austin_dern

I finished another week of my humor blog without running out of things to write about. I do have fears of that, yes, and you can probably tell there are days that I'm slumming, especially when I have a high-effort thing going on my mathematics blog. But I haven't run out yet! Somehow. If you didn't read all this on your RSS reader or your Friends page then here's the week's pieces:

• What To Do For Valentine’s Day which I guess is not so timely now but, what the heck.
• What I’m Thinking About While Telecommuting and the home office is snowed in but I'm not.
• Statistics Saturday: Birdhouse In Your Soul In Alphabetical Order which at least chefmongoose liked but I swear it made me dizzy to compile.
• What’s Going On In The Phantom (Sundays)? so you're caught up on nearly all the story strips.
• 105 Minutes Of Your Life You Won’t Get Back, Unlike Any Other 105 Minutes Somehow? or me recommending a podcast episode.
• What I Need In A Science Fiction Novel To Get Me To Read It (good advice for any writers here!)
• Probably Wouldn’t Know What To Do After The End Of The World Anyway, based on an actual dream so you know it's interesting.
• How Dry I Am, this week's big piece, which I'm already thinking about taking in to the shop for major renovations. Hm.

And now to pictures from the last day of our Omena vacation. This'll close out what we saw of the house and then on Sunday should come some pictures that will blow your mind. Promise.

The kitchen of the rental house. It was also the room we'd kept our rabbit in, inside a pen in front of the oven there. He seemed to take it well enough and we didn't have any serious issues except where we discovered how the sink was backed up through no fault of our own.

See? We can clean up a dining room well enough. Under the table you may be able to make out the trap door leading to the basement.

The living room with the carpet we were so afraid of getting dirty we didn't use the living room for anything until the last night.

And the ... other ... living room, including it turns out a modest but respectable DVD collection underneath. We put the stereo cables back where the house's instructions told us they should have been; when we had first got there the cables had fallen to the floor or something and we were a bit lost.

Reverse angle on the rug too scary to use.

bunny_hugger consults with our lost rabbit during his last morning in the yard of the house we rented. Considering that he was just barely recovering from a fly strike that left him closer to death than we imagined he is in really good shape. But I notice his nictitating membrane in his eye there, often a sign of pain.

Trivia: About 190,000 persons hired by the Civil Works Administration were classified as ``non-manual and professional'' laborers, including artists, teachers, window dressers, bookbinders, historians, architects, statisticians, and clerks. Source: American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put The Nation To Work, Nick Taylor.

Currently Reading: The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen, Kwame Anthony Appiah.

PS: Reading the Comics, February 11, 2017: Trivia Edition, some more comic strips none of them very deep.

Let me review my humor blog for the past week and then we'll get on to the last evening spent in the rented house in Omena that we liked so.

• January 2017’s Scraps File or how I turn some odds and ends into fresh self-deprecating comedy about my pants.
• Some Groundhog Results and pity the folks who think I can be of any help.
• Statistics Saturday: My Motivation or excuses, whatever.
• What’s Going On In The Phantom? Continuing my recaps of the story comics.
• And What I Find when I grab an old picture and try to pass it off as inherently funny.
• Statistics Tuesday: What January Meant For My Humor Blog as I discover my hidden purpose in blogging.
• Why I Am Not Paying Attention To You and yeah, it's screens that are at fault.
• What To Do For Valentine’s Day, this week's big piece, no crafts involved.

Would you rent to people who make a mess like this of the dining room table? Yeah, well, we cleaned it all up. The pile of stuff on the far end, from the Bird Songs Bible through the Yahtzee game were the homeowner's. On the near end of the table are the books borrowed from the Omena General Store and which I suppose we'll return when we get there again, except for the one bunny_hugger's father sold to the used book store.

View from the dining room to the living room of the rented house. The rug there was so thick and comfortable we were basically terrified to step on it lest we drop something staining on it. We overcame that enough the last night to play a round of Talisman and I think one of Betrayal at the House on the Hill.

Overgrown weed something in the backyard. Our lost pet rabbit kept trying to shuffle his way generally in that direction and we're rather sure he did this with a plan involving digestion.

The house's back side, as seen from about that impressive-looking tower of weed. The grill to camera right of bunny_hugger we were terrified to use because we had the idea it was brand-new and we didn't want to spoil its newness. After investigation revealed it had ben used at least once before we were comfortable grilling stuff for the last night there.

View of the rented house from up front, and a door we didn't really use. The back door was more convenient for getting to the car and getting any view of ... anything, really. Houses turn out that way sometimes. I have no explanation for this phenomenon.

