Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Posted by Paul Taylor

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https://wapsisquare.com/comic/invited/

https://wapsisquare.com/?post_type=comic&p=20677

I mentioned the Pokemon game as one of the not entirely coincidental reasons we went to the RLM tournament in Grand Rapids on Friday. There was another tournament going on, at the Sparks In The Mall location in whichever exactly Detroit suburb it is, the one with all the Pee-Wee Hermans hidden around. We might have gone there instead, and while we couldn't have played Pokemon there it's not like the game won't be around everywhere soon enough.

But a deciding factor was the threats of weather. Eastern Michigan was under a heavy fog advisory, with visibility incredibly low and after a harrowing experience bunny_hugger had a couple weeks back she did not want to face that again. Western Michigan, though, and an hour later the central band where we live, would be facing severe thunderstorms. But the forecasts and radar projections suggested the heavy weather would hit while we were inside buildings, so we picked that as the likely-safer option.

It did not amuse either of us when, approaching Grand Rapids (annoyingly RLM Amusements is on the opposite side of the city), the sky dimmed to a quarter its previous brightness in around sixty seconds. We were driving into a heavy storm, with multiple lightning flashes at once, although fortunately it was at this particularly intense level for only a couple minutes. After that it was steady rain but not heavy enough to be threatening.

While we didn't encounter anything bad on the drive home, home did. There were reports of a hecking lot of flooding including in our area; apparently the gas station two blocks away was under four feet of water until someone got the drain unplugged. And people living downtown by the Grand River got hail smashing their car hoods. Our house, maybe a mile and a half away, got nothing but a full goldfish pond cured of the last bits of the ice cover. And personally faced nothing worse than the Taco Bell we hoped to get a post-pinball dinner from being unexpectedly closed. Wild.

I continue exploring Glen Echo Park here, with a half-dozen pictures going from the bumper cars all the way to almost the front of the park. There is a reason my photos are running like nine months behind ``current''.

The eyebrow roof of the bumper cars building, with pictures of bumper cars ready to bump. I don't know if this is (a restoration of, surely) what the ride had when the park last operated or if it's a modern construction to evoke what the art was like.

Standing by the bumper cars looking at the carousel building, left, and Pop Corn/the arcade, on the right.

Past the Pop Corn building we get a passage to the front, with a candy shop in front and what looks like a small castle out front. Note on the right the National Park Service shield.

Candy Corner there; I don't know when it last operated although the signs in the window suggest that maybe we were just not there on the right day to get something.

Very close to the front here! And I got a picture of someone else taking a dramatic photo looking up the rock wall. I don't know why but I failed to take a similar picture myself.

I swear, we're almost to the front. I just wanted to highlight the style of what would otherwise just be boring supports of the overhang; it really lets you know when they built this in the late 30s/early 40s they wanted to be in fashion. You could almost take this and drop it into the Emerald City sequences and with a coat of paint it'd fit .

Trivia: Between 1917 and 1918 Bridgeport, Connecticut --- with Remington Arms (making rifles, cartridges, and bayonets), the Locomobile Company (making trucks), Lake Torpedo Boat Company (submarines) --- grew from 114,000 people to 166,000. Source: A Call To Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II, Maury Klein.

Currently Reading: The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe, Matthew Gabriele, David M Perry. Sorry, people normally have 20 baby teeth and not the 32 that would match their adult teeth? How have I gone over a half-century without hearing a word of this? (It comes up in a discussion of people's responses to the Black Death, one of them being that allegedly children were being born with more teeth, the change in human bodies matching the fundamental change God had wrought in the world.)

austin_dern

lcohen

• This year my house is 100 years old and I am 60 years old, so maybe I should plan a big backyard party for us both for May or later. After a very cold and snow-laden February, suddenly it's getting very warm, so in theory I could throw a party sooner, but I have too much chores to put on a big party. 
• Mainly, I need to deal with my taxes (I know, I know), get my car fixed (a small crack on my windshield last weekend has this week meandered over a foot across so I got an appointment for next week), get a passport replacement (stymied b/c I accidentally threw the old one away in a folder of Germany maps, and the forms don't quite cover that and I don't want to lie), and do some de-cluttering.
• My basement computer which is the more secure Ethernet-connected one where I like to do my financial stuff wouldn't display to its monitor for a while but it's better now (I took fresh backups as soon as I temporarily fixed it) so I really need to get going on organizing 2024 tax materials. 
• I have played a lot of Garden Joy and Polytopia this weekend.

