A month or two ago bunnyhugger noticed something through pinball friend FAE, whose non-pinball interests run along the lines of ... well, it's right there in the high score initials. It was an upcoming event in Byron Center, a Grand Rapids-area town we know mainly because of the rumor it has an emergency vet clinic that's competent to handle rabbits. But someone-they were putting on a fairy ball, the name of which I never quite got straight. But, costumes? Music? A --- we'd learn shortly before the date --- real wedding? This may not be a furry convention, but it seemed likely to scratch a similar itch. FAE was attending; why not us, too?

bunnyhugger had an outstanding idea right away for a costume, too. She could make a jackalope outfit, using a masquerade ball-style partial face cover and affixing horns and fake fur and all. And then dress up the rest of herself with the sorts of things she'd done for her dragon/wyvern costumes in the past --- furry leggings, well-chosen outfits, the tail she always wears at furry events. It would be grand, if she could get it all together.

Despite summer seemingly offering no end of days to do things, the days ran out, not least because of Roger's shocking and sudden decline. The last days before the ball were a whirlwind of crafting and stress. Also visits to thrift stores to find outfits that went with the theme. Along the way she also discovered a film camera with a flash that might work on her better film camera. I don't yet know if that's panned out. Still, the all-nighters and the anxiety and the stress paid off in a jackalope mask that looks fantastic. Not quite experienced-professional-level good, but you can see experienced-professional from where she is. Combined with the rabbit tail and the sweater-vest and dress and leggings you have a really good suggestion of jackalope without something as involved (or heavy, or movement-complicating) as a fursuit. Furry cons should have more costumes like this.

For myself? I didn't have anything like that creative energy. I figured to use the coati tail and ears from every furry convention, trusting that there'd be woodland animals included in the fairy affairs. I did add a bit to it by wearing the werewolf-paw partial gloves that I keep forgetting to bring to furry cons, giving me that extra bit of animal look. And then bunnyhugger --- in trying to find the gloves --- found a raccoon masquerade-style face mask that I ended up wearing, so that I could go as a slightly confused blend of raccoon and coati. There were not many people going as outright woodland creatures --- I might have been the only one if you rule out a jackalope and some people who were kind of faun-ish --- but it would get a pretty good reception anyway. (Also I got the jolt that people outside the furry community haven't got the word about using ``racc'' as the one-syllable shorthand for raccoon.)

In any case we knew that whatever our outfits were they wouldn't come close to FAE's, whatever it was. But we wouldn't know what it was until we picked them up ... a story I hope to pick up Friday.

Back to the Wonderland of Lights, where you'll see only the ceiling lights inside one of the Potter Park Zoo's buildings:

More of the lemurs eating one another's tails.

And here they're just eating each other. Really you'd think someone would feed the poor creatures sometime.

Ah! Now here we are to ... uh ... I'm not sure. The Potter Park Zoo doesn't rate these guys as worth mentioning on their web site and just lists the Feline and Primate House as offering that ``animals can be viewed in their outdoor habitats''.

I'm thinking shrew? That seems plausible. But shrews are not felines and are not primates, so I don't know what they're doing in the Feline and Primate House.

The cape porcupines are easy to identify. We should come back sometime and see them when the weather is nice; we only ever see them in the Feline and Primate House despite their being rather famously rodents.

Lion pondering why the shrews and the porcupines are in the Feline and Primate House, too.

Trivia: Before the War with Mexico, what is now the state of New Mexico was the Mexican province of Nuevo Mejico. The only part of Nuevo Mejico's border this is still part of New Mexico's is a small segment of the Texas/New Mexico border just north of El Paso. Source: How The States Got Their Shapes, Mark Stein. That line of latitude between Texas and New Mexico preserves the old border; the parts east of the Rio Grande were (mostly) sold by Texas to pay off its quite large formerly-national debt.

Currently Reading: His Majesty's Airship: The Life and Tragic Death of the World's Largest Flying Machine, S C Gwynne. I should be honest here: while I have touched the book I haven't got any real reading done. It's just been too busy a week, between doing stuff all weekend and then having in-office days Tuesday and Wednesday, and other chores besides that.