View from the end of the dead-end street on which the rented house was. The trees in the background were part of the rented property and were once part of a working orchard. No more, though. The trees near the camera were still farmed, if I am correct in my understanding of things.

Trivia: One woolsack, a large square bag filled with cloth and used since the reign of King Edward III as symbol of England's staple trade, remains in service, as the seat of the Lord Chancellor presiding at the House of Lords. Source: Shakespeare's Kings: The Great Plays and the History of England in the Middle Ages, 1337 - 1485, John Julius Norwich. And I bet they went and abolished that since the book was written anyway since Britain seems to be determined to toss off all its charming quirky stuff and cling to the bad parts anymore.

Currently Reading: Tubes: A Journey To the Center Of The Internet, Andrew Blum.

PS: Reading the Comics, February 3, 2017: Counting Edition, more of last week's comics.

So here's my humor blog from the past week, if you didn't read it originally or on your RSS feed. Here you go.

• Craftiness, last week's big piece, about crafts.
• In Which I Get Worried What Some Advertising Server Thinks Of Me and serves me right for paying attention to the ads.
• Statistics Saturday: What The Full Moon Reveals About You and you might be surprised.
• What’s Going On In Alley Oop? Another story strip recap.
• Caption This: Finally We Understand What’s In Cargo Bay 6, a scene I'd forgot about from Star Trek: Enterprise.
• Some Weather-Forecasting Animals, an abbreviated guide.
• The Eternal-Ish Question some pondering and a survey even.
• January 2017's Scraps File and stuff you can use if you like. s

Another day, another day ending at the beach, from our summer vacation.

Found inside Joe's Friendly Tavern: Fish Tales. It's an old familiar pinball machine to us at this point. And we looked at it and noticed the factory-default high score on the table there and figured, oh, we could take that. Well, we only got one game in each and ran out of quarters, not enough time to figure out where the shots were, so we didn't get to leave our initials on a pinball machine in a tavern in a small town up north.

The beach in Empire, Michigan, almost walking distance from Joe's Friendly Tavern. You get nice sunsets like this on the Great Lakes.

The Robert H Manning Memorial Light, on Empire Beach, a memorial to a lifelong resident of Empire. I do not understand why he gets a lighthouse like this except that, you know, you make friends and this sort of thing happens. It dates to 1991 and is the second-newest lighthouse in Michigan, says Wikipedia. (Detroit's Tricentennial Light is newer.)

Meeting of gravity planes on the starbase Yorktown as seen in Star Trek: Beyond.

bunny_hugger kneels, camera and coffee in hand, ready to take a photograph of the sunset from the beach. Folks were packing up, strangely, since the sun was about to go down and the place looked all the better for that.

Everybody's Dad caught piddling off the boat launch.

Trivia: Josiah Dwight Whitney, head of the Geological Survey of California from 1860 to 1874, surveyed the highest point in the contiguous United States (Mount Whitney) and the lowest (Death Valley). Source: Maps and Civilization: Cartography in Culture and Society, Norman J W Thrower.

Currently Reading: Barnaby, Volume Two, 1944-45, Crockett Johnson. Editors Philip Nel and Eric Reynolds.

My humor blog the past week had more longwinded titles than usual. Wasn't on your RSS feed? Here's your chance to read them all now:

• The Boot: And How I Got It, last week's big piece, about my shoes and chronic agonizing pain.
• On Tour with P T Barnum and a funny thing he said happened to him.
• Statistics Saturday: Problems Occupying Me again funny because true?
• What’s Going On In The Amazing Spider-Man? Rocket Raccoon is going on, that's what's going on.
• Possibly The Biggest Problem We Do Have Right Now and again it involves Mark Trail.
• I Just Need You To Tell Me Of Course I’m Completely Right About This based on stuff that happened last weekend.
• In Which My Sleeping Mind Doesn’t Accurately Remember When Ogden Nash Died, Somehow which disappointed me because I had reason to think I might just get this one right.
• Craftiness, this week's big piece, about making stuff.

Back to photos of the summer trip. Today's are photographs of Glen Arbor.

One of the nearly infinite number of little artist boutiques in Glen Arbor. It's a small town, quite photogenic, and full of stuff for tourists like us to look at or maybe even buy perhaps? Anyway, picture your classic small town with maybe two traffic lights only the whole main downtown area is this.