• The worst federal lead has had us do a lot with metrics and road map for a big presentation he has next week. We finally got things into shape that pleases him Friday. Also, he attended some new-to-him meetings I was in last Thursday, finally realized I do a lot of work and have a lot of expertise he was ignoring, and spoke to me with a little more appreciation Thursday evening. We'll see if that lasts.
• The work for the OTHER federal lead went by the wayside for a while and I need to pick it back up and jam on it before our meeting Wednesday afternoon.
• Middle and upper management at both my employer and my client are jamming AI down our throats, the worst literally to the point of "But ChatGPT says" to contradict our recommendations.  
• I now have to drive in to the DC office 2x week. I love my old house but am sometimes a little overwhelmed by it (basement leak, etc.) and the yard, especially since my sister moved out. So I actually looked at 3 town/rowhouses a 20-minute walk from work, and I really like and could afford one of them, but I really shouldn't think about applying for a new mortgage until I file those taxes, plus this may not be the time to go back into debt. The commute is really tiring me out (I know others have it worse), but I am listening to more audiobooks. 
• I finally made back my hours from the negative leave I was in from the fall shutdown, so maybe I can take a day off later in March. 

There's a new Pokemon pinball game --- amazingly, the first-ever licensed Pokemon pinball game --- and RLM Amusements out in Grand Rapids got one yesterday. So, not entirely coincidentally, we went there for the weekly pinball tournament. I was never called up on the game during the tournament, which was randomly-picked pairs for the fourteen-round qualifying session and then games picked by the quartet's highest-seed player for playoffs. But I did get one game in late, past 1 am, and it went pretty well. Along the way I caught a Stufful, which bunny_hugger --- who understood what I meant by saying it was a ``Stuffit'' --- explained on the drive home to be kind of a plush red panda, so at least the game knew who was playing it and what they'd look for. (I mean given the weird ongoing failure of Pokemon to make a good raccoon-based creature.) Also since I've never played the video games or the card games or any other spinoff of the intellectual property, this means that the 7th of March, 2026 saw me catch my first Pokemon ever and it was this.

Otherwise, well, this was the first time this year I've made it to an RLM tournament. Since my last visit they've put Scorbit data-gathering things on many of the tables. These allow for the results of matches to be logged automatically. And since the games are logged to Matchplay.events, we can go back afterwards and look at score versus number of balls and score versus ball time, and also just how long each ball was in play. Other than logging the results automatically, this isn't actually useful but I suppose will someday make prop betting easier.

bunny_hugger went in and put up what's got to be her best performance in qualifying, winning 12 of her 14 matches and coming in tied for second. The only person to beat her --- with 13 wins --- was a guy who's the 12th-highest ranked player in the world. She did great in the semifinals round, taking first-place finishes in two games (which is always going to let you move on) and a third-place finish on the other (for a little bonus). Unfortunately in semifinals (in a group led by that 12th-place-worldwide guy) she had a worse time of it, taking last places on everything and finishing the night in 8th place, just as she would if she'd decided to go home rather than play the next round. But there's never knowing that before you play.

And in every regard she did better than me: in qualifying I put up a mere eight wins, enough to get into playoffs, and the last win coming against JTK. In the quarterfinals I was playing RLM (top seed) and a woman I'd noticed all night --- CP --- wearing a shirt with what looked like a 50s-children's-book-watercolor-picture of a deer with a huge safety pin through its body. She would explain that it was the logo for a metal band. Anyway in this group I took last place on Harry Potter, and second place on Getaway. RLM had won both games so was assured to move on, and the rest of us were tied for the other advancing slot. RLM decided to toss a bit of chaos into the mix and deferred choice of game to JJL.

JJL picked Fast Draw, an electromechanical, and one of my pocket games that I can always pull out a good finish on. Reader, I did not. My first ball got a mere 10 points, the lowest possible. My second ball got five times that. It wouldn't be until the fourth ball that I got anything together and it wasn't much of that. Fifth ball drained without my touching it too, and I went not just to a last-place finish but a dismal one, literally a hundred thousand points behind CP.

So that came out dismal. But on the bright side we got to talking with CP and her wife --- bonding first over all of us wearing N95's or KN95's --- and quite liked them, and they seem to like us too. So hey, maybe new pinball friends? That's always nice to see.

In pictures, I'm going to spend today focusing on a specific aspect of the former bumper cars pavilion at Glen Echo Park. Why? You'll see momentarily.

Carving of a bumper car that's one of a bunch of sculptures hanging on the pavilion's walls.

Here's two people crammed into the bumper car.

And a picture of a car also being a Dutch wooden shoe.

And here's the fourth bumper car design seen in this array of pictures.

Finally, some cars bumping!

And one last design of bumper cars. I have no information about which of these body designs were ever on the ride here.

Trivia: After his first experiments with X-rays showed their ability to see through solid objects --- including seeing the bones of his own hand --- Wilhelm Röntgen locked himself in the lab for seven weeks to find what possible mistake he was making and to try to find a more plausible explanation than ``X-rays can see through solid objects''. At some point he joked to his wife that ``I'm doing work that will make people say, 'Old Röntgen has gone crazy!'.'' 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 Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe, Matthew Gabriele, David M Perry.

Good gravy, this semester is tough. I'm juggling a million different things and keeping my head above water, but only just. Admittedly, a number of things I am juggling are not work things (birthday trip planning! proof of Canadian-ness! community service!) and everything will get 100% easier when it is above 50° every day and the world isn't pitch black at 6pm, but until that time is upon us, I am apparently going to be surviving on pizza and hummus.

