure what they think makes an Eastern Raccoon, though.

Ah, there's the Eastern Raccoon, serving as obstacle.

Oh, for crying out loud ... gang, can we spread out a little?

Some Eastern Grey squirrel propaganda here.

And here's the Bunny Golf hole that does not quite give the course its name.

That's ... a lot of bunnies, all in a curved file like that.

Trivia: From 1954 to the end of its independent existence the Pennsylvania Rail Road paid no federal income tax, and had enough annual tax-loss carry-forwards to shelter its subsidiaries from income tax also. Source: The Wreck of the Penn Central: The Real Story Behind The Largest Bankruptcy In American History, Joseph R Daughen, Peter Binzen.

Currently Reading: Casper the Friendly Ghost Classics 1, Editor Mike Wolfe.

We went to another drive-in! And one we haven't been to before, on US 23 near Flint. This brought us very close to our friend MWS's house, but he wasn't available so we couldn't sit in adjacent cars or anything. Our goal: watching Bill and Ted Face The Music. The gauntlet to get there: they showed it after the R-rated and quite violent Unhinged, because apparently every other movie they could possibly have paired it with was unavailable? Like, I could get deciding not to pair it with either of the first two Bill and Ted movies. But, like, why not Wayne's World, then? Or Airheads? Harold and Kumar? Any other genial-dopey-pair movie?

Also on the bill: light rain that turned into steady rain with a massive lightning storm, which was just lightly immersive as the first scenes in Unhinged took place at night in the rain, and the climactic scenes in Face The Music included a lot of alarming things in the sky.

I'll have more thoughts on Face The Music later. I want to vent some about Unhinged, which is coming to a bad-movies podcast near you. It avoids being offensive by virtue of being too dumb to make the audience think we should take it seriously. But, like, the opening credits is this long spiel explaining the phenomenon of ``road rage'', like this is 1992 and they're a special report for your Fear At Five local newscast. And even tosses in how with the deep cutbacks to police departments and thousands of police layoffs there's no way of handling increasing ``road rage''. So it starts off mis-reading the room so fully that you'd think it was working for the Biden-Harris campaign.

Anyway this may be my New Jersey upbringing showing, but you have an absolute and unqualified right to give the finger to anybody who's screwing up traffic, and that person has to grimace and accept, yeah, that they deserved it.

Also an observation I made during the film: cars don't catch on fire and explode at the end of every accident the way they used to in the 70s and 80s anymore. Now they just go free-wheeling end-over-end while parts fly off. It's neat to recognize what stunt effects are going to date this era of film and to wonder what their replacement will be.

Oh also after both movies, I learned this drive-in has some demon lurking in the men's room. One of the sinks had a plastic bag duct-taped over it, and the thing was billowed out full as I started washing. And then the sink breathed. Like, the air inside evacuated and the bag fell down over the sink handle. A couple seconds later it billowed out again to full. And a couple seconds after that, the bag deflated again. So I don't know what extradimensional horror is lurking under there and breathing in the men's room sink at the US 23 Drive-In in Flint but I'm not stupid enough to stick around to find out, thank you. I warned bunnyhugger about this but did not take her over to see it because I do not want our faces ripped off by some tentacled hell-beast THANK YOU. We drove home at 120 mph.

Back to fun stuff. Darien Lake, for example, in the June of 2019.

Bees! There's some wonderful bushes lining the queue to Viper and we were just admiring these when we overheard someone complain that the park put in all these plants that attracted bees. bunnyhugger and I looked aghast at each other after hearing this.

And here's Viper, lift hill on the left and its big loop to the right, with a train just past the brake point.

Viper's station is pretty airy, although the paint seems to be a bit old.

Viper arriving at the station. I think we got to skip ahead in line when they asked if there were any two-rider groups waiting.

Viper's lift hill seen from the exit, which does wander through some surprisingly empty park space.

Big sign for Grizzly Run, which we thought was the name for an area of the park. No; that's just the log flume's name. The area?

The area's called Rowdy's Ridge, and I like these ride safety signs for giving you both the area and the ride name. Also a pretty good view of the ride logo.

