Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

We got a lot done yesterday and today, Mark and I sorted through a bunch of stuff on Tuesday, and talked to Ralph (Mom's stepson) and figuring out which things are his/his sister's, and then which withim that what people actually want. Legally, he and Liz own the flat and some of the contents (specified\). In practice, there are things none of us want, partly because of geography: Ralph doesn#t need furniture, and he's the only one of us who lives anywhere nearby. So it's mostly what has sentimental value, like Simon's family china.

To our London friends: If we get enough done today, we might still be able to see people tomorrow or Saturday, but I don't know yet.

I also got into a stupid argument Tuesday afternoon with Ralph's wife Jenny, who was trying to convince me that my brother and I had some koind of obligation to arrange for clearing out everything that nobody wants, so Liz (Ralph's s sister) can sell the flat. This started with me telling her that we hadn't traveled from the US to be unpaid labor clearing out a flat for someone else to sell, and then on the third time she cirled back to telling her that by insulting my recently deceased mother she wasn't helping. |She said she wasn't trying to help, I told her to at least stop hurting then, and walked away from the conversation. My brother is one of the executor's of the will, so maybe has some obligations here, but Ralph and Liz own the flat now--my mother had a life tenancy and then it went too her stepchildren. I emerged a while later to find that Mark, Ralph, and Jenny had made a bit more progress in figuring things out.

They left here at about five, and Cattitude and Adrian went shopping to buy a few groceries.

liv, who is staying part-time in a flat half a mile from here, came over for the evening, and we had a very good, long visit. Adrian cooked dinner in an unfamiliar kitchen; I'd checked with Live a fw hours earlier about dietary restrictions. The original plan was just for her to come over here, where we can sit in the back garden, but one advantage of that is being able to comfortably share meals with people.

Wednesday was productive, sorting through papers and Mom's jewelry and a few oddments. The will leaves a few specific pieces of jewelry to Simon's daughter and two of my cousins, so we need(ed) to locate those. Beyond that we can do whatever seems good, and had agreed to offer things we didn't want to our cousins. We've found one piece Adrian is taking, and there's a bracelet of Grandma's that my cousin Janet asked us to sell her. If we find it, it's Janet's, as a gift.

After Mark and Linza left, the three of us decompressed a bit. After supper, I sorted through a bunch of [photos, pulling out a few that \I want and/or thought \mark would want to least see. My mother's youth hostel card, signed by her and Grandpa, was in an envelope, along with a 1949 student discount subway pass, which got her free or discounted trips home from school. Thirty-odd years later, they were giving us passes good for free trips both ways, but only after the first few weeks of the semester.

In going through papers, and figuring out what we need, including things the executors and Mom's account might need, we have so far found four social security cards. What seems to be the original has a number stamped on it rather than neatly printed. One of the others makes sense in that it has her second married name on it--Eve Rosenzweig Kugler--but four still seems like a lot.

I'm going to post this and have some breakfast

First, an errata. I was very confused about where we spent our last night and in fairness, it was confusing. Our last night was in a Brussels airport hotel, to get an early-morning flight to Amsterdam, there to fly to Detroit. We did not have a connecting flight in Paris.

However, the confusing thing happening during maybe like four hours of sleep is that our Amsterdam-to-Detroit flight got delayed. And by several hours, too, enough that the airline asked if we wanted to rebook on a later Brussels-to-Amsterdam flight. Not, by the way, one late enough that we could have stayed in De Panne anyway, so at least that irony ball didn't get kicked into our stomachs.

Since they sent it overnight, though, and I woke at the first beep of my alarm I was in the shower and cleaning myself before bunnyhugger could check her e-mail and find out this. She was of course happy to get a bonus four or whatever hours of sleep and accepted the rebooking, and then her computer started doing something cursed about mailing us new boarding passes. We went back to sleep and trusted things would be sorted out by our second awakening.

They were not, but we were now late enough in the day we could stuff ourselves at the breakfast buffet, and let me just say a word about having lots of cheese for breakfast. That word is yes. I was a little worried we'd be able to find the gathering point for the hotel shuttle --- several hotels share the same spot, and the night before we'd been dropped off at the hotel entrance --- and then remembered, oh yeah, it'll be the place everybody is walking to. So it was.

The Brussels airport delighted us by having one of those clicky split-flap schedule boards. (Partly. While city destinations and their times are split-flaps, the airline and flight numbers are flat-screen TVs.) We couldn't get boarding passes printed at the automated booth and, dreading the long line at our airline's ticket booth, went to the airline that was code-sharing this flight. They sent us back to the first airline. The line moved faster than we feared, except that somehow the parties right ahead of us had long, confusing questions and didn't seem to want to leave when their business was done.

Our own business was a bit baffling, and it took a couple rounds of explaining what happened before we got through. But we did, and I got boarding passes for the Brussels-to-Amsterdam leg and the Amsterdam-to-Detroit leg. bunnyhugger got a boarding pass for Brussels-to-Amsterdam and the instruction to talk with the boarding agent in Amsterdam. She was not happy with the Flightmare-ish thought of having been handed a ``go be someone else's problem'' ticket.

We got to Amsterdam with a bit over an hour to get from one gate to another and sort out bunnyhugger's ticket issue. Unfortunately the first two customer service desks we went to weren't able to help or even necessarily understand what we were talking about, and we were sent on to the gate. By the time we got there they were already starting boarding for the many, many zones ahead of whatever we might be in. And so there was a wall of air travellers between us and the gate. I grabbed bunnyhugger and plunged through, going up to the side of the counter and hoping anyone there spoke English For A Confusing Situation.

But they did, and were able to issue her a boarding pass. Better, one right next to me. Now we just had to wait the eighteen hours it would take for all 53 boarding pass zones ahead of us to get called, and we could step onto the plane with nothing to stop us from getting home.

Stopping us from getting home is that when bunnyhugger showed her boarding pass and passport security told her to stay there until they something something something. (While I'd had no problem I stayed there to see what fresh nonsense this would be.) Security would later call it a random screening and yeah, she had to do the thing where they rub a cotton swab over her clothes and put it in a sensor. This would take roughly forever and I can only hope nobody else on the plane thought we were to blame for the delay.

Anyway. We got on our flight. We got our seats. We had places to put our carry-on. All that could possibly go wrong is if they lost our luggage between everything weird going on, particularly bunnyhugger's bag.

On the flight home I got around to seeing A League Of Their Own, which turns out is a good movie even when you watch the whole thing instead of catching pieces on cable, and The Day The Earth Blew Up, which turned out to be a good movie I'm sorry Warner Brothers decided not to release, and Paddington In Peru which charmed me throughout and made me wonder if the other Paddington movies are any good, and also I forget what the other was. I know Wicked Part One was one of the movies I watched on the flight out so I didn't watch that again. bunnyhugger meanwhile mostly remembers watching this documentary loosely about trying to save a dying record store but mostly about the documentarian putting together all the projects he never finished after his early promise as a documentarian. This also led to bunnyhugger asking me what's with this Uncle Floyd guy and I have to admit, never really watched him, sorry.

We got to Detroit, and took our time getting off the plane and all so we could avoid waiting in line at the ICE concentration camp tryouts. By the time we got through, our flight's luggage was disgorging onto the conveyor belt. We just had to wait for it to roll out.

