austin_dern

So here's some more of the Silverball Museum, as seen in not-quite-mid-January 2020.

Looking down the Silverball Museum's row of 90s Williams Games, a murderer's row of all-time great games.

Their FunHouse, and a note celebrating Rudy's 30th anniversary as a pinball icon.

The FunHouse high scores. bunnyhugger has beaten those scores in simulation. I've beaten some of those scores in simulation, but not all. And ... those under-13 scores, on the FunHouse at Stella's in Grand Rapids.

A teacup which I have assumed is from an old amusement park ride. I assume from Asbury Park's Palace Amusements, but they don't have it signed that I remember.

A Superstar Slugger, one of the pinball-like baseball simulator games out there.

The 90s Williams row, along with two more of the signs for anniversary games.

One of the museum's oldest games, the 1962 Friendship 7.

And an even older game, the lovely woodrail Rocket. Like many games of the era you can get replays from scores or from collecting rockets, essentially, as achievements.

The playfield for Friendship 7, which fits the highly symmetric style of that era of game.

And here's their oldest game --- and an anniversary game --- the 1950 Knock Out. This is nothing like the Knock Out that's one of the pillars of my Fremont games.

The backglass for the 1950 Knock Out, which shows off all sorts of mayhem outside the ring. Notice the credits counter in the cigarette girl's box; it's almost but not quite aligned to fit.

Knock Out's playfield. Like many old-fashioned pinball games the goal is to get a complete set of targets 1 through 5, and repeat. Note that the flippers are crazy far apart, but there's a metal wedge that can pop up and make the ball impossible to lose except by your own bad play. I'm curious when that sort of drain blocker element will return to pinball.

Trivia: In 1940 the Soviet Union harvested 95.6 million tons of grain. In 1942 it harvested 26.7 million. Source: The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food, Lizzie Collingham.

Currently Reading: Cracking the Cube: Going Slow to Go Fast and Other Unexpected Turns in the World of Competitive Rubik's Cube Solving, Ian Scheffler. It's fascinated me how much the competitive-cube-solving community seems like a parallel-universe version of the competitive-pinball community. Rubik gets quoted a bit about the differences of various sports and how cubing is one that's well-balanced between physical requirements and mental requirements (picking what moves to do, executing them quickly and precisely). Pinball's like that too; so much of the game is mental, knowing what to do next and how to recover if something goes awry, but also that you need reflexes and at least some nudging game. That so much of cubing also involves not moving faster than you know what you're doing is also similar. So I wonder how much of these parallels draw from being very loosely similar demands on mind and body.

My mathematics blog continues on very low-power mode, although I was hoping to get things back up to speed. Anyway here's the last couple weeks' business:

• A Quick Yahtzee Puzzle
• What do the less-than and greater-than symbols mean?
• How January 2021 Treated My Mathematics Blog so yeah, all my original writing there for the first quarter of the month has been one post about what I wrote up the month before.

So let me wrap up here the trip to Freehold Raceway Mall and then to the restaurant and ice cream place I went for a meal. This because the ice cream place was one of many happy childhood memories and I didn't know when I'd be back to it, and also it was like 60 degrees which, for mid-January, is pretty good.

And here's a couple of the horses and the stairs up to the second tier of the Freehold Raceway Mall carousel.

Looking from behind the carousel out at the food court. Obscured by the carousel is a little corner spot that I still think of as an arcade because for, like, a year after the mall opened in 1990 it had a Simpsons pinball machine that was in awful shape (already) for a not-that-impressive game but that I'd play because when I was home from college it was nearby.

Looking down the second floor of the mall to what used to be just a big common area where they could have Santa visit or whatnot and is now mostly a Starbucks.

Figured that's the last time I'll ever see that sign.

Spotted in the mall's Disney Store. So this is how Jumba created him! You wouldn't think the mall would sell illegal cast-moulding kits like this.

The Freehold Raceway Mall Sears's interior entrance. I couldn't resist the ``Everything Must Go!'' right next to ``where it begins''.

Route 34, outside Jersey Freeze. The place used to be on the rim of the Freehold Traffic Circle, which was torn out in the late 80s just before traffic planners started getting into traffic circles again. So the ice cream shop and restaurant is a fair bit from the main road, US Route 9, but it seemed to be holding on all right.

The front of the Jersey Freeze ice cream parlor. I know those aren't the same benches and tables it had when I was a kid but it's got the same feel.

From a different angle you can see the logo. I did get a small ice cream and eat it outside and that tells you how ridiculously warm it was. I was amazed they were open at all in January but this was the weekend for it.

Ice cream cone atop the restaurant's weathervane.

Trivia: Cabin depressurization for Apollo 14's second moonwalk began about 27 minutes ahead of the prelaunch flight plan. Source: Apollo By The Numbers: A Statistical Reference, Richard W Orloff. NASA SP-4029.

Currently Reading: Cracking the Cube: Going Slow to Go Fast and Other Unexpected Turns in the World of Competitive Rubik's Cube Solving, Ian Scheffler.

If things were right we'd probably have spent today arguing about whether to drive to Marvin's. First Friday of the month and all. But also a pretty substantial snowstorm. There's almost no chance bunnyhugger would have driven up to campus for the department meeting, and it would be hard to argue that it was safer to drive at night, at least as long, to somewhere as dense and trafficky as Marvin's, even if it would be almost all on the Interstate and the snow would have mostly stopped before we'd set out. But it probably would have been the last or next-to-last meeting of the season, and making it to A Division might well depend on it. And they'd probably be having the launch party for Stern's newest pinball machine, Led Zeppelin For Some Reason. I bet we'd have gone, telling ourselves that we would turn back the moment the roads looked too nasty for us. Might even have taken bunnyhugger's car, with the snow tires, as much as I'm usually the driver to pinball events.