My internet, which is allegedly FIOS, is periodically deciding that it does not want to be an internet, it wants to be a lumberjack, and rebooting the router does not do a whole lot. This is kind of a problem given that I work from home and build things on the internet. I feel like I'm back in 1998 on dial-up. I spent thirty minutes fighting the phone tree and then the customer service agent tried to sell me a new router and a new plan, which: no. I want the thing I am already paying for to work!

Implementing a shared zookeeper routine is working out super well so far; I get to play with a friend's kid so she can concentrate on chores and she keeps me from becoming one with the couch, which is my true desire.

The big Six Flags/Cedar Fair merger has finally reached the point it's causing us personally to lose something. We've had some effects before, but most of them were neutral-to-good, like getting into Six Flags America cheap.

So the problem with the merger is that the much bigger Six Flags is still losing, like, all the money in the world, and things like closing Six Flags America and announcing when they're closing California's Great America won't change that. They're at the point where they're trying to raise money by selling off things, so they're probably at most two years away from going bankrupt yet again.

So this brings us to Michigan's Adventure, which for years has been the quiet, good little child of the Cedar Fair operation. Doesn't get much attention (it's not literally true that its big upgrade for 2024 was ``a new bathroom'' but it's very close), doesn't need much attention: families love it as is and more of them come, and spend a lot of money, every year. If every park in the chain were like this the chain would have no rational complaints. But this also means it's one of the parks that they could put up for sale and find a buyer for.

So that's what happened. Six Flags sold Michigan's Adventure and six other parks to EPR Properties, a real estate investment trust, which has got hastily set up --- bunnyhugger noted their initial logo was clearly AI slop and now it's cleaned-up AI slop --- Enchanted Parks. For this year that won't change anything, since season passes were already sold, but for 2027 and beyond? Who knows?

And the scary thing? Beyond having to change what's our home park for our long-standing season passes, and having to buy a season pass for a second chain? EPR Properties has mostly run water parks in the past, and there's a reasonable fear that they're looking to shut down the dry parks and just keep the wet. Besides losing the amusement park in an easy day-trip drive, losing Michigan's Adventure would also cost three wooden roller coasters.

Globally, the sale is probably a good thing in that an industry is usually healthier when it has a lot of comparably-sized companies rather than a handful of big ones. And to get that means things like Six Flags with an estimated 2,038 parks in the United States and Canada should be shedding places. It's just always sad when the thing you think would be good for the community is bad for you personally.

Also it's going to be really sad if we lose Shivering Timbers and Six Flags goes bankrupt anyway.

Speaking of shuttered parks, here's stuff from Glen Echo Park.

The Cuddle-Up pavilion now gets some use as a performing stage and there's bleacher seating for extra audience space.

Way off past the end of the old midway is this fountain; I don't know if it ever had water or was always a garden.

Here's the view back from that fountain along the midway.

Small and surprisingly haunted-looking building next to what had been the bumper cars building.

The bumper cars building has this section hazard-taped off, I guess for the trap door?

I suppose it's now an event space; you can imagine dances and wedding receptions and all fitting in here well.

Trivia: Bell Aircraft's X-16 was not a legitimate research aircraft but an attempt to hide the development of a spy plane. Though 28 of the craft were ordered, none were completed before the Lockheed U-2 demonstrated it could serve the spy flight missions. Source: American X-Vehicles: An Inventory - X-1 to X-50, Dennis R Jenkins, Tony Landis, Jay Miller.

Currently Reading: The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe, Matthew Gabriele, David M Perry.

On my humor blog there's some bonus comic strip content, some complaining about LLMs stealing my writing, one of my favorite Robert Benchley pieces, and a bit of nonsense about CHiPs because I was thinking about them for some reason. Enjoy!

• MiSTed: FX Down to Mobius, Part 6: Freddy Finds a Meteorite
• What's Going On In _Phantom 2040_? Are you going to start covering _Phantom 2040_? September 2025 - February 2026
• Statistics Saturday: CHiPs Spinoffs You Don't Know Whether I Made Up but Also Aren't Concerned Enough to Check
• Robert Benchley: Keep a Log
• Not Sure How My Plate Could Get More Full Unless I Had to Do a Thing
• What's Going on in Rex Morgan, M.D.? Wasn't _Rex Morgan_ Supposed to Start Looking Weird? December 2025 - February 2026
• Statistics February: The Month LLMs Just Blow Me Up
• MiSTed: FX Down To Mobius, Part 7: The Gathering Storm

And now let's continue with pictures from early July and the photographic beauties of Glen Echo Park.

Here's a view of the park's carousel, looking up a bit so you can see the arch of the carousel building, and also the slightly artistic touch of the outside reflected in the rounding board mirrors.

Better view of the tiger and two rabbits behind. So, how much does it remind you of Cedar Point's Kiddie Kingdom Carousel?

