austin_dern

Haven't had the time to start writing up Saturday at AnthrOhio. Was very, very busy this weekend going to amusement parks. So let me unload a mass of photographs on you. So let me close out Rye Playland and then we can get to more amusement park stuff.

From the intersection of the main and side midways, looking at the fountain and the Dragon Coaster.

Dragon Coaster's entrance by night. There's another retired car on the left, there; two people are standing near it.

DragonTron I found inexplicably fascinating. Here I have to have caught it in-between picture updates or for some reason they're showing the retired icon for the Fort Wayne River Dragons or something.

Except that here I definitely caught DragonTron in the middle of an image refresh cycle and that's just even more baffling, isn't it? I mean, what's the old and what's the new image in this context?

And now here's an interesting DragonTron shot. Is that a live view of the launch station? I couldn't work that out. It does look like the left half of the screen's a bit rougher than the right.

Dragon figurehead at Dragon Coaster breathing smoke by night. Doesn't that just look great?

Dragon Coaster's nice big tunnel. Looks handsome, doesn't it? All nice and sweet and innocent and ...

Gulp!

Night's over, alas. Operators from a bunch of rides milling toward, I assume, the employee area after the Grand Carousel's had its last ride of the night.

Main midway looking south and west, after the rides have closed down.

Fountains outside the park's main entrance, and beside the skating rink that's also part of the Rye Playland area, after the park's closed for the night.

We failed to grab a park map! I'm embarrassed by that. But at least I got a picture of the map sign, which makes Dragon Coaster look rather longer and more twisty than it actually is.

Trivia: Through 1930 unemployment in the United States did not exceed nine percent; in the Depression of 1920-21 it averaged 11.9 percent. Source: An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power, John Steele Gordon.

Currently Reading: Terrytoons: The Story Of Paul Terry and his Classic Cartoon Factory, W Gerald Hamonic. So on the one hand this is a plainly heavily-researched book about a figure and studio in animation history that was always there but that's always ignored. But it's also really sloppily written. Like, I come out of it knowing that Paul Terry, drafted into World War I, was put in the unit making instructional medical cartoons. What I can't tell you is whether he actually made one; the timeline of his induction and training and assignment and illness and discharge is so muddled and includes what looks like at least one typo somewhere that I don't know if he actually did any work or what it meant for his future animation career.

And what all's happening on my mathematics blog?

• Reading the Comics, June 4, 2018: Weezer’s Africa Edition, another of my meaningless edition titles but one that's maybe search engine friendly?
• Reading the Comics, March 9, 2018: Some Old Lines Edition which has a title that's technically relevant.
• Reading the Comics, June 13, 2018: Wild Squirrel Edition which has a title that isn't.

Oh yeah, want to know What's Going On In The Amazing Spider-Man? Mostly Green People Throwing Spider-Man Around. Read on to see why that makes sense as a capsule summary!

It's getting to nighttime at Rye Playland a year ago. How's it looking there?

Musik Express and the Derby Racer's dome, with the Ferris Wheel illuminated in the background. I love difficult-lighting shots like this.

Derby Racer's dome with the Ferris Wheel centered the way I so hoped it would be.

Super Flight in motion --- it was down for a while --- showing the cage with the four riders inside and yet it still somehow looks like a toy version of itself. I don't know.

Musik Express as seen from inside, from the seats in back of the facade.

One of a handful of fairy-tale scenes lining the outside of Rye Playland's Kiddyland section. This one is about the Sing-A-Song-of-Sixpence.

Rye Playland has one of the oldest Kiddylands out there. Over the entrance is the Kiddy Coaster, which opened in 1928 --- so it's a year older than Dragon Coaster --- but which adults aren't allowed to ride.

The Kiddy Carousel at Rye Playland's Kiddyland. We've seen this ride before, in other places.

The Kiddy Carousel in motion, beneath the moon. If I had a camera that could photograph the moon in focus this would be a picture of the year.

Rye Playland's midway at night. This is looking southwest from around the area of the Grand Carousel.

Trivia: Qualification testing for the Space Shuttle Main Engine required a successful test-firing of 65,000 seconds, approximately what would be needed for forty shuttle missions. The rated life of the engine design was 55 missions. Source: Development of the Space Shuttle, 1972 - 1981, T A Heppenheimer.

Currently Reading: Oswald the Lucky Rabbit: The Search for the Lost Disney Cartoons, David A Bossert.

AnthrOhio's theme this year was ``Barks and Recreation'' and they did a great job integrating the theme into the con's space and activities. Much better than any of the conventions we'd been to, that we remembered. Particularly, each of the convention spaces had a stand, with mock wooden signs holding the name of the place and, it transpired, an RFID card reader. This would be explained at Opening Ceremonies.

