Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

With the visit to Bronner's kicking off the Christmas season, what did we have to look forward to the next weekend but kicking of the Christmas season? Here it was at the Nite Lites show of so very many light fixtures at the Michigan International Speedway, down in Michigan's Brooklyn. In past years we've taken up driving through it, usually around Twelfth Night.

But before they open up to cars driving through they do a 5K, either a run or a walk as you like. I finally took bunnyhugger's invitation to do the 5K with her and signed up for the race, although too late to get a T-shirt or hoodie. All I would get is the official badge of entry, a foam crown of reindeer horns donated by Brooklyn Plastics and that will someday be something we have to throw out. Or turn into support for other projects; bunnyhugger thought this would be a good foam to use to keep costume masks from being to uncomfortable on the nose. And then moments before leaving for it bunnyhugger discovered she hadn't signed up yet, and she worried that there wouldn't be time for her to sign up on the spot.

There was time, though. The run/walk turns out to be very laid back, with on-the-spot signup maybe two lines long. The event is untimed, and you don't even get a number or anything, just the foam antlers mentioned above and you really only have to wear them to start.

The walk starts at a point that's midway through the course, as you see it driving through, but a point near the grandstands. Also a point where we got to see just how mid-century the styling of the support buildings of the raceway are; so much of it looks like a 1958 motel in ways that charmed us. It's almost worth visiting the place for the architecture alone.

Five kilometers is a pretty good walk, but not one that I'd normally need over an hour for. But this walk ended up not quite an hour and a half since it's so easy to stop and photograph things. So, in like eight months or so check in for a lot of pictures of sea serpents or the Twelve Days Of Christmas or an outline of Michigan with a Santa cap on the Thumb. But it'll save me feeling quite the same impulse to photograph everything when we get to driving through late in the upcoming Christmas season.

Now, for a couple more pictures from the Musée, and its wonders of carousel rides and fairground games:

Another carousel centaur! I don't know if this is a Boer War figure.

But here's the organ, all set for someone to start a waltz.

Near the organ was this sculpture of a horse with rider, pretty intimidating to stare up at.

And here's the second carousel! The horses look about like what you might see on any ride but what's that to the right?

Yes: it's a rowboat, that rocks back and forth as you go around. I'm a little sorry we didn't get a ride on that.

The docent showing something about one of the horses. Mostly I was getting a picture of the boat here, though.

Trivia: The 26th of November, 1963, was President Lyndon Johnson's first working day in the White House as President. He met with John F Kennedy's congressional liaison (Lawrence F O'Brien) and signed two bills which Congress had passed the 21st of November, after Kennedy left for Dallas. Source: From Failing Hands: The Story of Presidential Succession, John D Feerick.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 75: Grand Poobahr of Smoochistan, Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

We've made a tradition of going to Bronner's Christmas Wonderland for bunnyhugger's birthday. This year, her birthday was a Wednesday, with the weekend before occupied by a pinball tournament in Grand Rapids and our disappointing Closing Day at Cedar Point, and the Saturday afterward occupied by another pinball tournament, so late as the next Sunday was, it was go then or not at all.

A more substantial break from tradition is we didn't eat just when we arrived, because it was way too crowded. Instead we went shopping for a pre-lit Christmas tree, something for our bedroom. The idea here being that we always have a hard time finding a real live tree that's the right size --- like, five, five-and-a-half-foot --- to put up there. With the artificial trees we found there's not actually much choice in the five, five-and-a-half-foot range we wanted. But the state of artificial trees has improved remarkably since the 1980s, when my family had a couple of trees that wished they could be cell phone towers.

After a bunch of looking around and discovering that you can switch the LED lights to different patterns, including some that are definitely too irritating to use in a bedroom, we picked out and bought one! Or at least, we got the order slip that we would, at the end of the day, bring to the register and then go to the pickup window for. It's a modest-sized box, one that our rabbit chinned several times before I took it up to the bedroom, so I guess it's her tree now.

This got our visit to Bronner's off on the ``wrong'' side of the big Christmas complex. We spent the day going around it in a more scrambled version than usual and, you know, that felt pretty good. We did spend a little time looking for a customizable mouse ornament, since we have four mice as pets this year, and the strangest thing is we couldn't find one. We did get a custom ornament for bunnyhugger's father's dog, and then we realized that her mother has a cat, why don't we get something for her? Again we didn't find a customizable cat ornament that really worked.