If things were right.

So after flying home from Charleston, I had a full day at home and then ... flew back out again, this time to New Jersey for work. Since this was a proper work trip there's not a lot of photographs because, like, there's only so much interesting stuff to say about a Wawa, but I was able to get to some things worth photographing when not at work. For a rare change, these are all iPod photographs. I guess I wasn't thinking that I might want a real camera and, of course, the camera you have is better than none at all. But, sorry they're only better than none at all.

Oh, yeah, one thing from our flight back from Charleston, though. We noticed this water bottle put down for safekeeping on the outside of the jetway where you can't get it without the ladder. Don't know what's going on there.

A look at our outdoor Christmas lights, nicely covered by the snow. My leaving right away meant it'd be bunnyhugger's task to take them down, as we didn't leave the up through Candlemas for 2020.

The lights as they look without a flash photograph.

On to New Jersey! I couldn't go back without at least stopping in at The Book Garden. It's a fine used book store even if it does break the industry standard by having aisles between the shelves wide enough, and kept free enough of clutter, that the place is accessible to people with mobility issues.

The far back wall of the Book Garden, which is a warehouse-size building in New Egypt, New Jersey.

Looking from about halfway back, towards the front; have to appreciate that rack of miscellaneous magazines. The books bagged and hung on the wall in the far background there? Mad Magazine paperbacks.

And here from the science fiction section looking back. Also, they have comic books.

Yes, I thought about getting the comic book adaptation of An American Tale II: Fieval Goes West, as adapted by Marval Comics.

Two of the signs for the Book Garden out on the highway. The signs are somehow abundant yet hard to actually see from the road; even after thirty years of going there regularly I'm always taken by surprise coming across it.

And here, the front of the store, which was still decorated for Christmas. I think I was the last customer of the day.

OK, so one photo from work. In one of the offices I noticed a Rolodex and had to bring its memory to you all, eventually. As far as I could tell all the pages were blank.

Trivia: The Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package was set up about 500 feet west of the Apollo 14 Lunar Module. The laser-ranging retrorefector was set up another 100 feet farther west yet. Source: Apollo By The Numbers: A Statistical Reference, Richard W Orloff. NASA SP-4029.

Currently Reading: Chariots for Apollo: The NASA History of Manned Lunar Spacecraft to 1969, Courtney G Brooks, James M Grimwood, Loyd S Swenson Jr.

Those were my workdays. What about the non-workdays? Evenings involved a surprising lot of trips to this shopping mall that's not actually that close, because I needed to get stuff like tubs of hummus, and somehow the Acme that's on the same street as my hotel is also inaccessible. A highway cuts off the two sides of the road and I never worked out how to get there. Somehow I never had the time I expected to after work, in large part because I wasn't at all ahead, or even on, deadline for my various blogs, this included. Also I learned that they don't have The Price Is Right episodes online anywhere you can see them anymore. I ended up watching a buch of Simpsons episodes on the channel I can only find when I'm at the hotel.

And we went to movies. One thing bunny_hugger and I used to do was see a movie apart ``together'', going to showing at the same time or as close to the same time as possible. Friday night we went to see Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, largely so that we could safely listen to our podcasts, all of which are doing episodes about it. For me, I got to a theater in Trenton that's spent forever going through cycles of being closed and abandoned, then renovated and reopened, then closing and being abandoned. This is one of the patches where they're open so I was glad to catch it in that phase.

The movie was, mm, all right. I didn't like it as much as The Last Jedi, mostly because it kept shying back from the most interesting stuff. Like, there were two points where characters seemed to meet surprising fates and both were walked back and that was disappointing. It's not like it was bad. But, like, the Flophouse podcast episode on the movie pointed out how the story is a point-and-click adventure, get this thing to get that thing to get this other thing to get the next thing, and that's a bit dissatisfying.

The other movie that we saw, on Sunday, was Cats. We would have been inclined to see it anyway. But the air of fiasco surrounding it made us more eager to see it in theaters. (This is also why we're probably going to see Dolittle too.) Here, it's blazing through theaters so fast we could only find one showing that was roughly synchronous for both of us, a Sunday morning show. That's all right. bunny_hugger has heard the movie is turning into an interactive thing, people calling out stock riffs at the characters, and was worried this would spoil her screening. I hadn't heard about this. While the theater was about one-fifth full, enough to be noticeable, it was a quiet audience at least back where I was sitting. The only audience member I noticed speaking was someone who, at the first singing of ``Memory'', gasped ``Here it is!''. Can't fault someone for that.

So how bad a movie is it? ... I can't say it's that bad. There are many bizarre choices to it. The camera moving around far too much the first half of the film, for example. CGI slathered over people dancing so that you can't trust that you're actually seeing skilled dancing. The cats being presented in inconsistent sizes, and the camera forcing you to notice this, so that some scenes look like optical illusions. Rebel Wilson as Jennyanydots scratching and licking herself in ways that are, yes, true to cat behavior but not, like, good to see. James Corden bringing the action to a halt to make jokes that are appropriate to a comedy sketch based on Cats but that just break the scene of the movie.