Let me see if I can say anything useful about playing in Silver Balls. Well, I had low expectations for myself even with the joy of having a new job. And being able to share the good news with people like CST, whom we hadn't seen in maybe a year, or BIL, who I had seen but not talked to at the tournament a couple weeks ago. My first game ended up being Getaway, always a difficult table. It's got a very short ball save and since it moved to its current location is a real drain-monster. Everyone in my group had very short games; I won by virtue of getting the video mode as a random award. The video mode in Getaway is actually a very easy one and normally anyone can get a full twenty million points plus on it. I failed to, for the first time in like ever, and still squeaked out a win.

Next game was Ghostbusters, one of the more difficult tables in the venue. But I have stumbled onto a promising-seeming new strategy for the game, shooting for the Psychokinetic Energy Frenzy that's surprisingly always available. And this time it ... didn't work for me; I took third place, and got two strikes. Still, this is a good pace. In a progressive-strikes tournament like this, if you average one strike per round, you're going to end up in a high position. Next round was Batman 66, one of my strengths, and I put up a great ball one that should have iced out everyone else. Then they went and had great balls two and three, while I did nothing and sank to third place, picking up two more strikes. Then up on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, another game nobody likes and one where, somehow, I got first place. Back on that one-strike-per-round pace.

My next game was Guns N Roses, the new Jersey Jack game, and while I was up against some fierce competition --- including CST --- I was feeling good because I have this weird harmony with Jersey Jack games, and I can pretty much always get at least a million points, on this machine a good score. I managed to shoot for nothing, on any of this, and come in last, my worst finish yet.

Guardians of the Galaxy was the next table and I was feeling confident since that's another table I really like and usually do well enough on. BIL squeaked me out on it, though, one of his three first-place finishes for the night. Then on to Willy Wonka, another Jersey Jack game and I got a first-place finish again, getting closer to the one-strike-per-round average. Somehow I squeaked out a first-place finish on Star Trek, too, a win that gave BIL his tenth strike and sent him home. It also sent home bunnyhugger since, of course, the first and only time we were matched up for the night it was when she had to win-or-go-home.

Now? I was among the final dozen or so people left and feeling great about my finishing. It would also get only tougher from here on. I would play CST in each of the next three rounds, though to my amazement in one of them --- The Walking Dead --- I would put up a score on my first ball greater than anything anyone else did on all three. Somehow in this strikes tournament I managed a first place finish in five of the eleven rounds; even CST only got four. One of those was against me, in a two-player match on Iron Maiden, but knowing that I was among the top four finishers now left me feeling really good about whatever might come next.

What came next, and for me finally, was a four-person match against CST, MWS, and RED --- CST and MWS are solid bets to win the Michigan state championship this and any year --- on Game of Thrones. MWS's favorite game, and one that CST and RED can routinely put up a zillion points on. My only hope was to start this one high-scoring mode that I'm okay on, and hope everyone else flops, since at this point I have nine strikes and can only move on if I finish in first place. Well, none of them have the faceplant game that I needed. And I never get anything started, so I go out in fourth place for the tournament. Which is still a fantastic finish, better than I have any right to expect. bunnyhugger made trophies for the top three finishers.

CST takes third place in the game, and with it, third place in the tournament. MWS and RED are the only players left and they go head-to-head on Lord of the Rings, a table that can go on forever. It does not. RED wins, taking home first place and a healthy 16.01 points in the struggle for a position in the State Championship Series. It's not enough for him, though; RED finishes the year in 35th place, too low to go even as an alternate. MWS finishes the year third place in the rankings, although I'm not sure that this strong finish helped him secure the spot. Suppose we'll see how that turns out for him next weekend.

bunnyhugger has a worse night than me on every count, starting out with two last-place finishes in her first three rounds. But in-between those last-place finishes is a first place, and after the fourth round she never takes anything but first or second, which is all quite respectable. And finishing in the tie for tenth place, in a group of 35 with this many power players in it? Really reinforces how good a player she is. Neither of us is anywhere near making state; we aren't playing enough events, nor enough high-value events, but it's one of those moments that show that if we chose to, we could be plausible.

We go home with more money for the Capital Area Humane Society, and more confidence in our pandemic-era pinball abilities, than we could have imagined going in.

I have a quick bowl of microwaved ravioli and go to bed. Work in the morning.

Please enjoy some more of my dwindling stash of Potter Park Zoo pictures!

Illuminated elephant at a crossroads. Potter Park Zoo does not have elephants anymore since we've learned a little better about that.