The gimmick, one of many that Morphicon/AnthrOhio has been trying to create a communal event out of just being at a convention, was that people could earn badges for their activities. By checking in at spots --- checking in recorded by tapping their RFID badges at these signs --- they could earn credit for achievements, and also earn points for their team. Participants would be one one of two teams, the Night Owls and the ... I forget. Early Risers or something. A group that we were not, by any sense of the word. And they promised it was all in fun and there wasn't any identifying information about what RFID chip matched what congoer. You know, in case you worried about fine-level movement detail being logged and recorded by goodness knows who and kept under unknown security and used for who knows what purposes.

Still, taking all that at their word it did seem like a fun enough idea and maybe even a better way to keep track of attendance at convention panels than just sending someone in to do a survey or asking panel-runners what attendance was like afterwards. (I say, as regular host of one panel that's never all that popular and of another that's only occasionally liked.) We were kind of up for it, but bunny_hugger kept missing chances to activate her card and join a team; you had to fiddle with something on their web site, which was no good for us on WiFi-enabled iPods, and then go to their computer just outside Main Events to activate a something else. It took a day for her to get all that registered --- and at that she somehow ended up on the Early Risers team --- and felt that she had spoiled her participation in the thing, or at least missed the chance to earn a good number of badges, by being so late to start. Me, I never did join; I forgot about the web site thingy even more resolutely than bunny_hugger did, including forgetting to go to the site after she had mentioned she was activating her card, until it was just ridiculous to even try.

It turned out that what determined whether you were on the Early Riser(?) or Night Owls team was not anything about when you first made your account. It was a registration question that was supposed to superficially have nothing to do with anything, to better balance the teams. The question: how do you feel about pineapple on pizza? (Or do you like it, or something like that.) When she realized this bunny_hugger was offended as we know how much anti-pineapple-pizza sentiment there is. Her team would always be behind in points, earned by people checking in to events; but the disadvantage in population left the team hopelessly behind. ... Although, not so, apparently. At Closing Ceremonies they revealed that about 49% of people had been on the Early Risers team and about 51% on the Night Owls. If the Night Owls earned about 60 percent of the points awarded that's just because they logged in more.

In practice I'm not convinced this RFID thing will help them better work out what popular and unpopular events are. Even without being on a team I did try to tap in, to show that I was at events, and I managed maybe a 40% success rate at remembering to do this. There were plenty of other people I noticed poking into a room, tapping in, and moving on. There might be some salvageable data about the relative popularity of things but I wouldn't want to try to bake the noise out of that raw data.

And there was some exciting news at Opening Ceremonies. That was that there'd be signups that evening for the Variety Show to be held Sunday. We always think we ought to do something with puppets, since we're the sad remnants of the convention's once-mighty puppeteering track. The chance to tell whoever was running the variety show that if you've got a part for puppets we could give it our best try was just what we were hoping for.

So that evening we went to the last couple minutes of the Whose Lion Is It Anyways? comedy show, there to find the promised signups. As the show broke up and the audience disbanded we saw a clear group of ... nobody, anywhere. I pestered Alkali, trusting that he would either know what was going on for the Variety Show or would know who to ask about it. No such luck; he wasn't going to be at the convention Sunday and was out of the loop on Variety Show planning. But he pointed us to someone else, at least. Who thought a bit and said that the signups were being organized at another room. This room turned out to be registration, which was closed for the day. I did knock several times, rousing the interest of absolutely nobody inside. So whatever these signups where they weren't there and then, either place.

bunny_hugger was confident she remembered the time and place right, but hadn't written it down at the time. I thought she was right, but I didn't play close attention to the time and place for signups, I suppose out of an assurance that it would be on the schedule (it wasn't) or would be easy to find by talking to performance-track people, and you see here how that went.

So this seemed to quash any idea of being the untrained and unrehearsed, but at least existent, puppeteering side of the variety show. Can't say we were impressed this this part of the convention's procedures. At the complaints session after Closing Ceremonies I did talk about how confusing this all was, and that there did need to be clearer ideas of who to ask about this sort of signup event as opposed to the event proper. I'm not sure that my point was made, as opposed to being lost under the general problem that schedule changes are never easy to deal with at a convention. But at least someone took a note that we were looking for signups and couldn't find anybody who knew such a thing could even exist.

Trivia: Between July 1869 and July 1874 customs agents at the Port of New York seized over 3600 shipments and secured 68 smuggling-related indictments, gathering over four million dollars in fines. Source: Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America, Peter Andreas.

Currently Reading: Oswald the Lucky Rabbit: The Search for the Lost Disney Cartoons, David A Bossert.