Some more of the horses on the carousel; you see what having National Park money behind the restoration will get you.

Also look at that jester's head; seen one anywhere near that on, like, my Kiddie Kingdom pictures?

Of course they have a band organ off to the side and it looks precious too.

bunnyhugger looking eagerly for tickets and it turns out you get them nowhere near the carousel because ??? ?? ?????. Anyway look at that great old rock-wall cladding at the base of the carousel building.

So we had to go past the Pop Corn stand, which is now in use for some artistic inspiration thing ...

And which is connected to the Arcade (no longer an arcade) and The Puppet Company (which is where we get tickets). Also, gads, what a beautiful building.

And past The Puppet Company are a bunch of fronts that were probably once midway game stalls but now host things like placards explaining the history of the place.

Here's one explaining the old arcade, from before the one you see here. Yes, I too am interested what was in the Lot O Fun.

bunnyhugger explores what had been the ride building for the Cuddle Up (a small teacups-type ride).

We couldn't be there at night, in case they still ever turn the neon on, but at least we can look at what had been the ticket booth beneath the lights.

Trivia: Between 1750 and 1786, Toulouse's spending on public roads increased from 1,200 livres per year to 198,000. Source: The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography, By the end of this era Toulouse had postal services operating for up to 90 miles from the city.

Currently Reading: Prehysterical Pogo (In Pandemonia), Walt Kelly.

Posted by Paul Taylor

https://wapsisquare.com/comic/drop-it/

https://wapsisquare.com/?post_type=comic&p=20673

https://wapsisquare.com/comic/drop-it/

https://wapsisquare.com/?post_type=comic&p=20673

Meanwhile in petty business. The passenger-side headlight on my car burned out, which very slightly irked me since I was pretty sure I had just replaced it last year? The year before? Not too long in the scheme of things, anyway. But in replacing it I saw, as if for the first time, that the passenger headlight casing had a lot of moisture in it. I can't swear there was actually rainfall in it, but it was close. Way too many beads of water, at least, which I can't swear didn't have something to do with why the light was so dim even when a working bulb was in place.

So, off to the car dealership, where they explained they recommend replacing the whole fixture when it's that wet inside. This seemed reasonable enough to me and so I came back a couple days later after the one they ordered got in. The headlight assembly was more expensive than I would have guessed, but the installation was a lot quicker; I don't think it could have taken an hour.

The result was a great success. The like-new fixture is dry as far as I can tell, and without 147,000+ miles of colliding with air to cloud it up, it's ferociously bright. To the point that now my driver's side fixture looks pathetically dim. bunnyhugger was surprised I didn't get both changed at the same time and now that I've seen how much better the light looks? I might go for it the next time I'm getting the car serviced. We'll see.

Now to see Glen Echo Park, though, once upon a time an amusement park on the outskirts of Washington D.C. and now a national park with a special feature.

We're getting closer to the excitement: we've found UFOs!

And here's the thing we most wanted to get to. Glen Echo Park's kept its antique carousel, and it's got the care and attention that a Smithsonian exhibit gets, only you can ride it.

And hey, why did an amusement park on the outskirts of a big and growing city like Washington, D.C., close in the 60s? Could it have anything to do with finally being forced to integrate? (If an amusement park closed in the 60s, there's a good chance it was because Black people were finally allowed in any old day and the white people were not even remotely normal about it.)

The stand claims Pop Corn, but it's really more Art Deco. (It's been decades since you could get snacks there regularly.)

Here's a picture explaining about the history of the ride, along with a picture of the thing you're right in front of.

... And here it is! Notice the two Dentzel rabbits on the inner rows, just behind the tiger?

Trivia: In 1906 New Orleans had only two vaudeville houses, the Greenwald and the Orpheum. In 1921, when the city's population was 387,408, there were four: Loew's Crescent, the Louisiana, the Orpheum, and the Palace. Source: The Encyclopedia of Vaudeville, Anthony Slide.

Currently Reading: Prehysterical Pogo (In Pandemonia), Walt Kelly.

You may, dimly, remember that a couple years ago we snagged some fallen tree limbs after a heavy storm knocked them down all over the neighborhood. And last year we even got a chainsaw to cut them down to the roughly footlong installments that would fit well in our fireplace insert. What we had not done is split the wood so there'd be both bark and exposed ... you know ... wood innards to make for good fire-having.

A couple weeks back bunnyhugger got something that promised to simplify the wood-splitting trade around here. It's a gadget that holds a blade upwards, so that you set the wood on top and hit it with a sledgehammer over and over. The advantage of this over the splitting maul we had is how this lets you save intermediate progress. Only split the wood a couple inches? That's fine, it'll stay there, balanced in place, ready for the next hit. bunnyhugger tried this on her own a couple days ago and was able to split several logs that she would never have been able to do by maul.