I can't say it's good, although good bits keep trying to emerge. But it is a great spectacle, and it's unreservedly itself. Again there was a Flophouse podcast episode about this, and while they were way too put off by the character design, they did come to agree they had a lot of fun watching this. Part of that, yes, from thinking through the implication of Macavity having broken, as the verse reminds us, ``every human law''.

What else did I get up to? A certain amount of poking around old haunts. A bunch of used book stores, where I tried my best not to go too wild but you may notice me having a book about the Bowery, for example. I also went to the Freehold Raceway Mall, to see the carousel there, although I didn't feel like riding it without bunny_hugger. This was also a chance to poke into the Disney Store, although they didn't have any good Stitch merchandise.

I did stop at Jersey Freeze, an ice cream place we went to all the time when I was a kid and the Freehold Traffic Circle was still there. It's got a restaurant attached and we only rarely ate there, but this was a good spot to go for lunch. And then ... you know, I realized, it's like 65 degrees out. It was warm the whole time of my visit and over the weekend it was alarmingly warm. (Meanwhile back home, Lansing was bunkering down for a major ice storm and not sure that wide swaths of the city might not lose power.) So I got an ice cream, too; they were doing brisk business and boy, remember before we broke the climate and a freakishly warm day in January was something that only happened every five years?

Later on I realized I should have gone to the Popcorn Park Zoo, although I don't know whether the small rescued-animals zoo is even open in winter even if it is 65 degrees out.

I also visited the Silverball Museum. Twice, as it turned out: once for Sunday and once in the long afternoon that I had between checking out of my hotel and the scheduled time for my flight home Thursday. They've got a nice row of all five Jersey Jack pinball games now. They've also been getting better about putting up signs explaining the games. Also they've got anniversary signs, pointing out which games are 25, 30, or in one case 70 years old. Sunday I stayed at the museum until it closed at 9 pm --- they turned off all the games while I was in the bathroom and I'm not sure they knew I was in there --- and, you know? It's fun to do that.

Flying back home, out of Newark, kept threatening to be a fiasco. I had booked a return flight for the early evening and that might be fine at avoiding having to get up early to get to the airport on time. But I was going through security about 5 pm, in an enormous mass with a confusing array of bins, including two conveyor belt's worth of bins that maybe makes the flow of screening go more continuously, but also means you get crazily separated from your belongings if you have more than one bin. Plus, I forgot to take the work-issued tablet out of my duffel bag and they got all snide at me for expecting them to X-ray a duffel bag with a tablet computer inside.

The other thing was my flight. I'd had a flight for 7 pm. There were high winds in the northeast that day, though. This limited the number of flights coming in, which is a real problem as you need a plane coming in to fly a plane back out. I kept messaging bunny_hugger as our flight was pushed back, and back again, and back some more. And I slowly noticed that, like, I'd been in this little corner of the airport for two hours and not a single flight had arrived or departed from any of the four gates around me. A guy sitting near me, whose stuff I watched while he got food, would not stop commenting on the absurdity of all this and like, yeah, it is absurd. At one point I told bunny_hugger I was going to stop messaging her with new flight times because every time I did we got bumped back again (and right after doing this, we lost another half-hour). But there's only so much complaining you can do without the complaining becoming the problem.

Also I learned that airport Dunkin Donuts do have their new BeyondMeat Sausage biscuits and those are really good.

But finally they had a plane for us, and we got on, and I got into the wrong seat, interrupting a fair-sized party. I got back into the right seat and felt amazingly stupid about this, though. Taking off and the whole ascent was a bit rough, owing to those winds, and I thought the whole time about how glad I was bunny_hugger was not on this flight. It was only ever a modest shaking but I know how much she would not have liked any bit of this shaking, especially so soon after takeoff.

So I got back to Michigan after midnight, and drove to the long-term parking exit gate where I learned they had changed the card system between when I left, the Wednesday before, and this Thursday. Had to go to the one gate attendant, who seemed surprised that I had an old-style ticket, somehow. But he was able to make that work and I was able to drive home.

I reunited with bunny_hugger, and saw Sunshine and Fezziwig for the first time this year, sometime after 2 am.

Trivia: By 1946 all US reserve supplies of grass seed had been exhausted during the war effort. Source: The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession, Scott Jenkins.

Currently Reading: The Bowery: The Strange History of New York's Oldest Street, Stephen Paul DeVillo.

PS: Reading the Comics, January 18, 2020: Decimals In Fractions Edition, a handful of mathematically-themed comic strips with a little bit to write about.

PPS: More of what we saw at Lakeside Amusement Park, the junior version.

Junior Whip ride in the Lakeside Kiddieland. Some of the other flat rides are visible in the distance.

Kids boat ride; notice that the track rises and falls, so there's something evoking the rocking of a boat in this motion.

Pringles, Doritos, and ice cream sandwich vending machines at the park. Also ... wait, there's Pringles vending machines?

So back in late 2019 I nudged work a couple times, pointing out that I hadn't been out in years and was feeling out of the loop. They were fine with my productivity, though. And then in December my boss had an idea. He's got a new project he wanted his team to get to work on, me among that team. So the call came up. Could I be in the office the 5th of January for a big planning meeting? Well, first, I would be visiting my parents the 5th of January. Also, the 5th of January is a Sunday. Well, could I be out sometime that week?