The Dragon's entrance and the smoke-breathing masthead above in the early evening light.

Secondary midway, perpendicular to the main one at The Dragon coaster and facing west. Mostly redemption games and a couple of concessions such as a place for fruit drinks or coffee.

Evening view of The Old Mill's entrance, and ticket booth, with The Dragon's lift hill in the background.

So there was driving to the new AnthrOhio hotel. It was just about the same trip, except that instead of finally ending by turning right off of US 23, the satellite navigator took us from 23 to ... I'm going to say I-71. Doesn't matter if it wasn't. The point is we turend off of that major road to an Interstate, which we stayed on for maybe a mile (a very slow mile; since we had to leave Coon's Candy by 5 pm, we were getting into Columbus at rush hour), then turning off that onto another Interstate, that to drive on barely long enough to get onto the road before turning off again. It was this strange, slowly constricting spiral of access ramps. But we finally got to the surface streets, to finally approaching the hotel, to the burned-out remnants of a Bob Evans that was listed as a place to eat in the con book. Apparently it was a really bad fire and pretty recently. Place was destroyed.

Also we passed a strip mall promising the Continental Movie Theater. Its sign promised that they were showing Scary Movie V. I didn't even know there was a Scary Movie V. We'd pass the sign a couple more times and it would fascinate me. I wrote down the movies they promised they were showing. They included Olympus Has Fallen, G.I.Joe: Retaliation, Oz the Great and Powerful, Oblivion, 42, and Evil Dead.

So what the heck? Why are they showing the films of 2013? That doesn't even make sense for a second-run theater. This would be, like, sixteenth-run. We formed a hypothesis. It was ridiculous but, given our familiarity with things like Conneaut Lake Park, it seemed sufficient: when the place closed down five years ago they left the board running.

We were wrong.

bunny_hugger found their Yelp page and that they were still getting reviews. They're still showing movies. This week they're showing Infinity War, Deadpool 2, Sherlock Gnomes, and Life of the Party. They're also showing Kaala, in both Tamil and Telugu-language versions. This is an (Asian) Indian movie and apparently the theater has a modest existence as the place to see Indian films in Columbus. Based on the reviews, the theaters may be run-down and the films might start at the wrong time and not quite be in focus and it might smell funny. But it's not expensive and it's got this niche. And the sign out front promises the movies of five years ago because ... uh ...

We're going with ``when the place changed owners five years ago they didn't get the passwords to the lighted sign''.

And it turns out that the Continental is more than just a bizarre movie theater. It's a 40-year-old quasi-utopian project, a mixed-use place that combined a shopping mall, apartments, and services into one big but walkable place. According to articles about its decline and eternal hopes for redevelopment, it was a swinging, happening place for young adults to start their lives all through the 70s and 80s --- heck, who back then didn't want to live in the mall, at least a bit? --- and then come the 90s and it wasn't. There's probably no single reason, but the place is surrounded by Interstates, Boring Corporate Parks, Boring Light Industrial Parks, a Wendy's, a Skyline Chili, and the burnt-out husk of a Bob Evans. You can make assumptions, although see how I was wrong four paragraphs ago.

But we finally got to the new hotel. It's much larger than the old hotel. The main rooms block is seven storeys, compared to the Holiday Inn's nearly three. It overcomes even the enormous growth of the convention since the new management decided to grow. There were officially 862 attendees listed this year; that's more than double what it was three years ago.

The hotel's nice enough. Newer than the Holiday Inn, although it's hard to say that it's in much better shape. We'd spend much of the weekend just learning the new layout; by about Saturday I was getting the hang of it. We were on the third floor, convenient, as there was a small express elevator near the panel rooms that only ran from the first through the third floors, giving us an alternate way to get back to the room. And the convention did not fill the hotel; there were people who just happened to be staying here while hundreds of weird-dressed people wearing mascot suits were playing. I understand the thrill of a convention taking over a whole hotel or, with Anthrocon, the whole city. But people who were just here because they were attending a vague relative's wedding finding out there's a theme park crashing their space? That is such good energy.

We got our badges in about the one five-minute window of the registration room not being overloaded. And we saw mystee, just long enough to agree that we were so glad to see each other and had to talk more over the weekend. We'd miss each other the rest of the con.

But on to important stuff. We could get to Hot Head Burritos, a fast-food chain that hasn't got up to the Michigan area yet and that we like in ways that people who live with the place surely roll their eyes at. Don't care. We really like it and we were able to get there before it closed. Also to have me distracted by seeing, muted, a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode that I surely knew but just could not identify. Finally I saw a scene that helped; it was the one where Data sets up a ham radio rig and gets a call from a little girl whose planet has a case of the imminent-explosions.

