austin_dern

Thursday all I managed was to get one game in on everything in Main and Classics. bunnyhugger had a similar strategy, but she was further divided by the need to enter Women's, and I believe she ended up not entering games on all six Classics tables to clear time for Women's. Nor did she end up focusing on Main very much. In this she seems to have been like most of the women playing at Pinball At The Zoo. You can get into the women's championship with a strong finish in women's-only events, or in open-to-all events, and there's big open-to-all events you can get five or more ratings points in every week. Women's only events with this kind of rating are Pinball At The Zoo and that's that.

For a while she was up top of the rankings, but as the day wore on and more people showed up she dropped lower. By the end of the first day qualifying she was tied for 14th, with the top 16 players going on to playoffs, and despaired that she would make it when everyone playing Friday entered their games. I countered that given how busy Thursday was, it was likely that most everyone who was going to play at all had put scores up. My prediction was that the roster of finally qualifying women would look a lot like the people who currently were there. The positions would be scrambled, surely, but probably 90 percent of the people currently above the cut would be there in the late morning Saturday when women's finals began. The discomforting thing to answer that is that wouldn't the people most likely to drop below the cut be the people in 14th and 15th and 16th place?

Well, I thought to save a screenshot of the standings after the first day and can tell you: I was wrong that 90 percent of the top 16 would be there at the end of qualifying. Only twelve of the top sixteen made it. The interesting thing is that three of the women who didn't make it were in the top eight after one day. The other was the woman who was tied with bunnyhugger after the first day.

My strategy for Friday --- when FAE couldn't come with us, owing to work --- was going around playing the games I thought I could most likely improve my standings on. For example, my Thursday game of The Shadow had been a disaster, three rapid drains. Surely I could do better, by ... no, that was another three rapid drains. All right. And then The Shadow went down so solidly that I gave up on the idea of ever getting back to it.

In Classics I got back to Jungle Queen, putting up a more okay-ish game that still wasn't in the top 60 of players. I tried Golden Arrow, especially after listening to some better players about how they got their scoring strategy together, and somehow did worse than I had done before. At this point, I gave up on Classics and focused on Main, so far as I played at all.

Particularly, like, their Iron Man pinball. Their table was prepared for tournament play by a simple strategy to make it harder, removing this pop-up post that stops the ball in the middle of an orbit shot. The better players weren't thrown too badly by this. I was completely beaten by it. There was in the free-play area an Iron Man that I was able to use and practice things like ``how can I make the skill shot without that pop-up post?'' and ``what exactly do I do to start the Iron Monger Multiball again?'' and armed with this knowledge, was able to nearly quadruple my score to 97th best among the entrants.

The one where I kept figuring there'd be a breakthrough was Metallica. It's a table I know quite well, and that usually treats me well, and it wouldn't be hard to break through on it. The median score was about 30 million points and that's not at all hard to hit; just get two multiballs on a game that has seventy multiballs. A hundred million, which would be unlikely on a tournament game but hardly unthinkable, would be a top-15 score. So I spent most of my Friday --- and Saturday --- entries crashing up against that, somehow failing to start the simplest multiball, the Sparky electric chair, over and over and over until my final game started in the last minutes of open qualifying on Saturday. That one, finally, I managed a partial breakthrough, getting one multiball started and getting to about 16 million. About half what I thought I could reasonably get, but still, far better than I'd been doing, and beating even skilled players like MWS or MAG.

Reader, I failed to make playoffs again. Even with B Playoffs taking a largest-ever sixteen players (and that after A Playoffs took a largest-ever 24 players), I finished in ... 41st place. Just behind MWS, PH, and BIL, which I have to say is at least really good territory. PH I'm sure was was so far out of contention only because his responsibilities running the tournament --- and fixing games, especially the often-broken Shadow and Bobby Orr's Power Play --- ate up his time.

And now a last half-dozen pictures of Roger and his birthday present.

Roger leaping back into his pen. It happens he caught his foot doing this, so when we first worried about his mobility issues I thought it was that he'd wrenched his foot a moment before this picture.

He had grabbed the 'pie' shell and carried it off to eat. Note that his hindleg is a little damp from the condensation on his freeze bottle.

That's not going to slow down his eating, though.