We had got off to a late start, part of why we arrived at Bronner's in time to see the lunch rush at the snack counter. Yet somehow we felt like we did have about the right amount of time to spend wandering around in the teaser to the Christmas season. We would go on after this to the Cheese House and get possibly too much in cheese spreads and blocks (there are ones we haven't opened yet, two weeks afterward), and then to a rare restaurant meal in town. Made for a nice Sunday and even got done early enough we didn't technically close out any of the three places. That never happens.

In photos, I'm still on our layover in Paris on the first day of our trip but, y'know, how often are you going to see things like this? So please pardon the occasional boring photo because we're soon going to be up on things you won't believe.

Now we're moving into the second of the big exhibit halls. The door here has an archway that looks like a carousel's scenery panels above it, though I don't know if they really were.

Little stand outside the venue with the promise of information pamphlets, though my recollection is we were roped off from this.

The astronaut suit was, I believe, constructed a couple years ago for publicity and tied to the anniversary of the French launching of a cat into space.

Close-up of the angel-like figure ready to clobber you with a wreath.

And, farther off down the hall, I hope this all needs no explanation because I don't remember that we got one for the fairy-wing gown or the mannequin legs dressed for a can-can.

Around this time I noticed there was a nice silhouetted view of the courtyard.

Trivia: Austro-Hungarian Empress Maria Theresa's 1770 order that all houses be given numbers specified that the numbers were to be red in Vienna, black everywhere else in the Empire, and in Arabic numerals, except for Jewish persons' homes, which would be in Roman numerals. Source: The Address Book: What Street Adresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power, Deirdre Mask.

Currently Reading: The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City, Kevin Baker.

Posted by Paul Taylor

https://wapsisquare.com/comic/agreeable/

https://wapsisquare.com/?post_type=comic&p=20540

https://wapsisquare.com/comic/agreeable/

https://wapsisquare.com/?post_type=comic&p=20540

Couple weeks ago I went to donate platelets. I've fallen into doing that this year, and it's kind of nice. It takes a couple hours, but they set up the TV for you to watch something and it's let me catch up on Mystery Science Theater 3000 some. Plus there's an almost unsettling number of gifts given for donating.

What takes a couple hours is that they can only remove the whole blood from you, so they do that, filter out the platelets, and return the rest to your other arm. And when I went to do that the start of this month, I had a curious failure. The needle in my left arm, taking out blood, was doing fune, but the needle in my right just wasn't making contact. The saline they were trying to inject wouldn't get into my vein and it just produced a small bruise. They tried a couple times but couldn't succeed. So I went home with a failed donation.

Thing is you can donate platelets in principle every week, and especially when there's nothing but the need for my elbow to heal up, and I went back in last Monday. Since I'd had the failure last time I figured the thing to do was draw blood out from my right arm and put the filtered blood back in my left, and give things the chance to balance. Getting the return needle in went just fine; apparently my left arm is really good for this stuff. But the right arm? They could figure where there were two veins either of which were viable but they bent off in weird directions, apparently, and while they finally got a needle into one of them, they also picked up some debris material so that none of the blood could get into the needle rather than make another bruise. The other vein might have been workable but it was too close to the already-present damage so there wasn't any using it. So that's two failures in a row and I'm plum out of arms to try donating with.

They did give me the Red Cross Pac-Man socks that are the gift for people donating platelets through to December 7th, though, which is kind.

More pictures here from the Musée des Arts Forains from our layover in Paris:

Swan-boat chariot on the the carousel with the fine steps. You can see hooks that I guess were once for reins, like a swan would let you get away with reins. That or it needs readers.

And a sheep, another rare animal for carousels.

Couple of figures on balconies that, it turns out, would move and 'sing' along to a massive organ, making this part of a huge mechanical performance.

More of the mechanism, part of a show that we got to see.

And a comic foreground, ready for you to poke your head into.

Looking back again at the carousel. You can see the sides of other chariots hug on the walls in the background.

Trivia: Shortly before accepting the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the quantum-mechanical model of atomic structure, Niels Bohr received a telegram from György Hevesy and Dirk Coster, who had just isolated the element hafnium on their first attempt, sifting through zirconium which Bohr's model predicted would have the not-yet-discovered element's closest chemical analogue. Bohr announced the discovery at his acceptance speech. 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: The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City, Kevin Baker.

https://revlyncox.tumblr.com/post/801059742616256512

This month, the Philippines has been struck by some of the most destructive typhoons in recent memory. Unitarian Universalists may be aware that we have religious kinfolk there. Look for updates from the UUA Director of Global Connections, and please consider a gift to the UUA Disaster Relief Fund:

UUA Disaster Relief Fund

https://revlyncox.tumblr.com/post/801059742616256512

Today I was busy until past 10 pm attending a pinball tournament and then having dinner so please, instead, enjoy a double dose of Musée des Arts Forains pictures.