Now I finally had the chance to try it out and, you know, it works quite nicely, especially on wood that's been sitting in the driveway two years or whatever it is now. It can take a fair number of starter taps to get it wedged enough to stand upright on the blade. And it can take several reasonable swings to start it going. But once the wood starts splitting it just cracks apart like you're Popeye punching a cinder block or something. Very satisfying. After I'd cut enough for the night's purposes I had to restrain myself from doing just one more log.

Now in our extreme tour: after a full day at Six Flags America we would need to be driving on, hoping to meet up with my brother and then get to HersheyPark. But first ...

The view from our hotel! At least, from the window beside the elevator. We were a whole ... twelve? ... floors up and this was the highest up we'd been somewhere in a while.

And here's the view outside in Cinerama!

So our first visit was to Glen Echo Park, once upon a time an amusement park and now a National Park, with echoes of the amusement park still there. Also, the place was next to New Jersey heroine Clara Barton's final home.

Neat wooden bridge leading to what I imagine was always the back side of the amusement park. Don't worry, I have photos of the front.

Coming up to it we passed the Glen Echo Park Aquarium, closed when we visited, but with such let's say folk-art signage that we were enchanted and hope the animals are kept well.

Also ran across this sign hidden deep in the woods as we got closer to the former amusement park.

Trivia: George Washington was sworn in the 4th of March, 1793, to begin his second term as President. John Adams was not sworn in until the Senate met the 2nd of December, 1793. Source: From Failing Hands: The Story of Presidential Succession, John D Feerick. Adams, you of course recall, had in 1789 begun serving as Vice-President nine days before Washington was sworn in, although it would not be until June that there was even an oath of office for the Vice-President to swear.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Sundays Supplement Volume 20: 1958, Tom Sims, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

PS: If you read about What’s Going on in Rex Morgan, M.D.? Wasn’t _Rex Morgan_ Supposed to Start Looking Weird? December 2025 – February 2026 I'll explain the rules of beloved childhood game Punch Belly Blue!

Back in 2014, seeking even more pinball than we could play in Lansing, we went to the Arcade Pinball League in Brighton, not quite an hour away. It was a fun venue packed with pinball machines from the 60s through the present, and it solidified us as people taking competitive pinball way too seriously. But around 2015 the owner got tired of the venue as it was and moved or sold or both almost all the games, and the league evaporated. For a monthly pinball league about as far away we could play at Marvin's Marvellous Mechanical Museum instead.

Marvin's has been closed for a bit over a year now, far exceeding the five months or so they figured needed to move to their new location and despite their posting a proof-of-life video to Facebonk the desire for a monthly league in that area remained. And, what do you know, but the Arcade had picked up more pinball machines again. We've been there a couple times, for furry meetups, but despite thinking how nice it'd be to just go there and play all day on pay-one-price terms we haven't.

And this is how last Thursday we were at the rebirth of the Arcade Pinball League. Or the creation of a new Arcade Pinball League; identity for groups is a difficult concept to make precise. I even got out my original Arcade Pinball League shirt from twelve years ago to wear, delighting the couple people who noticed.

The format was like what Arcade League had used before, no surprise as Marvin's used the same format: you get in a group of three or four people and take turns picking five games, getting points based on your finish. The first week we were put in ``random'' order, which turns out to be how we checked in for the night, and in future weeks we should be put with players who have about the same standing. This it was by a one-in-four chance that bunnyhugger and I were not in the same group. I ended up in a group, instead, with the guy we'd seen at Pinball At The Zoo last year who was wearing a full rubber strap-on face mask, and waved ultraviolet sterilizers over the flippers before his every ball.

And how did I do? ... To use our old slang, I hit for the cycle on the first four games, getting a first, second, third, and fourth. The third place hurt as it was on the game I'd picked, Whitewater, and while the sterilizer guy had an insurmountable lead by the third ball, all I needed was a couple million points to take second, and I fumbled the ball rather than make a safe shot. I'd picked Whitewater partly for historic reasons: it was one of the games they always had at The Arcade in the old days but back then I didn't know how to play it at all. (This game is either a new instance of the table, or is a heavily refitted one, as the toys on the playfield, originally Bigfoot themed, were replaced with after-market Abominable Snowman toys.)

The first place came on the Jersey Jack game Elton John, which just in case it wasn't destiny enough for me picked as my starting song ``Pinball Wizard''. Other people had to change their song to get to it. In that case I was doing all right, chopping wood, making a lot of shots that weren't exploding in points and then on my final ball the game gave me several distinct multiballs right in a row, like it didn't want me to stop playing.

The fifth and final game of the night was my choice again and I went for Creature From The Black Lagoon, partly because I don't have many chances to play it. And it turned out to be a great choice for me because I was able to try going for Super Scoring, a mode I learned recently from playing the game in simulation. Shoot the right ramp twelve times (seventeen on some games) and then the Snack Bar and there you go. Well, dear reader, I got it, on my third ball, and I could feel my quartet staring at me as this mode they'd never heard of before came up. By the time I could see the score again I had embarrassingly overwhelmed everyone else. Two firsts, a second, a third, and a fourth totals out to a slightly better-than-average night, this format. I finished a little bit above bunnyhugger, who had a night with no first places but more seconds.