Central garden and main shop and main cafe for the Grand Cherry Republic, which sells all kinds of cherry-based stuff to eat or, in soda form, drink. Lots of stuff to sample inside if you are willing to on sampling more than you would realistically ever buy.

Another boutique in Glen Arbor and actually a shop I didn't venture into since we weren't sure how much time we had and I really do have to get my book-buying habit under control. But aren't you charmed too? Yes, yes you are.

On the main street in Glen Arbor. interesting to me mostly because one of bunny_hugger's grad student hangouts in Lansing was Art's Bar, which I think might try to style itself a tavern in some references.

The miniature golf course on the far east side of Glen Arbor (maybe like five blocks east of Art's Tavern) and while we didn't have the time to play, we could at least look at some of the sculptures and stuff.

Some very homemade signs for stuff around the miniature golf course. You understand why it was hard to resist just buying our way in to walk around at least.

Trivia: When Apollo 1's Command Module was delivered to the Kennedy Space Center in August 1966 it had 164 incomplete engineering change orders. Within a month there were 377 incomplete engineering change orders. Program manager General John G Shinkle estimated seven-tenths of the changes should have been identified at manufacturer North American. Source: A History of the Kennedy Space Center, Kenneth Lipartito, Orville R Butler.

Currently Reading: P T Barnum: The Legend And The Man, A H Saxon.

PS: Reading the Comics, January 21, 2017: Homework Edition, finishing up last week at last.

Back to the summer and a day spent in Suttons Bay. There were two really big photographic targets there. One was the garden shop. So here's some of that. After my update on what happened in my humor blog this past week. Remember that RSS is still a thing so far as I've ever heard.

• New In Town, last week's big piece, a guide to stuff to see in the area.
• The Standoff, In E-Mail, in celebration of my reaching Mailbox 150 from one direction or another.
• Statistics Saturday: Art Prompts which is that usual mix of silly and true.
• What’s Going On In Gil Thorp? About what you'd think, if you ever thought about Gil Thorp.
• How My Week Is Starting and a moment of weird competence in a bundle of incompetence.
• On Reflection As I Haven’t Seen That Billboard In A While, a follow-up thought.
• Without Denying That We Have Bigger Problems and a passing thought.
• The Boot: And How I Got It, this week's big post and a real true bit of real truth that really and truly happened.

One of the dragons in front of that Bayside Gallery garden shop in Suttons Bay. It and another dragon sit in front of the entrance when the place is open; when it's closed, they're out of sight.

Bayside Gallery outside attractions because how can you not be captivated by a bundle of light and texture and shape like that?

Goldfish in the pond outside the Bayside Gallery. There's a healthy number of them there in a lake with a good bit of space and a little waterfall and everything.

Dragon and hatchling statue from the garden shop that's just so adorable you'd hug them if they weren't solid concrete.

Translucent fairy with all those wonderful colors in the background: sundials and yard decorations and all the sorts of complicated things we might find at the gallery.

Trivia: William Henry Harrison was, at inauguration, older than seven of his eight predecessors were on leaving office. Source: From Failing Hands: The Story of Presidential Succession, John D Feerick.

Currently Reading: Innumeracy, John Allen Paulos. It's been a while.

PS: Reading the Comics, January 14, 2017: Maybe The Last Jumble? Edition covering more of last week's comics and admitting my fear that I won't have many more Jumble comics to mention. Warning: rambling memories of the 1990s Internet included!

Normal: do you remember it? Yeah, me neither, really.But my humor blog's carried on almost as if normal, as you can put on your Friends page or your RSS reader. And run there since last week at this time were:

• The First Of 2017, last week's big piece, about the challenge of getting started.
• MiSTed: The Tale of Fatty Coon, Chapter IV, in which Fatty Coon gets into the tiniest possible scrape while trying to eat baby squirrels
• MiSTed: The Tale of Fatty Coon, Chapter V concluding the MiSTing for now and, honestly, what was wrong with Arthur Scott Bailey? You know?
• What’s Going On With Judge Parker? as I try to make sense of the new writer there.
• In Which The Local Indie Totally Rips Off My Unread College Left-Wing Newspaper From Two Decades Ago and I tell a wheezy anecdote about sophomoric mischief I did while a senior in college.
• Meanwhile As I Scrutinize My E-Mail Like Every Five Minutes I notice something missing.
• Statistics Saturday on a Wednesday: December 2016 in my Statistics and how much reading people did of me last month.
• New In Town, this week's big piece.

So here's some of what we got up to in Traverse City that Tuesday we were in and hoped to find FunHouse and other pinball.