More of pinball's ancestors here, with bagatelles where you try to shoot a ball around the obstacles.

And isn't that a fun obstacle, shooting through the legs of a jester-y type?

One of the attractions was a big roller-ball-racing game, dating all the way back to the 1970s (whimper). Everyone got a chance to roll balls in one of two races.

The docent explains the rules. bunnyhugger would come within a whisker of winning. When I got my turn, I was in no danger of winning.

Another picture of the floor here in the first building. On the left is a gondola like you'd find on a salon carousel.

Seeing the promise of The Original Marvelous Mechanicals put us in mind of Marvin's, of course.

Cat figure on one of the carousels we got to ride. This was on a multi-level carousel that went very slowly but, as you can see from the floor, looked almost oppressively deluxe.

Looking over bunnyhugger's shoulder at the mermaid serving as a central figure. You can see a woman sitting on a mere bench reading the guide pamphlet.

We've been on a couple carousels with more than one level before, such as at Denver's Lakeside Park, but few with steps that look like they belong in an early-20th-century luxury hotel.

Out the door we saw the occasional cat walking by.

A look at the central platform and the inner ring of benches.

A game, here, your classic toss-the-ball-in-the-mouth game. I think there's something French people would recognize about these figures, but I don't.

Trivia: The gold-colored United States dollar coin issued from 1999 was made of 88.5% copper, alloyed with zinc (6%), manganese (3.5%), and nickel (2%), with each coin costing about 13 cents to make. Source: Nature's Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements, John Emsley. By the time of the book's writing (the book is copyright 2001, so this can't have been later than mid-2000) about fifty had been minted for every person in the United States.

Currently Reading: The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City, Kevin Baker. I really am enjoying this read a lot. I'm just finding so little time to read.

Pausing a moment from things directly about my life, there's a scandal going on in the competitive pinball world. It says a lot about when I got into the competitive pinball scene that my first reaction to learning of it was ``thank goodness it's not Michigan this time''; the state used to have an outsized reputation for causing Drama. But this drama is more about an unfolding sad mess rather than things you can look and snicker about from the safety of being uninvolved.

In short: at a North Carolina pinball contest, one of the venue staff decided --- against the explicit direction of the tournament organizers and the venue owner --- that she was going to be the Vagina Inspector. This chased off a nonzero number of transgender people from the event, and disrupted things for everyone else.

The International Flipper Pinball Association, the body that sanctions competitive-pinball tournaments, ruled that the venue would not have any sanctioned events for twelve months and would be subject to annual reviews until they were confident it was an open, welcoming place for all players. Okay enough there. But they also ruled that the tournament, broken as it was, would be allowed to stand as a sanctioned event. They did not ask, particularly, the IFPA Women's Advisory Board, set up to provide guidance on how to make pinball events less misogynist, their opinion before this quick ruling.

And the IFPA has responded to criticism of this like a cishet guy being told for the first time that ``gyp'' is a racial slur. Insisting they have made their decision, it's not going to be altered, and if you bring it up in the IFPA Discord you're banned.

The sympathetic reading to this is that they want to avoid the precedent that if someone hollers loud enough they'll de-sanction anything. It's easy to see how the malicious will abuse that, and there's few things with as much malice as a transphobe who's noticed a project to combat sexism. So far as I know, and I am getting all my juicy gossip secondhand as I'm not in the IFPA Discord, nobody has actually said this, though. And it is hard to distinguish the actions taken from what someone who didn't actually care but wanted the fuss to go away would do. The resignation of the entire Women's Advisory Board suggests what they, people in closer touch with the IFPA management than most, believe.

So it's an enormous mess with a lot of people threatening to quit the IFPA, or at least asking what it's good for. Mostly, from the player point of view, it's a way of getting sanctioned events which draw players to them, in the hopes of winning renown for their play.

At one point bunnyhugger said there was talk of a schism, breaking off a new sanctioning body. There's no reason in principle there couldn't be one. But the IFPA does have a considerable lead in having a lot of people already registered, and a rating system in place and tried by experience. Also a lot of personal ties with Stern, the one big maker of pinball games, as well as with the second-tier makers like Jersey Jack (and don't let's get started on that) or Spooky Pinball or American Pinball. (The lack of separation between the makers of pinball games, the organizers of tournaments, the judges of tournaments, and competitors has been a minefield competitive pinball has so far not set off.) The practical objections might be insurmountable, unless the organization really does fracture along some natural fault line.