Monkeys! We spent more time than expected watching the primates in their house.

Oh, and there were some more porcupines but they weren't up for doing much.

Back to the primates. Those are some great poses on them.

This little raised arch between the two halves of the primates-and-big-cats house was chained off, in a way it hasn't been in past years. It's a little steep, but I didn't think it steep enough to be dangerous walking. Maybe bad if you're on crutches or in a wheelchair but I'd imagine folks using those would take the other ways across the building naturally.

The Theio's Restaurant Memorial Bench remains, silent tribute to the lost eatery with bad waffle management.

Trivia: Five arches --- about a quarter of the span --- of London Bridge were destroyed by an exceptional buildup of ice and snow at the end of 1281. Source: Old London Bridge: The Story of the Longest Inhabited Bridge in Europe, Patricia Pierce. British History Online says it was four arches, by the way, and intimates that it was the flood resulting from the thaw.

Currently Reading: Standpipe: Delivering Water in Flint, David Hardin.

I'm sorry to take another pass on finishing the story of the Silver Balls tournament, but I've just had less time than I would like for messing around on the Internet what with work and all. At least during the time in the office I'm diligent about not poking over to see what's going on in the secret coati Telegram chat room or something. But between that, and pinball league Tuesday nights, I don't get nearly the time early in the week to write long-form stuff like I could when I was doing nothing. It's a shame but on the other hand it's triple the money I was making before so I can put up with that a while.

Work meanwhile finally reached the point where I'm set up and connected to things and can, like, check out code, unless it's supposed to be checking in, and fix things, and push, unless I mean pull, or I think I have to push and then pull? ... things to get them looked at and maybe approved. I did enough work on the simpler project (knocked out the bug I was assigned, plus ones reported in two other listings) to convince my boss I was ready for the other project. This other project is ... a disaster, something that was worked on for six years by my predecessor who seems to have been writing more cleverly than wisely.

It's doing a lot to reassure me about the workplace, though, since --- first --- they're clearly willing to keep a guy around for six years even though his code is much more rickety than mine. And also that everyone --- my coworkers, my boss, my boss's coworkers, and my grand-boss --- agree this new project is a disaster and it is impossible to get into shape by the deadline, finally hard after six years of being pushed back again and again. But what this means is it is impossible for me to be the screwup here. There is nothing within my power to make the situation a bigger mess; all I can do is make it a smaller mess. It's a good way to learn the system of programming groups that have a system; nothing I do before the deadline can possibly be failure. Nothing for a good while after that either, as everyone tries to drag the system back to ``something where you can almost see what it should have been in the first place''. I am, in this regard, lucky.

So let's finish off one of the little buildings at the Potter Park Zoo and get back to the lights, shall we?

Hi there! Friendly li'l guy in the reptiles-and-avians house.

And another of them, in even better light to show off their color.

While trying to find the snake in here I thought that the rock a little below dead center was their head. The big snake-like thing behind it didn't register for a while.

Tragic, another snake all tangled up in their own charging cable.

Boy, you just can't get hand-knitted woolen Gila monsters like this anymore. So cozy!

And the rainbow wall of lights, which we never miss. I always love the puddles of color at the bottom because they don't hang it too high up.

Trivia: Fannie Farmer was a director (the most famous one) of the Boston Cooking School, founded in 1879 to teach working-class women to cook scientifically. Source: Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, Mark Kurlansky. (The Boston Cooking School merged into Simmons Univeristy in 1902.)

Currently Reading: Standpipe: Delivering Water in Flint, David Hardin.

Tuesday after Christmas was time for Silver Balls In The City, the oldest of bunnyhugger's charity pinball tournament series. Thanks to the Christmas Eve disappointment she'd had most of her work done ahead of time, so all we had to do was wait for me to be done with work --- I was working from home, so we even had a little advantage in time there --- and head to the venue. The parking lot was nearly full, firing her anxiety that there was a big event at the bar that nobody had thought to tell her about. I offered that maybe there was something going on at any of the whole block of businesses, including another bar, that share the parking lot. Maybe even people practicing for the tournament; as it's one of the last of the year, it's a choice one for people hoping to get into the State Championship Series, or to better their seed. But it seemed too big a crowd for that and I suppressed the thought.