After playing we got to talking with MWS, and some of the many people who know him and chat with him. Also with the woman on the venue's staff, who had come in to oversee the place on what was otherwise a closed night for The Arcade. (This explained the mystery of why league isn't Friday night: add the general public to the fifty or sixty people there for league and the crowd would be unmanageable.) Turns out, she's also the person who runs the furry meetups, when those are held, so we got a fresh angle to talk about as well as vinyl stickers of her snow leopard. bunnyhugger offered back in trade a Lansing Lightning Flippers sticker, with her Thumper Bumpers rabbit mascot, and this got talk going about whether The Arcade could get a snow leopard mascot.

It will not surprise you at all that we closed the place out; they were shutting games off as people finished them, and we would get only one last game of Twilight Zone in at the end of the night.

And now, we come to the last pictures of our Wednesday at Six Flags America, our full day at a park that's since been closed and probably will be doomed to become a plaque in front of a condo soon. What comes next in my photo roll? Do you remember?

Looking up at Superman: Ride of Steel's lift hill (left) and return path (right) while focusing on just how dark the clouds could still make the evening sky.

On the right is the Joker's Jinx ride, and in the distance, The Wild One, over in the Mardis Gras area.

Noticed the gates to a stadium-seating performance venue open and I was curious how close I could get to it without being yelled at.

Didn't actually get this close but I did use my zoom lens and see, mm, seems like the area hasn't seen heavy use or maintenance love in a while.

Block party also didn't show much signs of having happened, but maybe it cleans up fast.

Here's a picture creeping up on The Flying Carousel's rounding boards, my last interesting picture before leaving the park. And what could come next?

Trivia: In the months following Thomas Edison's 1891 victory in lawsuits over the light bulb patent, Edison General Electric stock dropped from $120 a share to $90. Source: Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World, Jill Jonnes. Finalizing the decision took time, and Westinghouse had held onto its money well and was actually coming out of the patent fight stronger than anyone expected.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Sundays Supplement Volume 20: 1958, Tom Sims, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

Day after Motor City Furry Con I went to bunnyhugger's parents to pick up our pet rabbit. bunnyhugger had to work; I would have had to work but it was Presidents Day so I got to sleep in instead. Our mice we left in their cage as they had water and plenty of blocks of Boring Nutrition Lumps that they could eat if they had absolutely nothing else, and they did. I didn't stay long at her parents', though, nor did I take off my N-95 since there was such an obvious high risk. We never came down with any symptoms of Covid-19, to our mild wonder considering how packed we were in the elevators, and the following Saturday visited to celebrate their birthdays.

bunnyhugger had briefly seen her mother on her own birthday, since that was the day before the con when she dropped our rabbit off. And her father's birthday was the next day. But this would be a chance to pause and, you know, celebrate them and once again fail to let us buy dinner. Her father has a thing about it; we were able to get the check for their 50th anniversary and that's been it.

They had a cake, a two-layer white cake with frosting a bit sweeter than bunnyhugger's mother really liked, to share their birthdays, though it was inscribed to her for her 80th. After we sat down and ate too many potato chips and talked a while her father got a cake knife out and sliced off a couple for himself, as he was afraid he'd be too full if he waited until after dinner. I protested --- I was just shocked --- but bunnyhugger pointed out it was his birthday and his birthday cake too.

So besides the cake --- and the resolve that bunnyhugger's mother would do no cooking --- it was a fairly usual visit with her parents, pleasant and comfortable and somehow shorter than I'd expected. I guess I'm used to staying past midnight or so. Maybe if we had gotten out one of the games; we'd found and brought our barely-begun campaign game Aftermath, as well as the rolling-dice pinball simulator, but never did find the time for them.

In part, this because bunnyhugger had gotten an account for her mother with Archive.org's lending library for people with sight impairment, and was showing how to borrow books and use them on her iPad. In part it's because we had so much cake. We brought leftover cake home and didn't finish for nearly a week after. (Granting we didn't eat it every day either.)

But mostly it was because we wanted to spend more time talking with them about the convention (her mother was so sympathetic about the hat loss, and also said she felt bad for what a time I must have gone through trying to comfort bunnyhugger, which does show how she has both our numbers), and about what they've been doing, and, you know, all that being with family.

In pictures we're closing in on the end of our full day at Six Flags America so please enjoy considering these sights:

The Wild One running again now that the weather permits.

Pretty sure I could sell this as a postcard if amusement parks still sold postcards of their marquee rides. ... Also if the seats were packed.

Hey, turns out Gotham City is a swinging place! Who knew? (The silhouette is the park's Mardis Gras sign, on the other side.)

We had the idea that Blizzard River was going to be opening later that season, which seemed amazing considering (a) that's definitely a 1980s Comics Penguin design and also (b) they've known all year that the park was closing. And yet --- well, computer, enhance.