Mercifully this hasn't required bunnyhugger to take a big stand yet. It does suggest that we need to do a little prodding around to see if there've been problems people haven't been willing to bring up, though, and that won't be happy to learn.

Now, venturing into the Musée des Arts Forains, during our little layover in Paris.

Some of the many exhibits there, including a (Bayol, I assume) rabbit leaping above them all.

And hey, pinball! At least, one of the ancestors of pinball, where you roll the ball into holes for points. These are about the length of a dinner table.

And here's a rabbit posed over a heck of a garden vase.

Ooh, hey, what's this? When did we get to a Middle Eastern castle?

Ah, there we go, it's an elaborate model displaying some street scene. Oh, but wait ... computer, zoom out.

There we go! It's an elaborate miniature street scene riding the back of an elephant!

Trivia: In 1645 Blaise Pascal introduced his Pascaline mechanical-addition machine in a pamphlet entitled Advis Nécessaire à ceux qui auront curiosité de voir la machine arithmétique, et de s'en server (Advice necessary for those who will be curious to see the arithmetic machine, and to use it). The last paragraph directed orders to Sieur de Roberval, a resident of Paris, who could provide demonstrations. Source: Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, Keith Houston.

Currently Reading: The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City, Kevin Baker.

The past week on my humor blog featured a weird density of me remembering things, and you won't guess what's scheduled for tomorrow. So why not pause for what's been this past week through to today?

• MiSTed: The Tale of Jimmy Rabbit, Part 14: Mr Crow's Picture
• Who Wants to Be in a Stupid Online Argument?
• Statistics Saturday: Some Pokemon Names Regis Philbin Died Too Young To Say
• Robert Benchley: High Life Among the Birds
• Speaking as a Person Still Upset ‘The Hucklebuck' Wasn't Made Up for That One Honeymooners Episode
• What's Going On In Mark Trail? What is with this tiger cult thing? August - November 2025
• The QuestWorld Animation Though, That I'm Sure Has Never Looked More Awesome Than It Does Today
• MiSTed: The Tale of Jimmy Rabbit, Part 15: Boy Lost!

And now to our trip to France and Belgium! Coming up, my first picture on another continent.

You must recognize this iconic Paris setting, right? No? ... Well, it's just off the Metro near the carousel museum we went to while waiting for a train.

Through this passageway we ... got a little closer to the place we meant to go. We were pretty sure.

And here we are, the Musée des Arts Forains. The carousel centaur leaps over the entrance. I don't think this is a Boer War general but can you say for sure it's not?

The entrance corridor. The museum itself is past this in the green space there. The kid was just there.

Trio of horses lining the entry way while we gathered for the guided tour (the only kind offered).

The horses seen from the side, which the light makes look completely different.

And here's the start of the tour. The guide here was far more energetic and dramatic than we could have imagined and, despite this being a French-only tour, she kept giving us and a couple other English speakers short versions of what she was saying in the native tongue that didn't seem any shorter, really.

Tucked into many of the upper windows were busts of various figures. You know, people you expect to see busts of in a private French museum of carousel and fairground attractions, like past presidents of France.

Or here, Jimmy Carter and Mick Jagger, naturally.

Hidden in the trees were a number of figures too, some of them doing festive things like here playing a trumpet in a parade.

And here's a figure that seems too off-model to be an off-model Bugs Bunny, by a timepiece that suggests they're also badly mispainted to be the White Rabbit.

And now, into the museum! It was dim, of course, and I didn't yet have experience with how to take dark photos on this camera, although in this case it worked out perfectly.

Trivia: 16,508 truck loads of debris were carried away from the Empire State Building site before construction began. Source: Higher: A Historic Race to the Sky and the Making of a City, Neal Bascomb. That precision is extremely believable, yes.

Currently Reading: The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City, Kevin Baker.

Posted by Paul Taylor

https://wapsisquare.com/comic/not-a-bother/

https://wapsisquare.com/?post_type=comic&p=20536

https://wapsisquare.com/comic/not-a-bother/

https://wapsisquare.com/?post_type=comic&p=20536

I tried a new-to-me CSA this year, Who Cooks For You Farm. The summer share (which we got biweekly) was great, so I signed up for fall (weekly) which started this week. Their produce is very good, the prices are fair, and the people are very helpful and friendly. When we suddenly needed to leave town the day before a pickup (out-of-town funeral), they changed it for me. They don't do a winter share, alas, but maybe someday? Anyway, if you're in Pittsburgh and looking for a CSA, I recommend this one.

