Daphne Eftychia Arthur, guitarist+. Read.
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wapsisquare_feed at 08:15pm on 2026-07-07
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firecat at 12:46pm on 2026-07-07malada at 09:20am on 2026-07-07 under home owner
accomplished
blockedsorcyress at 01:07am on 2026-07-07austin_dern at 12:10am on 2026-07-07 under carousels, eden palais, old northwest tempest, pinball, trip reportAfter 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.
sorcyress at 10:48pm on 2026-07-05_@), finishing just about in time for mom's "hey let's have plenty of time to go to the pharmacy before it closes" alarm to go off. Mom and Sam and I walked off to Davis Square, which was...okay, it's not hot anymore, but I would like the air to not be soup? Anyways, we got meds and crepes and fancy lemon soda from HMart (it's not discontinued! just moved! Sam found the new spot for me! Yay!!!!!!) and then went home and I spent three hours working on the Jobs Coordination for Scottish sessions. I had estimated 4-6 hours of work, I'm at about five total and I _might_ make it? austin_dern at 12:10am on 2026-07-06 under eden palais, holidays, old northwest tempest, parents, trip reportSo thing about the Sanfilippo mansion and museum is it's got a lot of stuff in it. We were mostly looking at music pieces, which included --- at the top of the grand staircase --- a coin-op band organ that had been in at least one British movie; the docent identified which but the knowledge is long since gone from my memory. And there's some astoundingly ingenious ones too; he showed off a combination player piano/violin instrument that handled the violins brilliantly. In the upper chamber above the piano's keyboard and strings were three violins, upside-down, inside an ever-rotating ring set to be the bow. Each violin had just the one of its normal four strings, with pneumatic(?) fingers to press extend and a mechanism that moved the violin against the bow for its notes. This is just such a bloody brilliant solution to the problem of ``how do you get a mechanism that can bow a violin?''; realizing that you can instead use multiple violins, one for each string, and move them to the bow was a stroke of genius. (There were only three strings, so some of the violin's natural range was unavailable to this, but you can transpose your music around that.)
The docent also treated us to playing a transcribed scroll of piano music, which he billed as a live performance by Ignacy Jan Paderewski, whom you may recall died in 1941. But he played on a piano that recorded his exact keystrokes into a player piano scroll, which he could play now. While it played bunnyhugger and I had a telepathic conversation, with just a few glances between, exploring the meaning of ``playing live'' in this circumstance. We're probably going to have it again, out loud, after this essay publishes.
Once you have a big enough collection of things other collections start coming by naturally. One was a bunch of these cute little statues of imps that were also light fixtures; these, turned out, one of the family members had gotten into obsessively collecting and then discovered he had run out of space to put them (!). Some have since been offloaded to relatives' homes. There was also a fun anecdote about the collector and his daughter unknowingly bidding-warring against each other on eBay for something meant to be a gift to him. And in the room with the imp lights I noticed stairs leading down to at least one mechanical horseracing game, like Cedar Point used to have, but those stairs were roped off and we never got near them. We did get downstairs to see even more contraptions and a side museum.
One of the family had got, by chance, interested in cologne and perfume bottles and created a big collection of those. Part of the way many are put on display is by a replica of a Parisian shopping arcade (with, we noticed, a Kewpie Talcum advertising doll), and a lot of the bottles and packaging for perfumes across many countries and many decades that are ... not as varied or fascinating as I expected. Like, yes, the need for a perfume or cologne dispense to hold in a volatile liquid while allowing for its use forces things about the design, but I was expecting more wild, genie-bottle design things. Instead we got some novelties, like Aftershave For Dad in a golf-club-shaped bottle or the Jurassic Park 25th Anniversary Shaving Kit as the outrageous end of things.