Little Free Library in Traverse City, just outside the State Theater. It imitates the theater, as the picture suggests.

Catching my eye in Toy Haven: your child's own play parking garage! You can almost feel the child discover the world of magnetic-stripe tickets. The part with the elevator I really like. But I'm that sort of nerd and always was.

Among the Toy Haven toys were these pretty cool translucent dragons. Because kids don't have enough cool stuff, they get translucent dragon toys too. You know? It's not fair.

Bijou By The Bay: another little theater, in a park on the water line. The building only looks like a WPA power substation. It was for many years a museum set up by/in honor of one of the first people to run a movie theater in Traverse City. And it runs a mix of art-house stuff and popular movies plus whatever you want to say The Secret Life Of Pets was. It just looked too dire to actually watch.

Stuff we missed at the State Theatre or the Bijou By The Bay: some interesting movies for the Cherrry Fest. They might have got carried away or hoped they'd have more pirate movies.

Trivia: After months in 1924 spent trying to convince the owners of the New York Tribune to sell to them, as the only way the two (Republican broadsheet) newspapers could survive in the crowded market, Frank Munsey admitted defeat and sold his Herald to the Tribune. He got five million dollars, a tenth of that for the Herald's Paris edition. Source: The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune, Richard Kluger.

Currently Reading: The Wandering Variables, Lois Trimble. And if I thought Chad Oliver had set a new word record for violently inhumane social experimentation along comes Trimble with multiple societies set up to prove out grad student theses. It's fun enough and keeps brushing up against being funny but still, wow, I've got a new entry for the next time someone wants to know what books top Pohl's Starburst for this sort of thing.

PS: How December 2016 Treated My Mathematics Blog, just going over exactly what the title says it is.

This week my humor blog featured the start of a fresh Mystery Science Theater 3000 fan fiction. Hope you like. Also run there:

• The Top Ten For 2016, last week's big thing and a year-in-review-if-you-dare bit.
• Way Too Much For Me This Or Any Time Of Year and as you'd expect it's about a billboard.
• Statistics Saturday: What I Spent December Doing and see if you did any better.
• Jack Benny: Goodbye 1941, Hello 42, an old-time radio New Year's Eve event.
• MiSTed: The Tale of Fatty Coon, Chapter I starting some animal-fantasy from the days when authors didn't need to like their protagonists even in the slightest little bit apparently.
• MiSTed: The Tale of Fatty Coon, Chapter II
• MiSTed: The Tale of Fatty Coon, Chapter III
• The First Of 2017, this week's major piece, about how little there is to do even.

Now for some strolling along the beach at Omena.

Entry to the Omena Beach. The set of rules for the beach were so worded that I argued it was against the rules to take your trash home for disposal, and you instead had to toss it out in the bins there. Can't imagine they prosecute many of those cases though.

Stuff to do at the Omena Beach if you don't want to swim or toss pebbles or fossil-hunt. Also we would learn those rubber-strap seats hurt when you're a grownup and have hips wide enough that the hooks holding the strap on will dig into your hips and will never, ever stop digging.

The former Harbor Bar as viewed from kind of a little way along the beach. Now it's Knot Just A Bar and a winery and feels like the natural habitat for my mother's college friends.

Setting sun at the Omena beach. Half-moon and a bird in view there.

Water rushing in to the Omena beach. I couldn't line up a picture that perfectly if I tried.

Trivia: There are at least 2,500 species of mosquito. Source: The Path Between The Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870 - 1914, David McCullough.

Currently Reading: 1919: The Year Our World Began, William K Klingaman.

Getting back to whatever normal is with my humor blog. This past week's included such entries as:

• I Got Nothing
• Quick Little Test Balloon
• Statistics Saturday: Twelve Days of Christmas In Alphabetical Order
• The Only Day Of The Year I Can Share This, Apart From Literally All The Others
• Choose Wisely
• Update On What’s Going On in Mark Trail
• Some Things I Unironically Love About Glue Web Site ThisToThat.Com.
• The Top Ten For 2016

One of the quiet little highlights of the trip's Monday was walking down to the Omena beach, this time without a poison ivy scare. Here's a bit of what it looked like.

Do you see it? I had forgotten why I took a photograph of this leaf. It's because there's a frog beside it. A tiny little frog that stood still a while as we towered over it and finally made its way off to the woods when it figured it had a clear chance at things.

The path from our rented house down to the beach. The sunset glow is why there's a rim of such bright orange and yellow and such. Summer ends early in the northern areas of the lower peninsula, but not mid-July early.