Related to this, any suggestions for ways to use watermelon radish other than raw in salads and roasted? It turns out that if you pickle it, while it tastes fine, the colors run and it no longer looks like little slices of watermelon.

In principle, the Internet is built on open, decentralized protocols. But in reality, an awful lot of the modern Internet depends on some key chokepoints. I found Cloudflare's post-mortem of Tuesday's outage fascinating and very well-done; most companies either don't publish reports like these or skimp on the details, but this one explains what happened and how red herrings made recovery harder. (Their service and the off-site status page went down at the same time; it was reasonable to suspect a coordinated attack, though it turned out to be a coincidence.) I feel for the team.

Today we got a notification from our local water utility about replacing lead pipes. They need our permission to replace the pipe connecting the main to our house, because part of it is on our property. They'll fix the sidewalk, but if they damage anything else, that's on us. Technically we can say no -- but if we do, they shut off our water. Um, great. We actually tested our water several years ago and the lead levels are well within acceptable parameters; left alone, we wouldn't do anything. But they're forcing the issue and I'm not sure why. (If there were bad test results, that would be different.) So, somebody will come by the week after next to look at our meter and plumbing and tell us what's going to happen. Joy.

I am now studying talmud, weekly and separately, with two different rabbis, neither of them my new rabbi. Earlier this year I also got connected to a Chabad Rosh Chodesh group (women only), which has been very nice. I love how interconnected the local community is. :-)

My new congregation continues to be a great fit.

I backed the Kickstarter for Kavango, a board game that we play a lot. The Kickstarter for an expansion is ending soon; I'm usually not a fan of game expansions, but this one looks solid, enhancing the game without making it more complicated or adding to the play length, so I backed it. (You can get the original game as a backer, too.)

We've been playing a lot of other games too. Terraforming Mars continues to be a favorite, including with one expansion (Preludes). Other expansions we've seen are not so appealing, though I'm interested in the alternate maps (other side of the planet).

A recently-published master's thesis on Stack Exchange's alienation of their core community and community responses was fascinating reading. I might have more to say about that later.

I am appalled by some of the shenanigans coming from the federal government of late, and that is about all I have the energy to say about it for now.

https://revlyncox.tumblr.com/post/800743710966104064

skinnerhousebooks:

A Prayer for My Queer and Trans Siblings

Here you are.
Here, in this holy space,
on this ground that is holy
because you are here.

Here you are, in flesh and bone,
filling up this body that belongs to you alone.
Your pumping heart is a wonder
because it keeps you alive.
Your loving heart is a blessing
because it keeps all of us alive.

The Spirit of Love has a home in you.
May we all see that love in you
and let our hearts become mirrors
for the compassion at your core.

The Spirit of Justice has a home in you.
May we light our wicks
from one another until we are all aflame,
until we burn out every prejudice
we carry in these bones.

Here you are.
Holy as you are.

Blessed be.

Jess Reynolds
Love Like Thunder

https://revlyncox.tumblr.com/post/800743710966104064

Back to Closing Day at Cedar Point, with a guest. As mentioned the weather was just nice enough, and the staff just short enough, that everything was closed or crowded.

Worse, though, is that MWS started to feel pained, and went back to my car to sit a while and drink ice water while painkillers tried to do something for him. We couldn't think how awful it would be to have the first trip to Cedar Point in years have the center knocked out like that. (And he's had similar problems before, one day at Kings Island being knocked out when he was nauseated after an hour or two and had to go back to the hotel room to sleep for hours.) bunnyhugger worried that the day was a bust, but I kept my usual optimistic self and insisted that it was going to be fine. If nothing else it was going to be a day at Cedar Point, what's terrible about that?

And after about 6 pm the crowds did seem to be diminishing, with the line to Top Thrill 2 looking short enough to be worth trying out. So we did, stuffing all our things into the same locker and everyone relying on me to remember the number (I could remember where it was but had to reverse-engineer the number from that). And got into a line that didn't look much longer than what we'd had during our Halloweekends visit; we might have time to ride both this and Siren's Curse. Then the ride went down.

A good number of people jumped out of line ahead of us, but they never played the ride-is-closed-for-the-rest-of-the-day announcement. No real word will ever go out about how long they expect the problem to be, but we were heartened when a train loaded with people did go out and ride successfully. That turned out to just be discharging the people who were already loaded up and there was more maintenance to do. We kept an eye on the clock and on the eventually launched test trains and were on the brink of leaving when they announced the ride was open again, to great applause.