Yup, just had to wait for it to roll out.

Aaaaany time now, it'd surely roll out.

Yup, surely our luggage would be in the next batch to come --- all right, this is nonsense.

Playing a hunch, I went to the next carousel over from the one that the baggage claim said our luggage would be on, and that all the Amsterdam-tagged bags were coming up on, and there we were, our bags, safe and sound. They've done this before with my bags for some reason.

But. There was no nonsense getting to our car, or paying for however long we spent parked, or driving home, or stopping to get the biggest pops Speedway is allowed by law to sell, we sincerely thought. We got home safe and sound and that was the close of our European Vacation.

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And now, the close of --- wait, yeah, there is another close happening here. All right. The close of my pictures of Marvin's from our September visit. There's three more rounds of these to come!

Once again the Identification Medals stamp machine. I think this time it was working.

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Posters from many old nickelodeon coin-op movies. Also hey, notice that Mickey Mouse's Chocolate Factory poster in the lower right? Computer, enhance.

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OK so it's all charming little bits of nonsense featuring your classic Disney characters except they're gathering up turtles and dipping them in chocolate to send out to be eaten. You notice that, right? Anyway Thumper's breaking walnuts open which is cute but I bet hurts.

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That comic foreground is up way too high for anyone to take pictures through it.

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Can't ever see enough of those Carter The Great posters, really.

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And the vintage reproduction horses that a terribly old sign suggests might be for sale, but it's hard to imagine anyone buying it. Anyway the horse on the upper right has some kind of vein problem. Probably shouldn't fly commercial.

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Trivia: Over 150 miles of drainage structures were built under the land which would become Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport in 1920. Source: Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World's Most Revolutionary Structure, Alastair Gordon.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 65: Private Life of a Privateer, Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

PS: What's Going On In Popeye (Sundays)? Wait, Brutus is in Popeye? April - July 2025 and my humor blog can start being about things that aren't Popeye again! Wait, why do I want that? Popeye's great.

Hi did you miss these?

Just finished: The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett. I ended up enjoying the shit out of this. Murder mystery/political palace intrigue set in a world where eldritch abominations threaten to break through the seawall and destroy entire cities every wet season, and magic is done through bioengineering. The brilliant Sherlock Holmes analogue is a mysterious and terrifying elderly woman and the Watson analogue is a dyslexic disaster bisexual kid who's been altered so that he remembers everything he experiences. It's very fun.

Currently reading: Bread and Stone by Allan Weiss. Look at me I'm reading CanLit! It's about the Winnipeg General Strike, though, so it's not off-brand for me. In the first section, William, a failure of a farm boy, goes off to the Great War against his family's wishes. It's immaculately researched; you get every detail of small town Alberta and the culture shock of moving to the big city of...1914 Calgary. William's father is a coal miner who describes in passionate terms the solidarity that comes from joining a union, but doesn't want his son to go down into the mines himself, so Williams seeks it first in the church, and then amongst his unit. I've gotten to the bit where he's finally being shipped out for France. Quite good so far.

Why all the hate for the Department of Education? Because it gave money for education to black people.

Oh sure, it was there to help 'lower income' people but to a conservative that meant black people. Urban people. Them people. Not clean white blond and blue eyed kids - but brown kids with kinky hair.

Pure racism.

Oh sure, the rabid (heretical) Christians are all slobbering over the chance to take over the schools and talk about Jesus all day- but it's Christian Nationalism they'll be preaching. White Christian Nationalism. How they saved the heathen Native Americans (infected them with diseases, waged war on them, slaughtered them whole sale, drove them from their lands, broke every treaty) and established a Shining City on the Hill - that White people rule. White men mostly. Straight white men.

Yeah, religious schools all the way - just don't expect to see any headed by a black preacher. Oh no. It's white folks all the way down. The only black folks you'll see are the ones with mops and maybe some serving in the cafeteria. Maybe a token house n***** (cough cough Clarence Thomas) but that's about it.

Black kids? Let them darkies start their own schools.

It's going to be a real pity that those rural white folks who'll feel so smug for sticking it the blacks (and liberals of course) are going to lose big time = because rural schools get lots of money from the DOE.

Don't get me started on the PBS/NPR funding. That's personal.

So we finished our truncated ride along Belgium's coast, returned to our hotel room, and did our final packing up, somehow missing the travel pillow along the way. Annoying. Then we went to the hotel clerk who was confused and worried that we should be checking out at like 3:30 pm. We assured Mike --- the guy who'd taught us how to use the elevator --- that everything about the hotel was great, we'd just had something come up and had to return early. bunnyhugger followed up with a review of the hotel reassuring them that everything was great and please don't let Mike worry about us. (Well, almost everything was great. She did note that the bed was harder than she found comfortable, and they wrote back that they had been scheduled to replace the mattresses with something softer anyway.)

At the train station we had several small sadnesses. One is that Plopsaland was easy to see, right there and big as life, and still open as it was only mid-afternoon. Another was that the automated ticket booth was clogged by a good-sized, ambiguous, confused group not sure what it wanted and who got there seconds ahead of us. I also worried that we were getting on the right train which is silly because this station is literally the end of the track --- much farther and the trains would go into the ocean --- so we couldn't be going the wrong way.

The good news is we could take the train to Amsterdam, but we'd have to make a transfer. And not in Brussels, the system advised us; instead, we should change trains in Gent-Sint-Peters or as we know it, Ghent. You know, like in ``Treaty Of''. I completely failed to realize this or I'd have been more fascinated by our locale while bunnyhugger rolled her eyes. In any case all we saw was the train platform --- the main level of the station was walled off for renovations --- and we sat for an hour-plus waiting for our connection. Then, we failed to take it.

See, thing is, the destination signs on two platforms offered trains going to the Amsterdam airport and one of them was arriving like five minutes earlier and was on the track we were already on, so, why not take that one instead? The answer we'd learn too late is that, apparently, the train we didn't take was an express. The one we got on made every stop, twice pausing to let the Belgians and the Dutch build new train stations around us to stop at. That lay in our future; at the train station, all we had to do was look at this gorgeous, impressive-looking old building and wonder what the heck it was. Afterwards, using google maps and all, bunnyhugger would come to the conclusion: we can't figure out what it was.

We eventually made it to Amsterdam airport, regretting how much sleep taking the local cost us. At least I regretted it. And we needed help finding our way from the train station to where the hotel shuttles would come not nearly soon enough. Fortunately when ours did come everyone was going to the same hotel and the driver skipped right to what was otherwise the end of the line. We checked in, getting our biggest room of the whole European stay, as well as the highest one, at least a dozen storeys off the ground. bunnyhugger checked in to our flight online, battling a weirdly stubborn and balky airline web site to do it. And we went to bed, annoyed that we were going to have to get up at like 4 am and head out fast, before even the morning breakfast started, to get our flight to Paris and then from Paris to Detroit.

In the small window of our bare sleep, our flight plans got changed.

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Bit more Marvin's, September edition, while you wait for the revelation of what happened next.

Miscellaneous signs up around the top. The Yagoda's Bitters may have an element of truth as Marvin Yagoda made his fortune as a pharmacist so there's a nonzero chance he made his own elixirs at some point.

