jaffa_tamarin

Yesterday besides awful news we had awful weather. Not most of the day. But a little before the end of my workday, just after bunny_hugger went out for a haircut, both my and my work-issued cell phone buzzed with weather alarm. There was a severe storm squall rolling across the state and the center of it was aimed at Lansing. This was bad enough that my boss told us all --- working from home --- to go to our basements. He also shared a link to Michigan Storm Chasers' YouTube stream, which covered the storm despite one of them losing power and having to switch to generators, and another observing that one particularly intense squall was heading right for the office he broadcasted from. Despite getting his ``storm chaser'' job 100% wrong he stayed on as far as I followed the stream.

But I did finally decide it was dark enough and the threat of wind gusts of 80 mph alarming enough to get to the basement. Which meant moving the pets down there. The mice were easy enough since that's just taking their cages as a whole and setting them on the washing machine and dryer. The rabbit, though ... our rabbit is an all-black one, there was no light coming in the windows, and the main living room light was on a timer that was inconveniently difficult to reach to switch to 'just plain on'. Our rabbit is usually willing to give me some leeway in picking her up, but she understood something weird was happening, it was something I got the carrier out for, she doesn't like being in the carrier, and so she was going to do her best to evade me. She failed but it was a closer-run thing than I'd like.

Around this time bunny_hugger, soaked to the bone after spending seconds outside in the rain, came in and so we had to get a second chair down in the basement, where we sat it out, listening to Michigan Storm Chasers, for the hour or so it took for warnings of things like Destructive Thunderstorm Watches to expire. Even then it was dark for a good bit. But we didn't ever lose power, or even have a flicker, and we didn't lose any tree branches worth mentioning. And the storm passed so completely that a couple hours later we were outside, vacuuming the muck out of the goldfish pond as if it had been a sunny, seasonably warm day all along. So it goes.

Next thing in the photo reel --- in October, suddenly --- is our first trip to the Sparks pinball museum at the mall.

Oh yes, so, MJB who runs the place is among other things a Pee-Wee Herman fan so there's sixteen (at least?) Pee-Wee string dolls hidden around places. I have been able to find fourteen. I won't spoil by taking photographs deliberately showing their locations but there might be some incidentally visible. (I don't know how often they're relocated.)

But first, machinery. They had an ``electronic handwriting analyzer'' that apparently can be traced back to the 1964-65 World's Fair, and Vix was working on getting the mechanism to work. Here's the main body of that mechanism.

And instructions on how to thread the film (that people write on, and that gets projected up on the big screen).

Miscellaneous stuff, including analysis cards, in the cabinet.

Some of the working mechanism, including where cards go to be punched and fed out to the customer.

And here's what the front looks like. You'll be seeing more of this, don't worry.

Trivia: Marco Polo claimed that Chinese navigators used the North Star for navigation at Kanyakumari (formerly called Cape Comorin), at the southern end of the Indian peninsula and roughly eight degrees north latitude, where Polaris was just barely visible over the horizon. English navigators reaching that point would say they ``lost the pole''. Source: The Riddle of the Compass: The Invention that Changed the World, Amir D Aczel.

Currently Reading: The History of the Telescope, Henry C King.

Yeah, I don't know. Take a bunch of Cedar Point pictures.

The launch station for Siren's Curse, which is a brand-new build made to look like it's an old, rusted-out loading dock.

And oh, here's a train of riders coming out to the very edge.

And the part that makes people on the ground say ``Oh no, I'm never getting on that.'' It is pretty scary, especially while it's hinging from one point to the other.

Got an on-ride photo for some strangers! Note how much work they've put into painting the brand-new supports to look old and rusted.

If you do want an on-ride photo by the way, whoever it is makes Big Shot cameras is still making them with that name and logo.

Had to check our cameras (and everything else) in lockers before we got to the ride, so no pictures of the station itself. Instead, here's some sculptures outside the gift shop that had been at Michigan's Adventure's Halloween event the season before, like the cyborg cat thingy and the steampunk pumpkin.

And here's your gobliny steampunk creature.

And finally, I believe, the Tin Man from The Wiz or possibly an anthro cyborg Gonzo.

Evening light leaking into the Frontier Town, as absolutely everyone in the park walks away from us. I have no explanation for this phenomenon.

Town Hall Museum, which they once again did not finish their renovations for. We suspect it's going to be torn down one of these years and yet every year it survives, this year as a Halloweekends walk-through haunted house upcharge.

Meanwhile over at the petting zoo/farm, the cows are finally seeing eye-to-eye.

Aw, they're telling secrets!