Darien Lake amusement park is adjacent to, and somewhat grown together with, the Darien Lake Performing Arts Center. Here's the gate that separates the two. There's also a campground that abuts both.

Moose! Moose! Moose on the loose! A surprisingly fun ride here. The mount goes along the track, rocking up and down, while a prerecorded audio tells you about the things you're passing, like this ``campground'', and tells corny jokes. The ride op talked about it as the best ride in the park and it is, certainly, the one we remember most fondly. We rode one like it, but serious and medieval-knight-themed, at Festyland in France and it's surprising that the ride doesn't have more installations that we can see.

Props outside Moose On The Loose. It's the kind of ride where they talk about the chow.

Moose On The Loose's logo and a pretty good description of what you get from the ride.

Loading station. The ride op insists on you putting your thumbs to your temples to make moose antlers before setting off. And was happy talking to us about other parks; bunnyhugger had her Six Flags over Texas t-shirt on so the ride op knew exactly what sort of people we were.

Trivia: The Soviet Union went through seven military Chiefs-of-Operations between June and December 1942. Source: Why The Allies Won, Richard Overy.

Currently Reading: Computers In Spaceflight: The NASA Experience, James E Tomayko. NASA Contractor Report 182505.

$10.60 more in returned bottles and cans, including the lone glass bottle that Meijer's was willing to take. (They don't have to accept brands they don't sell and a couple of these I think we got from the farmer's market. The Moxie bottle I tink we got from Cracker Barrel.) And this, amazingly, clears out our stockpile of cans and bottles that were building up since the quarantine started. We had altogether a total of $53.20 in returns, allowing that we were still using cans and bottles after the first load went back, and stuff like that woman who gave me some La Croix cans.

We went to another movie at a drive-in theater. This one, a weird one. The theater was weird I mean. It's not a traditional drive-in so much as it is a couple screens set up in the parking lot of the USA Hockey Arena, which has an Olympic-size and an NHL-size arena and which has some slow times in the middle of summer. So they set up a couple temporary screens, mark off spaces in the parking lots, and invite people to come for the show. We're thinking to try taking in pictures at all the drive-ins around an hour from us --- there's three of them --- and since this one closes for the season earlier than the rest, this was a good chance for us.

It's, well, a professional sports arena, although one damaged by the pandemic. It still has the schedule posted for this spring's intended ... uh ... I don't know. It was some impressive-looking slate of a lot of games over the course of a couple weeks. The corridor leading to the bathrooms were divided by those extendable fabric ropes and signs saying which side to go on. Someone sitting outside the restaurant stopped us, as we approached, to ask if we were looking for the restaurant or for the bathrooms and while they didn't reveal things we hadn't already worked out, it was a friendly gesture.

The movie --- they only showed one, and Yelp is not happy they're not a double-feature theater this year --- was E.T.. I don't remember when I saw it last, and a movie you've gone that long without seeing can harbor surprises. I'm glad to say most of the surprises were pleasant. Like, the movie didn't go get a bunch of particularly sexist or racist or homophobic jokes, even though it's about a bunch of kids in the 80s. There's a lot of nice, honestly sweet moments among the siblings. A great deal of the movie's more arbitrary moments are set up, or at least foreshadowed; you can ask why it was E.T. came back to life, but then earlier, Mom was reading the bit in Peter Pan where you have to will Tinkerbell back to life. It doesn't explain things any more, but it does remind you, you can accept this stuff.

Also, as happens surprisingly often with these beloved 80s movies, the ``villains'' really aren't wrong. The alien should be observed, and the whole family should be quarantined until they know they haven't picked up Space Flu. When E.T. does die, one of the medics rips off his mask and starts giving mouth-to-mouth. To an alien. This is daft, but it's certainly heroic.

And, boy, y'know, you forget the stolen-drug plot that's in every 80s comedy. (It's heroin, in liquefied form, being smuggled through the beer cans that E.T. drinks. It's why his telepathic link with Elliott gets so supercharged but he also crashes hard, coming to his death, later on. Mom is so busy controlling her freak-out about this that she can't even process that Elliott started a frog-liberating riot in school. This is what Dad is doing in ``Mexico''. The feds tenting the house gets her off the hook since then the smuggling operation around them on both ends freaks out, assumes Mom and Dad are compromised, and cuts them loose.) Amazing stuff. Seriously though, Mom is surprisingly chill about what, to the best of her knowledge, is Elliott drinking enough beer to be drunk in school.