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The famed tic-tac-toe chicken, after what the screen makes it look like was a win. Wonder how that happened.

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And the back corner with so many circus posters. I don't think I'd noticed before the ceiling fans had 'Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum' written on the blades.

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Ceiling fan in action, with a hot air balloon obscuring some of the vintage magician posters.

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I don't know why those aeronauts are aiming rifles at the camera, sorry.

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As ever, the Cardiff Giant, with a tiny giant Ferris wheel to let you know where the heart is.

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Trivia: After concluding his work negotiating the Treaty of Ghent, American diplomat John Russell would go to the assignment that had been meant to take him overseas, ambassador to Sweden. Source: Union 1812: The Americans who Fought the Second War of Independence, A J Langguth. (And I've used this before, but: Ghent was a compromise location for peace talks; some American delegates wanted to remain in Gothenburg where they had been, some wanted to be in London where the British delegates could not claim an inability to get instructions from the foreign secretary. Lord Castlereigh's deputy proposed the Belgian city.)

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 65: Private Life of a Privateer, Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

PS: What's Going On In Olive and Popeye? Is Popeye still in Olive and Popeye? April - July 2025 extends my Popeyeapalooza week.

So the Republicans have refused to release the Epstein files. Now, let's just assume that tRump isn't actually in there and was just visiting a good friend and dancing to bad disco songs.

You can stop laughing now.

The known list of Epstein's associates was vast. Royalty, wealthy folk, politicians, actors and musicians. Who's in there? Who are they protecting? Democrats? Bill and Hillary? Come on... if Billy boy was knee deep in under aged girls they'd be plastering that all over Fox News! If tRump isn't in the files...

... I said you can stop laughing now...

.. who is in there? Epstein had cameras, servers full of... stuff. Thumb drives. Loose hard drives. The FBI raided his house in Manhattan and his private island mansion and found lots of ... stuff. Let's wee what's on them, We have flight logs and witness statements. If the evidence exonerates tRump...

WOULD YOU STOP LAUGHING!

Who's being protected? While investigators, news persons and Congress dithers what pedophiles pedophiles are walking around free?

Because at the moment THEY are the ones laughing.

So tRump has given Putim 50 days to end the war? Accept a peace deal? Withdraw from Ukraine? If not there will be Sanctions Real Soon Now.

Putin's laughing up his sleeve.

Trump Always Chickens Out

Big Mean Tariffs! Until the tariffs are reciprocal. Or the Stock Market screams. Then he 'bargains' down the sanctions-tariffs. tRump blusters, screams, threatens, but when he gets push back he folds like a cheap suit. Putin knows this. 50 days is plenty of time for Russia to wiggle out of this.

tRump will cave.

I need to remember that if I want to see more content from other people on Dreamwidth, I really should post a bit more myself.

Our con activity has been -way- down since 2021 for the obvious reasons, so it was something of a trip (as it were) to do two cons in two weeks.

Dexlite was a dizzying array of games, separated by semi-scheduled bits of relaxation. Lisa and I volunteered to run our Good Society hack, Dangerous Refuge, twice -- once on the official schedule and once for Sparks (the rebranded "games on demand" non-scheduled games system); drcpunk ran one session and I ran the other. Interestingly, both of these sessions differed from our core concept and how our previous sessions have gone, in that the players constructed a world and session that was replete with external threats/problems and light on internal ones.

On the one hand, we could probably reduce this frequency by writing a deck of suggested Desires that pushed players towards internal tension. And should; not only can we not, in fact, use the base desires without either permission or referring to them by number (and I'd rather have the option to publish a complete game rather than a supplement, since I really like how playtests have gone), but obviously, dark fantasy school adventures do have notably different core motivations, typically, than regency romances.

On the other hand, it was really fun seeing how, despite the PC group being less strive-driven and more focused on external dangers and threats, whether they were from the Connections (who are, in fact, intended to do exactly that and the players were brilliant at bringing that) than our core setup, the games worked quite well -- in Lisa's game, the players dreamed up a Problem where the previous graduating glass had all failed to graduate, and in less than four hours, played themselves into a stunning conclusion where the PCs had to, despite difficulties, graduate One Year Early, freeing the school from Doom.

And in my run, the players doubled down on YA Dystopia, building a school that was a prison/indoctrination camp for teenage psychics the entire world was afraid of, whose greatest enemies were the faculty themselves and the school building itself, and whose allies were...well, the school building itself and and one another--if they could be trusted. The game climaxed when the players decided that the Newcomer PC would allow his connection to DIE in a challenge set for both of them (while she saved him; the player playing the connection signed off on this, of course), and that the faculty would decide, after the telekinetic PC intervened to save the matter-transmitting PC from a humiliating pop quiz, that she needed to die, resulting in a Danger phase full of menace and culminating in the students BREAKING OUT OF THE SCHOOL to be airlifted to a secret rebel base. I'd definitely read that first of a trilogy book!

I also played a small array of board games, other RPGs, and even a LARP of course, including getting to try a session of Daggerheart, but I think RPGs were thinner than they've been at previous Dexlites (not to mention Dexcons). In order to reverse this, we'd need more larps I like on the schedule--having some on Sparks is great, of course, but those serve as an outlet for players that don't have enough games to play--for the players to even be there there need to be games for them on the schedule.

The following weekend, I went to Summer Larpin', a rocking, larping convention, which I've been doing as an extra larping convetnion for...quite some time now. I was signed up for three games and played in four (sunday is unscheduled for SL); S.U.F.I.E.T.R.A, a fighting game-themed game (this time using a Street Fighter playset complete with a martial arts tournament) with a solid plot core that got elaborated on a bit with workshops where I played The Monster (character names were workshopped here so my name was unique to this run and ended up inspiring an extra relationship, though I forgot to get resolution there but did use one of my flashbacks on that), Shadow Soiree, a dark fantasy secrets and powers and quests game with solid inspiration from the Witcher, among others, where I played the Flame Reader (character names actually were usually titles here, which honestly made them way easier to remember; the only "names" I remember were Prospero and Pandora, both of whom were exactly what it said on the tin), Arabian Days where I played Aladdin's Djinn (which means I'm not going to say what name was on my badge, as that was not public information at the start of the game, although that Aladdin was in the game was)--which was also a secrets and powers and quests game, and as my one "signed up at the con becauese the game had lost players game, also played in Jubilee, which was an interesting psychological game--you played both your own character, who had two "voices" governing your behavior and future, and also were one of the representatives for those voices for the other three players who had the same voice as you had. It was a fun experience!

I also showed up late to the Dance, but still got to dance for over an hour, which just goes to show how much my endurance has improved--I did take breaks, but mostly not because I was tired but because the pairs people had formed didn't include me--or just because my face was running with sweat and I wanted a chance to cool off a bit.

Sunday we woke up with feelings as sour as since the Nigloland disappointment, which we had finally recovered from. We had breakfast at the hotel, even bigger than the one before --- I don't know how but we both lost weight over the trip --- and returned to our room to pack up, in the hopes that whenever we did have to leave we'd be able to do so without fuss or losing anything. We managed to overlook bunnyhugger's travel pillow, so she would have a lousy flight home and has had a couple lousy road trips without the ability to let her head droop safely since. I mention this to underline just how fantastic we were doing at this point.