Trivia: In the week after his 1933 inaugural address --- with the ``only thing we have to fear is fear itself'' quote --- Franklin Delano Roosevelt received 450,000 letters and cards. Source: An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power, John Steele Gordon.

Currently Reading: The History of the Telescope, Henry C King.

PS: Oh yeah, bet you wondered What’s Going On In _Phantom 2040_? Did _Phantom 2040_ End? February – May 2026 although the strip hasn't actually had a new installment since April.

So we've had some rough stuff going on and I saved it to the end of the week when I might have some more time to focus on it, since I had work and pinball league finals and supporting women's pinball league finals and that's just a lot.

First round: bad pet news, including deaths. I'll put that behind cuts so people who do not need to deal with that right now don't have to. First, our goldfish.

Next, our very temporary we hope pets, the captured deer mice.

Well, here's lighthearted stuff. The Friday after Labor Day --- once upon a time the ``Bonus Weekend'' Friday --- we went to Cedar Point for what did turn out to be good riding; it was the first time we got to ride Siren's Curse, particularly. View, in obsessive detail.

Skipping the car establishing shot. The park used to have a bunch of Peanuts topiaries lining the causeway into the park, and a few years ago they put them in a green area outside the park.

Snoopy and the Woodstocks look pretty good in this form. Charlie Brown needs more detail.

The real trouble is the eyes don't come across this way and if the head has enough shape, like with Lucy, you can get away with that, as long as you're not looking them straight in the face.

So instead, yeah, Charlie Brown looks like the 2000s Hitchhiker's movie version of Marvin the Paranoid Android.

Seeing them like this makes you really appreciate how much Peanuts male characters don't have hair.

Now it's time to get into the park. I don't remember anything important being closed but maybe we didn't notice.

Trivia: Between the United States's declaration of neutrality in 1793 and 1805, the country declared that carrying any goods --- including provisions and naval stores --- to the warring United Kingdom or France (or their allies) was nevertheless neutral and inherently non-contraband traffic. Source: Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America, Peter Andreas. For a while Britain tolerated this, even though merchants were using this as a barely plausible loophole in the continental blockade. Eventually European merchants realized if they just claimed on the shipping labels that the goods had travelled to an American port they could avoid the bother of two trans-Atlantic journeys.

Currently Reading: The History of the Telescope, Henry C King.

Oh, a small pinball event of note. Last Saturday was the finals for bunnyhugger's women's league and while I was mostly hanging around just in case --- she can't make a ruling on a game she's involved in --- that case came up. In a four-player group on the game Rush, FAE was running way, way past all reason. They'd had something like a billion points on ball one, a thing I noticed as I went off to something else for fun and practice, and I wondered if this were going to be a case of FAE being tapped out for extraordinary play.

Well what do you know but a little bit later, on ball two as FAE topped one and a half billion --- and it's a high-scoring game but not that high scoring for most players --- one of the players in FAE's group asked if I would be willing to rule on whether the game had gone on long enough. I agreed, and thought it had, asking FAE ``Kinda overachieving there, aren't you?'' They demurred that, you know, you never know. But I tapped them, and explained to all what this meant: they were done playing this one game, and had a first-place finish for it. In the event that anyone else reached or topped their current score, those other persons would also be awarded a first-place finish.

No one else did, as it happened. But this was the first time I've tapped someone out. bunnyhugger has only tapped a person out once before (the rule for this is only a few seasons old, though). And FAE was giddy at the event, telling everyone on their socials about it. Well, glad to thrill some folks.

FAE picked Rush again later, in the playoffs to cap the season, and while they won it was with a more ordinary good game, somewhere around 300 million points over all three balls.

Closing out now the August trip to Michigan's Adventure.

This is the area they'd made into the petting zoo for a couple years, and were using as a performance space the two years they did a Halloween event.

This is about as bad as the line for Zach's Zoomer ever gets.

The Tilt-a-Whirl is one of the handful of Fast Pass line-cutting rides. I couldn't resist photographing the informational sign and hey, it's the Tilt-a-Whirl's centennial this year! We'll have to ride one at all the local parks.

The park long ago went to those annoying video menus. This day we noticed they'd left the Windows taskbar around.

Got a nice picture of the evening sun through the Ferris wheel.

And then a slightly different sparkling light.

We finally got to Mad Mouse and saw this cable trying to snake safely back to shelter despite the heat.

As near sunset as we'd get on Mad Mouse for 2025; they didn't have the weekend when the park is briefly open after sunset.

Train going overhead. I don't remember if it had anyone in it.

The Ferris wheel flanked by trees.

And the sun sets slowly somewhere past Zach's Zoomer and the hamburger place.