There was no big event at the bar. Just their usual Tuesday night movie starting at 9:00 --- Spaceballs, which somehow has taken over as the default movie on cable whenever I look at the program guide recently --- but that wasn't any too big or crowded. The bar was just as we'd hope; busy enough to feel healthy but not crowding out the pinball play. And not doing anything that would be too loud or attention-demanding to spoil the pinball playing.

Also the crowd was there for pinball. The tournament drew 36 people --- a 37th arrived, but too late to be able to play in any way that would be fun --- which made for the most successful tournament she'd ever run. A guy from Stern Pinball, who'd had to cancel a visit at an earlier tournament because of Covid-19, made it this time, bringing a really choice prize, a Batman '66 banner, to be raffled off. (It was won by a guy named Biff, which he noted only made sense, since his name was on the banner. Lucky nobody named Sock or Pow was there.) Between the crowd, and donations from Pinball Pete's and from Stern, and some extra donations from people moved by the season, bunnyhugger raised over seven hundred dollars for the Capital Area Humane Society. The only sad thing about this is that this wasn't the tournament for the rescue we adopted Stephen, Penelope, and Fezziwig from. Not that the shelter we adopted Sunshine from less deserves a bounty.

The hugeness of the crowd made bunnyhugger worry about the format: ten strikes progressive. That is, you play in groups of four or three people on a computer-chosen game. You get one strike for everyone who beats you, so, first place gets zero, second place one, third place two, and fourth place three. You keep playing until you collect a total of ten strikes, so you're guaranteed at least four rounds, but no more. The amazing thing about strikes tournaments is it turns out the number of people playing doesn't affect their length very much. The number of strikes affects the length far more. But, like, bunnyhugger's monthly women's tournaments are a strikes format very similar, and draw a half-dozen people, and run almost the name number of rounds as this 36-person tournament.

Those rounds are much shorter, though, since the pacing item is the length of the longest game, and if you have nine groups of people, many of them the best players in the state, competing, someone's going to be in the group that goes on forever. That was me, several times over, it happens. But the whole tournament took a mere twelve rounds and we were done close enough to midnight, which is as good as we could have hoped for.

When I saw the crowd --- when it was only 25 people or so --- I asked MWS, so just how tight is the competition for State Champion Series ranking? Since pinball tournaments resumed in the pandemic bunnyhugger and I haven't been competing seriously, and haven't even looked at who's in or near the top 24 spots. MWS admitted, while the top seeds are pretty solidly set, there was a tight pack for the last couple spots. It may be some of the crowd was folks hoping to get a good two or three rating points over the competition.

And then there bunnyhugger and I were, standing in their way ...

But before we talk about that, walk the Wonderland of Lights with me some more, in a rare-for-us pre-Christmas visit.

Oh, and here's just a part of the zoo that's a haunted forest, that's nice.

bunnyhugger getting ready to stamp a penny and not expecting it to get launched out into hyperspace. The dropping mechanism is a bit too enthusiastic.

Arrangement of trees and balls on a bit of empty field that I used to think was a pond because we always saw it covered with ice at my first couple visits.

This tree arrangement when I first saw it (you get a glimpse of it just a little up and right of center in the previous picture) looked like a prancing reindeer to me. As you can see here, that's just coincidence from how the tree's largest segments happened to be arranged. I did take a picture showing just the tree where the illusion was stronger, but the picture's too blurry to be worth sharing.

Snow-covered empty enclosure occasionally used for animal encounters. These are some of the enclosures built as Works Progress Administration improvements, back in the days we thought there were benefits to making the community better.

Another view of those WPA enclosures. The mongooses and meerkats are shown here in the summers, although the enclosures are very obsolete by modern zoo care standards and are scheduled for replacement with something better for the animals and easier to clean too.

Trivia: The first oil refineries in Bayonne, New Jersey, were built in 1875. By 1880 Standard Oil had built a pipeline there from the oil fields of Pennsylvania. Source: New Jersey: A History of the Garden State, Editors Maxine N Lurie, Richard Veit. (Also, wow, think of pipelines that long being built in 1880!)

Currently Reading: Standpipe: Delivering Water in Flint, David Hardin.

Merry Christmas, dear bunnyhugger. Thank you for wanting to spend it with me.