(We also haven't seen her fitness watch's charging cable since we got home, but I would swear in court that I saw it at the airport hotel so who knows?)

After a small bit of re-debating the issue we decided to take De Lijn's coastal interurban up to about Ostend, near the midpoint of the line, which we figured we could do and return from without missing the last train or two out of De Panne.

The ride north (and, roughly, east) was a nice one, going through shore town after shore town. If there's a drawback we didn't get to see much of the shore, although since it was early summer it's not like it was packed with beachgoers or something. Some people flying kits here and there, some in boats. Along the waterfront we saw a lot of towns that felt like they had a Jersey Shore vibe, so far as you can tell from the seat of a tram line. And we passed some interesting stuff, windmills and monuments to The Great War and big cartoony faces that maybe were from that stuff at Plopsaland painted on the side of hotel-looking buildings. Also a Ferris wheel, that we could only see from a distance, somewhere around I don't know, Nieuwpoort or something? No way to know.

We got off the interurban in Ostende, a major stop and train exchange. Also harbor; we were delayed a bit on our perambulations by the drawbridge rising so a (personal) sailboat could motor through. With no particular objective than spending a little time here so it felt like our ride wasn't pointless we walked a couple blocks to and around a cathedral and evaded merging into a bigger group touring the place. On the streets around the cathedral and city park was a Bistro Beethoven, something called Señorita Daisy, and a tattoo parlor with several Betty Boops and Popeyes on the pret-a-écrire boards.

The ride back, Ostende to De Panne, I imagine you'd think was almost as pleasant but tinged with the sadness of leaving. It was tinged. But it was also made less pleasant by the crowd. Starting from De Panne heading north-and-east left us on the train before everyone else got on. From Ostende, a major station in the middle of the line, everybody else riding the line for fun, or to get somewhere particular, was already on the train. We ended up being straphangers for almost the whole 90 minutes or so of train ride, with only the view of many dogs brought along for the ride to relieve our spirits. Finally enough people got off the train we were able to sit down, for the last two or three stations of our ride.

We returned to the hotel with nothing to do but officially and irrevocably cancel our Sunday afternoon.

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Next up in photos? It was the first week of September, so another Marvin's visit. Small photo collection this time.

First play on the brand-new table and I get on the high score table! You'd think this would bode well for my play during the day and would be mistaken.

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Usual photo looking up, at a couple of the hanging airplanes, not all of which are on the moving chain. Also the back side of that Flying Fickle Finger of Fate.

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View from far behind Pinball Row where you can see an official State of Michigan certificate congratulating Marvin's on being all like that.

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One of the coin-ops, a circus. The ring on the platform rotates and the high-wire act moves back and forth and the lion tamer sticks his head toward the mouths. I don't remember what the disembodied legs do.

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Another coin-op, this one a couple foxes that walk and look back to see if they're being followed.

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And some more miscellaneous coin-ops.

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Trivia: July was renamed from Quintilis in honor of Julius Caesar because Julius Caesar was born in that month. Source: Marking Time: The Epic Quest to Invent the Perfect Calendar, Duncan Steel.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 65: Private Life of a Privateer, Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle. Even granting it's Poopdeck Pappy's scheme this seems like flimsy reason for Popeye to take up with privateers.

PS: What's Going On In Eye Lie Popeye? Is there new stuff in Eye Lie Popeye? May - July 2025 And the answer is sure, you'll like to see what that is, right?

It turns out that North & South (2004) is not soothing to watch whilst stitching; I am not interested in the 1850's generally, I am in no fit state to be entertained by the Industrial Revolution and labor unrest, and the cinematography is bleak. Richard Armitage's jawline does not make up for these flaws.

The Three Sisters plot has begun giving me peas! It is surprisingly difficult to distinguish between "immature snap pea" and "mature snow pea". I should probably give up this plot next year, as the fee is almost twice as much as the one near my apartment, and getting there & back is annoying, and the plot is weed central ....but the raspberry patch! I got sour and sweet cherries at the farmer's market, which of course means that I made cherry-pit whipped cream to go with the cherry galette; it is now corn and zucchini season, which is one of my favorite seasons; I miss having a grill so much. It is absolutely perfect grilling weather.

Somehow I have three community events at the same time tonight: a embroidery meetup, a constituent outreach meeting with my city councilor, and a meeting of the neighborhood association board. ::facepalm::

You are not prepared.



( many )

Bastille Day
Available on Caress of Steel

Music: Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson
Lyrics: Neil Peart

There’s no bread let them eat cake
There’s no end to what they’ll take
Flaunt the fruits of noble birth
Wash the salt into the earth

But they’re marching to Bastille Day
La guillotine will claim her bloody prize
Free the dungeons of the innocent
The king will kneel, and let his kingdom rise

Bloodstained velvet, dirty lace
Naked fear on every face
See them bow their heads to die
As we would bow as they rode by

And we’re marching to Bastille Day
La guillotine will claim her bloody prize
Sing, o choirs of cacophony
The king has kneeled, to let his kingdom rise.

Lessons taught, but never learned
All around us anger burns
Guide the future by the past
Long ago the mould was cast

For they marched up to Bastille Day
La guillotine – claimed her bloody prize
Hear the echoes of the centuries
Power isn’t all that money buys

The terrible discovery was about Monday.

bunnyhugger had not bought train tickets from De Panne back to Brussels because all her research said that there was no buying tickets for what was basically a commuter line; we had that same experience getting from Brussels to De Panne and that worked out fine. And getting from Brussels to Amsterdam, our return flight, was similarly no big deal, trains leaving like all the time. So neither of us had put detailed thought into how we'd get to Amsterdam for our morning flight.

Well, that Saturday, after a good day at the amusement park and some good dinner and even a nap on her part, bunnyhugger thought about the scheduling and what it implied about how early we'd have to get to bed. The immediate question was whether we'd be able to see the sun setting into the Atlantic while riding the interurban, a highly recommended activity for De Lijn.

The horrible answer was: there was no train leaving De Panne early enough Monday morning for us to get to Amsterdam in time for our flight. If we had a car we could get up unspeakably early and make it there, but I dreaded the prospect of my first experience driving in Europe being in the predawn hours and that was even if a couple Americans could rent a car in a tiny shore town on a Sunday. A taxi or an unlicensed taxi service would likely be almost as bad. And rescheduling a flight less than 48 hours before departure would be preposterous.

There was only one way to handle ``be at the airport on time'' that wasn't practically impossible, and that was to get to Amsterdam Sunday night. Which meant leaving De Panne Sunday afternoon. Which meant, among other things, not riding De Lijn all the way to its northern end and back, and certainly not riding it to see the sunset. We could still ride it some, during the morning and early afternoon, at least, and not the whole length. But that was a small consolation.

And no consolation at all: we'd have to leave our De Panne hotel room. We couldn't even close out our stay a day early, as it was too late for us to change our reservation. bunnyhugger kicked herself mightily for if she had realized this just two or three days earlier we could have changed the reservation but now, well, we could use it as a place to store our suitcases until we were ready for the Sunday afternoon train to Brussels.

Fortunately bunnyhugger was able to find an airport hotel in Amsterdam, and to work out the trains we would need to take Sunday afternoon-to-evening to get there. So at least we went to bed confident that we would be able to leave western Europe on time and on the plane we had planned on. But we didn't sleep happy.