And, yeah, I could do sometime that week. I decided to book a flight heading out on Wednesday, mostly because I did not trust that weather wouldn't delay us a day getting back from Charleston. It did not, as it happens, but after all, it has happened in the past. bunny_hugger several times cursed the madness that I couldn't just fly from Charleston up to New Jersey, but this seemed to be a too-complicated scheme for me, even if work would presumably pay for the change of flight arrangements. But what all of this did mean is that I had a day and a half to get home, unpack, do laundry, and re-pack, and this is why I didn't think I could take the time to ride with bunny_hugger to her parents' for dinner and maybe a game of Mice and Mystics and to pick up our animals. And why she wasn't eager to go on her own, especially as her parents pointed out she could spend the night, the last time that'd be easy to do midweek before the semester started.

Packing up and preparing took less time than I feared, actually, at least once the washing machine did the hard work it was designed for. I had a room booked at the long-term hotel again, and a car rental and a direct flight, Detroit to Newark, leaving near noon so I wouldn't have to wake too early. Indeed, I had enough time that bunny_hugger and I were able to go poking out to the local hipster bar and see some of our friends having a pinball night there. The place has also picked up, among its now-many pinball machines, Stern's newest: Stranger Things, the game. We had time for two games, and only two, because it turns out this game plays just forever. At least right now, and this despite a critical shot not actually working right.

While I didn't have to get up ridiculously early, I did have to get up in the morning, like, alarm-clock early, and shower and be ready while bunny_hugger was still waking up. And she shared the sad news with me, that by the time I got back the Christmas trees would be un-decorated and taken down and we'd have the house whittled down to its long winter decor. She works so hard to get the place looking great, and it never seems like we have enough time to appreciate it. We've been thinking how next year we might visit my parents before Christmas, when the airfare is particularly cheap, and that would be great, but it would slice out even more time that might be spent decorating, or appreciating decoration.

After an unremarkable drive to the airport I felt pointlessly hassled by the security theater people, who got snotty about me ``stacking'' my iPad and laptop. They were not stacked. They said they were, you can't go putting them on top of the TSA-approved sleeves for carrying them and my exasperation with this nonsense showed. The agent tried to tell me that they were just explaining the rules to me so that I could have no trouble in the future, and I did not point out that the rules had apparently changed since the last time I flew out of Detroit, six days before. And then they pulled me over for extra screening on the grounds that there was something suspicious in my belt(?) and in my groin. Sheesh. The plane was also late to take off, and to land, the latter because of some weather conditions reducing the number of landings Newark was taking. Despite this they still touched down pretty close to the scheduled landing time, which shows how much padding they put into the things. Before long I had my suitcase, and my rental car, and that strange comforting feeling of driving past the Anheuser-Busch plant and the Drive Safely oil tanks.

Meanwhile bunny_hugger had driven to her parents', to have her car make a disquieting noise, one bad enough she did stay the night instead and made plans to get the car to the dealer, and advance her thinking about just how much longer she wants to keep this car. The next day it would not get into gear at all, so the car had just reached safety before dying. AAA was able to tow it to the dealer, and the dealer got her to home, and her parents drove the animals to our home after all, and this was all a lot of stress and anxiety that she had to deal with while I was sitting in an office in Trenton, New Jersey, which is not the way I would like to arrange our business.

Trivia: Tantalum was first identified by Anders Gustav Ekeberg in 1802, but it was not until 1846 that Heinrich Rose proved the element was distinct from Niobium. Source: Nature's Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements, John Emsley.

Currently Reading: The American Mail: Enlarger of the Common Life, Wayne E Fuller.

PS: More at the part of Lakeside Amusement Park that you can see from the street outside which I didn't photograph, inexplicably.

I buy cameras for their optical zoom; in this case, it's 21x to the top of the Tower of Jewels, where you can see how beautiful the design is and how it's had some hard living.

Back to the base of the tower, and a pretty good view of the Redit invitation.

And a poster that sure looks vintage, encouraging kids parties at the park. I don't know whether this is actually old or a reprint or just designed to look old. I notice the poster hasn't got a URL, though.

We were in the long, skinny line for the lone screener at Trenton's tiny airport when I realized the disaster. I had left my iPod in the rental car. I'd got in the habit of leaving the iPod in the armrest cubbyhole, and there it went invisible, and we got our stuff out of the car and returned the keys and took the shuttle from the warehouse area of the outer airport grounds to the tiny terminal without my realizing. And now, with under an hour to takeoff, I had to get it back. I left the line, telling bunny_hugger to stay while I dealt with this, and she didn't.

After a few minutes of not seeing the rental shuttle I realized of course they wouldn't be sending the shuttle around; with no incoming flights there weren't any people who needed to go from the airport to the rental desk. bunny_hugger had the printout of our rental receipts, and that had the number, and I called and explained the situation. In a couple minutes the agency guy, who worked the counter and drove the shuttle and prepped the cars and everything, was driving up with the car we had used the past week, and handed me the iPod and cable. Crisis resolved.

So now we just had to get back in the line and ... oh, the security line was almost gone. OK. Through to the tiny waiting area which, thanks to airport renovations the last few years, now has bathrooms and even a little bar. We could watch the news, featuring the New Jersey budget standoff and how Chris Christie was caught lounging on a public beach closed to the public. So we were enjoying the Republican pettiness and thinking how nice it would to be to bunny_hugger's parents in a couple hours, to collect our rabbit and to see the fireworks in their town. And then suddenly everything went wrong.

What, I'm not sure I ever got straight. But our flight was going to be delayed. By six hours, they figured, so we might get out of there around 7:30 and get to Detroit around 9 pm. I think they had to get a plane up to Trenton from Miami or something like that.

So.