And now here he is having a bite of pie shell.

Just a nice picture of his eye. He looks wary or concerned or unhappy but that's just bunny face, you know?

Slightly different framing of his profile and he doesn't look quite so disapproving of all these goings-on. For now.

Trivia: The + shaped direction pad for the Nintendo Famicom controller was derived from the controller its lead engineer, Gumpei Yokoi, developed in the late 70s for the Game & Watch LCD games. Source: The Ultimate History of Video games, Steven L Kent. If I'm not being misled from what I can find about these games, it looks like no Game & Watch game used a + controller before 1982. But it would need development sooner than that to be consumer-product-ready, of course.

Currently Reading: Force: What It Means to Push and Pull, Slip and Grip, Start and Stop, Henry Petroski.

I forget when on Saturday at Motor City Furry Con this happened, but it was sometime over the day: bunnyhugger asked if I had thoughts what it meant that her parents hadn't sent a report about Athena's eating. I laid out my reasoning: if she had not eaten at all they would have e-mailed to say a crisis was potentially developing. If she had eaten all her pellets they would have sent the great news that she was feeling well and eating plenty. Therefore, she had to be eating indifferently, probably eating her vegetables and hay just fine and her pellets maybe if you held them up to her mouth so eating was the easiest way to get them out of her sight. This was her interpretation too, and it would transpire that this was correct.

Since the convention Athena has been eating much more reliably, touch wood, and we think we've found a possible explanation for the problem. We'd been giving her as much food as our Flemish Giants got, and, for example, Roger was about 50% more rabbit than she was. We cut her pellets down to half of what she had been getting and she had no trouble finishing that. Then bunnyhugger read the pellets bag estimates for what rabbits should eat (by weight) and we found we weren't feeding her quite enough. With meals in-between too little and too much? She seems happy with that now. If we'd gone and checked instead of just feeding her like she was a larger rabbit we might have avoided a lot of stress on everyone's part.

It's still odd that she was happy to overeat for months before turning off it. Most rabbits, like most humans, are happy to eat until the food is gone. Stephen would in his youth leap up the coach and the hutch to get at the pellet bag and dive into it never to emerge again. Also it's odd that she was overeating for months and not gaining weight. But she's young and maybe could work off the extra calories.

After the variety show I know we did go to the Dealers Den, finally getting in. We'd gone at like 6:30 the night before to find the place closed and surprised because we would have sworn the schedule said it was open to 7 pm. But this puts me in mind of a thing that happened Sunday, when we were sitting in Hospitality. We overheard someone on con staff discussing how annoyed they were that they had to have someone sitting guard at the Dealer's Den entrance --- it was housed in an outbuilding, just behind the patio, probably well-positioned for doing wedding receptions and the like --- because people would not stop coming up and trying to open the door. The person he was talking to asked, well, did you have a `CLOSED` sign up? Something with the hours posted? No, because of the high winds --- the whole weekend kept trying to be a severe storm before the severe storm actually rolled in --- any sign they tried taping to the door would blow off. I felt like they maybe hadn't considered taping something to the inside of the glass door. Also if both bunnyhugger and I mis-read the Friday night schedule the same way maybe there was something wrong with how the schedule was laid out.

On looking at the pocket schedule now I'm thinking I mis-understood the Con Store's opening hours to have been the Dealer's Den. But I'm not sure how to fix that; it's not like you can just leave the Con Store off. The pocket schedule organized things by what floor they were on, with the outdoor pavilion grouped with first-floor things and the Con Store with the second-floor things. The choice is compellingly reasonable. Maybe the best alternative would be to have swapped colors; Con Store was in bright while Dealers Den was in turquoise. One was more compelling to my eyes, but you can't count on colors for critical information.

bunnyhugger had brought her sketchbook, in case she found someone whose art she wanted to commission, but she didn't find anyone that time around. Similarly in going through the Artists Alley, back in the main hotel on the second floor; shame to go without getting a commission but that's all right. It's not a tradition to get one at every con, just a common thing to do.

Enough looking around the pinball arcade at Indiana Beach. Let's ... look at it just a little bit more and then move back into the amusement park proper.

Candy crane machine in the pinball arcade, with fun candies like Munch, Iceese's, Giggles, and 4 Icekteers.