In the story comics. Want to know What's Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? Why is The Phantom destined for an unmarked grave? May - July 2020 gets its recap here.

So this is not technically Anthrohio 2019 stuff. But after the con, we went to the nearby Olentangy Caves, a tourist trap we keep thinking every year we should visit, and here, we finally did. ... After one quick side errand, anyway.

Oh, yeah, first, a sign in the hotel elevator that could really use a bit more punctuation.

We went off to a nearby office park to get a letterbox, successfully, and while we were busy with that this little cottontail came out on some business. This even though it was the middle of the day.

Wild rabbit sits up for a bit of grooming. It would also flop, rolling in the dirt, something we never expected to see and which caused us to realize that perhaps flopping is something rabbits do to give themselves dirt baths.

I'm not positive but I think I got a picture of the wild rabbit's tongue here? Anyway we spent a good ten minutes watching the rabbit grooming and dirt-bathing.

Right, so, to the tourist site. The Olentangy Indian Caverns are limestone caves used by Wyandotte Indians all the way into the early 19th century. In the 20th century white folks realized it could be a roadside attraction and developed it that way.

Playground under construction. I'm supposing this will be a train playset once it's done.

They have a petting zoo. We didn't go in, but we were allowed to be glared at by this chicken.

And there were a healthy bunch of chickens strolling around.

``Am I being mocked? I feel like I'm being mocked,'' worried the chicken.

Go on. Take a wild guess what animals are kept inside the Hare Salon or the Lucky Foot Tavern. We could see the rabbits inside, but there was no getting a useful photograph in there.

M ... Mission ... accomplished?

Trivia: A kilogram of human teeth contain about 130 grams of phosphorous. Source: The 13th Element: The Sordid Tale of Murder, Fire, and Phosphorous, John Emsley.

Currently Reading: Coming Home: Reentry and Recovery from Space, Roger D Launius, Dennis R Jenkins.

We have been much better this year about having Movie Night, normally Wednesdays. Mostly they've been pretty good films, or at least delightful: Little Fugitive, This Is Spinal Tap, Flash Gordon, Demolition Man. Even the ones that aren't good are at least delightful. This week, we watched one that we knew was going to be bad: Pickup Summer, or to the use the name that made bunnyhugger aware the movie existed, Pinball Summer.

It is a ``teen'' sex comedy, made in 1979 and released in either 1980 or 1981 depending on what source you trust. Obviously, not a major release, although basically the whole crew also made My Bloody Valentine which I understand is a well-regarded slasher movie. The movie is split between being pleasantly stupid and being offensive. The offensive stuff is, like you figure, the treatment of women, who mostly get to be the things that the player-characters fight over. And, occasionally, who get to go topless. Less than you'd think; the DVD has the trailer and it sure seems like that shows all the breasts you get.

When the movie is content to just be about Very Old high schoolers doing summertime nonsense it's stupid but generally watchable. Its greatest problem is that the leads are awful, awful people. I realize this is endemic to the teen sex comedy genre (and, for that matter, 70s films), and that they were probably aiming for ``our protagonists are scamps, always pulling shenanigans''. Thing is, they forgot to set up that the victims of these pranks do anything to start it. Like, there's a runner where they keep harassing the Rich Kid. I understand the genre convention here, the Rich Kid is an annoying snob who deserves to be taken down a peg. But all we actually see Rich Kid do is boast that his daddy bought him a second Cadillac, and ask if the protagonists had spent all their quarters at the arcade. Fair start, but that doesn't put moral balance on recording him making out with his girlfriend and then broadcasting that to the cars at the drive-in theater.