First thing. There are airports where you can just kind of wander around aimlessly for six hours and at least be tolerably amused. Trenton's is not one of them. It's about the size of our dining room, and the rack of free magazines promoting Mercer County as a place to do business threatens to knock the place off balance. Of course, as public space, there aren't lockers, so there's no stowing your carry-on bags for a couple hours. And even if there were, it's in the middle of farmland-turned-into-McMansions; there's nowhere to go in walking distance to do stuff. Rent a car? For a couple hours? Maybe cheaper than taking a taxi there, but still, not great.

So we faced a right boring afternoon sitting in airport chairs and hoping the flight would come a little sooner. We thought we were stretching out what we had to do in pretty good form. For example, by holding out in the security-area waiting lounge until almost everyone else had left before collecting our meal vouchers. But that meant that everybody who was going to be on the flight was eating before us, and the bar/restaurant is not equipped to handle a plane's worth of people getting burgers. On the other hand, what did we have to rush for? We could sit and wait, watching like a hawk for signs that people were actually leaving their table. People were bad about this, although some of that might have been they didn't have the staff to clean tables promptly.

Mostly, the problems stem from the fact Trenton is a tiny airport, and that's all right normally. But if something goes wrong they don't have the reserves to handle that without it being a big mess. So we may be giving up on it, at least until they can do things like not have every attempt to fly out of it involve some crazy problem.

Well, there were tiny bits of good news. The six-hour delay shrank, a little bit at a time. Is it better to spend only five hours in a tiny airport with no services, not even public Wi-fi? Better than six hours, anyway.

Getting to bunny_hugger's parents house was ... well, we maybe could have got there in time for the city fireworks, since those have to be after dark and dark comes really late in Michigan in early summer. The state is really far west for the Eastern Time Zone. But we didn't think that wise; we'd have almost no time to spend with her parents. So instead we went home, and felt that great comfort of being back home, at least.

Trivia: There was one newspaper in New Jersey in 1777 (the Gazette); ten years later there were four. Source: New Jersey From Colony To State, 1609 - 1789, Richard P McCormick.

Currently Reading: The Vulgar Tongue: Green's History of Slang, Jonathon Green.

PS: The Merry-Go-Round Museum!

View from just inside the main room of the Merry-Go-Round Museum's working carousel and some of the exhibits on the far side. It's a nice big circular room, as the building's exterior implies should be.

A curiosity: the Cyber Coaster, formerly in a little nook in the far side of the above picture, would show a ride video from Cedar Point's Gemini roller coaster. It didn't shake side to side or anything, the way ride simulators in disused corners of shopping malls would. It just sat there. Now it sits somewhere else and the monitor showing the picture was gone.

More secondary figures: on the back of this tiger are a cherub head and an irritated-looking eagle. Why? I don't know, but file this image away for a later nightmare.

Sunday, our last full day in New Jersey for our anniversary trip, bunny_hugger wanted to drive again. This is when I clumsily dropped the astounding news that our rental car doors would unlock if you just pulled on the handle while you have the key fob in your pocket. She doesn't approve of what this does to the concept of ``car key''.

We wanted to go to a diner for lunch, and with our Regent Diner closed and even the Toms River Diner apparently gone we had a good candidate. Corner Post Diner, one of the several that we went to the first week she was in New Jersey. It was one of two places we'd eaten where someone stopped by to say bunny_hugger looked like their sister. (The other one was at a Lakewood Blue Claws minor-league ball game, a detail I think I forgot to mention in my report of the game that Bruce Springsteen Appreciation Night.) The diner looked ... weird. Rather more formal and dressed-up than we remembered. We spent a lot of lunch trying to work out whether the place had been renovated and upgraded considerably, or whether it's just that since our earlier table had been in this narrow corridor by the window we didn't know what the main dining room looked like.

The next stop on our old-places tour was the Book Garden, the used book shop that's five miles west of Great Adventure on Route 537. (I also thought for a bit we might go to Great Adventure after all, but we had more pressing old-places to revisit.) The most astounding thing there, as ever, was that the owner recognized me. I mean, yes, I used to visit the place a lot, but that meant once every couple weeks, more than five years ago. I grant I have a couple good distinguishing hooks to make me memorable, but there's so many other people in the world to remember.

I picked up a couple of books, of course, but bunny_hugger had the real find in the postcards. She found a bunch of Michigan-themed postcards. The only Lansing one was for one of the high schools, a reminder that for some reason you could just sell postcards of ordinary public buildings back in the day for some reason. The major find was a bunch of Detroit-area cards. They were written with the fascinating, compellingly boring material of that era's texting. Many, many reports of having arrived in Detroit, or having arrived in Detroit yesterday. And how it was not as hot as the day before, but hotter than it should be tomorrow. How it rained, or was expected to rain, or did not rain. But what we noticed: we had a bunch of cards written by the same person, apparently on the same trip. They were sent to different people, though, with different last names at different addresses. So how did they all end up sold to the same used book shop? What twists of fate shuttled them all to the same location?

My best guess was maybe someone in the neighborhood collected stamps, or postcards, and snagged them from everyone who was willing to turn them over. My father's guess, which is similar but I think more compelling, is that the postcards were just shared around to everybody in the extended family, or the neighborhood circle of friends, and they ended at whoever was the last to receive the cards that get moved around (or who was always slowest at sharing them with someone else). I mention all this so you can appreciate how we got to wondering about things and maybe use this as your creative writing prompt for the day.