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And now I bring you the close of our Labor Day trip to Michigan's Adventure. Enjoy some more pictures of buttons!

Trabant is one of the handful of adult flat rides at the park and we almost always take a turn on it.

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Arty picture of the fence, with the operator at the dead-man's-switch beyond.

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Here's the Trabant control panel being worked. I chose to have the panel be on top of the frame for aesthetics.

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Our last ride of the day, on Wolverine Wildcat, with light just pouring in through the fence there.

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This stairway is for ride operators and also people using the Fast Lane. This time I happened to notice you could also see the train as it dispatched from there.

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And with that, the day and the regular season were done. Here's a last look at the skeletons and the Lakeside Gliders and, not sure, I guess a security guy.

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Trivia: Dubai has about forty miles of natural coastline. Source: The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization, Vince Beiser.

Currently Reading: American Scientist, May - June 2025, Editor Fenella Saunders.

Okay, so I made a batch of cold brew coffee so I just have to open the fridge for quick and easy iced coffee in the morning.

But now the problem is that I just have to open the fridge for quick and easy iced coffee in the evening.

If you're playing along, try to ID the whales. Also some forest pictures and some dead fish that wash up en masse this time of year.

( whales! )

Quoted in the Yale alumni magazine: "You know the world is going crazy when Yale alums are making donations to Harvard!"

(This Yale alum donates to the United Negro College Fund, because they need it more than Yale does.)

I mentioned it being exceptional (and barely plausible) that a roller coaster might last seven minutes. We did nevertheless get on some rides that went on seven minutes or more; one even lasted at least a half-hour. This was the miniature train ride around the park, which unlike some modest amusement parks we could name (Michigan's Adventure, Cedar Point) makes a whole four stops at points along the park. This didn't give us as many views as we'd have liked of stuff from the wrong side, but it's always a pleasant kind of thing, and the sort of ride we want to get on when we have time.

Also we got on a dark ride, a boat ride this time. We'd tried to go early in the day but I think the ride was temporarily closed. Later on we saw it open again and didn't know what to expect from Het Bos van Plop, other than that the ``Bos'' thing sure sounded woods-y. And the ``Plop'' suggested something core to Plopsaland's identity. Sure enough, at the station, we saw a TV showing clips(?) from a TV show(?) with people dressed as gnomes and doing funny shenanigans that well, you can see pictures, and I'll suppose the show is what you expect from that. The ride was a fine one, a tunnel-of-love style ride in boats on the water through a lot of scenes, showing models and automata for fun effect. One point I know they had a couple figures on a carousel where the mounts were squirrels and bunnies, just in case they needed to appeal to bunnyhugger the more.

As you can tell I've given up writing a chronological progression of the day. No point to it, and we did a lot of walking back and forth across the park, which isn't that large. Bigger than Michigan's Adventure, probably, but better-connected so it's easier to get to different areas and different-themed areas. We would close out the day --- at only about 6 pm; European parks close crazy early --- with some rides on Heidi and then The Ride to Happiness.

I think we could have got some more rides in, but we weren't sure whether the gift shops would close when the park did at 6 pm, and we hoped for some souvenirs. Turns out they left the shops open after the closing hour, but we've been burned before. Sadly they didn't have much in T-shirts, although I was able to find something at least saying The Ride To Happiness. And we got some magnets and little things like that, including park maps.

As we left a most strange thing unfolded: outside the gate park workers gave us two small bags of baby carrots. Not just us, everybody got them. There were empty bags and partially eaten bags along the sidewalk and abandoned at the tram station. Why does the amusement park give out bags of baby carrots to people leaving for the day? I have not the faintest idea.

We used the tram to get back to our hotel and, after a while, went out looking for dinner, as our plan to eat all our meals at the amusement park didn't pan out. I had seen another kebab place that I thought might be easier to get to on our walks and suggested we try that. That place, too, wanted cash only payment so I had to backtrack a fair bit to get two €20 notes. bunnyhugger worried about having the excess foreign currency when we were flying home the morning after next, but I figured we were planning to spend Sunday riding the interurban up and down the Belgian coast, we'd find somewhere to spend it or most of it. (We talked a bit about going back to the amusement park for a second day, but we weren't sure there would be enough more stuff to do to justify the ticket price.)

After eating bunnyhugger napped for a couple hours. When she woke up she confirmed some horrible news, news comparable in badness to Nigloland's being closed.

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It's time now for a pleasant discovery, a couple more Michigan's Adventure pictures.

For some reason I was taking a lot of pictures of operators and their stations as the day went on. Here's the Zach's Zoomer operator.

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And here's ... uh ... the daily inspection card, I guess.

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Couple folks enjoying the ride. You don't think it's this fast coming out the station!

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Ride operator working the buttons of the control panel.

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Little stage set up for the Halloween event. We would actually see it in use this year!

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And here's just some unused landscape at the edge of the park being let go feral. The parking lot is behind the wooden fense there.

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Trivia: A February 1797 appearance of three French frigates in the harbor of Fishguard, Wales, a small fishing village, set off a demand for hard currency and account-holders withdrawing enough gold that the Bank of England had to suspend convertibility. Source: Wedding of the Waters: The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation, Peter L Bernstein.

Currently Reading: American Scientist, May - June 2025, Editor Fenella Saunders.

via oursin, something I found interesting: We still don't understand family resemblance, and some of what we thought we knew is mistaken, or might be.

This article describes research that used data from almost a million people: every Norwegian student who took a standardized test from 2007-2019.

Quoting the article: "The resemblance of twins cannot be reconciled with any model....The resemblance of adoptees cannot be reconciled with any model."

Adjusting a model to account better for twins makes it a poorer match of adoptive relationships, and vice versa. Any attempt to account for one of these moves the model away adopted siblings makes it fit twins less well, and vice versa.
( cut for length )

Cattitude, Adrian, and I are going to be in London for a week, starting Monday July 14th. This trip is partly so my brother and I can sort out my mother's things, including photos and papers, but we should have some free time to see people and/or do tourist things.

We'd like to get together with people. I realize this is somewhat last-minute as well as vague, since we don't know how much time we'll have available.

I have visited London several times, but that trip to see my mother in April was Adrian's first visit to England; Cattitude was three with me for a week in 2001.

We mask indoors, but it's July, so we're hoping for restaurants with outdoor seating.

After Heidi and all that we did get back around to K3 Roller Skater, a cute little roller coaster with the theme of ... well, I guess you're in a train of roller skates going through the clutter of a teenager's room. I don't know why ``train of roller skates'' is a model of roller coaster but it is and it's cute if odd. The high point of this particular instance is that it dives through a giant stereo speaker prop. Anything where you get nice and close to props like that does well. It's apparently themed to the Flemish girl band K3 and a tv series K3 Roller Disco so you see how this all makes sense.

Anubis: The Ride is another of their launch coasters, ones that accelerate horizontally rather than using a chain-driven lift hill for energy. It's got a pretty fancy station, one made to look like an English stately home, to fit its theme of 1910s-or-so Anglo Egyptologist who's brought back something he maybe shouldn't. Pleasant ride. What sticks out in my mind is that I made a mistake going into it dumb enough you could be forgiven for thinking it was a bit, although I think bunnyhugger just took me for saying something weirdly wrong in a way not worth challenging.