After being guided through the basement --- another band organ, a steam engine like used to provide power to a whole factory, a 1930s bar and more --- we went up the spiral staircase to the original auditorium-style room, with the band organ, there to watch a replay of a concert given at some other event. This was with one of those performing movie-palace-style organs with more keys than Apollo Mission Control had. The docent explained how a lot of the performance is actually in setting up the organ and the key positions so that one only has to go a relatively little, human-manageable, part in the live performance. And the mechanism allows the recording and replaying of a performance, so we could watch the organ and two player pianos by its side, like helpers to the main boss, do its work. On the screen where sometimes they project silent movies they showed, for most of this, a computer representation of the notes-playing keys and what ones were being 'pressed' for each of the sounds. It's staggering to watch; even watching it play 'itself' without a visible human, you get this sense of the craft and ingenuity and work put in to making this possible.
And the museum wasn't done yet.
In photos we're already(?) up to December 2025, and the first full weekend of which, when we got out to cut down Christmas trees for ourselves and bunnyhugger's parents. Let's watch.
It was one of the colder weekends we've had for this! Here's the tractor for people getting a ride to the back of the farm, which we haven't used for a couple years now.
bunnyhugger walking around the smaller trees which we've kind of been getting into since they're a lot easier to deal with.
Our choice. You know what happened next.
This was fun; we got to see a train of tree-hauling wagons being moved.
We had two trees to cut down this year, as we'd volunteered to get one for bunnyhugger's parents (who didn't make the long drive out) and here we are deep in the woods searching.
And there's the tree setup! Looks good, doesn't it? I mean in an undecorated way.
Trivia: The English word ``soup'' and the Italian ``zuppa'' both derive from the Gothic ``suppe'', meaning ``a slice of bread immersed in broth''. Source: The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts, Silvia Ferrara.
Currently Reading: Growing Up in Alphabet City: The Unexpected Letterform Art of Michael Doret, Michael Doret.
watersword at 01:56pm on 2026-07-05 under life: paterWILL NO ONE RID ME OF THIS TROUBLESOME FATHER.
Someone get this man to take my name out of his fucking mouth.
(One of his cousins died, he posted about it on Facebook and talked about how much I liked that cousin, someone saw fit to forward it to me. Leave me the fuck alone.)
austin_dern at 12:10am on 2026-07-05 under eden palais, holidays, old northwest tempest, pets, trip reportTuesday 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.
twistedchick at 04:47pm on 2026-07-04mrs_sweetpeach at 02:34pm on 2026-07-04 under holiday
contemplative
hot
hotJust got caught up with Helluva Boss, the twin series to Hazbin Hotel. (Same showrunner, same Hell, but contractually prevented from ever crossing over.)
It's nearly as brilliant as Hazbin Hotel, but very different. Not as much of a musical (the soundtrack for Hazbin is downright great), although it tends to have about a song per episode in Season 2.
Helluva Boss comes with a big CW for Comedy Violence: the high concept is that our protagonists are Imps in Hell, who run an assassination bureau, taking contracts to kill shitty mortals in the human world. The violence is almost always played for laughs (or just the sheer joy of mayhem), and it is fun in a comic-book kind of way, but that's not everyone's cup of tea.
That said, it's not about the violence. It's actually very much a queer romance, even moreso than Hazbin Hotel -- the relationship between Hazbin's Charlie Morningstar and her girlfriend Vaggie is sweet, but also mostly stable and fairly healthy, so it's not really at the center of the story. By contrast, the episode plots aside, Helluva Boss turns out to be entirely about Blitz, our protagonist, and his extremely complicated and messy relationship with Prince Stolas.
It's very much not all sweetness and light: for the entire first season, Blitz is very clear that he's using Stolas -- giving him sex in exchange for access to Earth. But season two gets far deeper, really centering their relationship, as Blitz begins to realize that Stolas is actually in love with him, and worse -- starting to realize that it's mutual.
As of where things are now, things are far from perfect (Stolas is having a bad time of it), but that relationship is actually starting to turn healthy, even downright sweet at times. It's a lovely character arc, with Blitz starting to internalize that maybe, deep down, he's allowed to be a decent person, and really makes the series worth watching.
(There are a bunch of other major characters and relationships, and all are great, but that's really the heart of the show.)