Back at the con there was ... not really much of anything happened. We explored the area, getting some idea of where stuff like Main Events would be, and hung out in Hospitality. Saw a couple people we recognized. Mostly, just eased into the convention space until it was a good time to get to bed.

Trivia: There is no evidence that the New York Knickerbockers sought to print or distribute or promote their 1845 rules, now seen as the first codified set of rules of baseball. Source: But Didn't We Have Fun? An Informal History of Baseball's Pioneer Era, 1843 - 1870, Peter Morris.

Currently Reading: Oswald the Lucky Rabbit: The Search for the Lost Disney Cartoons, David A Bossert.

Reading the Comics, March 9, 2018: Some Old Lines Edition

PPS: Poking around Rye Playland still.

Under-the-fence view of The Dragon's roller coaster unloading. Yes, the guy in the back seat is getting off the ride in the wrong direction; there's always somebody in the group.

Some of the old cars from The Dragon are set up where anyone can just sit in them and wonder how they didn't used to have seat belts or lock-down bars. (The roller coaster isn't that crazy. And it has a fixed bar in place that one could grab if one felt uncertain.)

Detail of the historic plaque that talks about The Dragon's history and significance, including what seems like a diagram that explains how the roller coaster works. It seems like it's from a patent application, although I'm not sure there was anything in The Dragon that would have been patentable.

We left for AnthrOhio early, in the morning, the Thursday before Memorial Day. It was earlier than we wanted to get up, earlier than we wanted to leave, but what choice did we have? Since the convention moved to Memorial Day weekend, we couldn't stop at Coons Candy on the way back Monday; the candy shop with the furry-friendly name and mascot would be closed. (It's a family name, but they've got a cute logo of a confectioner raccoon now.) To visit at all we'd have to stop in Thursday, and they closed 5 pm Thursday. So we had to be in Harpster, Ohio, between 4 and 4:30, so we had to leave bunny_hugger's parents house as close to 1 as possible, so we had to have the rabbits set up in their home before then, so we had to leave before 11 am with a car loaded full with everything we'd need for the weekend plus everything our rabbits would need, plus our rabbits. Oh, and also did I mention that Sunshine's pet carrier --- the one we got free when we adopted Penelope --- is too large to fit in the rear of my hatchback, only up front, so there's stuff that could not be loaded until at least one rabbit was put in? So that was a fun three-dimensional polyominos puzzle to start the day.

But we got the rabbits delivered and set up, much as we now have them at our home: one downstairs and one upstairs. We guided bunny_hugger's parents through their medical needs. Sunshine needs an eyedrop twice a day. Penelope needs a bit of meloxicam on a wheat thin once a day. Compared to what they had learned to do when caretaking Stephen this was nothing, but they were still unsure. But bunny_hugger was also able to do them a big favor, finding the malware they's somehow gotten, and that intercepted all attempts at going to mapping web sites. They could still get directions by going to Yahoo Maps.

We were about ten miles out from their house when we realized we'd left bunny_hugger's neck pillow behind. It makes long car rides much better for her, preventing pinched nerves if she dozes off. She made do, using one of the plush rabbits brought along as prizes for the Bunnies SIG she hoped to run and cursing herself for the accident of having even brought it in to her parents' house. (She'd had it around her neck when we brought rabbit stuff inside, and took it off when we sat down to lunch, and forgot to pick it back up.)

But the important thing: we got to Coon's Candy with about 45 minutes to spare before the place closed and easily 85 seconds before we would have exploded from needing the bathroom. Might have been able to take a rest stop somewhere along the way. Anyway the shop was as we'd have hoped, one wing full of tchotchkes and T-shirts and puppets --- Folkmanis has a new guinea pig, one that's got a mouth easier for my fingers to move, but that hasn't got the long hair that makes mine so cute --- and cookie cutters and signs about how put-upon moms do everything around here. One wing full of candy. bunny_hugger's father had hoped we could bring him some liquorice drops and, you know, we just could not find any. She got some anise jellies instead, and he would say these were pretty good, when we returned on Monday.

And then on to AnthrOhio's new hotel. We also learned along the way that the old hotel, the Holiday Inn Worthington, had not been torn down yet, for all that its imminent demise forced the convention to relocate. We're not sure just why it hasn't, although I expect it just reflects that every project starts later than it means to. When I ran into Ed the Hyena, head of AnthrOhio, I did cheerily be the 84th person to give him the good news that the convention could move back no problem, and he winced. But the new hotel was, we were told, barely a mile or so from the old and not very different a place to get to.

We'd pass a zone of deep weirdness getting there.