Also, no, the protagonists did not spend all their quarters at the arcade. While the movie was originally called Pinball Summer, and what plot there is circles around a pinball tournament at Pete's Arcade [1], we get like one scene of the protagonists playing pinball before the movie's climax. And that at the diner, not the arcade. Pete gets a reasonable-looking trophy for the tournament. The head of the local biker gang steals it. Our heroes steal it back and hide it inside the diner pinball machine. Pete's assistant Whimpy [sic] finds the trophy and tries to use it to buy his way into the gang. Pete finds the trophy and keeps it secure the rest of the movie. That thread takes about half the run-time and maybe ten percent of the volume of the film.

[1] This was delightful and distracting since the center of Lansing and Ann Arbor pinball is Pinball Pete's arcade.

Also, weirdly, the biker gang is somehow the most likable set of characters in the movie. I mean, they aren't good or pleasant people, but there's never the hint that they're just talking to a woman so she'll let her defenses down and they can make out. This is a pathetic standard to meet, but, circa 1980 teen sex comedy. You take what vague semblance of decent behavior you can get.

So little of the movie is pinball that we had to wonder if they tried to rejigger the film as video games started cleaning pinball's clock. But then why not replace the big tournament at the end with an arcade game tournament? It wouldn't make any difference to the plot and barely any difference to Whimpy's plan to rig the tournament. The movie has some traces that look like it suffered emergency plot surgery. There's an early scene where the mayor's wife takes umbrage at the arcade and those hoodlums hanging around it; that's never followed up on. And then there's Arthur ...

So, what pinball there is, is surprisingly authentic. The games at Pete's Arcade and at the diner are ones that would really be on location circa 1979. More, they use the actual sounds of games, rather than generic bells and buzzers. I know the tune played by a Bobby Orr's Power Play starting up, and that's what it played when the game started up. And when they show actual pinball play, in the big tournament, it's legitimate play, and pretty good too. There's even a strategically correct bit of cradling, bringing the ball to rest on a flipper and waiting to aim your shot. This was a surprise since we had understood cradling to be a little-used technique back in the day. You do not expect a movie this stupid to serve as accidental documentary. The credits list a pinball advisor, Jill Golick. The name is not in the International Flipper Pinball Database's records, but that just tells us she(?) hasn't played in competition in, like, the last fifteen years. Still, they got a pinball advisor who apparently knew the business.

There's two exceptions to this real-pinball stuff. One is in the climax; the big tournament is on a fake game called Pinball Summer, with art showing off scenes from the movie. This ought to read as a sort of joyful, lightly reality-breaking moment of transcendence for the film, although to reach that point the movie would have needed something it could call back to. Right up front, though, in the diner to start is a fascinating game given the backglass of Arthur: The World's First Talking Pinball machine. The game makes some call-outs, as we'd say today, telling the player they have to shoot the ball, or scolding the player for nudging hard enough to earn a tilt warning. This is astounding; it's something just barely within the realm of possibility for 1979 (Gorgar, released that year, was able to say something like six words, though they remixed into several tolerable sentences.) A game talking back to the player is always a great idea, and it would a decade later be done to perfection in FunHouse, with Rudy.

It's weird to have the game established so clearly up front, and with what would be a pretty impressive gimmick for the moment. It reappears at the end, as they're all chasing the bikers for the trophy. For some reason some of the gang is driving a flatbed truck with Arthur, set up and standing on truck bed, with the newly-crowned Miss Pinball beauty pageant winner (did I mention there was a beauty pageant, and the trophy winner got a date with her?) sitting across the table, which thrusts back and forth in the truck bed for some reason. It feels like something that was meant to be part of the movie and then got incompletely cut out.

So, with this movie we finally have the film we'd choose for The Flophouse podcast, if we ever won a name-the-movie contest for it. Also, to use their rating system, we would call this a good-bad movie, albeit with reservations. The reservations are it's got a lot of really bad treatment of women. When it's not doing that, though, it's mostly just dumb, with occasional bits where something fun happens. There's even a couple of jokes that actually land, such as the lead biker sputtering after one of the protagonists drove his motorcycle into the lake, ``You drowned my bike! ... It doesn't even know how to swim!'' So, it's a movie on that level. Glad we watched, kind of sorry not to have live-tweeted it.