Outside the building was a ride sign with information about it and I pointed to one of the little squares and said this was a seven-minute ride. Which is extraordinarily long; your average roller coaster ride is two minutes, with the longest ones you'll encounter about three minutes. A seven minute ride would be something with a weird circumstance, like for some reason they have to put all the track two miles over from the station. Or they stop partway through for a show. Well, what happened is I saw the square reading '7+ min' and took it for seven minutes. If I'd paid attention to the text underneath, 'jaar/ans', I'd have correctly understood it as the minimum age requirement. But bunnyhugger didn't correct me, or even acknowledge this, and when I looked at other ride signs I figured out my mistake, and I confess to it here just to be honest about it.

Any attempt to count roller coasters will encounter things you're not sure should count. One that we kept looking at and ultimately rode was SuperSplash, which looked like a water roller coaster, something that starts out on a track and then splashes down to sail the rest of the way. We've ridden some like that, notably at d'Efteling. This one, we decided after seeing other people weren't getting very wet, we'd ride.

It proved to be less of a roller coaster than we imagined. We got on the train on a segment of track that proved to be on an elevator, and that rose up to the top of a tower and rode a hill down, into the water. It's gravity-driven and on a track and all, but it feels a little like a Freefall ride in terms of not quite being roller-coaster-y. The Roller Coaster Database doesn't list it, although Coaster-Count.com does. Who's correct? You have to make your decision and hope nobody demands you give a rigorous defense.

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Would you like to see pictures of things at Michigan's Adventure that inspire no disagreement about whether they're roller coasters? Look on, friends.

The Corkscrew station. We invariably head for the back as the most comfortable ride; the over-the-shoulder restraints will bonk your head and from the back you get warning about which way to lean.

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The station had this penant. What the Battle Royale 2024 was we have no idea but they achieved something for it.

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Giant skeletons being prepped for their Halloween work season.

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Person on the left: 'So which way is Zach's Zoomer?'

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Ordinary picture looking up the Zach's Zoomer queue, but I like how dramatic it is. If I'd got the roofline of the building perfectly vertical I'd call this an art.

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No explanation for why those two seats were unavailable, although almost always the issue is that the restraints aren't opening right. Since Zach's Zoomer has only the one train they can't swap the train out and you wouldn't want to take the ride out of operation if you don't have to.

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Trivia: The Lumière brothers' films were first shown to American audiences at the Eden Musée theater in Manhattan, located on 23rd street between Fifth and Sixth avenues. Source: The Encyclopedia of Vaudeville, Anthony Slide. The theater closed in summer 1915.

Currently Reading: American Scientist, May - June 2025, Editor Fenella Saunders.

The Epstein Files: lists of clients with phone numbers and other incriminating evidence has gone missing. The authorities are starting to claim that it never existed and Epstein kept it all in his head.

I call bull**it.

Sure we continue to search for it (or dig it out of the shredder) but there are other pieces of evidence that can used.

We knew where he lived. Strip it down the the studs.

We know the island he brought people to. Flight records should be available.

But the most important piece: Epstein's victims. The man spent years, decades maybe providing underage girls to his clients. Find them. Protect them. Comfort them Get them tell their stories.

Then warm up the wood chipper the the kiddie diddlers.

I finally processed these. They're all from St. John's and Ferryland.

( cut for photos )

It's time to review my humor blog for the past week. Which, if you've seen on your Reading page or followed by whatever your RSS reader is, you know saw the end of this intense block of Robert Benchley posting. Why did it end? For one, because our very busy time from the end of May to the start of July has passed. But also? Read on and you'll see the hint I got.

• MiSTed: The 72 Hours Saga, Part 47
• Robert Benchley: Nature’s Noises
• Statistics Saturday: Some Adequate Cartoons Of Our Past
• Robert Benchley: Owl Data
• Robert Benchley: As They Say In French: Other Times, Other Customs
• What’s Going On In Judge Parker? Why is April Parker in Norway? April – July 2025
• Statistics June: Robert Benchley Is Somehow Less Popular Than Me
• MiSTed: The 72 Hours Saga, Part 48

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And now please enjoy returning to Michigan's Adventure and the end of a regular season on another impeccably lovely day.

As always, we rode the carousel, little suspecting that the next time we rode it the ride would go ... backwards?!

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Here's bunnyhugger riding the fiberglass white rabbit.

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bunnyhugger pointed out the nice work done on painting the trappings and so I stopped and noticed that, like, yeah, that's a nice picture to put on the zebra's saddle blanket there.

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The cat, again with a bunch of nice decorations. Also a fish in its mouth because classic carvers never thought about how it was showing the mount as having killed another creature.

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Here's the tiger, and the blanket there is quite well done despite being part of the fiberglass body.

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Of course we always like seeing the sea horse. This time I paid attention to the orca on its saddle.

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Now over to Thunderhawk. There was a longer line than usual, giving me time to take a picture of the train coming out of the station and beginning the ascent of the lift hill.

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View from the station back to Wolverine Wildcat, which you'd think you could just cut across to walk to and can't. There must be something unstable about the soil that direction.

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Photograph of some of the controls of Thunderhawk, revealing that the roller coaster is a big 10CC fan! I'm surprised the station isn't playing ``I'm Not In Love''.

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Arty picture of local trees and spiderweb against the blurry background of Wolverine Wildcat. You can see the train going by in the upper right corner.

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The swan boats are an attraction on this side of the park, past the entrance to the water park, and I liked how the light came here.

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I have to assume this promises some Snoopy meet-and-greet but we never saw it.

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Trivia: Otis Elevator demonstrated the world's first working escalator at the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris. Norton Otis, representing the company, was awarded the Legion d'Honneur. Source: Otis: Giving Rise to the Modern City, Jason Goodwin.

Currently Reading: American Scientist, May - June 2025, Editor Fenella Saunders.

I went to the Brookline (Coolidge Corner) farmers market this afternoon. I bought the two things I was specifically looking for--lamb merguez sausages, from Stillman's, and raspberries. When I was buying the sausages, I told the vendor that I'd asked for this kind of sausage a couple of weeks ago, at a different farmers market, and thanked him (them) for making that specific flavor of sausage.

One small box of raspberries, because we've had bad luck this summer with over-buying berries, and not eating all of them before them spoiled. I also bought two small cucumbers, and a baguette, even though it's not good baguette weather, because we like Clear Flour bakery's "ancienne" baguettes.

I stopped at Burdick's and got a cup of dark hot chocolate to take out, because it's unseasonably cool and felt like good weather for sitting outside with a hot drink. I didn't buy anything else there, because the chocolate-covered citrus has suffered from shrinkflation: Burdicks is charging almost twice as much as they did a few years ago, for about half as much candy.

The Dean Road station on green line C station isn't far, but it's enough of a hill to be good exercise: I walk quickly on my way to the T unless I make an effort not to, and then the walk back is uphill all the way.

I realized, after posting this but before dinner, that I overdid things and was out of executive function.

I mentioned not riding the log flume despite its dinosaurs. There were some other things we didn't ride or didn't get to do. The roller coaster miss was Draconis, formerly named Draak. Unfortunately, hanging across the ride's entrance sign was a plaque with this note:

Deze attractie is even in onderhound maar zal snel weer blinken als goud.