We try to get to the Potter Park Zoo's Wonderland of Lights every year. Usually we go between Christmas and New Year's. No chance of that this year; the event, normally held Thursdays through Sundays, was closing for the season the 23rd. Probably from not wanting to get the staff back together for a short operating week between Christmas and New Year's. Well, we can get there before Christmas, if we absolutely must. We chose to go Sunday night, even though it'd be a short trip --- bunnyhugger was working at the bookstore until early evening --- but I figured a short visit was better than none, and if something went wrong Sunday we'd have a backup date of Thursday. Thursday, it turned out, would get cancelled by the snowstorm, and I think Friday was too, so we got there what turned out to be the last day of the Wonderland.

Once again the Potter Park Zoo marked out a one-way path for people walking around the zoo. This started in 2020, back when we were still trying a little to contain the pandemic and crowd flow control seemed a useful tool. Not sure why it's still there except maybe it's proved a way to make it easier to tell when the place has cleared? There were complaints online that the number of lights had reduced, but I don't think it was by anything significant. I realized afterward there were two fixtures we hadn't seen. Some illuminated peacocks in the windows of one of the buildings were gone, but they were replaced by new illuminated penguins, so that's a wash. There was also this illuminated ballerina figure and I don't remember seeing that at all, but it's no great deal to change a couple figures out.

We had a harder time seeing animals. Most of them are in winter quarters, of course, but we had no luck spotting the arctic foxes, or the otters, or the wolves, which we usually get at least some dim glimpse of. There were some elk, but way off in the farthest part of their pretty large enclosures, doing that traditional zoo thing where they stay as far from the people as they can. In the feline-and-primate house the Amur tigers were nowhere to be seen. The big exception to all this was the snow leopards. One was out in the cold, sitting atop a rock and making those plaintif mrowls that sound like they really, really want you to ask who they're subtweeting.

There were a couple other nice spottings of animals inside the couple of buildings. Like, in the golden tamarind enclosure was ... well, a porcupine. If there were a tamarind in there we didn't see it. But we did spot a mouse running around, just like we saw in that same enclosure last year. Nice to see the mouse has made a good cozy home.

It was all pretty good weather for walking around the zoo by night. Cold, yes, but not bitterly cold or cold to where it'd feel dangerous. We were still very glad to have hot chocolate twice along our walk. The only down side is there wasn't any snow on the ground. This made the path, particularly the hills upward, safer, but less photogenic. Also on the paths: they had a bunch of signs saying they were aware of the condition of their walkways and there'd be improvements next year. If I'd known I might have taken some pictures of rough patches of asphalt, because I am like that, although by the time I noticed these signs my camera was complaining of a critically low battery. I would have sworn I'd charged it up to full, and I didn't take that many photographs compared to what I can do when I really try. I am going to suspect the camera was having some issue with the cold, but it is getting up there in age, as cameras go, and it might be wanting replacement, if you can get decent consumer-grade cameras anymore.

Though we had less time than usual, we were able to make two full circuits of the zoo before they turned the public audio off. And we stopped into the building where they do special events, where we were too late to get in on the Christmas-ornament-making station. We were able to chat some with the people showing off animal skulls and pelts and feel just, you know, how solidly warm the otter fur is. They had to see us squirt sanitizer on our hands before we could touch the pelts, I suppose like the one-way paths a thing that started for the pandemic and just kept going.

The zoo had several penny-stamping machines. I had a couple pennies. We only used the one station, though, near the food stand. The penny stamped well, but it was a challenge to find: the machine spat it out so fast it fell out of the coin tray and disappeared. A couple people also looking to stamp coins joined in looking, and couldn't find it; one offered a replacement penny so we could try again. I finally thought to shine my iPod flashlight into the space underneath the machine and there it was. It must have bounced off bunnyhugger's legs or shoes. You don't expect those penny stamp machines to be quite so caffeinated.

We were glad to have gotten a visit even if it wasn't quite two hours. It was one of the few really Christmas-y things we got to do around bunnyhugger's heavy work schedule. And, knowing that Thursday and maybe Friday would have been impossible, we're really glad to have gotten there.

Here's some more pictures from Halloweekends. Pictures from the Wonderland of Lights will be along, in time.

Some of the gravestone props used to spruce up dull patches of the Frontier Trail. None of them have funny names.

Turkey! This guy that we met in early September could not be coaxed to come out and maybe be head-petted because he already had food and privacy.

Turkey sitting up and wondering what my problem is.