Trivia: In 1982 the Hilton Hotel in Rye Town, New York, opened Bagatelle Place, a formal arcade with 33 video games, a cappucino bar, and a dress code. Source: The Ultimate History of Video Games, Steven L Kent. (Rye Town is near the Rye that has Playland Park but is a different municipality.)

Currently Reading: Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, January/February 2018, Editor Sheila Williams.

PS: Reading the Comics, April 7, 2020: April 7, 2020 Edition (Mostly) as I just work out a handful of comic strips.

PPS: So the next thing we went to was the Calhoun County Fair. bunnyhugger's mother, still feeling the pain of her back, did not go, but her father did. I believe we brought home an elephant ear for her.

Watching the pigs walk along their gated pathway from the show floor to the barns.

bunnyhugger making friends with one of the pigs!

``Wait ... you're leaving?!''

Cows set up in some of the washing stations behind the barns.

Last week bunny_hugger had Friday off, so that Thursday was free to do recreational things. We've tried in off-pinball-league weeks to do Movie Night on Tuesdays, watching a DVD or something off the DVR. But the March Hare Madness tournament occupied that time. We might have watched something Thursday but, as I'd said, ``we can't have movie night Thursday, we're going to a movie.''

We went to the Sun Theatre, in Williamston, again. It looked less bedraggled than it had last month, when a lot of seats were roped off for roof leaks. The ceiling wasn't repaired, but there were fewer seats roped off. And there was a better crowd. Possibly Monday night, as we'd seen our last visit there, is just a really dead night.

Our movie: Wonder Park. We were kind of interested in this mostly because it promised to be a computer-animated cartoon about an amusement park. And we had no expectations beyond that, other than that maybe it won't be annoyingly dumb a movie.

And it was ... a better movie than we expected. The premise is this girl discovers the amusement park she and her mother had dreamed up actually exists, and is in danger of being destroyed, and she teams up with the lovable animal mascots to restore the park. That's all that we expected. What we didn't expect was that it would be pretty directly about grief, and fear, and sadness and despair. The girl's mother is off for ``treatment'' for her ``condition'' and the plot beats all make it sound like the mother died and the girl is trying to cope. I'd assumed the mother had died, off-screen, and was startled to hear a reference to her still being alive. The thing threatening the park is this Darkness, that gets fed pieces of the park which are never seen again.

There's a lot to like about the movie, and we liked it better than apparently every critic ever did. But we're easy touches for amusement park movies, and an amusement park movie with animal characters, that's pretty much aimed right at us. Particularly the first discovered rides, like a roller coaster with track overgrown in brush, are beautiful to see.

Is it good? Better than we expected, but we were expecting ``this will be a movie with a fantasy amusement park in it''. But there's just little bits that don't quite hang together right. Like, there's a big action scene at the start where the girl's made a roller coaster out of her house and some of the neighbors' fences and stuff like that. And, in order to give the start of the movie a big action scene, the roller coaster mostly works. That's fun enough. It establishes the fantastic premise that this is a girl with the patience and motor control to build complicated contraptions, which she'll need for later in the movie. And it gives a big dramatic exciting action scene for early in the film. But if you start out with a roller coaster car made of a kids' wheeled wagon, propelled by fire extinguisher jets, that works in the slightest, you're setting the realism level at pretty absurd. It makes the magical fantasy stuff later on less extreme. The girl's already been flying around her neighborhood; what's more about her flying around an imaginary neighborhood?

All right, maybe that's a necessary concession to make the movie start exciting. But there's a bunch of little unnecessary sloppy parts. For example, the movie is called Wonder Park, while the amusement park inside it is named Wonderland. Why the discrepancy? There are some real amusement parks named Wonderland --- the film's studio, Paramount, used to own one --- so maybe they felt some need to avoid that trademark. But then why not just name it Wonder Land inside the movie too? It feels like a script error nobody noticed until the recording sessions were over. There's, for another example, this bit where Greta, the wild boar, discovers that she's the glue that keeps the band of mascots together. Great, but ... it's not really something that was shown to be in doubt. They left in the resolution of a subplot they forgot to include. (There's some talk about how the gang all need the chimpanzee who's the core mascot, but I don't think it makes the connection to Greta having any particular needs.) And, like, another unforced error: at the end of the story the park is restored and everybody's happy, and the girl ... leaves. Yes, human characters always have to leave the fairyland to return to boring old reality; that's the way they work. But ... she doesn't want to even spend a couple hours going around the real physical manifestation of this supernatural amusement park that came from her and her mother's imaginations? Is that plausible? Why not a montage of her riding any of the things that the first scenes of the movie show her designing?