Trivia: In 1848 Prussia repealed its ban on smoking in public places, years behind most of Europe did. Source: Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants, Wolfgang Schivelbusch.

Currently Reading: Oswald the Lucky Rabbit: The Search for the Lost Disney Cartoons, David A Bossert.

PS: What's happening in the Rye Playland arcade a year ago?

So, someone was able to get the cumulative Jack Pot shot on Cyclone and earn her way onto the high score table.

Look at that. Grand champion on an amusement park-themed pinball game at an amusement park. Is there better?

80s music nostalgia show going on, under the name 'Come Together', as we played pinball and poked around the boating area.

And before my next big event report, how about a little pinball tournament? This was one held at a person's house. Two people's, properly. That father-and-son team on the eastside held a tournament in their home, on eight pinball machines there. It was eight rounds, four-player groups, PAPA-style scoring. That means the top-scoring person in each group getting four points, second place gets two points, third place one point, last place zero points. Many of the games were modern ones, including the new Grauniads of the Galaxy table. But they brought in some older games too, including the weird mid-80s solid state game Tag Team, and the electromechanical Boomerang. And Genesis, my old friend from Pinburgh finals.

I had a lousy day. I mean, the pinball-playing was fun, yes. But I played lousy, coming in last or in third place all the time. Incredibly, I didn't bottom out, but I did finish in 13th place out of 16 competitors. I couldn't even get a break on Genesis.

bunny_hugger, though, now she was on fire. Er. No, that wasn't her. That was the game she was playing. She had just put up a compelling lead on Boomerang, and another player stepped up and drained, and then BIL came up for his turn. Then BIL turned the game off. bunny_hugger was baffled; she didn't see that the game was filling with smoke, and for a moment thought this was bizarrely out-of-character for BIL. They ignored my question about whether we should be adding much fresh air to something smouldering, at least without a fire extinguisher on hand, and opened the pinball machine up.

So the knocker, that strikes a mallet against the cabinet when the replay score's been reached, had melted. It looked like when bunny_hugger reached the play score, the hammer tried to strike, and something went wrong. The knocker kept soaking up energy until it heated up and the plastic smouldered. And, have to say, that's pretty awesome.

Boomerang is an electromechanical, with scoring wheels that don't move when the power's turned off. Also they were able to turn off the power to the correct game on only the second try. But this did mean that they were able to keep everyone's scores for the interrupted game, and --- once the power to the knocker was snipped off, and the game tested out --- resume.

bunny_hugger was in favor of resuming, on the general principle that if it's possible to resume a game after a major malfunction you should. On Tag Team, which had gotten its power knocked out in the first attempt to unplug Boomerang, this was impossible; the scores were lost and everyone had to replay from scratch. But while she's very well-versed on International Flipper Pinball Association rules, and loves following discussions of tournament rulings, she couldn't make that call even if she were one of the designated officials. BIL was, but he was playing in that game too. But her opinion, and BIL's concurrence, supported actual tournament director JMA in carrying on the game.

Well, bunny_hugger had a mediocre last ball, and BIL and one of the other players had great last balls and she fell to third place and she grumbled that she should have insisted on playing a replacement table.

She would have a good day, overall, and get into the playoffs. The first round of that went all right. But she tied for advancing to the second round of finals, and had to play GRV. On Genesis. They both have lousy games, although GRV has a slightly less lousy game, and I can get back to reassuring bunny_hugger that she isn't an awful pinball player and nobody thinks she is.

Also while I've had games break down while I was playing them, she's the one that's set a game on fire.

Trivia: By 1663 English King Charles II's household owed the royal rat-catcher £12, the bowling-green keeper £91, and the watchmaker more than £500. The apothecary bill was maybe ten times that. Source: A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game, Jenny Uglow.

Currently Reading: Neither Snow Nor Rain: A History of the United States Postal Service, Devin Leonard. Yeah so a late chapter talks about that period in the late 80s and early 90s where lawful gun-owning postal workers decided to shoot people at work, and it mentions how in 1986 Patrick Sherrill killed fourteen other people and wounded six more, the ``third-worst mass shooting in American history'' (not counting when packs of white guys would decide to destroy a non-white community). Jeez, these days that'd barely close school early.

PS: Rye Playland! And it turns out the Grand Carousel won't reopen until 2020, as it's being restored from water damage. The work's being done by the people who had it already in very good form, so that's reassuring at least.

More of the Flying Witch's facade, with figures that poke out from it. The demon on the right has teeth that rotate as ... well, teeth of a geared system.

The witch of the Flying Witch; she rocks back and forth while the ride's in attract mode.

Where the train cars emerge from the Flying Witch ride; also, something to airbrush on your white van if you find yourself in 1983 for some reason.