Our next stop on the old-places tour was the Freehold Raceway Mall, and the double-decker carousel there, and that brought with it the discovery of many small changes at the place. The Radio Shack was gone, of course. So was the dollar store, and who knew dollar stores could go out of business? The Sears had retreated to just filling the lower level of its anchor store location, and we'd discover that it closed at the same time the main mall closed. Since we'd parked just outside it this meant we had to figure an alternate way to get to our car. (We could, but we had to walk along un-sidewalked areas along the mall's road belt.)

Also at the carousel we'd discover that we had forgot the loyalty card and had to start a new one. Ten rides is supposed to get us a free ride, and we've probably got that, but scattered over about fourteen cards that we have got to organize for the next time we're in New Jersey.

We had gotten to the mall fairly late, and only had the chance to poke around one store besides the carousel. This was the Disney Store, which I don't think we have a local edition of. There we learned they had more of the four-armed Stitch puppets I'd gotten bunny_hugger for Christmas, which, good. Also we discovered these little ... tube-like plush doll renditions of various classic Disney characters. The clerk tried to explain the appeal to us: they were a Japanese thing, and the dolls stacked well. And ... that's it, apparently? I really don't get it.

But by then we were being turned out of the mall, a side effect of how ridiculously early everything closes on Sunday, and the end of our visiting old places. We did have a new place to go, though.

Trivia: In 1981 Atari agreed to pay General Computer $50,000 per month for two years, with first right of refusal to any games they might make. Within three months General Computer offered Food Fight to Atari, which had not expected them to actually make anything. (The contract was to buy Atari's way out of a lawsuit.) Source: The Ultimate History of Video Games, Steven L Kent.

Currently Reading: The Vulgar Tongue: Green's History of Slang, Jonathon Green.

PS: More Merry-Go-Round Museum exhibitions!

M C Illions backdrop panel, of the sort that would give scenery to a carousel horse. This is only two panels; they had something like eight, far too many to show at once, at least as the museum's exhibit was currently arranged, but they hoped this would give some idea of what it might look like. No idea whose face that is as a cherub up top.

Each year the Merry-Go-Round Museum carves a new horse that gets raffled off. In Presidential Election years they're designed to have a Patriotic theme, and there's nothing symbolic in the 2016 Patriotic Horse being flopped on its side.

Past carvings by the museum: two of a family of sea horses/dragons. The Merry-Go-Round Museum has as its centerpiece an antique carousel, but only (``only'') the mechanism and platform and such. The mounts weren't available or affordable, so, they've replaced them with their own designs.

If I had any preconceived notions about Gillian's Wonderland Pier, it was that it was a pier. You know, some elevated structure reaching out into the water, or at least over sand that might be underwater at some point. In this I was mistaken. It maybe is elevated from the sand; given the mist, there wasn't any way to tell. But it was a cement base, and on the shore side of the boardwalk, so if it's anything like a pier it's not really obvious. I don't know.

It's also much more like a large warehouse than I had expected. The main building for the pier is an enormous room, decorated on the outside as a castle, with little octagonal projections and even, in one spot, a dragon peeking in on a princess, getting chin pets. It's a friendly facade. Looks great.

Also great: they have an antique carousel. Philadelphia Toboggan Company carousel #75, built 1926 and moved to the pier, which opened in 1929, I do not know when. It's one of the few carousels to still have a brass ring mechanism. This was our third carousel to have a brass ring mechanism, and only the second one to have it working. (Knoebels has and uses the ring. Conneaut Lake Park has the brass ring machine, but if they ever run it, we've not seen that.) It's a lovely carousel, and when we first got there it looked to be the busiest ride in the park. It was packed, and when we'd go for a ride it would be a nearly full ride. Don't often see the carousels that packed, although come to think of it, when I have it's been at Knoebels. Maybe the brass ring is a really good idea.

If there's a pay-one-price admission we missed it. We did spent a fair bit of time looking over the rides that they had and figuring out what we'd want to do, and how many tickets this would take. The pier has a delightfully complicated structure, too, with a couple of elevated sections that's probably more fun for people like us who haven't got trouble going up stairs. Not sure what they do for people less mobile. Some of them weren't running, such as the Scrambler; we would see that, but not see it in operation. There's also, in another section, an elevated monorail that runs near the ceiling of the castle, and out over most of the pier. We had watched a good number of cars puttering along, shedding sparks at a couple of spots that we're sure are probably just fine. Those things never set antique carousels on fire, right? Ugh.

The pier's got two roller coasters, one of them a Wacky Worm of the kind you see everywhere and that we were still kind of cranky about not getting to ride at Keansburg. The other is the Runaway Train Coaster, a compact steel coaster with a couple steep, diving twists. It's got faintly Mine Train-esque cars, and the front car even has a mock Old West train engine. It runs right next to the giant Ferris wheel which, in hindsight, should indeed have been visible from far away, if not for the mist.

Also prominent and exciting: the Haunted House Dark Ride. We love dark rides, and any chance to go puttering around inside a bunch of little scary-themed haunted attractions is a great one. We had, now, a fair idea of what we'd want to ride, and we went to one of the ticket booths. Which were delightful, by the way, and decorated in back by folk art renditions of Wonder Bear and a female bear riding the park's attractions. We were set.

Trivia: The first appearance of ``chop suey'' in print was in an 1884 column that chef Wong Chin Foo wrote for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, about what Chinese cooking was like. In this appearance it was spelled ``chop soly''. Source: Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine, Sarah Lohman.