Anyway -- recommended for those who like that sort of thing. Amazon Prime, 15-30 minute episodes, good stuff.
So happy news! Our mouse came through surgery fine, and was judged not to need an Elizabethan collar. Which is the better outcome, yes, much as we were kind of hoping she'd have one on.
We got her back as she was still recovering from sedation. She looked wet, which we can't quite explain. The vet tech --- who it happens shares a name with one of us --- explained a bit about everything that had gone on, and that everyone had been excited since they don't often get a hamster in for surgery. I supposed this to be a slip of the tongue and figured if we did not get a mouse back we would have words. The surgery went fine, though, and the mouse, for she was and is a mouse, will need a daily injection of meloxicam. We're very familiar with giving meloxicam to rabbits, who by and large come to like it, but mice are a new line for us. We may have to give her a dosed cracker or vanilla wafer to ingest it.
Also, the poor mouse started to squeak when the vet tech picked her up, and particularly tried to turn her over so we could see her chest and where the scar was. Mice don't really squeak like you see in cartoons; they make that sound mostly as infants begging for mom to feed them, or as adults signalling their surrender to whoever is doing something that they can stop now, they're submitting. Between mice this is usually a quick bit of business to sort out but you can see how mouse would not understand why the vet tech isn't taking their surrender. We're supposing that the she's going to recover from this terror; one merciful thing about animals is they don't seem to mope a lot about inexplicable scary experiences outside their control. But we are going to want to try medicating her with as little physical contact as possible.
We should be able to arrange this, since the recommendation is our mouse be kept alone for the ten long days until her sutures come out. This to keep any other mouse, such as an over-grooming sister, from working on her sutures until something bad happens. Fortunately, with the deer mice released, we have a couple suitable bins. We were asked also to limit the mouse's activity, which the tech admitted was ... uh ... a challenge. The big thing is we're not setting a wheel in her pen, and also not anything much to climb. She has a little wooden bridge she can walk up and down but that's not much work to go up or down again.
I didn't explicitly mention this the other day but given the extreme heat and humidity we've moved all the mammals up into our bedroom, with the air conditioner running. This has been pretty nice especially for the mice as they're very easy to see from bed. In their cage's normal location they're across the room and I have to get up and stand next to it to see them doing anything. Here I can just roll over and oh, there's mice doing mouse business.
Given that, now, let me give you a half-dozen pictures of our mouse back home.
Here's the mouse in the travel kennel. Beside her is a monkey biscuit given by the vet's as food and, we think, drink, as it was moist.
Here she is in my hand. The bald patch on her head is because her sister grooms her too hard.
Now here, this bald patch on her side is from the surgery.
But there, isn't that a darling face?
We set her in a clear plastic bin to examine her chest without the stress of holding her, and this gives you the chance to see mouse paws at work standing.
And here she is, set in the recovery bin, with litter and things to hide under and a world she can kindly ask to leave her alone now thank you.
Trivia: The only text on the back side of the Declaration of Independence is the description: ``Original Declaration of Independence dated 4th July 1776''. This would be so that, when carried as a scroll perhaps with other official documents its contents would be known without unrolling. Source: Signing Their Lives Away: The Fame and Misfortune of the Men Who Signed the Declaration of Independence, Denise Kiernan and Joseph D'Agnese.
Currently Reading: Animation by Filmation, Michael Swanigan and Darren McNeil.
On my humor blog it's been a week with a lot of comic strip news. Some of it generic (plot recaps for a story strip), some of it silly (more of my weird Beetle Bailey animal fixation), and one of it serious (a comic strip I like is on hiatus). Here's what I'm talking about at least:
And now I'm going to close out the Silver Bells post-parade stuff and just look, there's some surprise bonus material here!
More of the pretty good illuminations: here, a polar bear eats the state capital.
Wishes for the happy holidays fall apart under the drones having to come back home.
But that's all right because now it's time for fireworks!
There we go, in what is definitely a picture from the 2025 Silver Bells and not every other fireworks show around the capitol dome ever!
I've learned slowly that pictures of illuminated smoke are more interesting than the explosions.