Reading my humor blog? Why not? I understand; it's been running kind of dadaist nonsense lately. I'm hoping to get back to stuff I care about but who has the heart to care about things these days? Anyway, RSS feed.

• Exciting Information About Our Rewards Program, last week's big piece and inspired by a gas station receipt.
• Statistics May: What Readership Around Here Was Like So Recently and how much of it there was.
• Statistics Saturday: Some Things Which Are Not Components Of May so yes, I found another joke to mine out of an utter nothing of a premise.
• What’s Going On In Gil Thorp? Who’s Provoking People Into Offensive Outbursts Now? March – June 2018. And oh am I having fun reading this.
• Could This Be The Final Shocking Revelation About City Hall? As I dig another joke out of that essay from like a month ago.
• The 38th Talkartoon: Chess-Nuts; could this be the end of Old King Cole? And, oh good grief, I forgot to explain what's surely a then-current pop culture reference.
• Minor Update To The Rewards Program since I had a paragraph that wasn't needed beforehand.
• Everything Interesting There Is To Say About Baseball Without Talking About Playing It, this week's major piece.

And now back to Rye Playland and the Grand Carousel.

Sometimes the Grand Carousel isn't in motion and you're able to take pictures anyway.

Rounding boards and the top of the carousel building, so you can see the painted scenery and mirrors and also the cupola that's where (I think) the fire happened.

Looking at the floor of the carousel. Notice the slats designed to let the horses swing outward just in case the ride ever gets up to speed.

Looking close at the Rye Playland Grand Carousel's band organ,

Rye Playland's Grand Carousel band organ, in context. The National Carousel Association census lists it as a McDonough 165 with Gavioli facade.

One of the three chariots on the Rye Playland Grand Carousel, this one the sphinx-themed one.

The sea serpent-themed chariot on the Rye Playland Grand Carousel.

Detail of the Rye Playland Grand Carousel's sea serpent chariot: A small serpent or eel clinging on to the big partner. Sea serpent chariots often have smaller snakes as secondary figures.

One file of four horses at the Rye Playland Grand Carousel, showing a couple of horses coping with being harnessed in their own ways.

Trivia: Xenon tetraflouride, the first artificial noble gas compound, is a solid orange crystal. Source: The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements, Sam Kean.

Currently Reading: Neither Snow Nor Rain: A History of the United States Postal Service, Devin Leonard.

PS: Reading the Comics, May 30, 2018: Spherical Photos Edition, trying to keep up with Comic Strip Master Command.

We left the Mythic Creatures exhibit with about an hour before the museum closed and stumbled into, y'know, stuff. Like immediately outside the room were World War II military uniforms. Then stamps, including some designed by a local philatelic club for a proposed but not printed 1956 series commemorating the Grand Rapids furniture industry. A diorama of toys for the decades brought out memories for us. Trivial Pursuit. Socker Boppers. What the label described as a Rubik's Cube but that I recognized as a Rubik's Revenge, the four-by-four version of the puzzle. And it's not like it didn't even have a Rubik's Revenge logo on one of the white stickers on top of the cube. I trust someone was fired for this blunder. From decades earlier than ours, a Popeye Spinach jack-in-the-box. Tinkertoys and Lincoln logs. A ouija board. Big, metal toy cars just perfect for gouging a sibling's skin out. From the earliest decades, playing cards with figures ike the Old Maid, Sunny Jim, Baxter Brown, Auto Reggie (perfectly dressed to go along with Lucille in his merry Oldsmobile), and the Katzs Kid.

The Grand Rapids Public Museum embraces the ``let's have piles of stuff'' motif and that allows for great stuff. Bicentennial merchandise with of course Gerald Ford's face smiling hesitantly over it. A red-white-and-blue design cash register from the American Freedom Train, again from 1976. A circa 1880 word puzzle, ``Blocks of Five or the Administration Puzzle''. ``Blaine is in --- How can Harrison Get Him Out?'' Can you get the continental liar from the state of Maine out of the five-by-five letter blocks? I dunno. The big clock mechanism from the former Grand Rapids City Hall. Chunks of decoration from the former Grand Rapids City Hall. Taxidermy figures of local wildlife, including a raccoon and cubs that reinforce how they're adorable but always look golden-brown in taxidermy form.

And finally the carousel, a 1928 Spillman carousel with a bunch of non-horse figures on it. Many carousels have, as this does, a lion and a tiger. This one also has deer, a goat, a camel, and a giraffe. It's been at Grand Rapids since the early 80s; the carousel Grand Rapids had, back when it had an amusement park, is off somewhere else and unavailable. It's in a nice glass enclosure connected to the main museum by a thin corridor, so that it can be seen from the riverside and just be full of light. We had a ride to ourselves, accompanied by the band organ, and I did wonder how many rides they get on a typical weekday afternoon when there's not a school group in. But didn't ask.