And noticed this fun bit of game detail on Roller Coaster Tycoon: the promise that Pinball 1 is fun, just like you'd get some Peep's thoughts.

Back outside here and enjoying the look up at the sky ride.

The evening shadows haven't quite gotten to the water park or the eastern end of the boardwalk.

Always going to appreciate seeing the Fascination parlor and its signage.

And this is a look up at a Flying Bobs that used to be at Coney Island C'town.

Trivia: The Soviet Union's 1929 attempt at calendar reform had five epagomenal days, days not part of any week or month, so that the rest of the calendar could be twelve months of thirty days each. The days were chosen to commemorate various facets of the revolution; on the Gregorian calendar, they appeared on the 22nd of January, the 1st and 2nd of May, and the 7th and 8th of November. Source: Marking Time: The Epic Quest to Invent the Perfect Calendar, Duncan Steel.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine Sundays Supplement Volume 15: 1953, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

We have enough hay for a while. We'd had enough already, as we got fifty pounds --- something like a cubic yard --- delivered last year and while Roger and then Athena eat hay tolerably well, they don't eat it that well. And of course in the gap between Roger and Athena nobody had any hay.

Well, turns out that bunnyhugger knows a way to get hay rather cheaper, and that's to have it on a subscription plan. The longest time between deliveries is eight months for some reason, not twelve, and turns out when they were verifying whether we were ready for another delivery she missed the e-mail to postpone this one. So yesterday morning someone dropped off another fifty pounds of hay, and we've now got something like eighty pounds of hay in the basement.

Going to really count on Athena to step up her hay-eating especially if she's going to carry on not caring for pellets.

Now to some more of Kings Island pictures from the couple hours we spent there Thursday.

The horse with that PTC shield from yesterday. Plausibly a lead horse given that it's right behind the chariot.

I don't know who the JP of these initials are. It's possibly some reference to something else in the park, the way the Adventure Express signs reference current and past exhibits.

Cherubs on the chariot, carved with all the baby fat.

Here's one of the scenic panels above the carousel. I don't know if the Christmas tree scene is authentic to the carousel's origins or was a completely fanciful creation.

Last ride! We had overlooked the Backlot Stunt Coaster, despite it plunging out from its sign like this. So we made good on that.

Operator's station for Backlot Stunt Coaster, with a nice view of the control panel. It's not the most complicated of panels.

The ride's theme is that you're doing a race around a movie lot so here's the backlot version of the Los Angeles River.

Made it to the gift shop, as we'd hoped. The 16-bit Coasters Shirt was nice, and different to the one MWS has --- he got his the year Mystic Timbers debuted --- but we didn't need that this time. The photo book about Kings Island seemed nice too but not compelling to me.

Oh, and while we were walking out we encountered a couple enormous bees on the flowers. Not the little ones that occupied that drink stand at the Eiffel Tower but your classic bee the size of a softball, like this.

bunnyhugger gets her own macro photo of the bee.

And as promised, we leave the park early in the day. Note that WindSeeker wasn't out of operation even more than a couple hours after getting stopped with me aboard.

And a last look at the entry gate, which still has its classic 70s design. And the promise of the new family coaster, Snoopy's Box Car Racers.

Trivia: At the start of the Battle of Britain the British government asked phosphorous manufacturers Albright & Wilson to make a quarter million Molotov cocktails a week, using any bottles at hand, for defense against a Nazi invasion. The firm commandeered screw-top beer and milk bottle production, creating a national shortage. Source: The 13th Element: The Sordid Tale of Murder, Fire, and Phosphorus, John Emsley.

Currently Reading: One Heartbeat Away: Presidential Disability and Succession, Birch Bayh.

First, some rabbit news. With Athena not being all that interested in eating again she got a vet visit. This was during my office day at work, so bunnyhugger, on her Spring Break, took her in.

The verdit is we don't know why she hasn't been interested in pellets. It turns out she has some points growing on her molars, the kind of thing that could be an early stage of malocclusion, teeth missing each other in a way that makes it painful to eat. Which would explain her not eating, but is inadequate to explain why she's happy to eat hay and vegetables and treats and cardboard and wood and power cords. The gastrointestinal incident would explain her not eating, but not why the disinterest in eating has lasted given she's definitely not still in it. She's far too energetic (and her droppings too healthy) for that to be the case.