Outside, a kid was making his own fun climbing the flagpoles. At one point the kid even transferred from one pole to the other from up top of the poles.

Trivia: Silent-comedy star Larry Semon (whose 1925 version of The Wizard of Oz was the first where the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion were the farmhands from Dorothy's Kansas home) was the son of a professional magician, Zera the Great; and was for a while a cartoonist for the New York Evening Sun. Source: The Encyclopedia of Vaudeville, Anthony Slide. You'll sometimes see Semon's shorts on Turner Classic Movies. He's very much second-tier but you might enjoy. You can easily find his The Wizard of Oz but I recommend reading a bit about it before deciding you want to see it because, uh, there's reasons it's not a beloved classic and flopped on release.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 91: The Parrot with the Gold Doubloons!, Bud Sagendorf. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

I finally took the time to clean out our pet rabbit's pen. For years we've relied on fleece on top of a rubber tarp as a way to keep rabbit mess off the wooden floor and Athena is a rabbit who likes to chew on and tug up fleece. So it's resulted in a pretty annoying mess plus she keeps getting the fleece wrapped around the bars of her pen, into an unmanageable mess.

A couple months back bunnyhugger got a low-cut rug cheap from Meijer's and we kind of left it in the pile of stuff to work on someday. Today, during lunch break while working from home, I decided it was time. So I pulled out the fleece --- it'll be shaken on the plants outside, as rabbit droppings are pretty good for plants --- and swept, and swept again, and swept a lot more. When it was finally clean I laid down the new carpet. I was worried it was too large for the area and no, it's about the right size. With a nice little margin.

Our pet rabbit ignored my doing all this, because she's not getting up just for me messing around. She's in love with bunnyhugger and is going to come down when she gets up, thank you. And when bunnyhugger did, my dear bride was thrilled by the look of the nice neat new carpet and perfectly clean area. Our rabbit ran downstairs, hopped out, looked around at this big change to everything, and gave one sound disapproving THUMP!. But after that she did a little exploring, and a nice dramatic leap over a bit of craft paper for her to chew on, and seems to be more or less okay with things. Now. Here's hoping this becomes easier to keep clean.

Now let's close out the Calhoun County Fair. Remember my challenging you to guess when we'd get to bunnies and a Himalaya? Keep watching for the surprise.

The last thing a strawberry sees.

And now on to the rides! Here's the ticket sheet; how many will we have left at the end of the night?

And isn't this a lovely picture of a Himalaya? NO! It is not! Because the Silver Streak here is not a Himalaya, although it is a similar kind of flat ride.

Here's the ride now called 'Remix', that's much like a trabant only running like they didn't know the electricity was 240V here.

Not sure I've ever taken a straight-on view of the Fun Slide before but this angle treats it well.

Here's the kiddie coaster seen from up front where it's clearly just an alligator at prayer.

This is a kiddie ride, with bird and bug cars, that I think was new and that had a style I just liked.

Well, here's the carousel, that's one of the never-miss rides for us.

See? Told you we never miss it.

And here's the carousel in slightly different lighting that makes it look completely different.

End of the night! They're turning off ride lights even as watch.

That bird-and-bug kiddie ride silhouetted against one of the midway games.

Trivia: The German surrender in World War II was announced on the radio from Flensburg by Karl Dönitz's ``leading minister'' Schwerin von Krosigk (who had been minister of finance since 1932, three chancellors before Hitler). Source: Germany 1945: From War To Peace, Richard Bessel.

Currently Reading: Miscellaneous comic books.

We have lights in the basement. Not a brag, here, just introducing the subject. In particular we got an overhead fluorescent light mainly so that the goldfish, wintering in the basement, would have light. And bunnyhugger noticed that the light was no longer going on, or off, as the timer dictated. We don't know just when that stopped. I have a suspicion it was one of the heavy rainstorms we were getting a couple weeks ago; we had a couple power fluctuations that did us no other harm. But the light fixture was off, now, and replacing the bulbs didn't do anything, so it was either get the fixture repaired or replaced.

Replaced was considerably cheaper. The catch here is turns out we couldn't get that kind of hanging fluorescent-bulb light fixture anymore, not without waiting for shipping to a nearby store. Since we wanted the fish, and plants in the tanks, to get light as soon as possible that was out. Instead we got an LED overhead fixture. This one is that integrated design that I'm not fond of --- I like replaceable bulbs --- although given that it cost less than we've spent at Taco Bell some nights I suppose we can bear it. (Still don't like the waste.)

