austin_dern

After the great organ concert we all went to our respective cars for a maybe half-mile drive to the other building. This is a smaller place, maybe the size of a regional train station, but one with an awesome collection of stuff for middle-aged white guys to look at. Great clocks. More band organs. A full-size train with a couple cars that isn't operated to go anywhere because the city's zoning board won't allow that in a residential zone. A temporary exhibit of more perfume and cologne bottles. And a carousel.

Specifically, the Eden Palais, a salon carousel, a nearly-extinct kind of carousel that once travelled Europe, especially, setting up temporary buildings with elaborate fixtures and furnishings, trying to make the mere amusement of riding horses into an experience straining at elegance. The name gives the aspiration away, doesn't it? At least it's an entertainment striving for respectability. We've been to salon carousels in Europe, at d'Efteleing and at that museum in Paris, but now? One --- maybe the only one? --- in the United States.

We got a ride on the Eden Palais; that was part of the admission price and the thing that made this a key element of our trip. Just the one, though. We were also scheduled to have time to wander around the carousel, and this part of the building, although it wouldn't end up being enough. We had spent a great deal of time in the first building and its musical pieces and cologne bottles, and the docent had a hard deadline as there was some event going on that evening. (There was one guy in the party --- the only person below middle age --- who was an organ player himself and apparently had some familiarity with the Sanfilippo Estate. He was clearly straining to not take over the docent's job of explaining things here and there.)

I know we always close places out but how are we expected not to close out a building that has, like, a circa-1960 performing robot jazz band? Or heaps upon heaps of the fanfold music scrolls for band organs? A luxurious train car and then a more normal one with all the trimmings of an early-20th-century game room? The ``Personal Desk and Chair that formerly belonged to Farny Wurlitzer''? All right, I mention that just because ``Farny Wurlitzer'' sounds like something robots call each other as an insult. But you see how whatever time we had here, it wouldn't be enough. Yes, I was the last person out, begging the time to use the bathroom; I'm told one of the docents grumbled that she thought I had already gone.

Well, had to spend all the time I could at a fascinating place. Now, it was on the road, journeying to a land I had never before set foot in ... Wisconsin.

Next thing on the photo roll was a rare Friday night where we went out to a pinball tournament. And you know where it was we went?

No, not an Aladdin's Castle that's survived time's ravage, but the Sparks Pinball Museum at the Oakland Mall, which has a lot of that sort of stuff housed within.

It being late December they had a random-draw gift exchange, everyone participating bringing in something and getting something back.

Meanwhile, remember the Time Traveler holographic video game? I do!

Here's the path you can take through time, including such far future years as 1998 and Trader.

Anyway, here we are gathered around to follow MWS's instructions.

bunny_hugger wearing her reindeer costume at the gifts table.

Trivia: In the early 1890s the United States Patent Office --- following decades of patent submissions regarding flying machines --- refused to consider any application outright unless the inventor actually succeeded in flying. The Wright Brothers' March 1903 application was rejected as ``a device that is inoperative or incapable of performing its intended function'', with claims ``vague and indefinite''. Source: First Flight: The Wright Brothers and the Invention of the Airplane, T A Heppenheimer.

Currently Reading: Growing Up in Alphabet City: The Unexpected Letterform Art of Michael Doret, Michael Doret.

Tuesday of our Old Northwest Tempest would bring us first to a Chicago-area ... well, not exactly museum. It's a private home, a mansion, of the Sanfilippo family. You may know them from no you do not. Sorry. But the family business for a couple generations has been in making own- and store-branded nuts, and packaging, which is one of those things that may seem small but when you consider how many people like eating nuts of some kind will give you the chance to make a lot of money.

So a part of the estate is the Place de la Musique, a private museum with a staggering collection of mechanical musical devices, and concert and band organs. Also coin-operated gadgetry. It was hard not to think this might be what Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum might look like had Marvin won a billion-dollar Mega Millions. It also was hard for someone else in the tour group with us to compare to The House On The Rock ``except everything worked'', a faintly ominous note since going to The House On The Rock was a possibility if we decided to make time for it on the trip.

As alluded, they sometimes run public tours and getting one of them was one of the more annoying constraints in bunnyhugger's planning out our trip. And strangely, our tour group was a small one, maybe a dozen or so people; the seating they had available was for something like fifty people or more. I couldn't help thinking of our visit to that private carousel museum in Paris last year, when maybe half the usual crowd attended. Maybe we're just lucky.

We gathered as directed, cars parked in a line along the long driveway because, it would transpire, only part of the tour was in the mansion, with the event moving toward the end over to an outbuilding. The mansion is still a --- if I say ``working home'' will you follow me? So we had a couple of rooms we were allowed in and reminded a couple times that the family was still there. We'd been asked to dress respectably, which is why I had one of the polo shirts I wear into work; given that the whole crowd was mostly retired-looking folks I'm not sure they had to specify respectful dress.

The collections started out with the eldest Sanfilippo going from his mechanical-engineer's interest in how to better automate the shelling of pistachios into how much amazing stuff mechanisms can do. So mechanical music-players, particularly, drew his interest and as he had the money to put into an obsession he could get a lot of really interesting stuff. Some of it resembled things I'd seen back in the Netherlands at the Speelklol Museum, including such novelties as the changeable-disc music-box players. (I kept waiting for the docent to mention how it used to be you could rent a music-box player and different discs; he never did. Maybe that was just a European thing or maybe he figured that was getting too far into the weeds.)

The centerpiece of the collection in the main building is a player organ, rescued from a movie palace, with pipes running all over a big two-story auditorium built for some of the many charity events held. (The docent mentioned repeatedly about the charity events held but not what any of them were, to the point of it growing suspicious. I understand not wanting to brag about doing good, or to make it sound like you should have too much credit for what a group does but, like, we admit bunnyhugger does her charity tournaments mostly for the Capital Area Humane Society.) We'd keep coming back to it while we were in the main building.

But before I describe all that, here's a couple of pictures from around Thanksgiving, spent with bunnyhugger's parents and their pets.

bunnyhugger's father brushing their dog's teeth, a nightly chore that I hope is helping for all the work it's put both to.

Start of a story in three pictures. The cat, napping.

The cat, noticing me.

The cat reacts.

And not long after Thanksgiving we had our first substantial snow of the season! Look at that, you can totally see the city not plowing the street.

Back yard, so you can see this was a regular old two or three inch storm.

Trivia: When Humphry Davy isolated a sample of magnesium (by electrolysis from what we would call magnesium oxide) in 1808 he proposed it be named ``magnium'', arguing the word ``magnesium'' was too much like ``manganese'' and would lead to confusion. His recommendation was not taken up. (``Magnesium'' reflects the magnesium mineral having come from Magnesia, Greece.) Source: Nature's Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements, John Emsley.

Currently Reading: Animation by Filmation, Michael Swanigan and Darren McNeil.