Yeah, their sign had 'frosting' chipped off the Z! ... Anyway turns out Blizzard River had been around since 2003, and it's a pity that it wasn't running when we visited since it was so hot we might have considered a spinning rapids ride.

The Superman ride's lift hill as it looks with stormclouds having passed.

Trivia: In 1971, the top five university conferences together awarded fewer than fifty athletic scholarships to women compared to over five thousand to male football players. In 1980, five years after Title IX regulations required women receive the benefits of educational programs or activities, women made up 30 percent of college athletes, though women's teams still received only about 16 percent of collegiate sports budgets. Source: With Amusement for All: A History of American Popular Culture Since 1830, LeRoy Ashby.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Sundays Supplement Volume 20: 1958, Tom Sims, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

Posted by Paul Taylor

https://wapsisquare.com/comic/not-listening-2/

https://wapsisquare.com/?post_type=comic&p=20670

https://wapsisquare.com/comic/not-listening-2/

https://wapsisquare.com/?post_type=comic&p=20670

We’ve been in New Orleans for a few days, enjoying warm weather and eating outdoors— cattitude in particular needed to get away from winter. Not as much interesting food as we’d hoped, but lunch today was at a lebanese restaurant, where we tried Lebanese iced tea, made with rosewater— the server apologized because she thought we had asked for it instead of ordinary sweet tea. My grilled shrimp and rice were also excellent.

Then we wandered through the French Market, and bought hats, a shoulder bag, and a smaller cros-body bag.

We rounded the afternoon off by listening to the drum circle in Congo Square, which has been weekly for more than 300 years. My brother suggested than because our hotel is across thethe street street from the park.

More when I get home ; we’re flying back tomorrow

Closing Ceremonies. We'd missed opening ceremonies because they were inexplicably early on Friday, like 10 am or something, and there was no fursuit parade, so this was the first big everyone-at-the-convention activity we were at. This is where I finally got to know anything particular about the charity --- Wolf Creek Habitat, for the second(?) year in a row --- and that the 2,525 attendees raised a total of like $35,000. We were wrapped up enough in our own problems to have missed them, wherever they were.

With the convention officially closed we had a couple hours of unscheduled time and spent some of it in Hospitality --- bunnyhugger finally got some alcohol from the free bar; I missed it altogether --- and somewhere around here we picked up the rumor that depending on just when the Renaissance Center renovations start, if they start next year, then Motor City Furry Con might be forced out into some other venue, if one fits.

bunnyhugger used the time to take her daily half-hour walk. I went back to the video game room where they were once again playing Wreck-It Ralph on an overhead projector. They were always playing that or Tron Ares I think because it didn't look like what I kind of remember from Tron Legacy. I finally got some time in on Quick And Crash, the target-shooting game with a fun exploding mug as the final target, and I managed one time even to shoot the mug. I wasn't doing very well. I also stunned bunnyhugger by playing the Crazy Taxi video game --- how often do I play arcade games? --- because it was right by the pinball and it had looked like a lot of fun. It is pretty fun, yeah, have to say.

And the pinball games? Surfers was still working, doing better than it had last year, although the flippers were sorely weakened by three days of heavy use. I'm not sure it was still possible to make the candycane shot that's the real points mine. Bow And Arrow was still going strong, though, apparently unfazed by all its attention. bunnyhugger and I got a last couple games in just before the close of the gaming room, with bunnyhugger once again putting up just over 100,000 points. She was eerily consistent on the game all weekend. I was more erratic at it, but the final game, after two bad balls, discovered just what happens if you max out the bonus, which you can collect mid-ball with the right shot: you can light an extra ball, and that let me get to enough points to collect another extra ball, so I ended up coming achingly close to properly rolling the game.

bunnyhugger got into her Cerberus kigurumi --- while she'd had some time fursuiting Saturday it was just too much to bring the suit from the car to the Headless Lounge and back again --- and got appreciative congratulations for having chosen to wear a neat three-headed outfit. And we went to the Dead Dog Dance, taking in the last hours of a convention that wasn't really our thing. The DJ brought the songs to a stop at 10:00 and then rolled out one more song to close things out that I couldn't tell from what came before. And then the guy in charge of the AV came out and did two or possibly more songs before bringing the Dead Dog Dance, and the last event of the convention, to an end. They did not play the ChipTunes version of Toto's ``Africa'' that had finished Closing Ceremonies.

We did a last check of lost-and-found and careful examination of the path back to my car --- and to the next floor up in the parking garage, where we'd parked for a few minutes before discovering the pedestrian-overpass-level was free --- without finding bunnyhugger's hat. Can not recommend losing precious gifts from family members, would not do again.

Our full day at Six Flags America got interrupted by rain, most of which I didn't photograph. We just waited stuff out in the food court. But ...

It really was raining, though, as you can see from the raindrops coming out of the trees.

The steampunk-themed midway with a fresh coat of water. Not bad, is it?