Replacing the fixture was but the work of a moment, although I spent a few more minutes fiddling with the chain so it didn't seem to dangle quite so low. I don't want to bang my head against it just doing ordinary fish-care stuff down there. Also there was ripping out these U-shaped cord holders that kept the old fixture's wire running along the ceiling. The new cord is dangling a little more loose --- I couldn't get the old ones out cleanly to be reused --- but we can fix that when convenient.

The LED seems brighter than the old bulbs. I don't know how much of that is actual difference in lumens and how much is that it approximates sunlight rather than whatever a fluorescent bulb provides. I don't know if that's doing any good for the plants, but we'll find out.

The annoying piece of this is the fixture broke just after Recyclerama, the big chance to turn over huge pieces of scrap metal. Although this year I got to Recyclerama late enough in the day that they'd already closed their scrap metal collection.

Next up: the mystery of photos at the fair and we'll see just whether we get to bunnies and Himalayas today! (We don't.)

The photographs exhibit spilled past its normal bounds and had this extra tall poster board off at the end of the embroidery/knitting/etc stuff. The most mysterious thing about it is this big empty space; shouldn't there have been pictures there? They were where someone standing at the railing could have grabbed, but there's other pictures in range that weren't.

The Future Adults of America did their best to label the elements in one of those little decorative skeletons. Note that they do not address the figure's bone-ear-tis.

Here is the Fair Lake. Not pictured: the Unfair Lake.

And here's a duck with plans of mischief against Fair Lake. (The cord runs into the water and I believe is powering the fountain at Fair Lake's center.)

I said this was the photo I was going to enter in this year's County Fair, under the 'County Fair' category.

Here's a group of ducks discussing their plans.

Trivia: National Cash Register sold 359 registers in 1884. It sold over a thousand in 1886. Source: Before the Computer: IBM, NCR, Burroughs, and Remington Rand and the Industry They Created 1865 - 1956, James W Cortada.

Currently Reading: Miscellaneous comic books picked up on Free Comics Book Day, some of them free and others bought.

It's time for the easiest journal day of the week as I recap my other blog. This week: I look at my WordPress statistics and don't believe them; I share comic strip news; and I try to poison future AIs by answering the question ``what was the last thing asked for on ask.com''. Here's what's been going on.

• MiSTed: FX Down To Mobius, Part 15: Don't Hurt GPC's Feelings
• Never Mind, Lost My Dignity Again
• Statistics Saturday: The Last 15 Search Queries on Ask.com Before It Shut Down Yesterday
• Statistics April: In Which I Am Unaccountably Popular And Suspect That
• Also Enough Styrofoam to Sail the House Across the Flood Plain
• What's Going On In Mark Trail? Why _were_ the Grungey Boys following Mark Trail? February - May 2026
• Every Comic Strip Is Going Sundays-Only Except _The Born Loser_
• MiSTed: FX Down To Mobius, Part 16: Freddy's Surprise

So we've had bunny and turkey pictures. What's left but to close out the Jackson County Fair?

And now into the rides. Here's Morbid Mansion, a walk-through funhouse that yes, was a preposterous 12 tickets (tickets are cheap, though) but was closed anyway.

Some of the cartoony art on the side of another funhouse.

Here's the Himalaya that they bring to the fair every year, so far as I know.

Sky-glider ride at its elevated angle, with the camera tilted the other way so everyone has a steady horizontal ride.

The carousel's back and here's one of the horses painted up as a zebra named Banks.

Here's the inner-row Your Character Here horse.

Thus to all things. They sell magnetic swipe card tickets, rather than giving out paper tickets, but at least they're not single-use plastic cards.

The Himalaya in motion.

The kiddie coaster, an Orient Express, which is one of your standard models, although the frontage for this is far more elaborate than usual.

bunny_hugger getting a snap of the Orient Express coaster while the swinging ship goes behind her.

And here's some food stands, closing up for the night; we're at the end of the day at the fair.

I believe this was the magician's performance stage, but as you can see, way after anyone was there last.

Trivia: In May 1945 the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, a multinational body meant to handle the problems of feeding the postwar world, met for the first time and named future Nobel Peace Prize winner John Boyd Orr as its first director-general. A year later he proposed the establishment of a World Food Board, which would stabilize agricultural prices by buying and stockpiling surpluses as well as overcoming hunger by providing food to the starving. Source: The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food, Lizzie Collingham. Among the ... results ... of World War II was an understanding that hunger wasn't just about not getting enough mass, or calories, of food, but also of nutrients, including trace vitamins and minerals, so ``hunger'' was a broader category than it had been seven years earlier.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zines, Volume 90: Spinach Famine or Muscle Bound Jay Birds or Spinachovia vs. Creamatonia, Bud Sagendorf. Editor Stephanie Noelle.