So with medicine once more giving way to idiopathy we're left with some guesses. The first, to Athena's great relief, is that she's off Critical Care. The vet thinks it's not likely to be giving her nutrition she's missing, and having the food shot into her stomach might keep her from feeling like she needs to eat anything. Also, she hates it and if we keep force-feeding her she's likely to seek revenge. She is going to be getting some shots of the gut-motility-increaser, three jabs a day in the scruff of her neck. But while she tenses up at that she doesn't get stressed by it, and she's quick to forgive of that insult to her dignity.

In the meanwhile, she's got a couple days to start eating pellets before another follow-up. And she did eat some pellets when she got home. Just not all of them.

Second, some mouse news. bunnyhugger had opened Crystal's cage to give her a treat and then, distracted by something or other, forgot to close it for an hour or more. Had we lost our mouse? There was an excellent chance we hadn't, since her cage is on top of the rabbit hutch, four feet or so off the ground, and mice do not go plunging into the unknown depths if they can avoid it. But sometimes there isn't any avoiding it, and if she were feeling unusually adventurous she could climb down the hutch or to the record player tower beside it. All we could do is wait and see if we'd ever see her again.

Or we could go looking, and bunnyhugger decided on looking. She poked into the lair Crystal has made of the bedding material in her cage and found it surprisingly solidly packed, resistant to the damage of her fingers intruding. And then that there was at least one empty space inside, with the soft feel of a mouse suddenly having a very annoyed day in there. With the mouse proven to have stuck around bunnyhugger stopped her intrusion, and left a treat, that Crystal was in no mood to stick around for. Pretty sure if there were any more litter left to use she'd have used it to build an even more impenetrable fortress by now.

Very likely that, originally, Crystal had taken the treat and retreated to her lair to eat it or cache it, and never went back to discover the door had been left open. But we can't rule out that she didn't explore how far she could go outside and then returned to the safety of home, rodents being as they are fond of checking back in at home a lot after exploring a tiny bit away. So, we have a mouse who's at least happy enough with where she is to stick around there.

You saw yesterday me closing out the last pictures of our Tuesday at Kings Island, so what was there to see next on the photo roll but our Wednesday at Kings Island. Here's how it started:

Parking lot shot. The Kings Island sign you can kind of see in the middle is about where we parked the night before, to give some idea how much busier it was even though it was early in the day. Mind, the day was also 2,850 degrees Fahrenheit and muggy.

Near the bathrooms up front and about the same location where I took those photos of the guy photographing the reflecting pool that you saw yesterday.

There was a staff-members-only door open nearby and I got this view of the Hall of Fame, which they appear to expect will be expanded upon.

Sculpture of Don Quixote alongside the International Midway. bunnyhugger found that it is based on a specific real Don Quixote sculpture but is, remarkably, not a copy. Just a variation on the idea.

bunnyhugger goofing around with Don, possibly pleading with him to leave the windmills alone, they have enough problems.

The German/Bavarian area of the park has dwindled to an Auntie Anne's, but at least pretzels are a German thing. (There's a few other spots but the original premise that there was a touch of World's Fair to the place is all but gone.)

Trivia: The Dutch West India Company in 1630 chose as its main base in the New World a set of delta islands on the Brazilian Coast, on which they would build Mauristaad, modern Recife. Source: A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World, William J Bernstein. (By 1654, with the Portuguese revolt against Spain, the Dutch colony was taken over by Portugal. Which seems odd to me as the Dutch were busy revolting against Spain themselves at the time.)

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine Volume 56: Uss vs Themm & Thees & Thoos!, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly, Editor Stephanie Noelle. Done with Yapple versus Napple and we get to ... somehow ... another College Football Season story?

Athena's finished getting her injections, and she agrees she's finished with them, although she's been mostly very patient about them. SHe'll try to tense her skin up, making it harder to make the injection, but she doesn't try to launch herself out of range or anything. The meloxicam she's not enthusiastic about, but she's willing to take, if it's dribbled out a little at a time. This allows us the chance to see her lapping up the medication, her tongue twitching like hummingbird wings, occasionally flipping to the opposite side of her mouth and then back again.