The movie has the production-trivia that its director was fired after an investigation into his ``inappropriate and unwanted conduct'' towards people on staff. Nobody ended up credited as the director, ultimately, so we can maybe excuse glitches on this. Maybe ultimately there wasn't anyone with a strong enough vision and authority to polish out the small problems.

But mostly I'm glad we saw it. The movie was more interesting than we expected or than it needed to be. It's got a bunch of characters fun to see. Boomer the Bear could only have been more precisely aimed at bunny_hugger if he were acted by one of the Classic Doctor Whos, and it turns out in the United Kingdom version of the film he was voiced by Tom Baker. There's a fantasy sequence where the girl imagines her father struggling to live without him or her mother around; it's short, but fantastic, funny enough to watch on its own. It's only disappointing in that you can see where the movie might have been better.

Trivia: On the 11th of April, 1564, England and France signed the Treaty of Troyes, England ceding Calais to France for what has been, to date, the final time. Source: The Life Of Elizabeth I, Alison Weir.

Currently Reading: Paris Reborn: Napoleon III, Baron Haussmann, and the Quest to Build a Modern City, Stephanie Kirkland.

PS: And here's some more parade!

Another traditional float, this one of the Turner-Dodge House. It's one of the historic fine homes of Lansing and we might have had our wedding there except we'd have had to do too much event planning. The English Inn is much easier as bunny_hugger was able to just go to them and say, ``I would like to buy a one (1) wedding please'' and that was that.

Another traditional and extremely popular float, the CATA-pillar. One of the bendy buses, being all flirtatious.

Hurry up! The camera was low on battery, so this friend of the camera guy had to take the very short commercial break between the end of parade and the start of the community sing to swap things out. WILL HE MAKE IT?

We haven't just been seeing movies in the theaters, by the way. With the new Blu-Ray set up we're finally trying to make good on our idea of having somewhat regular movie nights. So far we're ... well, two nights in, but that's like twice as good as we managed in 2018. We're doing these on Tuesday nights when we don't have pinball league, making popcorn, turning off the lights, and putting away the computers so we just watch a movie. So far we've been watching things we had on Blu-Ray or DVD. My first pick was Watership Down, mentioned in these pages a bit ago, in reporting on getting the thing set up.

bunny_hugger's first pick was a DVD she'd gotten while in Ann Arbor. She'd been to Ann Arbor for a medical appointment, and made a side trip to Encore Records, which had an alarming quote in the newspaper about the new landlord figuring there's money to be made in rebuilding and renovating and raising the rent. The spot has been a record store for decades (it was formerly Liberty Records) and goodness knows how long it'll be before the place turns into a twee restaurant.

But her pick. It was Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, part of her project to fill me in on the movies of the 80s that she can't believe I never saw. I can't quite believe I never saw it either. Or at least not more than pieces here and there. My sister (over Twitter) said she couldn't believe it either since it was on our TV often enough. Fair point, but I spent a lot of my teenage years trying to avoid my siblings, something I expected my sister to understand. She said she spent that decade wanting to interact with her siblings in some way that didn't involve hitting. I don't understand how that could even be.

I'm glad to say, and I suspect bunny_hugger is relieved to say, that I really liked the movie. I had been worried I'd sit there watching a movie that's just nothing without the nostalgic charge. It has that absurdist, surreal humor that I do get into. It's likely that had I seen it in the 80s like everybody else my age I'd have loved the movie, possibly too much. Still I'm sorry to have waited so long to get around to it.

This coming Tuesday is a league night, so we won't have time to see anything. It's my movie pick the week after that. I've thought of what to watch.