Then, of course, the Fast Lane --- which had been empty --- filled up, probably with parkgoers who saw the ride had been closed and had a minimal line-cutter's wait. So our wait kept on waiting. Finally the 8:00 closing hour passed. We would get one ride on this, our one roller coaster of the day, and that only if the ride didn't go down again.

It did not. We got up to the station finally, where as usual the ride operator was assigning seats. Within limits: he offered the people in front of us the choice of front seat or back on the next train. They picked back. So he gave the three of us rows one and two. Front seat. We both deferred to MWS for the front row; we'll likely have more chances for a front-seat ride than he will, for next year at least. I tried to defer the other front seat to bunnyhugger, but she took the second row, so, there I was, having my first front-seat ride on a coaster of this size since, probably, that time at Great Adventure we got to ride Kingda Ka (RSVP) repeatedly at the end of that night.

Top Thrill 2 does not have the single acceleration of the original Top Thrill. But it does have three linear induction accelerations, and a nice long hang after the reverse one, peering down hundreds of feet and, for me this time, nothing obstructing my view but the track. And when we crested the top hat it felt again like we were being pitched out of our seats --- no seat belts, by the way; the restraints are just that cozy and good --- and could see the whole park, closing up, in the darkness. Then a rocket back down and a brake to a stop and applauding for what a fantastic ride that was.

We staggered off the ride --- the ride photos booth was unattended and it turns out you can't just buy a ride photo anymore anyway --- before remembering that we had to get our stuff out of our locker. And then we also had to get MWS's milestone photograph. We had all forgotten to get a sheet of paper with 100 on it, but he was able to type out 100 on his phone in a big typeface --- the thing I'm told the kids do --- and we got to the entrance of Top Thrill 2 for the scene. They had already turned off so many lights that our pictures came out lousy, unless we turned the flash on, in which case they came out lousy in a different way. Still, he reached his milestone, and on a quite good coaster, and from the front row, in a way that has a story behind it. Great stuff.

Still, it was a day that saw us ride only a couple of carousels, and the loaded-to-capacity(!) train from back of the park to the front, and one roller coaster, plus eat some cheese-on-a-stick and fries. It wasn't the good low-key riding bonanza we had been hoping for. Maybe opening weekend will be different.

Now? I have a couple scattered pictures from April and May as I tried to talk Motor City Furry Con's lost-and-found into acknowledging my existence and returning my camera. Not enough to be worth sharing, though. Instead, here's the first couple pictures with my brand-new used camera, and I bet you can guess what's first on that new photo roll.

It's Athena! Who doesn't see what the point of this thing shoved in her face is.

With the flash you get to see her eye color and her concern that I'm covering part of the flash rectangle with my finger.

There we go, that's a slightly better camera flash. Yes, her food dish reads DOG.

She went upstairs in her hutch and sprawled out where she could look disapprovingly at me.

Got a little closer and got a slightly different look of 'what are you bothering me about?' picture.

I turned off the flash and turned up the ISO and got a more naturalistic view of our all-black rabbit in her hutch.

Trivia: The longest animation strike in the United States was the May-December 1947 strike against Terry Toons. Source: Terrytons: The Story of Paul Terry and His Classic Cartoon Factory, W Gerald Hamonic.

Currently Reading: The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City, Kevin Baker.

Small but long-running pinball tournament tonight, so before I give you the last pictures of Motor City Furry Con and my last pictures before going camera-less-except-for-my-iPod, please pause and ask yourself What's Going On In Mark Trail? What is with this tiger cult thing? And when you're satisfied you know what's happened from August - November 2025 in that strip, go on to read this:

Minimally arty shot looking out the window at the pond that's always there and just a little enhanced now.

The directional sign that's been with the convention through three hotels and I assume will be back in February for a fourth. Also the paid refreshments stand the hotel set up for people who needed more than hospitality's popcorn, Faygo, and beer.

Some fursuiters hanging out in the bar while everyone agrees it's probably too lousy to drive home.

The two games in hospitality: Pattie Cakes is a whack-a-mole-style game, just hitting whatever the lit button is. And Surfers, the pinball game, was down all day that we saw.

Mysterious list of numbers on a piece of cardboard attached to Surfers. The steadily ascending nature suggests high scores, although a score of 14,619 would take forever to do.

The Dead Dog Dance started maybe an hour late, and ran short (the deadline to start cleaning up was unchangeable even for acts of god), but it did start.

Fursuiter with a pride flag at the dance.

bunnyhugger posed all dramatically on the dance floor.