Most of the time.
Fireworks over, we went back into City Hall for the bathroom break and to warm up and got a snap of the dedication plaque. There's a bunch of names here that you see on stuff to this day.
Here's bunny_hugger missing badly at photographing City Hall's tree! (She was photographing a display of things from Lansing's sister cities.)
The lobby of City Hall, plus a peek at what's up the stairs hidden by the partition wall there.
Warmed up, we went back out for some up-close pictures of the tree now that the crowds were subsided.
And what did we find but a bunny! Not the Eastern cottontail I imagined when bunny_hugger first told me she saw a rabbit, but rather a domestic angora.
I know this looks like an angy cloud but apparently the rabbit is actually extremely mellow, which is the only thing that makes it remotely sane to bring to big public events with fireworks like this.
Apparently, angoras get really used to being handled and being around people since they need their hair brushed about 28 hours each day.
bunny_hugger has since seen the rabbit at another event --- I think a 5K walk/run --- but it still seems bold, at minimum, to me to take a rabbit out like this.
Trivia: Rumors of Zachary Taylor's illness were heard between the 4th of July, 1850 --- when he contracted ``cholera morbus'', attributed to the iced drinks and fruit he had during lengthy ceremonies in the hot sun --- and the 8th of July when it was finally officially announced that he was unwell. He died about 10:30 pm the 9th of July. Source: From Failing Hands: The Story of Presidential Succession, John D Feerick.
Currently Reading: Animation by Filmation, Michael Swanigan and Darren McNeil.
Now that I'm sure my Teva sandals fit well enough for me to walk to the store and back, I have ordered a second pair online, as planned. This pair is purple, which they didn't have at the brick-and-mortar store. Mail order has real advantages, but shopping in person let me try them on. This is one of four or five different styles I tried on that afternoon.
Yesterday was the first time I'd walked any distance in these sandals. I grabbed them while pulling on clothes and hurrying out before it got too hot (extreme heat warning starting at 10 a.m. yesterday).
For my reference, these are Teva Tirra sandals in a women's 9.
vvalkyri at 12:45pm on 2026-07-02Before resuming the trip report there's a mouse report needed.
So we discovered one of the mice has a tumor. A big one, like she were smuggling a jellybean in her chest. It's default for any unneutered female mice to get tumors by about age two, but she's only age one. We discovered by accident, when picking them up to clean their litter and finding one got distressed when I rubbed her head; our guess is this pressed her tumor into her chest in a way she could otherwise compensate for.
Last week bunny_hugger took the mouse in to the vet, where the examination came back yeah, it's a big tumor. Investigating it did involve puncturing the skin and that let a good bit of fluid out, at least, but it also left the poor mouse every upset; she was peeping submissively, the way a mouse begs for a release from these torments, for the rest of the day. At least until we got her back in her home nest with her sister. (Her sister seems fine, so far.)
Today, bunny_hugger brought the poor mouse in to the vet for surgery. That'll be tomorrow morning, when the vet who does small-animal surgery is in. Turns out the particularly difficult part about small-animal surgery is not so much that it's a tiny workspace, but that small animals lose body heat fast when they're anaesthetized, so I guess it's lucky we brought her in the hottest week of the year.
The best case scenario is that she comes through fine and we bring her home tomorrow where she can recuperate in a cage we've moved into our bedroom where the window air conditioner is going. The second-best case scenario is that it turns out she chews at her stitches and so has to be put in an Elizabethan collar. You may know it as the Cone Of Shame on dogs, but, mice can get them too. More, since mice are flexible and dextrous creatures that could wriggle out of a collar that's merely snug around them, the collar has to be sutured in. I don't really want that, since every round of anaesthesia is a chance to die under anaesthesia, but also ... gads can you imagine how adorable that would be, seeing? There would definitely be so many pictures of that rushed here, if it comes to that.
Meanwhile, let's get back to chilly November and the Silver Bells parade and all. We're up to something important in my photo reel ...
You see it? It's coming up right ...