Currently Reading: The First Space Race: Eisenhower and the Quest for Aerospace Security, Nicholas Michael Sambaluk.

PS: Hello, Halloweekends Sunday! ... Eventually. You'll see.

View, while driving, slowly, of the carcass of Mean Streak. We got a few glimpses of the ride under reconstruction since you can't drive to and from the Breakers Hotel without seeing the roller coaster's site. And you can see what the weather was like, which is why we picked Sunday to go out to the Merry-Go-Round museum.

In the Merry-Go-Round Museum, in Sandusky: a kiddie carousel mount made to look like Mighty Mouse for the reasons. I can't say that the teeth are helping Mighty look friendly in the way they want.

Elephant stander with a basket for riding at the Merry-Go-Round Museum. It's an amusing and interesting mount and it's nice to see stranger things like this around.

PPS: How September 2017 Treated My Mathematics Blog, a brief report.

So first thing to understand about Playland Castaway Cove, the park we didn't know we would visit, is that it's tiny. You know the size of an amusement pier you're thinking of? Think of something smaller than that. It's maybe the size of our bathroom. Also, that it was packed. I estimate that everybody in South Jersey, Delaware, and Southeastern Pennsylvania had converged on the Castaway Cove for the day. Also they have a rather good number and variety of rides. The result is it felt cramped, and claustrophobic, and honestly a bit tense. There were always swarms of people moving around, wherever you might want to go.

A quick check of the arcade suggested no pinball, which, all right. Didn't expect any. Also there's not much space for arcades there. They did have a modern-style Chance carousel, a swinging ship ride, a drop tower, the Ferris wheel that I'd thought was Gillian's, bumper cars, and a lot of roller coasters for the square footage. What they didn't have, so far as we could tell, was a wristband plan that would make sense for us. It was all tickets. But that was kind of all right; we didn't figure to do more than ride the roller coasters and maybe if something seemed uniquely compelling about the area that. Mostly we hoped to get through the park without being compressed into lumps of person-flavored protein by the crowds.

To give some idea of how cramped the park was: the centerpiece, tallest, biggest-thrill roller coaster is this brilliant blue thing named Gale Force. It was surrounded by the track of what I assumed was a recently-defunct roller coaster, Wild Waves. I was wrong about that: it wasn't a recently-defunct roller coaster. It was a roller coaster still being built, and slated to open later in July. (According to the Roller Coaster Database it actually opened the 7th of September.) That's two major roller coasters they opened in the same season, by the way. Also next to both of these is a compact, spinning, figure-8-shaped coaster named Whirlwind that was a kind I'd never seen before. It's only 14 feet tall, but makes up for not being tall by running many, many circuits each ride. And it wasn't the only roller coaster of this type we'd ride that weekend. I love the aesthetic of rides atop rides; it's one of the things I love about Blackpool Pleasure Beach, and Indiana Beach, and Kennywood; and here, was a place going crazy with it.

I felt a bit indecent looking over the park's attractions and deciding what ones to target. Usually we go to a park to soak in the atmosphere and while we'll have priorities, we want to amble around it. But we were fitting an unexpected park into an already-advancing evening. And the crowd made it difficult to figure where to just wander or take in the atmosphere. We picked out what we wanted and bought the tickets that we'd need for that. Which included separate, special, Willie Wonka-style Golden Ticket sheets for one ride each on Gale Force.

Gale Force is the tallest ride, and it's a launch coaster, one that uses electromagnetic induction to build up speed, instead of a chain that pulls you slowly to the top of a first hill. Instead it gets you up to speed at the base of a U-shaped hill, fast enough that you ... don't ... quite ... get up to the top of the hill. The car falls back down, picks up another boost as it goes backwards through the launch station, and then goes up the return-leg hill again partway. You fall back down again, pick up more acceleration going through the launch station, and then go over the hill to see the rest of the ride. Which is your complicated, twisty path that's all surprisingly close to being in one plane of motion.

From the top of the hill there's a grand view of the Playland Castaway Cove, and you could probably see out to the ocean, if there weren't so thoroughgoing and heavy a mist. As it was, the park looked like a little patch of color and evening lights turning on in the middle of a great grey expanse, one that hid even the water. And this from the Boardwalk. Quite a weird feeling, especially compared to the brilliant sun and warmth of the previous park, two hours earlier.

Trivia: The Latin zodiac sign Capricorn, the Goat, was in Sanskrit `Makarus', and in the Babylonian scheme `Goat-fish'. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.

Currently Reading: The First Space Race: Eisenhower and the Quest for Aerospace Security, Nicholas Michael Sambaluk.

PS: Just some walking around Halloweekends before sunset.

One of Cedar Point's old statues, emerged from hiding and set up with a guitar because near the Corkscrew roller coaster here they put up the Rock and Roll Graveyard every year.

Pumpkin Spice Snakes. Decorations, with lights on the inside, so that at night you just see the slits of their eyes and the enormously many holes over their bodies.

Photo of the Magnum XL 200 photo stand, which we didn't know was going to be renovated out of existence over the off-season, but which was, and aren't you glad to have its Very 1989 styling preserved? The photo's at a weird angle because I wondered what it would look like if the apparent path of the roller coaster train were level instead, and I missed that angle too.