We had not been tempted to explore the trail until we saw this sign. We don't know members of what or what one has to do to gain the trait of member-ness.

Well, make up your mind. What you get if you walk past street signs and can catch a T-intersection at just the right spot.

Oh yeah, one of these trees. Very, very poofy cloudy tree near the beach.

Trivia: Between 1851 and 1854 some $175 million in gold reached New York City from California. Source: Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, Edwin G Burrows, Mike Wallace.

Currently Reading: FreeMaster, Kris Jensen.

PS: The End 2016 Mathematics A To Z: Yang Hui's Triangle, which you know. You just don't know you know, maybe.

I guess that exhausts the report on our pet rabbit's last day although goodness knows I can't avoid thinking about it still. Well, here's the list of stuff from my humor blog that would've been there on a happier last Thursday.

• In Your Houses Late At Night Sit Down Cozy, Kill That Light, major piece.
• Some Weather Forecasts
• Statistics Saturday: Things Found In The ‘Cans And Bottles’ Recycling Bin
• What’s Going On With Rex Morgan, M.D.?
• Meanwhile In Nihilistic Crossword Puzzles
• My New Pastime
• Oh Yeah, One Thing I Didn’t Understand About Rex Morgan
• I Got Nothing, another major piece.

In Leland, on the way to Fishtown. There's something about the town that encourages people to bring antique or oddball cars there. There's a garage near where we parked which was working on several antique cars. And then on the way to the pier we saw this whatever-it-is.

Looking down into Fishtown. It's still a properly working fishing pier, although nearly all the buildings have given over to tourist-trade items like cheese and ice cream. There are still people gathering Lake Michigan fish from the spot, though.

One of the charter boats that does ply the waters out of Fishtown. I think that on the far side is one of the fishing boats and a house that is either occupied by an actual fisher or else by someone rich enough to own lakeside property in a touristy town.

Looking upon my works, ye mighty: ``This plaque marks the site of The Leland Lake Superior Iron Company. Began operating as a blast furnace in 1870. Dedicated by the Leelanau County Historical Society. May 9, 1958.'' Former industry.

bunny_hugger and her father examining the tree stump. From the plaque: ``Leland Champion Cottonwood Tree. This trunk remains as evidence of the Champion Cottonwood Tree that watched over the entrance to historic Fishtown for more than 100 years. The tree was planted circa 1901 by Ozzie Cordes, and was taken down on November 7, 2011.'' Cuttings from it were taken in 2008 so its clones could grow, somewhere.

Trivia: A&P stores did not carry toothpaste or shaving cream until 1951, when an experiment on a hundred toiletries began. Source: The Great A&P And The Struggle For Small Business In America, Marc Levinson.

Currently Reading: Exile From Xanadu, Ian Wright

Let me get you my humor blog. If you skipped it the last week and haven't heard about its RSS feed that's because you have never ever read this blog ever, and so are not reading this now. Well, there we go.

• Some Things One Can Do For The Holiday Season which was last week's major piece.
• Great Quotes From The Ages or me being snarky.
• Statistics Saturday: Some Words Which Mean Nothing so use with caution.
• What’s Going On With Mary Worth? An excessively over-answered question.
• Picture This: And Some Mathematics Comics as I don't have something to caption.
• Cleaning Up Around Here after the first appreciable snow.
• In Which Every Word Up To “Index” Is Completely True And Accurate or something else went and distracted me again.
• In Your Houses Late At Night Sit Down Cozy, Kill That Light, a Buggles reference to lead off this week's big piece.

Back to Omena!

Put this way, how could we not stop there for a snack?

bunny_hugger puts a towel around our pet rabbit, who's skeptical of all this but willing to try anything that lets him get closer to those bushes and eat them. He would do very well with the long towel: using it and bunny_hugger as support he could walk, run, even hop.

From the orchards, some of them still working, around the house we rented.

Looking out on fallow fields from the edge of the property we rented.

Exploded(?) tree trunk that we found on the edge of the road leading from the rented house to the beach. A few steps toward the tree would reveal that the road was lined with poison ivy. Mystery not pursued.

Our pet rabbit enjoying a late evening on the lawn he would do so very much to eat. We warned him that we could see his fluffy white belly. He was unconcerned.

Trivia: Boris III, Tsar of Bulgaria from 1918, was an avid train enthusiast. Engine drivers on the Orient Express were warned not to let him anywhere near the cab. Source: Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed The World, Margaret Macmillan.

Currently Reading: In The Hand Of The Goddess, Tamora Pierce.