The turkey decided my problem was not worth interrupting lunch for which, fair.

bunnyhugger tries to talk the turkey out of seclusion, but does not succeed.

Here's some of the other animals in the 'historic' zoo. You know, like how those early-19th-century Ohio farmers kept llamas.

Trivia: Up to 1826 the Michigan Territory (the lower peninsula) comprised two counties: Wayne and Washtenaw. Source: The Bicentennial History of Ingham County, Michigan, Ford Stevens Caesar. (So says Caesar. Wikipedia says Mackinac, Macomb, St Clair, and St Joseph counties had been organized by 1822, when Washtenaw County was first authorized. It's possible there's differences in precise definitions, though; Wikipedia says Washtenaw was, after its definition, still attached to Wayne County for 'revenue, taxation, and judicial affairs', which seems like a lot of what the point of a county even is.)

Currently Reading: King of All Balloons: The Adventurous Life of James Sadler, the First English Aeronaut, Mark Davies.

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.

And at last now the mathematics blog.

• From my First A-to-Z: Orthogonal
• From my Second A-to-Z: Orthonormal
• From my Third A-to-Z: Osculating Circle
• How December 2021, The Month I Crashed, Treated My Mathematics Blog
• From my Fourth A-to-Z: Open Set
• From my Fifth A-to-Z: Oriented Graph
• From my Sixth A-to-Z: Operator
• From my Seventh A-to-Z: Big-O and Little-O Notation

After getting to the gift shop, and getting some hot chocolate, we went back around the zoo a couple times, albeit taking fewer pictures this time around. Here's the evidence.

Going back through the zoo and also to see some things we had missed before. This is the great illuminated path leading past the otters, I believe.

The two swan figures are among the oldest still at the Wonderland of Lights. The ballet dancer is only a couple years old.

It's a great illuminated figure of a ballet dancer and I just regret the line holding the head steady makes it look like the figure's being hung. They need darker thread.

Here I just like how there's lights at every possible distance from the camera.

The skating bear figures sure seem like they should also be at Crossroads Village, although I don't think there are ones quite like this there. I think Bronner's has these too.

Looking up into the trees above those skating bear figures because I loved the way they arched like lightning against the black sky.

Trivia: In applying for the 1978 astronaut selection group Anna Fisher learned the position would pay about a quarter of what she earned as an emergency room physician in the Los Angeles area. Source: The Astronaut Maker: How One Mysterious Engineer Ran Human Spaceflight for a Generation, Michael Cassutt. (She applied and, in 1984, became the first mother in space. Her husband William Fisher also applied, was selected for the 1980 group, and flew in 1985.)

Currently Reading: Pierre-Simon LaPlace, 1749 - 1827, A Life In Exact Science, Charles Coulson Gillispie with Robert Fox and Ivor Grattan-Guinness. Although I picked up the book from the university library's solidly Q143 mathematics shelves I didn't realize it was going to start with mathematical topics, like, giving out sketches of work Laplace did in differential equations, rather than the usual, like, what we can tell about where he went to school. Bracing start!

Our first thing for New Year's Eve was more company. EJL, bunnyhugger's grad school friend who's still in town, came over for the first time in months. He's still teaching at Michigan State --- which had just announced it requires students to get vaccinated and boosted --- and we were hoping for gossip on how the pandemic is ravaging all possible plans for anything over there. Unfortunately, he somehow doesn't have any gossip about the place. Somehow he's got as steady as an academic job can be without having any idea what's roiling the department or what might be coming down the line. We don't know how he does it. So instead we just had a couple nice hours with a friend who's also an academic. Sunshine hid from the fire.

For the evening, and to ring in the new year? ... MJS had invited people to his pole barn, the one with forty pinball machines. He wasn't having a pinball tournament (although he was doing one on his ring-toss machine). And ... gads. The trouble was not having any idea how many people would be there. Like, that space, if there were ten people present? I might be able to take that. If there were forty people, as will sometimes happen? Especially considering the rate of Covid enthusiasts among Entitled White Pinball Guys? I didn't feel comfortable taking that chance. It would turn out that somewhere around ten people --- counting MJS's family --- showed up so maybe it would have been all right after all.