The message is repeated in French so as to not sound so much like someone making fun of Dutch. But you get the gist: the ride is closed for maintenance but will soon be back, shining good as gold. (We only got that precisely translated with machine help.)

The change of name from something meaning ``dragon'' to something else meaning ``dragon'' may seem unmotivated. Its motivation: this year they re-themed the ride to the series Nachtwacht. There were statues of what we surmised (correctly) to be the main characters: a vampire, a werewolf, and a girl. (She's an elf.) According to Wikipedia and the Internet Movie Database they're a trio of supernatural teens who protect the city from monsters of the week. I believe the dragon appears in one episode. I don't know if the extended downtime of the ride is part of the retheming or if the ride is just having issues.

Also missed: Nachtwacht-Flyer, an elevated swings ride. There was no chance bunnyhugger would ride it, but I was up for it. Unfortunately, by the time we felt ourselves free to mess around with optional attractions like that, the ride was closed for weather. High winds, you know, which only reinforced my nicknaming of it as a WindSeeker. We thought to get back to it later, but never found the time.

And the big thing we missed? Shows. We had seen some characters doing happy dances at the park entrance when the day started. But they had events along the way. The most important of those --- a parade --- we caught. But there was some kind of show at the stage up front, a couple of times during the day, and we managed to miss it every time. While stumbling from one attraction to another we saw a bit of it from afar, across the field of water sprays from the concrete, and maybe it might have given us some idea what the intellectual properties we were watching were about. Maybe not. We don't know. We'll only ever know any of these characters and shows from YouTube or people making comments here.

There were other things we didn't get to at the park --- it has way more attractions than we could have got to in one day --- but those were the ones we were most interested in.

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Putting aside now Plopsaland De Panne, let's enjoy pictures of Michigan's Adventure from last Labor Day.

The Dock, est 2024, is what they ended up doing with that weird wooden structure they were building at the end of 2023. It's more of a boardwalk than a dock, leading from where the bumper boats used to be to the beer garden. It's no kind of shortcut to anything and it doesn't support any water features we know so it seems like that thing where you have a little spare money in Roller Coaster Tycoon but no idea of anything to do with it.

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But here's what The Dock looks like, with a tiny bit of cute bunting where it changes direction.

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It's a nice spot to pause and look at the water, at least.

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There's this spot where the boardwalk Dock changes direction and that has some space but it's hard to imagine setting up an event here, at least not anything supposed to keep a crowd.

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Oh hey, this is nice, they're trying to help prop up a tree using the corpses of other trees!

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And here's Corkscrew, the ride that started the deer-petting-zoo's transformation into a modest but respectable amusement park. Note the train is mid-cork.

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Trivia: In February 1946 mob boss Charles ``Lucky'' Luciano was released from state prison, given a reprieve in exchange for his support of the war effort (from inside jail) through his Italian contacts and ensuring of no New York City dockworker strikes, on condition that he remain in Italy the rest of his life. He arrived in Cuba the 29th of October, 1946, to reside in Havana. Source: Cuba: An American History, Ada Ferrer. (Cuba would expel him in 1947, under United States government pressure.)

Currently Reading: Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, Keith Houston.

I talked to someone at Amalgamated Bank this morning, who told me what I would need to do to take my mother's name off a joint account, then suggested that I set up online banking and then transfer the money to my account at another bank. Setting up online banking on their website was straightforward, and then it popped up a verification step involving sending a text to a cell phone associated with the account. Entirely reasonable, but my phone number isn't on the account.

I called back, and talked to another helpful person. She told me how to add the number: send her an email with "attn: Cheryl" as the subject line, giving them my current phone number and attaching a copy of my ID. I did that, and got an "undeliverable" message from Postmaster@[bank], saying I wasn't authorized to relay messages through the server. So I called back, again, and spoke to someone who told me that oh, yes, it does that, but it does deliver the messages. I got her to check, and they had received my email, but Why?

This still feels like significantly less hassle than sending them a copy of my ID, and an original death certificate. That has to be done by paper mail, not email, because they want an "original" death certificate, which she promised they'd return. (At the moment, those originals are in either New Orleans or London, I'm in Boston, and my brother is on vacation in Ireland.)

After taking The Ride To Happiness we were feeling pretty happy indeed, and looked for more of the park's attractions. It's a fun park, with a bunch of whimsy to its decorations even if it is sort of the West Europe Nickelodeon Studios chain of parks. Like, anyone can have a flat-ride boat, with boats that go in a circle in a little water trough, but make the boats into ducks? That's different and fun to see.

We went next to Heidi The Ride, the wooden coaster that I had penciled in to be my 300th unique coaster before the Nigloland disappointment. Looking at the track suggested to us who made the ride, and going on it --- with its heavily banked turns and hills --- confirmed. It's a 2017 Great Coasters International ride; their personality is just that strong. It's fun, albeit short, but should do a lot to teach kids how fun wooden roller coasters are.

Really though the theming of the ride is the attraction. Not the signs and the monitors showing what I guess are clips of the specific Heidi adaptation they're promoting. That looks like an adequate, low-budget computer animated thing. It's the decor of the station that looks so good, done in a style that evokes the Alps Or Wherever setting that I assume the Heidi story or stories take place in, with furniture that looks hand-made and wooden sleighs and cedar chests and iron implements. The train is even done up to look like a wooden sleigh. It's all very charming.

And nearby was Plopsaland's other carousel. It's not an antique (I assume it dates to about the same time as the roller coaster) and it's not wood, but it works hard to look like wood. Specifically the animals and seats on it --- including sleds rather than chariots --- are made to look like wood sculptures, rustic and imperfect, though if you look at multiple models of the same animal you notice they have identical flaws. But it has the look of the kind of merry-go-round someone might make by hand in the Alps Or Wherever. It commits hard enough to this that it doesn't even have a center pole and axles from which the animals dangle. They're mounted on the rotating disc of the ride, and fixed in place, without any kind of rocking or jumping mechanism, just like the oldest of carousels. The only downside is it isn't run like the oldest of carousels, with the ride rocketing up to maybe two rotations per minute. In the old days you could get five or six.

Also a strange feature? Dinosaurs. Lining what looked like the path of a log flume were bunches of dinosaurs, pterodactyls and stegosauruses and triceratopses and all that. Why? We don't know. We considered riding the log flume to see but it takes a lot to get us to ride a log flume, usually an intensely hot sunny day with nevertheless short lines for the ride. It wasn't intensely hot so we kept bumping the log flume down to ``maybe later'' and we ran out of time to consider it.

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But enough of that exotic park we'll probably only ever see the once; how about photos of Michigan's Adventure, which we might easily see twice this season?

Park flags outside the Shivering Timbers ride.

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There's not much of a line for Shivering Timbers; here we're already at the station and you can see the blue train circling the helix at the end of the ride.

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The purple tent here is set up for the Halloween Tricks-and-Treats event.

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Wolverine Wildcat's queue and in the distance, lift hill, and one of the monitors that's not working.

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They've been replacing the wood on Shivering Timbers, including some retracking, and it has done wonders at making the ride smoother and faster. For some reason they've got it replaced here on the lift hill, where the ride doesn't need to be fast or smooth.