Now! The 2025 was back to an Aggressively Normal coloring after the ruby-anniversary red of 2024 (the event's 40th) was mistaken for being a pro-fascist coloration (and, going back several years, the green-with-a-red-band was taken for being a cigar or a picke or something).
And they put a drone light show in between the tree-lighting and the fireworks. Have to admit the drones are getting more interesting.
So here's a map showing where the State Tree started out its life.
And here's where it ended up.
Glinda the Good in her bubble, one of a number of drone shows reflecting The Wizard Of Oz but also really Wicked II: The Wrath Of Boq.
Trivia: On the 2nd of July, 1776, the Continental Congress closed its doors at the normal 9 am hour; about an hour later, as the vote to declare independence was happening, a severe storm struck, for the second day in a row. Source: John Adams, David McCullough.
Currently Reading: Animation by Filmation, Michael Swanigan and Darren McNeil. I like the book --- really an encyclopedia of all Filmation's projects --- but it's got a weird lot of copy-editing glitches. The one giving me the weirdest giggle so far has been the Fat Albert executive producer credit given to sex pest ``Dr William H Cosby, Jr, pH''. (I'm not sure just how old the book is but it is old enough that Cosby was still held in esteem back then.)
malada at 01:17pm on 2026-07-01 under home owner hotmrs_sweetpeach at 12:13pm on 2026-07-01 under project 52
sicktb at 11:23pm on 2026-06-30 under better things, cape cod, food, garden, marking time, medical stuff, phenology, simple pleasures
sick I apologize to my dear bunny_hugger most of all, but I haven't had time to continue writing up the Old Northwest Tempest trip report. Please enjoy a double-dose of pictures from Silver Bells maybe after you read up what's going on in The Phantom's weekday continuity, please. It's probably not aliens but I can't prove it's not just yet.
There's the reviewing stand, before many people have got ready to sit down and review stuff yet. You can kind of make out the big throw switch they totally use to light the State Tree.
And here's an architectural thingy on the capitol that looks all nice and official and all. ... Is that tree stumps on the left? That's tree stumps on the left, isn't it?
Paws, the Detroit Tigers mascot, rides in one of the first cars of the parade.
The mayor and grand marshall of the parade and the tree-donating family get brought in by horse with ruby-slipper horseshoes.
Here's eternal crowd favorite the Cata-piller bus.
The Old Newsboys float advertising their spoof newspaper that I didn't see last year either.
Here's the Hager Fox inflatable suit.
Ooh, hey, got a picture of someone taking a flash photo! Or just using a spot light to take a less bad picture. You know my picture is art because of the light leak.
And here's the TV camera operator in front of one of the floats, and as the camera operator is in focus you know this picture is also art.
Eternal crowd-favorite the Petoskey Steel Drum Band. Turns out the drum band started out because one guy really thought it'd be a fun thing and yeah, the Petoskey community agreed.
Here's a float showcasing, based on the way those streaks look, two people shooting 1930s Flash Gordon serial guns nowhere near each other.
And again I catch the TV camera operator taking a picture. I like that you get motion blur on the float from my picture but see it clear enough in the TV camera's screen.
Trivia: The (apochryphal) Books of Enoch and of Jubilees, dating from Maccabean times, mention a year of 364 days containing 52 weeks, with the year divided into four quarters of months of 30, 30, and 31 days, with a warning about abandoning this year in favor of a lunar year. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.
Currently Reading: Animation by Filmation, Michael Swanigan and Darren McNeil.
austin_dern at 12:10am on 2026-06-30 under amusement parks, holidays, old northwest tempest, silver bells, six flags great america, trip report Happy anniversary, dear bunny_hugger.
I suppose it was in the first, lighter rain that we came to accept we weren't going to ride every operating coaster at Great America. The second rain sealed that, though. That and the park being open only until 8 pm. In our last hour and a half we had to decide what we really wanted to get on and we forewent a bunch of the DC Superhero-named rides that we might or might not have ridden twins of at other parks, like Batman The Ride or Superman Ultimate Flight. One that was of interest was Demon, located near Wrath of Rakshasa. In 1976 a ride with two corkscrew loops, Turn Of The Century, opened in this location; in 1980 two vertical loops were added and the ride given a new name, which is a shame as Turn Of The Century is a great name.