What we did instead was stay home with a fire going, and watch Yellow Submarine again. The return to a New Year's Eve tradition of my youth brought for us a 2021 that really, really sucked. But maybe this year will go better. We spent the first ten minutes of the film trying to figure out if we had the aspect ratio wrong. It turns out the movie was filmed in 1:1.66, that is, wider than a traditional TV without being, like, widescreen enough, and with the skinny vertical look of all the human figures we couldn't convince ourselves it looked right.

Yellow Submarine hit me pretty hard this year, in ways that I needed. I can't imagine why I would want the reassurance that a long, weird, confusing period of drifting uncontrolled through arbitrary perils because because a bunch of creeps decided to be mean would, finally, end happily and with a strong declaration of universal belonging, but there you go.

We finished the movie closer to midnight than would have been really good --- all that fussing over the aspect ratio ate time --- and so I didn't get our hors d'ouvres dinner ready until the last minute of the year. But then we could ring in the new year with our first meal, a late dinner, and a lot of vegetarian and vegan snacks, and the company of each other, and Sunshine giving a dirty eye to the last hour of 2021's last fire.

There's still several more days' worth of Potter Park Zoo pictures. Enjoy the look of things!

More of the reflections in that icy pond. It was lovely and I could not resist such a complicated set of lighting challenges.

The lights around the fencepost above that pond. Note that the strand on the left is incandescent bulbs, some of the few remaining against all the LED bulbs elsewhere in the picture.

The gazebo and the frozen pond that I'd taken the previous photographs from.

Trivia: The Battle of Pydna is known to have taken place the 22nd of June, 168 BC, as a lunar eclipse was recorded the night before. The Roman calendar had the date as the 3rd of September. Source: Marking Time: The Epic Quest to Invent the Perfect Calendar, Duncan Steel.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Volume 17: Sea Dust, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle. So the inciting incident is the discovery of Sea-Dust, the powdered, concentrated, ready-to-rehydrate compression of human knowledge. So that is a first-rate concept to start things out with and I can't wait to see how disappointing it is when the story abandons the premise and it all becomes Wimpy has to get on the other side of a door or something like that.

PS: From my Seventh A-to-Z: Big-O and Little-O Notation, something that touches on algorithms and errors, everybody's favorite topics!

And what was left for the appalling year of 2021? Company, that's what. The Thursday after Christmas bunnyhugger's parents came for a visit, something we had worried they weren't going to do this year. They don't visit enough and we mostly accept that we just have to visit them more to make up for it. But this did make a chance to push us to clean the house a way we hadn't for Thanksgiving, which we spent with them instead of up here.

It also was another chance for a fire, and one to run all day. Even more surprising, Sunshine didn't get anxious and hide from it. This might be good luck; she had ensconced herself under the coffee table before we lit the fire and it's possible she didn't notice it starting. We would have another fire that she didn't freak out about, raising our hopes that she might achieve peace with the fireplace, but then one more attempt since then sent her into hiding behind the recliner for hours.

Her parents would not stay long enough for us to play Mice and Mystics; they ruled that out to start. In fact as I understood it they planned to only stay an hour, barely longer than it takes them to drive up here. But somewhere on the line they agreed to stay long enough to have lunch, and we ordered pizza delivered that would give us I think two meals' worth of leftovers.

They didn't stay long enough but they weren't likely to. We were at least able to show the most important decorations, and we can hope we'll coax them into visiting again soon.

You haven't seen enough of the Potter Park Zoo yet. You'll see.

More of the trees and ornaments made of non-flashing lights outside the closed refreshments stand.

And one more picture as we walk along the path orbiting that open field, the one that sometimes has had a layer of ice fooling us into thinking it's a pond. This year was clear.

A peacock illumination, one of two in the windows outside the bird house.

Trivia: Colonial troops raised from New Jersey fought Spanish troops in the Caribbean during the War of Jenkins' Ear (1739 - 1741). Source: New Jersey: A History of the Garden State, Editors Maxine N Lurie, Richard Veit.

Currently Reading: Miscellaneous comic books sent me by a friend.

PS: From my Fifth A-to-Z: Oriented Graph, in case you missed it last time around.

The Tuesday after Christmas was set aside for a pinball tournament. Our oldest charity tournament, Silver Balls In The City, the one originally founded in the hope of a last-minute tournament that would get bunnyhugger into state finals ahead of MJS, who also started a traditional last-minute tournament that year. There is no state championship for 2021. There's supposed to be for 2022, but we'll see.