Critical Care she remains very critical of, not just resisting the lure of food shoved into her mouth and not just wriggling her head out of the way, but using all her young-bunny strength to squirm out of the way. Wednesday night we'd taken to the Bunny Burrito, wrapping her tight in a towel, to avoid this, and Thursday it failed entirely. She worked out how to liquefy herself and squirt out at an instant. I've gotten good at grabbing her after that, but she's not willing to stay held. Last night she leapt out of my hold and was flying at bunnyhugger's face when I snagged her midair. bunnyhugger was getting ready to be seriously hurt by an eight-and-half-pound rabbit with a temper and was glad she was not. Me, I thought of that as ``the last thing a banana sees''.

Still, the morning, she got around to taking a couple mouths full of pellets. She hasn't finished the bowl, as I write this in the morning, but she's not refusing them either, which is progress. Hopefully we won't need to force-feed her tonight, or at least won't have to do it much lon

Enough looking at the history of Kings Island. Now it's time to look at stuff we did there.

Now here's the real actual Eiffel Tower at Kings Island, a one-third scale replica. My recollection is that it was closed when we visited, but the drink stand at the base was open, but swarmed by bees.

Quick look back at that garden because this stone sculpture, I'm told, used to have a small waterfall in it. But that got renovated out of existence and looks like they're not planning to bring it back, a shame.

At the far end of the main reflecting pool is this stage. We were there as a show was going on --- I forget what about; I'm going to guess it celebrated songs of the 80s --- and while it looked interesting we moved on and failed to catch any of its eighty repetitions the next day. Maybe it only ran once the next day. Don't know. We didn't see it.

Here's one of the roller coasters new for this year, and new since our last visit. Not Pigpen's Mess Hall; that's a restaurant. But this is Snoopy's Soap Box Racers, which had opened May of last year and so was about two months old when we visited.

Here's the lift hill for the ride, which is a shuttle coaster and starts by pulling you back and letting go.

And you do go up this hill, which rises up high enough that you can't actually go off the edge, but that sort of stunt is fun.

Trivia: Benjamin Franklin's 1750s post office reforms allowed for the paying of sending charges by the sender (rather than the recipient), albeit not at the rates specified by the Post Office Act. Source: The King's Best Highway: The Lost History Of The Boston Post Road, The Route That Made America, Eric Jaffe.

Currently Reading: The Secret of Apollo: Systems Management in American and European Space Programs, Stephen B Johnson.

It can now, at last, be revealed.

When I last talked about looking for a new pet rabbit it was the adequate but unspectacular meeting with Walter and Larry. We didn't change our mind about Walter (or Larry). And we understand that Larry has been adopted out. But ...

bunnyhugger learned of a young female rabbit suspected of being a Flemish Giant --- granting that every non-dwarf rabbit is labelled ``Flemish Giant mix(?)'' to make them more attractive to big-bun enthusiasts --- out near Kalamazoo. And we got pictures. She was a young rabbit, barely old enough to be neutered. Found out in the wild, somewhere, despite being a domesticated rabbit and so not appropriate for outdoors on this continent. And, when taken in, in some pretty rough shape. Diseased (who knew a rabbit could even have a tapeworm?) and injured, likely reflecting some conflict with a raccoon or something that she survived.

We were enchanted, bunnyhugger even moreso since she saw more pictures more often than I did. We thought it worth going out to at least meet the rabbit and see how we felt. ... And then, you know, we just kept having stuff going on. Evenings booked by something or other. Weekends occupied by, for example, going to Cedar Point. We could not find the time to make the hour-long drive and see how this rabbit felt to us.

At some point this transitioned into, do we really need to know to put in an application? To fill out the survey questions and give a photo tour of the area we'd plan to keep her, in case the rescue found us acceptable? And once we had that set up, well, why not at least put down the adoption fee so that if we did meet the rabbit and felt good with her we could take her home right then?

So, somewhere around last week we had it basically decided: unless this was a rabbit violently repelled by us, we'd be adopting her. (Our credentials and our setup and all were, of course, quite good.) All that we needed was time to meet her and ... you know, this week? Monday and Wednesday bunnyhugger was working, Tuesday was a pinball tournament, Thursday Halloween, today another pinball tournament ...