We had a bit of time left and walked around the first floor, which has something they bill as a three-quarters-scale replica of Old Grand Rapids. I'm not sure how this works exactly. But it had facades and interiors that do look like what an early 20th century city might have had. A horse-drawn trolley car, like you see in a Harold Lloyd movie. A replica train station with that dazzling black-and-white tile floor and books of tickets for the Grand Rapids and Indiana or the Grand Trunk or other rail lines. Some area fossils. One of those clocks showing how recently humans have appeared on the planet (humans here represented by plastic Flintstones toys). A chunk of the Berlin Wall, along with a photograph to show where it was when it was an intact evil wall.

By then they were getting ready to close up. We explored the gift shop until 5:00 arrived and they really started closing things down. I marvelled at a map of the constellations that sure looked like the one I had as a child, although I suppose constellations look pretty similar today as in 1984. bunny_hugger snagged some astronaut ice cream, an ever-reliable joy from any museum visit. And we went off to a night at Grand Rapids pinball league after that.

Trivia: Cleveland baseball club manager Napoleon Lajoie contracted sepsis after a spike injury in 1905; this grew into blood poisoning blamed on the dye in his stockings. Source: A Game of Inches: The Story Behind The Innovations That Shaped Baseball, Peter Morris.

Currently Reading: Neither Snow Nor Rain: A History of the United States Postal Service, Devin Leonard.

PS: Can We Tell Whether A Pinball Player Is Improving? A problem in linear regression.

PPS: Back to the Rye Playland arcade!

Coin slot for the Bat-a-Ball. I'm delighted by the name 'North American Philips Controls Corp' and by the typeface used here.

bunny_hugger at the Twilight Zone, just next to Bat-A-Ball, and getting to hear the game's ambient sounds and background music --- Golden Earring's ``Twilight Zone'' --- for the first time. The arcade was quieter than the bar we typically see the game at, and the game was set to play at about 166 dB.

Workroom at the arcade that was left open, letting me snap some exciting pictures of ... well, all right, of junk, but it's junk they have in storage for some purpose or other, and isn't that neat?

Over on my mathematics blog I started a sequence of actual interest to the local pinball league. Someday I might even tell them I wrote it. If you want to read my mathematics blog via RSS, here's your URL. If you'd like to read it in a more old-fashioned way, here, too:

• Reading the Comics, May 23, 2018: Nice Warm Gymnasium Edition
• Who’s The Most Improved Pinball Player?
• How May 2018 Treated My Mathematics Blog
• Reading the Comics, May 29, 2018: Finding Reruns Edition

and how about the story strips? What's Going On In Gil Thorp? Who's Provoking People Into Offensive Outbursts Now? March - June 2018.

Now back to Rye Playland and more of its historically significant and fascinating stuff.

Sign of maybe future times? Westchester County has had ideas about redeveloping Rye Playland for years; one that sure seems like it would have spoiled the place was abolished when Superstorm Sandy flooded everything back in 2012. Here's a poster showing the 2017-era redevelopment plans. I can't make any sense of them from this picture, but look at the nice old late-20s vintage architectural detail above.

Main entrance for the Dragon Coaster, along with one of the original stock train cars, retired in favor of one that has restraints. The entrance has these nice pictures of a girl in a skirt riding a wheeled dragon.

Entrance to Playland's Old Mill, one of the very few actual Tunnel of Love-style rides that exist outside old cartoons. In the 80s the ride was renovated so that it has gnome animatronics and this waterworks/cave-mining theme and it still looks great.

Ride operator leaning into the brake at the Old Mill launch station.

Path diagram for the Old Mill ride that can be seen from outside the station, in case you wanted to build a replica of it in Roller Coaster Tycoon. Not illustrated: how much of the Dragon coaster rides above all this.

Historic landmark sign outside the Old Mill's entrance, explaining something of the ride's significance.

Picture of part of the detail of the historic sign, with the brightness and contrast fiddled with so it's possible to see the design sketch that's otherwise light background. Yes, the sign reads, ``The designer's freehand drawing style is ihdicative [sic] of the spirt [sic] of the amusement'', which falls just short of quite making sense.

Boat ready to be launched at the Playland Old Mill, along with the ``map'' out front promising wonders and terrors within the Waterworks and Gnome City and Troll Caves and all that.

And here's a good look at the ``map''; the ride's got this style of cute, slightly childish scariness to it that's all quite fun. Great ride; go on it if you can.