Some more scenes. Three men in a tub, in a little pond by a mock mill. The mill was for 'The Merry Miller', a nursery rhyme I don't know anything about. We got pictures taken from inside Moby Dick's mouth and wondered why not Monstro. Looked into Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater's shell. Into the crooked house. The Old Woman Who Lived In A Shoe's shoe. A mysterious bit of doggerel:

Little Tommy Tittlemouse
Lived in a little house
He caught fishes
In other men's ditches

He had a fishing pole and hooked 'fish', above a water canal that was almost empty. We never heard anything like this bit before.

There's a miniature railroad that goes around the park, and we took a loop on that. It offered some good views of the far side of rides and features and also a good view of Hey-Diddle-Diddle and that barn. Then into the Gingerbread House for a snack. It's a gorgeous building, by our lights, since it looks like it hasn't been changed since the 80s and that tickled us. The room had a bunch of news clippings. What compelled our interest was the front page from the 1st of July, 2012, exactly five years before our visit. The articles were about the derechos that had swept through South Jersey the day before, and that had destroyed many trees and damaged rides at the park. As we were marrying, this gorgeous little park was being torn up by intense winds and severe rain. We felt that weird sense of knowing exactly where we were and exactly what we were doing while this event we had no idea happened went on.

More features. Mary's little lamb, and the schoolhouse. They had an actual lamb, in a sandy pen. While we watched the lamb picked up a plastic dish (a feed dish?) and walked along the perimeter, rattling the dish against the bars, just like in a prison movie.

We walked to the far back of the park, with some trepidation about the promise there were ``animals'' there. We got stopped along the way. They had this fun ``Pirate Blasta'' feature. Water cannons shooting at pirate-ship-themed stuff. For a change of pace we actually played it, and had a great time shooting stuff so it knocked over. We had never seen this before. We would see it again at a park later in the day, and then again several more times over the summer.

Anyway, past this Bader-Meinhoff game, we got to the Billy Goats Gruff. This had two elevated little houses, connected by a rope bridge, and a couple of Nubian goats prowling around. You can feed them, too: drop your pellets into a bucket and wheel the bucket, by a pulley, up to the goat's houses. Or just put the pellets in, since the goats have figured out how to pull the bucket up themselves. We were delighted by the goats' good understanding of just what the pulleys were and how to work them. Also by what a charming, personable face the goat we spent the most time near had.

We went onward, worried that we'd find in other pens that there animals a park like this couldn't possibly keep reasonably well. No reason for concern, though. In the other pens they had some more turkeys and some deer, animals that they ought to be able to handle and in pens that looked about the size and kind of terrain that I'd see at the Popcorn Park Zoo. It was a palpable relief that we didn't have to worry about, like, their having a polar bear or something crazy like that. (I did worry that they might have, in the past, kept something like a tiger. But if they had then they must have completely ripped out the old enclosure. Or they kept it dangerously vulnerable.)

A statue that only makes sense in South Jersey or Eastern Pennsylvania: Phillis and Phil, statues of Phillies fans that used to be outside Veterans Stadium, back before that place was torn down. They're now standing, or sitting, beside some seats saved from the park, and holding a Phillies 2008 World Champs penant.

The park has one other tour-around-the-park ride, the Candy Cane Express. It's a long motorized car ride and I thought that'd be good for maybe seeing the park from an angle you can't get to on foot. Not so much, it turns out; the Express didn't go on any paths that we couldn't have walked on. But it made for a good review of the park's terrain and probably it'd be a good way for someone to get acquainted with the place if they didn't have time to walk it themselves. On the other hand, it's not like it's so big a place that walking it would take unreasonably long.

We went for another ride at the carousel, and then I noticed something curious at a picnic pavilion. I thought it might be a vending machine, but it looked weird. It was weirder than that. It was a little automated puppet show, the kind we might see at Marvin's Marvellous Mechanical Museum. It ... had something to do with a witch and Santa Claus and elves and ... I don't know, but the whole thing was put inside a cartoon-styled castle. One more bit of curious charm for the park.

And so we went to our last look around, getting pictures of the backup electrical generator building which I know sounds like a dull thing. But understand, they had a statue of Benjamin Franklin out in front of it. And we admired the Mother Goose statue, and a swarm of kids coming up to take their photos there and then to flee, and we watched sparrows duck into the ``folds'' of the Mother Goose statue's dress.

Somewhere after this, the time passed 5:00, and the park was officially closed. We left, slowly as we could, after the first wonderful park of our day.

Trivia: In 1956 the United States Merchant Marine had 3,083 deepwater vessels of 1,000 or more Gross Register Tonnage capacity. By 2005 there were 412, about a quarter of which were used for Jones Act-protected trades. (There were another thirty or so technically US-flagged as part of the Maritime Security Program.) Source: Box Boats: How Container Ships Changed The World, Brian J Cudahy.

Currently Reading: Binary Fusion and the Millennium Bug, Beth Bridgman. Oh yeah, gimme those hermaphroditic Christ-clones rewriting all humanity's DNA so the worldwide network of Oprah Winfrey fans can make her show tapings appear, live and unedited, on every station ever. That's what I was reading this for!

PS: It wouldn't be an amusement park without a little something for porsupah!

More skeptical animals: two of the rabbits have had enough company, thanks, and would like their distance and to let their heads melt into their dewlaps.

The third rabbit has had so much of even that she wants a layer of rabbits between her and the space between those rabbits and any people.

Rabbit very worried that someone will ask what she's doing in the chicken enclosure.

PPS: The Summer 2017 Mathematics A To Z: Zeta Function, attempting the greatest of all challenges: to say something about the Riemann-Zeta Function, core of the Riemann Hypothesis, that hasn't been said already on every mathematics blog ever.