If you accept Demon as the same ride as Turn Of The Century, though, this would be another golden-anniversary ride to get on and it was closed. At my suggestion, though, we went to The Lobster, a Polyp-like spinning-cars-on-elevated-arms ride. It's been through several names and color schemes and locations in the park, and the park's ride sign monitors list it as one of the rides people might want to get on. It illustrates The Lobester with a picture of a completely unrelated claw ride, for reasons of pointless petty insult. But, with the 1976-ish ride we wanted to ride being down, why not a 1976-ish ride that we would want to get instead? (Aided by Cedar Point having just removed The Monster, a ride of the same general type as The Lobster.) This was a good, fun ride and we didn't quite spin too much, but we got close enough for pleasure.
And! When we got off the ride we heard the distinct sound of Demon's lift hill. (Different lift hill mechanisms have different sounds, and if you know the manufacturer of a ride --- Demon, being a steel coaster from the mid-to-late 70s, was built by Arrow --- you have a good idea its most likely lift hill sound.) So we were able to rush up to that and get a ride as it reopened for business.
And then? We probably had time for a couple rides, if we chose well. bunny_hugger nominated the ride she had been most impressed by her first time at Great America, Raging Bull. It's a 202-foot-tall coaster --- comparable to Magnum XL 200 --- in the Old West section, a part of the park that's not on the main loop and so we hadn't been in yet. Fortunately and even with a diversion to the bathroom we found our way there efficiently and had no significant wait.
Sitting next to us in the four-abreast seats were a couple guys I'm not sure where they came from. I mean in line; where they came from was the north of England, excited by my Camden Park T-shirt and talking about rides they had been on this trip. We caught up with them after the ride and talked about, like, what our favorite coasters were --- I forget if bunny_hugger or I named Ravine Flyer II, but they were looking forward to it. And they asked us about The Ride To Happiness, which yeah, we'd gotten on just the year before. One of them had a tattoo of The Ride To Happiness's logo, which is great commitment to the ride's happiness. Their roller coaster tour had taken them to Mount Olympus, a park in the Wisconsin Dells we had on our schedule; they warned of the roughness of the rides, something bunny_hugger was afraid to hear about.
Even without the company we had a great time on Raging Bull, though, and even had enough time that we might have gone around for another ride. But I was getting a little fatigued and bunny_hugger was moreso, so we left the night off with a really good ride on a coaster we enjoyed a lot.
Back at our hotel home --- there for the last night --- we were too slow getting things together (particularly thanks to stopping for some food) to swim again. But we got pictures of the hotel, a place just so beautifully dated in exactly the right ways. Did I mention they had a pay phone just off the lobby? It didn't work, but it was there at all. You don't get that just any old hotel, not anymore.
Despite the disappointments and the rain rolling through our day, we were looking at a pretty good parks trip. Up for Tuesday: no parks, but somethings else maybe as wondrous ...
Now up in pictures: it's time for the Silver Bells Electric Light Parade and Fireworks and Drone show and State Tree Lighting! I may have the name a little wrong. Roll with it.
The past several years they've set reindeer up in a pen outside the Lansing City Center.
Here's the reindeer looking up a little more, possibly scarfing down someone's candy.
The lobby of City Hall, in all its 1950s architectural glory. There's plans under way to replace it and who knows how many more Silver Bells this'll be an attainable view for?
Stepping out we get to peek at the state capitol and, on the lower left side, the local TV broadcast booth.
And here's our news anchors, plus the camera guy.
Lined up and ready for the parade to start!
Trivia: The globe that Magellan used to convince the Spanish crown to finance his voyage was made by Martin Behaim in 1492; it had originally been commissioned in 1490 by the city fathers of Nuremburg, produced to extend German trading along the western coast of Africa. Source: Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance, Lisa Jardine.