Well. This afternoon, while I was still at work, bunnyhugger went on her own to the outmost skirts of Kalamazoo, and formally met this rabbit and made official what was a foregone conclusion.

And so today we welcomed into the household Athena, named for the goddess of wisdom and war (the latter reflecting her presumed survival of a fight with a predator). She's large by rabbit standards --- over eight pounds --- but small for a Flemish Giant, if she's eight months old. She's right-sized for a Flemish Giant if she's six months old. In any case she's the youngest rabbit we've ever had, and likely ever will.

No time for pictures tonight; see above comment about pinball. And probably not tomorrow because of thing taking us away from home tomorrow. But, soon, I promise.

We are finally again a home with rabbit.

Trivia: When the World Series was made a permanent baseball institution in 1905 the National League and the American League agreed the winning players would receive an ``appropriate memento, in the form of a button''. Within a few years giving some kind of jewelry --- initially, a stickpin --- became the custom. Source: A Game of Inches: The Story Behind the Innovations that Shaped Baseball, Peter Morris.

Currently Reading: Images of America: Lake Shore Electric Railway, Thomas J Patton, Dennis Lamont, Albert Doane.

Not a lot going on right now so here's just a bunch of Motor City Fur[ry] Con pictures from this April:

Dutch rabbit giving chase to a black rabbit, the sort of thing going on all the time. (I think this might have been a three-legged black rabbit but can't swear to that at this remove.)

Bye!

Rabbits gathering around the Bunny Orb.

Oh, I think Bunny Orb heard me talking about them and wasn't happy.

Oh, Bunny Orb just wanted a bit of head-grooming.

And now on to, I believe, the Bunnies SIG. Here's a suiter ready for it.

bunnyhugger's ears peering over the scene as people mill around.

Lining up for the group photo.

Here a bat just wears a bunny on their head, simple enough.

Some of the hallway poster art that gathered at the convention.

Another poster of someone's event. Also there was a raffle for video game stuff that we didn't win and that I might have forgotten to enter anyway.

Here's bunnyhugger playing a pure mechanical pinball game that someone left in the arcade room. (I believe it was an original build, not a vintage device.) We couldn't get it to plunge reliably, though.

Trivia: The football team for the Michigan Agricultural College --- now Michigan State University --- had its first undefeated season in 1913. Among the teams played were Olivet College, Alma College, the Buchtel College of Ohio, and the University of South Dakota. Source: The Bicentennial History of Ingham County, Michigan, Ford Stevens Ceasar. This was a ``mere'' seven-game season, but the team outscored its opponents 180 to 28, with three shutouts and no game where the opponents scored more than seven points. (This was also the first year they beat University of Michigan.)

Currently Reading: The Life of Lines, Tim Ingold.

Thursday after work we went out to meet a rabbit. Two rabbits, in fact. bunnyhugger had found a pair of rescued rabbits ready for adoption and in a town in the Lansing area. These were literal rescues, two domestic rabbits who'd been abandoned in the wild. After being caught and treated for everything from fleas to tapeworm(!) they're about ready for a permanent home.

So this was our chance to meet them. bunnyhugger had originally started talking to them about just one rabbit, the one with the pleasantly human name of Walter. But the foster keepers were pushing heavily the idea that he should be adopted alongside Larry, named for everyone's favorite gym trainer from Pokemon Spain (probably not). We were given not-quite-clear answers about whether the two were a bonded pair. It seems unlikely that two male rabbits would decide they just had to live together, but on the other hand, if they'd been set loose in the wild and stuck together they probably have some interest in being with one another.

Our meeting was ... well, you know from my lack of a report about the new rabbit/rabbits adopted that we didn't take them home. Walter was an active and curious rabbit, throwing stuff around but not quite venturing outside his pen to meet us. Larry was even more reserved, staying on the far side of his pen apart from one moment of hopping up to my hand, nose-bumping it, and then recognizing me as a stranger and hightailing it back to his reserve. This reserve isn't a bad thing --- it's absurd to think whether we adopt a rabbit depends on whether they decide to flop at our feet twice --- but it must be admitted.