Trivia: By 1908 Captain Gustave Ferrie was able to use radio signals from atop the Eiffel Tower to communicate four thousand kilometers. Source: Signor Marconi's Magic Box, Gavin Weightman.

Currently Reading: Hero-A-Go-Go: Campy Comic Books, Crimefighters, and Culture of the Swinging Sixties, Michael Eury.

It's a good night. We play a lot of nice old games. Some of them the ones that got me into pinball, like Weird Science or Secret Service. Some that are part of that weird cartoon-mayhem theme that ran through the late 80s, like Mousin' Around or Bad Cats. Bally's Game Show, a silly game with such a great theme.

We have a couple games we've got to play before the end of the night. Mystery Castle, one of the handful of games from Alvin G and Company. It was organized by refugees from Gottleib pinball --- the original pioneer company of pinball --- when that fell apart in the early 90s. They only made a few games but they're all weird and fascinating. Mystery Castle is one; the theme is to complete some kind of quest by gathering tokens from around a castle, each one gotten by completing some set of shots. Some are easy. Some we've never done. Some we've never gotten close to doing. It's worth trying. If we had all the time in the world to play we might get to understand the game. Maybe Pinball Arcade will get around to simulating it, especially once it loses the Williams tables at the end of June.

And then there's Domino's. Spooky Pinball, which has made a couple of games now including Total Nuclear Annihilation, has also made a Domino's-themed game, for use in ... I guess pizza places. Never seen one on location, nor have I ever expected to. I don't even know if they've ever shipped anywhere for location play. But yes, the playfield has a Noid on it. It seems to be themed to achieving various stunts to advance your career as a pizza guy. I have a bizarrely good game. There's a couple multiballs available, and I keep starting them. It's a bit spooky. Yes, the game is meant for extremely casual players, and the VFW sets up its tables pretty easy for these kinds of events. (Maybe in general, since, y'know, who wants to do all the work-in-kind it takes to be a member of the club and then play a frustrating game?) But this was spookily good. I have one of those games that just can't end.

The game ends abruptly on the second ball, after bunny_hugger has a pretty good multiball going. But during it, as best we can figure, two balls went into one of the scoops and only one ball ever came out. The ball search couldn't figure out where the pinball was. It seems likely to me that a ball somehow dropped out of the mechanism and rolled lose in the playfield. But one of the staff couldn't figure out where it might have gone, and had to restart the game, hoping that a fresh start might help the game find the lost ball. No luck, and the game was down the rest of the night. Which was only a couple minutes, but still. Glad I saved my two-ball score; I'm pretty sure it was a great one.

There's just a couple minutes left. I get in a game on Firefly, which had been occupied before. And we dive into the second outbuilding, with all the electromechanicals, and finally get a chance on Thunder Bolt!. We close out the night on Mad World, where I again recount --- this time for GRV, who's happy to see us (he's one of those people you can hear laughing from the next town over, at least as long as he's not having a bad couple games in competition) --- the time I lost a game in a best-two-of-three on that by two points. And started the next game, with the scoring reels settling to 000 versus 004. And joked, ``Oh, just leave it, what are the chances four points will make any difference?'' And had to repeat it because my competitor didn't hear me. GRV loved the story and bunny_hugger put up with hearing it again.

And this closed out the night; the VFW's Friday night closed. The place would have two more days open for the weekend. A 12-hour day on Saturday that by reputation is always crazily packed, which is why we've avoided it. And another 6-hour day on Sunday that we'd miss. There was a triple pinball tournament in Fremont, on the other side of the lower peninsula, we wanted to get to instead.

We left, sighing at how there were all these games we hadn't gotten to, despite it all. But what we did do was pretty great as it is.

Trivia: When New Jersey's Camden and Amboy Railroad received its charter in 1830, it took minutes to subscribe its million dollars in stock. The contemporary sale of $100,000 in stock of the Delaware and Raritan Canal Company took days. Source: Railroads of New Jersey: Fragments of the Past in the Garden State Landscape, Loret Treese.

Currently Reading: Hero-A-Go-Go: Campy Comic Books, Crimefighters, and Culture of the Swinging Sixties, Michael Eury.

PS: How May 2018 Treated My Mathematics Blog, that nice easy writing to do.

PPS: How about some more Rye Playland? I'd like that.

Peering up at the Crazy Mouse launch station and showcasing the disturbed-mouse cars.

Frontage of the Zombie Castle, one of several dark rides that Playland has. Go ahead, you decide whether the lizard-man, the vulture, the dragon, or the ... owl(?) is the best facade creature.

The ticket-taking cage for The Dragon, Rye Playland's major roller coaster. There's no need for tickets anymore --- you scan a pay-one-price wristband or a card --- but the booth remains and someone sits in it.