Here's Steamwinder, the ride we most wanted to get on in Steamtown besides the roller coaster. So, each of the big levers rotates, with the seats staying horizontal, and all four of the levers is in time so they always just miss the others, but keep looking like they are on the brink of contact. Meanwhile the whole base rotates around a vertical axis. It's a much more intense and fun and delightful ride than we expected.

This is just the sign for Roar, which doesn't put the A in a separate color the way the logo posters in the station do.

Did you know they had character meet-and-greets? Neither did we until it was too late.

Here's that picture of a white polka-dotted chef alligator mascot that you were asking about.

Trivia: An Ottoman Financial calendar, or Marti calendar, was in use in Islamic border countries (like Turkey) from 1676. These years began on 1 March, and had a 29-day February in Julian leap years. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 85: Dragon or Overgrown Lizard?, Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

After we got to the Trash Animals panel --- despite having missed the SpinDizzy wizard --- things did start to pick up. The session had by that time broken up into a couple of groups of people talking, really just hanging out with people, some of them in raccoon fursuits, one in a rat suit, and a couple people in other suits or costumes. bunnyhugger brought her squirrel puppet Chitter, but ended up talking more with Ed Hyena than anyone else. I gravitated that way too.

Also there was a somewhat long kerfuffle in trying to get a photograph of all the participants. The photographer had the idea everyone should gather around a trash bin, which pushed us all out of the adequate-sized meeting room into the narrow corridor of the walkway from the hotel's center ring to the conference room, there to gather around the small trash bin that never stood a chance of dominating the scene. We'd probably have been better off moving the trash bin into the room --- we'd at least have the chance for people not to be stacked five deep across a too-narrow walkway --- but that's a lesson for next time.

The hanging out merged imperceptibly into getting ready for the next panel, Show Me Your Camera, which was just what you'd imagine from the label. Lot of neat camera gear shown off, ranging from the stuff familiar from my youth --- remember those Kodak short but fat rectangles with the tower of flash cubes plugged in? --- or early digital cameras that record on 3.5" floppies. Some was quirkier stuff, like the Argus cameras once made in Ann Arbor. There were more than one century-old camera, and more than one person with so many lenses and lens extensions it was terrifying to stand too near all this expensive glass.

bunnyhugger was excited for the chance to show off her cameras, collected from estate sales and thrift stores and the like. But when the panel host stopped about midway through saying they were going to just pause showing off cameras to take a group photo, she correctly forecast that the showing-off would never resume. Instead it broke up into a general chat session, and she was able to talk with individuals about their cameras and about hers but never to show the whole bunch off to anyone. Also to people testing out their gear on shots of a couple volunteer fursuiters.

We did get to see a demonstration of someone who'd got a couple portable LED spotlights --- these were actually held by hand --- wirelessly connected to his main camera so that when he snapped there would be a bright flash short enough that the eye --- my eye, anyway --- couldn't even see it. But the picture came out with the spotlight colored as per the spotlights, with a dark background, just as if he were photographing in a studio. Astounding feat of photography; he explained something to the effect of when you have the right gear, everywhere is your studio now.

Following this was a bit of time with nothing particular on the schedule. We did an orbit of the dealer's den where we didn't really spot anything all that interesting --- it felt weirdly smaller than last year's, despite the hotel being so much larger --- and also a dip into artists alley though there wasn't any chance of getting a sketchbook commission. I think bunnyhugger got a couple stickers, though not of what she really wanted, Animal Crossing's lovable jock Bam.

After that, we went back to Hospitality, in my case mostly to get a couple Faygos and to sit a while. We needed to recover our energy somewhere and this would do it. The next thing we had to face was, and it's hard to think it came this soon, Closing Ceremonies.

We're also coming up on the close of our full day at Six Flags America, if you can imagine.

I mentioned in passing a Johnny Rocket's at Six Flags America. There are several reasons we didn't eat there, but one of them was that it was closed due to as the sign says, ``HVAC complications''. This sign being there implies they were getting enough questions about Johnny Rocket's that just not opening the place wouldn't have addressed.

The Tea Cups ride had pretty ordinary decoration but it's always nice seeing one. Little odd none of the parks nearest us have one.

That lake that's over by the carousel (seen in the background) where that squirrel appeared earlier, but here seen from where you can also tell there was a wooden suspension bridge alongside.

Heritage House Food Court is that spot that had all the signs about the park's history and grammatical catastrophes, by the way. We spent a lot of time in here waiting out the rain.

Oh yeah, and checking in on the clocks, well, the analog clocks are at different wrong times and Ye Olde Digital Clock is missing.

It's coincidence that my first picture after the rain included the Cyclone (a Scrambler) but it's at least a little bit funny too.

Trivia: When Louis Blériot made the first airplane crossing of the English Channel from Calais to Dover in 1909 he was accompanied by a French destroyer, monitoring his flight and ready to rescue him should he have to ditch. Most of the flight was at an altitude of about 250 feet. Source: Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories, Simon Winchester.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 85: Dragon or Overgrown Lizard?, Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.