Though Discord and Telegram and such have taken over communicating with folks at the convention, they still had a wall of post-it-notes for people who needed, and it turned into art.

The tunnel to the dealers den had this tent that, we found, was fully closed up. Since nothing particular was under there I don't know what the closing up did. Maybe kept the space dry for things being moved from the outbuilding into the hotel.

The big schedule by the stairwell was removed, one more stroke of the convention being over.

And the ... toucan puffin? ... waves goodbye. End of con and shortly after this I left my camera in, probably, a bathroom and wouldn't see it again for months.

Trivia: After the Gemini IX Agena target vehicle crashed into the Atlantic Ocean rather than reach orbit, the very first production model, number 5001, which had been rejected early in the program as too trouble-ridden, was refurbished and used for the final, Gemini XII, launch. Source: On The Shoulders of Titans: A History of Project Gemini, Barton C Hacker, James M Grimwood. NASA SP-4203.

Currently Reading: The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City, Kevin Baker.

Our big Halloweekends trip was not our last visit to Cedar Point for the year. We had figured to go Sunday, the 2nd of November for closing day. And we brought a friend along, MWS, who's been becalmed at a mere 99 roller coasters on his record ever since the 2019 road trip when both Altoona's Leap the Dips (the oldest roller coaster still standing) and Kennywood's Steel Curtain were down. He's had some tight budgets lately, but we had free Cedar Point tickets from Michigan's Adventure, offered as compensation for that park cancelling its Halloween events. So he could come in for nothing more than the inconvenience of meeting up at a park-and-ride. That park-and-ride is now hidden behind a complicated new traffic circle-plus-extra-cilia arrangement but it's not too much a price to pay.

The night before bunnyhugger noticed something in the fine print of the tickets: that they were good until the 1st of November. We were going the 2nd of November. Some research found that Saturday, the 1st of November, had been the scheduled close of the season up to a couple months before when the last day was added. I supposed that whoever was in charge of the schedule at Cedar Point failed to communicate this change to the person in charge of make-good tickets at Michigan's Adventure and everything would be fine. Even if the ticket-scanners at the gate had some issue with it, by the time we got to the park a couple hours into the day, they would have had enough people coming in with ``expired'' make-good tickets that they'd know what to do, and that would be to let people in, since the entire point of the tickets is to make people feel good about the chain after a disappointment.

bunnyhugger checked online, finding in Michigan's Adventure or Cedar Point forums that many people were very confident that of course the ticket would not be redeemable on the 2nd of November, what kind of doorknob are you? But could not find anyone who had actually asked anyone connected with the park. Well, as you might have expected, there was no trouble getting into the park; the ticket scanned as if they had printed ``good until December 31, 2025'' on them. The only hitch was MWS approaching the gate noticing the fine-print date and wondering if that was going to be a problem. I pretended I hadn't noticed it before. After getting through the gate without issue bunnyhugger explained that we had seen it, but figured not to tell him about it if we could because there was no sense worrying him if it wasn't needed.

And she took a moment to report back to the forums of very confident people that the ticket was no trouble at all.

Past experience has been that Closing Day, especially after Halloween, is a good one for riding. Past experience failed us here. Maybe it was the pretty decent weather, and the park having been (by reports) a ghost town on Halloween itself. But the park was busy, not helped by a lot of rides being closed. This included some roller coasters like Corkscrew and Gemini and Blue Streak that can handle a hundred thousand riders every fifteen minutes being closed. I assume that's staffing issues. Derby Dogs was also closed, as was the booth where they sell pins. Also a bunch of the gift shops on the exit side of roller coasters.

But the evidence on the ground, and of the online queue reports, was that it was going to be a terrible riding day; even Magnum, which normally can handle any number of riders in at most fifteen minutes, had a line estimated at 45 minutes. While we got rides on the carousels easily enough there wasn't much to do for the roller coasters, especially any of the three that could be MWS's milestone hundredth coaster, except hope that the line was less bad later on.

I've been promising photos of Sunday at Motor City Furry Con 2025, and delivering, but now we're up to the most exciting yet least photographically interesting part of the event.

So, a massive storm front rolled in, severe enough that tornado warnings sounded on everybody's phones and they shepherded everyone into the Main Events room as the largest tornado shelter in the hotel.

It took a bit to get everything organized, particularly to get the whole remaining population of the convention in one room and also leave enough space that should a chandelier fall down people wouldn't be immediately killed.

People hit on the idea of making chair circles to block off the most immediate danger zones, although it was hard for other people to resist grabbing a chair and sitting in comfort as the storm front rolled over Ypsilanti.