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Here's a close-up showing the Gravity Group logo for the new wooden track.

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Trivia: A dill cucumber pickle is about 93 percent water. A fresh (such as bread-and-butter) pickle, 79 percent. A sour pickle is about 95 percent water. Source: The New York Public Library Desk Reference, Editorial Directors Paul Fargis, Sheree Bykofsky.

Currently Reading: Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, Keith Houston.

PS: What’s Going On In Judge Parker? Why is April Parker in Norway? April – July 2025 in my latest comic strip plot recap adventure!

In the category of continuing COVID side effects, add the inability to taste strawberries properly.

I realize the berries available locally or in the non-chain market where we shop aren't going to be the ones I used to eat up north, but the ones this year were so acidic and unsweet that I couldn't eat an entire bowl. They were making my stomach turn over. They weren't that way last year, so I can only assume it's another COVID side effect.

I used to eat a quart a day when I grew my own, up north.

This is just disappointing.

Last night I looked out the window a few minutes after nominal sunset and saw an unusual and impressive color in the sky. Naturally, I ran outside to snap a few pictures before it disappeared.

These are unedited cell-phone photos, hastily framed because I know things like this don't last long. ( Read more... )

A couple weeks ago we went out to Shi Miao Dao Noodle House, which for the last year-or-two occupied the location of the rather lovely Japanese joint next to my favorite Vietnamese, An Loi. They also go by "Ten Seconds", which I believe their name translates to.

What they do is a bowl of broth into which you throw many things, but all of their broths are either spicy or porky or tomatoey, so I hadn't tried to make the time. Well, they do have other things, and I decided to go for dumplings and supplement them with a rice ball. Spouse went for a tomato-broth soup, and reviewed it favorably, and the spicy soupy things our friends had also hit the spot with them.

Me, I was a bit less lucky: as everyone else was served I got a question instead: did you order the chicken mushroom dumplings, but instead I made chicken soup dumplings, is that ok? I can't say it was necessarily thrilling, but I didn't exactly want to wait for a whole nother batch, so I went for them. And they were entirely ok. I also got the rice ball described as "shu mai" (shrimp); the shrimp was chopped into small enough bits that little texture remained, and the texture of the rice ball made me feel like it had sat for a while. (A couple days later I picked up a very similar rice ball from the deli counter at Lotte supermarket, and it was superior in nearly every way.)

We split an order of milk buns for dessert, and those were just fine.

It took rather longer than 10 seconds, but I would go back, if only to try the thing I actually ordered. Though maybe with a different second thing.

When last October The Big Greek Cafe first came to town (to replace the excellent Madrid tapas place, sigh) we attended its grand opening and won a door prize in the form of a gift card. (Then we forgot about it for a while.) We split a trio of appetizers - falafel for Spouse (which came with a bonus salad), calamari for me (with pita), and spanakopita to split. The first two came with containers of very dense tzatziki, and each was a perfectly adequate example. The spanakopita was, nicely, a rather sizeable mini-pie of it, rather than a slice of a larger sheet; I think I prefer this presentation, and it was a good size to round out the meal. All in all, a pleasant enough outing, though I don't know that I'd prioritize returning to it.

Finally let's resume talking Plopsaland De Panne.

The Ride to Happiness is the roller coaster that has a reputation, to the point it might be something an American roller coaster enthusiast might have heard of. That reputation is of an unbelievably intense ride, something unlike what you might have experienced otherwise. The station, and the ride, has this steampunk vibe, all gears and clockwork mechanisms and, like, a forge's furnace in part of the queue building. You also might get some of the vibe of the place by the sign put out front, delivered in three languages --- English as the first and largest text, the only place in the park where that happens, and French and Dutch translations beneath that:

Dear people of Tomorrow, welcome to The Ride To Happiness.

After many wonderful years of writing history, Tomorrowland has been searching to expand its horizons. This spectacular ride has found its course, created to stimulate all senses in a way that hasn't been done before --- as a true symbol of uniting the People of Tomorrow community around the world.

The 4 elements of nature work together to power this extraordinary machine. Kicking off with the first element Air --- known to blow harshly at the Belgian coast --- of which the force is collected for the next element Fire. The scorching fires are then controlled in the oven to be used in the next element Earth. The incredible temperatures can shape Earth's surface any way it desires, ensuring its path to flow perfectly for the last element Water. Finally, the 4 elements unite to fully power The Ride To Happiness.

Prepare for an unforgettable journey of a lifetime.

Tomorrowland, by the way --- designers or something of the ride --- is a big electronic dance music festival in Belgium, scheduled for a couple weekends later this month in Boom, Belgium. So despite all that text, and the huge monitor of a cybernetic woman introducing you to the ride when you get to the station, it's not some prog rock thing. Actually the music is more ... I'm not sure how to describe it. Softer, though, and enveloping and seeming out of line with a thrill ride. But the cybernetic woman congratulates you on being guided through the energy maze to this place and that you will have nature embrace your inner being so live today, love tomorrow, unite forever. The ride is full up to the brim with vibes, is what I'm saying.

And what is the ride itself? ... Well, the roller coaster is a short one --- all the Plopsaland roller coasters are --- but it's a pretty intense, curving, topsy sort of ride. And what elevates it further is that the cars all spin, and are released to spin almost right away. The experience is much like if you put spinning wild mouse cars on an Arrow megalooper of the 1980s. In fact, the ride is pretty close in length and speed and inversion count to Kings Island's Vortex, though it's not so tall as that one had been. I'd call this more intense than Vortex, although just how intense varies, depending on your luck in the spinning. We got several rides on this over the day, and avoided doing a real session on it because it would be just too much for that. Also you start the ride with a low-speed inversion, the track doing a heartline roll before you get to the launch. These are always unsettling.

It is a really good ride. And the theme and presentation is so very different from any American roller coasters. It's amazing.

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And now, getting into the photo reel, since we're done with the Fairy Ball what comes next? ... Go on, guess.

Establishing shot. Exterior, my car, outside the Mad Mouse ride. Labor Day. So, looking like maybe not too heavy a day at the park? We'll see.

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Here's the park's tree, and Ferris wheel, against the cloudiest sky we ever thought we'd see at Michigan's Adventure.

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Maker's plate for the Scrambler, a ride we don't get to nearly enough considering it's pretty hard to have a bad ride on one.

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bunnyhugger here was snagging a picture of the charming cartoony figure of the safety warning figures, cartoon stick figures who are smiling when they're letting the restraint bar keep them safe during the ride and unhappy when they unlatch it and stand up. Note the Big Eli logo on back of the cars.

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There's Thunder Bolt, the Himalaya ride, which for 2024 lost its roof. Now it's protected from the elements only by the elements themselves.

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Trees outside the Scrambler and Thunder Bolt already starting to change colors for fall.

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Trivia: The British Naval Intelligence Office cracked German naval ciphers at the start of World War I, thanks in great part to the accidental capture of three German cipher books, one from a merchant ship in Australia, one from the light cruiser Magdeburg wrecked on the Russian coast, and the third from a torpedo boat salvaged from the English Channel. Source: To Rule The Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World, Arthur Herman.

Currently Reading: Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, Keith Houston.