Trivia: By 1890 there were still no railways connecting to any seaport from Johannesburg or Praetoria in what is now South Africa. Source: Fuelling the Empire: South Africa's Gold and the Road to War, John J Stephens.

Currently Reading: Gemini Flies: Unmanned Flights and the First Manned Mission, David J Shayler.

PS: Here's some more pictures from Marvin's that October 2017 visit.

Yes, definitely the back corner of Marvin's, including one of those coin-pusher machines that somehow doesn't get busted for being gambling and aimed at kids. There's also a simulated jump-rope game, but really, the magician posters are the fun part of all this.

From the back corner and looking off in the direction of the Barnum Cardiff Giant, which is here hidden behind the Monopoly coin-pusher gambling machine. There's also that cute sign for ``To The Egress'', which points in no such direction here. It's pointing more towards the women's bathroom.

There's a couple of inspirational quotes hung up here. Also some kind of panels hug around a cylinder that looks for all the world like it should be a space-history exhibit of, like, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Program, but isn't. On the far right is a movie poster for Disney's Dinosaur, an animated movie I'm sure you all remember as ``why they decided it was better to have Pixar make animated movies instead''.

In the evening of Boxing Day we took out a DVD. We'd grown interested in the movie Toys because of its Trevor Horn-connected soundtrack, and I picked up the DVD from the Best Buy $5 bin. Since we figured it as a Christmas movie (I guess the opening action is set at Christmas, although the timeline is a little vague) we were saving it to Christmastime to actually watch. This was our first really good chance to see what is by legend a terrible movie.

It is indeed bad. It is a big, sloppy mess, marked by some compelling set design and camera angles. There are a couple good scenes, and a couple moments where the movie feels like it's getting at something clever or insightful, so that I understand why the movie has avid defenders who insist it's a misunderstood work of genius. I can make out the movie they think is there, but, good heavens is it not there. bunny_hugger and I ended up live-tweeting our experience (``She sleeps in a duck?'') and I needed time to decompress after watching this, the same way watching a really awful Mystery Science Theater 3000 movie --- however good the riffing is --- requires time to recover from.

Why the movie, about a mad general who figures to turn the toy company into a drone-warfare center, goes wrong is hard to pin down, but I'll blame Robin Williams, since he's the guy we seem to be set up to think is the hero. You can play the protagonist in this setup one of two ways, as either an agent of such pure whimsy that dealing with him is like dealing with the fae folk; or the protagonist can be functionally near-identical to the antagonist and just have happened to turn his mania to producing the world's greatest rubber vomit. (Thinking it over, this sounds like he has to be either Doctor Who in the pixie incarnations or in the jerkface incarnation.)

Williams is mostly in fae-folk mode, but he dips into earthy-base mode often and irregularly, spoiling his character. It makes him creepy, and not in the way Gene Wilder's Willie Wonka carried a taste of danger with him; he gets sleazy. So besides a theme that's somehow both obvious and muddled (toys are good, war is bad, but in the climax, toys are used to fend off the war materials, yielding an obscenely protracted scene of cute dolls being mutilated) there's a central character who's tiresome or making jokes like identifying a doll as ``Mahatma Gumby''.

But I understand people who think there's a great movie lurking around here. There are some good scenes, like one in which Williams's character and other toy-factory workers study minutely the ways to improve some rubber vomit while the walls close in on them (as the war department needs more space), or strange interludes that look like tangible nightmares, like a golf-cart ride down an undulating hallway corridor being halted at a toy duck crossing. It gives off a lot of signals of a movie that means something, even if I can't make myself buy that it does.

And I will admit that a movie that digs into your brain so thoroughly isn't without some merit, but, it digs into your brain to sit on it and make you beg for mercy.

Trivia: United States customs agents seized seven thousand pounds of marijuana in 1964. By 1968 seizures grew to 65,000 pounds. Source: Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America, Peter Andreas.

Currently Reading: A History of Modern Japan, Richard Storry.

PS: Reading the Comics, January 6, 2015: First of the Year Edition, some comics, for the first mathematics comics post of the calendar year and the fifth mathematics post since the last roundup around here.