For a while they had radar updates going on screen, but that stopped for reasons I don't know; possibly from the expectation that people might decide the radar doesn't look bad to them so they were done with sheltering.

Somewhere around that last picture they announced that Main Events was officially a Headless Lounge, so that fursuiters could take their heads off without fear of being photographed breaking character, and I stopped taking pictures. Eventually the storm receded enough that they allowed us out; here's what the back of the hotel looked like. Note that, like, every chair is blown over outside.

And then bunnyhugger had to get back to work as she'd hoped to use the couple hours between closing ceremonies and the Dead Dog Dance as a chance to finish some stuff for school. That was impossible to do for the hour or so of sheltering so, back to the grind.

Trivia: Portugal issued its first national stamps in 1852. The first stamps celebrating the nation's history were issued in 1894, commemorating the 500th anniversary of Henry the Navigator. Source: The Invention of Tradition, Editors Eric Hobsbawm, Terence Ranger.

Currently Reading: The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City, Kevin Baker.

What else to say for Sunday of our Cedar Point Halloweekends trip ... well, we got a ride on Magnum, the last of the roller coasters we'd needed for the trip. Also to ride on Calypso, a twirling ride much like a Scrambler but on a tilted platform, and from a vantage point where we could see the Skeleton Crew doing their acrobatics routine from the side, making it look novel again.

Also we got to see whatever the heck was the Peanuts show, the one cancelled for want of a Snoopy understudy(?) the other day. It was something about trick-or-treating and Snoopy's wild candy mania and the scary house at the end of the block with the Legally Distinct From Willy Wonka And Besides She's A Woman So There.

Also we saw something we'd have expected never to see: Derby Dogs, a hot dog and walking taco stand next to the Derby Racer, was open. Cedar Point, like any big amusement park, has more refreshment stands than it has staff for on any day, but I couldn't swear that I had ever seen it open before, and word on the forums is that no, it's just like never open. Given the staffing shortages they seem to be enduring, I don't know why Derby Dogs was open this of all days, but there it was. We didn't eat there --- nothing vegetarian even if we hadn't just had lunch --- but my photos of the phenomenon also show nobody in line.

Another thing we finally did was get to a show, this one at the Jack Aldrich Theater which we hadn't seen used for Halloweekends shows in a couple years. The theme this year was something about mutants putting on a rave, and they opened with a couple great tricks of the performers interacting with the screen and lighting effects --- like, having a bubble appear around them and swinging a hand to crack it --- and then otherwise carrying on as if it were a furry convention's dance. The only strange thing was not clearing the theater to the tune of Toto's ``Africa''.

I've conveyed already the sad news of breaking my Angel kigurumi; after we dealt with that we got a ride on the Antique Autos, and Blue Streak again, and even saw one of the other live performances, an extremely loud skeleton-themed band on the Bonewalk. These the sign explained were The Ska-Letons, a name I know bunnyhugger didn't see because she would have groaned at the wordplay.

For our last ride of the night, and of Halloweekends, we went back to Siren's Curse for another night ride, again beautiful especially in the settling evening, as most everything else in the park closed up. My photograph timer suggests we wrapped up about 8:30, a half-hour past close, and we did sadly have to hustle our way back to the car so we could drive home in time for our work the next morning.

Meanwhile, Sunday at Motor City Furry Con 2025, after closing ceremonies. Surely a bunch of average, calm, slightly-sad-for-the-parting-moments pictures with nothing remarkable to share, right? We'll just see ...

Some kind of robot-y creation that I saw a couple times during the convention. After closing ceremonies was the best view I ever got. What the reason for it is, I know not.

It folds up pretty easily into one of those strollers people use to carry loads of stuff around amusement parks, though.

Afterward, fursuiters wait eagerly for people to take pictures of them.

Here the fursuit's handler poses the Sims cursor above their head.

Over in the bar we see the results of a veritable tail'splosion.

And here's a picture of a piece of the post-closing-ceremonies schedule which was about to get blasted to smithereens.

Trivia: Around 1815 Joseph Henry, future pioneer of electromagnetism and first chancellor of the Smithsonian Institute, was a well-regarded member of Albany's Green Street Theatre, with the manager offering him a permanent, salaried engagement. Joseph had, according to his recollections, just discovered Professor George Gregory's 1808 Popular Lectures on Experimental Philosophy, Astronomy, and Chemistry, turning his interests to science. Source: Joseph Henry: The Rise of an American Scientist, Albert E Moyer.

Currently Reading: The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City, Kevin Baker.