The format would be, again, strikes. This year we switched to ``group strikes'', in which the computer would group people into groups of three or four, and the last- and second-to-last players (by score) would get strikes. Three strikes and you're out of the tournament. bunnyhugger picked this format, and this number of strikes, as the number most likely to get us out of the bar before midnight. They close at 1 am these days and we did not want things going longer than they had to.

The tournament would get attacked by energy vampires before it started. One was the thing I told you about, the Entitled White Pinball Guy trying to call the International Flipper Pinball Association cops on us for having a pinball tournament in a bar. Another was a couple Covid supporters harassing bunnyhugger on Facebonk for her ``dictatorial'' insistence on people wearing face masks. You can imagine how happy things were around here after that.

And then there were further issues. Stern Pinball had a representative who happened to be in the Detroit area and he was planning to attend ... until he got exposed to Covid-19 and had to quarantine. (Also spoiling his promise to bring some new Stern merchandise to raffle off.) RED, the guy who fixes all the machines, also had a Covid-19 exposure and had to quarantine. MWS ... did not have fresh pinball exposure. But he did have a health crisis the day before and planned to stay home to recover. And, then, there was also a threatened snowstorm moving in. It turned out not to be much --- we still haven't had a big snowstorm this season, because we destroyed the climate to make the Dow Jones hit 36,000. But the fear was reasonable.

So between plague and weather we expected a depleted turnout. Sixteen people (counting bunnyhugger and myself) did attend, a decent and manageable group. We also remembered at the last minute we'd meant to have a side tournament. This we did as a ``closest to the pin'' tournament, where the objective was to get as close as possible to 100,000,000 on Road Show without going over. Mostly we wanted people to play Road Show more. But it turned out to be a great objective. Road Show is a game where scores in the hundreds of millions are routine. You can avoid the big-scoring modes easily, but then it takes forever to put a hundred million points together ... but if you start a big-scoring mode it's easy to go over. A good number of times over the night someone would play carefully and strategically and then hit one target too many and finish at 102 million, which made for good, frustrated fun.

Frustrating and not fun: my actual play. I got knocked out in three rounds, the fastest anyone got knocked out. (One person had to leave after the second round and so officially was recorded as knocked out first, but still.) And it wasn't even that I was put on games I was weak on; the computer drew me on tables that I love, like Guardians of the Galaxy or the Stern Star Trek. I just failed, early and often, and really hard, and will admit to taking it badly. After being knocked out and while nothing was happening with the tournament I went to some other games and played them and, relieved of the pressure of competition, put up a long string of lousy games. I ended up spending hours at this, playing worse and getting myself into an even more foul attitude, and missing the gradual dwindling-down of the active players, to 13, then to nine, to five, then to three and then to the final match. Which was on Willy Wonka, which I so like and which, given the choice, I should have gone and watched instead.

Other people, besides me, had good times, though. And the tournament ended with admirable speed. The first Silver Balls they were threatening to close the place (at 2 am!) on us; this, we were done by 11:00 at the latest and I'm not sure it wasn't earlier than that. And despite everything, it raised about two hundred dollars for the Capital Area Humane Society, so there's appreciable good to have come of it.

Now, more of the Potter Park Zoo.

One of the lionesses, also asleep, for the evening.

The Theio's Restaurant bench! I'd wondered if it was still in the felines-and-primates house. Theio's has been closed for years, and was torn down ages ago so that the property owner could have a vacant lot that does nothing for anybody. Here's a fossil of the venerable Lansing 24-hour eatery that never learned how to make coffee and one time just ... couldn't make waffles anymore.

And here's a snow leopard that I bet knows that isn't a real mountain behind them.

Trivia: Harvard College attempted public subscriptions in 1805, 1816, 1822, 1823, and 1825 to fund an observatory. All failed, although they did draw a $1,000 pledge from John Quincy Adams. Source: The Long Space Age: The Economic Origins of Space Exploration from Colonial America to the Cold War, Alexander MacDonald.

Currently Reading: Miscellaneous comic books sent me by a friend. And I know this sounds like a lot of comic books but, you know what? They're nice and easy to read and I like that.

PS: How December 2021, The Month I Crashed, Treated My Mathematics Blog, which was: worse than November did, but also, worse than average for the preceding twelve months. Hm.