We didn't feel anything right at the moment to say we had to have either of these rabbits. They're nice, certainly, and we probably would get to like them well. We'd prefer to have larger rabbits; these were a more ordinary seven or eight pounds and not in any way Flemish giants, though they had some handsome shape to them. We might come back to them, if we start to feel the rabbit-lack in our lives too much, the way Penelope the Californian came to be with us for too little a while. But for now we're looking yet.

Here's some more pictures from Easter, mostly visiting bunnyhugger's parents and their town.

Oh, Pookie, how can that be comfortable? ... I deliberately didn't rotate this picture to the correct orientation because this is more interesting.

Walking around town. One of the ancient, near-forgotten boat ladders was cleared out enough to be usable.

The bandstand had gotten renovated lately and it's looking nice.

Hey, look at that ancient rock wall in the park, I never noticed that before. How old could that be?

Ah, it's from 2015. All right.

I'm guessing the place was actually renovated or maybe restored to usability in 2015, and that the rock stairs and all are much older.

Trivia: In 1973 the International Astronomical Union established a Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature, which created task subgroups to name features for the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, and the outer solar system. They had in 1970 established a Mars nomenclature working group for features revealed by Mariner 4 and anticipated to be revealed by Mariner 9. Source: Voyager: Seeking Newer Worlds in the Third Great Age of Discovery, Stephen J Pyne.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 45: A Great Mystery, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

We haven't adopted a rabbit. But bunnyhugger became aware of a compelling rabbit in need of a home, a bunny down in Jackson, Michigan. Not a Flemish Giant, or even a New Zealand, a rabbit almost as big as a Flemish but, you know, pretty big yet. (We think Sunshine was likely a Flemish/New Zealand cross.) This would be a more average-size rabbit, like, eight pounds or so.

The distinctive thing, though: his ear. Something attacked it, so the poor thing's almost half chewed or burned away. And ... like, lengthwise, so the part of the left ear that touches the right ear is there. It's the outside of the ear that's gone. The rescue didn't have information about how it happened. A fight with something seems most likely.

We like large rabbits, yes, but there's something compelling about a rabbit that's had such a life already, and bunnyhugger kept coming back to his page. And Jackson isn't far away; we could meet the bunny and maybe bring them back any afternoon.

The rabbit was adopted, but not by us. Have to suppose it was by someone looking forward to caring for a rabbit who'd had a previous life that hard already. Hope they're what he needed.

Going to share pictures of the Women's North American Championship Series at Wizards World arcade, much like the last couple days. But there's a big surprise coming this time ...

I think every time I see a Grand Lizard I photograph the backglass. It's just such a good example of this kind of art, you know?

Also my, but this grand dragon has a look, what with the ... harness that seems to be support for her cape of tiny skulls? Also pretty sure she's not kneeling on top of a squat, wide creature with that face (above the 00 and 40 readouts) but I can't swear to it.

I stepped outside for a snack and then noticed something happening out front. What's this?

Yeah: it's a brand-new pinball game being delivered!

It would not be entered into the tournaments, of course, but it would be open for playing in just a few minutes after this and become the thing everyone had to try at least once.

Installing the game. You can maybe see the scoring is three seven-digit LEDs; the game is deliberately retro with the look of a mid-80s game but, of course, modern play style.

Getting ready to put the glass back on and open it up to general play. In an ominous move the game defaulted to being five quarters --- $1.25 --- a play, although they soon changed that to a dollar a play.

And now, a game's getting moved out to be put in tournament play. I had written it was Nine Ball earlier but no, it was Stars getting swapped out.

The move. ... Sure hope that guy works for the arcade.

Here's what they needed that Stars for. The epic alphabet battle between AB and BC.

Jacket left behind on a stool, which struck me as the sort of thing that shows the tournament advancing and people getting tired and maybe also figuring that it's not that cold inside the venue. (It would get a bit warm, possibly because of a hundred games all turned on and there being no windows.)

Some of this stuff is free giveaways meant for anyone who wants it. Some of it is door prizes for people who are in the tournament. Choose wisely. (The Godfather is a Jersey Jack pinball game I saw at one (1) Pinball At The Zoo and nowhere else. I saw more Grand Lizards at the Women's Intergalactic Pinball Tournament in July than I have ever seen Godfather pins.)

Trivia: In June 1893 the British battleship Camperdown collided with Admiral Sir George Tyron's flagship Victoria because of a faulty signal Tryon issued, and that no one had courage to countermand. Tryon and 358 officers and men died in the collision. Victoria's second-in-command, John Jellicoe, survived. Source: To Rule The Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World, Arthur Herman.

Currently Reading: The Emerald City of Oz, L Frank Baum. Marvel Comics adaptation by Eric Shanower, Skottie Young.

Thursday, as the sharp-eyed or the long-memoried out there may know, was my birthday, 52nd in a so-far-unbroken series. It happens that it was a work day for me, and that bunnyhugger had a morning appointment in Ann Arbor that brought her to the brink of madness because every road leaving Lansing, driving between Lansing and Ann Arbor, and in Ann Arbor is under construction. But she got back shortly after my workday ended, and a little before her reading group was starting. Which is a long way of explaining why we didn't do anything, not even go out to the former Kokomo's where they don't have a roller coaster anymore and apparently have let the miniature golf course badly decay. I'm hoping we can get to an amusement park this weekend.

But bunnyhugger was kind enough to give me some presents. One is a book, a 1200-page anthology of humor writing. There's a lot of names there, from familiar names like PG Wodehouse or Robert Benchley through to names I kind of know like Petroleum V Nasby. There also seems to be a chunk of James Joyce's Ulysses in there.

More exciting, though less tangible, is a piece of art. bunnyhugger had commissioned a non-furry artist, Meike Wallum, to draw Austin in the style of a 1950s funny-animal comic book and Wallum just nailed it perfectly, getting a picture that's friendly and open and just looks like the covers of a Dark Horse reprint of Harvey Comics or something. It's gorgeous and I understand why bunnyhugger had been quivering with anticipation to give it to me.

bunnyhugger noted that she had had to sneak some information out of me, to get the name of an example 1950s funny-animal comic book to explain the style concisely. She'd done this by asking, apropos of nothing, what that kangaroo character I keep drawing was named. (Spunky, a character for Star Publications who kept disregarding his sleepy mother's good advice and then having an adventure, often a dream, that teaches him a lesson. See this story, from page 37 on, for a particularly wild example.) So once again, it turns out to be possible to hide something from me by just declaring, ``I am about to hide something from you, do you understand?''

Pictures of dear Roger got a good response yesterday so let's have some more from the same photo session.

Roger standing on the threshold of the unconquerable void of the floor.

Roger standing on the other threshold, having gone back to his pen's area and the fleece underneath his pen. He didn't have much trouble getting across the floor but he'd rather not have had to deal with the wood.

What he absolutely could not put up with was the fence blocking off the dining room, though.

bunnyhugger tries to talk Roger into posing for a film photograph.

Roger had his price for posing and that was food, but he would take headpetting especially if it would get him food.

And now he settles in for hiding under bunnyhugger's coat and getting belly petting in.

Later, he puts some more thought into the fireplace.

... Ooooor maybe he'll go home? Hard to decide. There's a fair chance he had smudged his chin on the fireplace stuff by now.

The completed version of a jigsaw puzzle which had had bunnyhugger stumped for months. The challenge is that the enclosed picture shows a moment shortly before the scene of the puzzle, so you have only a loose reference to find where pieces go and, you can see, that Turbo 3000 vacuum cleaner is a big, low-contrast segment that isn't in the 'before' picture.

There is a lot of funny stuff going on in the picture, though, with like every direction having something going on. It's not all bugs being confused and crying for help. Note, for example, the bug that's on the wanted poster; can you spot them in the scene here?

Do you spot the bugs making off with a battery? Or the bee promoting some bee pride, plus, the revelation of what that wanted bug had stolen three cents for. The bug declaring ``Oh come on'' was a longrunning source of joy around these parts.

The small bug that had been using the opened book as a half pipe and who's now crying out 'Hurt!' was one of those things making us lightly sad. It all looks bad for the bug city but note there's graffiti already saying 'Rebuild Our City', so, the residents have survived this before and will again.

Trivia: By summer 1962 there were about 12,500 miles of Interstate Highway System open in the United States, with another 34 miles opening on average every week. Source: The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers who Created the American Superhighways, Earl Swift.

Currently Reading: Comic books of various sorts.