Currently Reading: Animation by Filmation, Michael Swanigan and Darren McNeil.
watersword at 08:58pm on 2026-06-29It is extremely poor timing for the gherkin to decide that she needs to be touching me at all times. I love you too, you furry menace, but we are about to have three days of Extreme Heat Watch (topping out at 102°F/38°C), please go lie on the bathroom tile and/or cuddle the aircon instead of me.
I am ...a little freaked out about the rest of the week.
This is mostly just to say "hi, still here." There's not much going on here.
After the cats' annual checkup, it turned out that one of them (Molly) has a urinary tract infection. We gave the vet the OK to run more tests using the same blood sample, to identify the pathogen.
It's some form of E. coli. I picked up the pills on Saturday, while cattitude was out of town doing family stuff. He got home late last night, and we just gave Molly the first of seven pills. Once we've done that, they want us to bring Molly back so they can draw more blood to check that the antibiotic did the job.
Adrian and I took the opportunity of Cattitude being away to cook and eat mushrooms: stuffed mushrooms Friday, and a mushroom-barley casserole Saturday. We agreed that the casserole was easier, and it was less work, so we're unlikely to make stuffed mushrooms again. (Adrian pointed out that the stuffed mushrooms weren't difficult, it was the difference between "easy" and "very easy.")
twistedchick at 01:35pm on 2026-06-29anniemal at 12:12am on 2026-06-29austin_dern at 12:10am on 2026-06-29 under amusement parks, holidays, nite lites, old northwest tempest, six flags great america, trip reportSomething I forgot to mention about the construction fence. Fences, actually, as there were several areas blocked off. They were decorated with those low-effort AI-generated posters promising something coming next year. Something campground- or nature-themed, apparently, since a typical one promised 'Nature Is Getting A Lot' ... and then the main body of the image before the conclusion of the teaser. This only makes sense if whatever the big project for next year prominently features 'Lot' in its name and I'm going ahead and betting it does not.
Anyway we were able to start getting some good riding in after the rain, starting with Flash: Vertical Velocity, the Wicked Twister-like coaster that would not be the only Wicked Twister-sibling we rode this trip. And then Joker, which in this incarnation is a ``wing'' coaster, with a course that's in nearly a vertical plane, the track rising and falling and going back on itself. It's a lot like a Mad Mouse in its vibe. Or a spinning Mad Mouse particularly, since the cars --- on either side of the track --- can spin freely(?). The result is a ride that isn't just a long vertical climb and then a bunch of bunny hops back and forth and back again; it's also twirling so at any moment you're going up, or down, or back up again. It is a lot of fun and we were both feeling maybe a little overwhelmed by the motion. I've been lucky not to be particularly vulnerable to motion sickness, but bunny_hugger was having a worse time of it than I understood. Bodies, you know?
Also the ride asks you to choose whether to ride the purple or the green car --- one on either side of the track --- but a park employee supervising where the Fast Lane line-cutters join the regular line assigned us green. That had a nice benefit though since as we were waiting to get in line, someone coming off the ride spotted bunny_hugger's t-shirt and got enthusiastic about ... I forget which park she was showing off just then. (More encounters like this to come.) Her warnings about how dizzying the ride was heightened bunny_hugger's worries that this maybe wasn't a great idea but no, the ride was a great idea. Riding it several times in a row, though? No, and so we did not.
After another and heavier rain --- I had a sad picture of Foghorn Leghorn and Petunia Pig barely visible through the downpour --- we would get a couple hours of solidly good riding time. This would be how, for example, we got a pleasantly short wait for Great America's newest coaster, Wrath of Rakshasa. The Rakshasa is a figure from Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and Indonesian folk-Islam but don't worry about whether this might be a little creepily appropriation-ist: they've themed the ride as an Old Timey Travelling Carnival Sideshow promising to show off freaky weird stuff going to scare your pants off.
It's a fun dive coaster, like a ValRavn that isn't disappointingly short, and it's got the great conveyor-belt stuff-stowage-system that we first fell in love with on Yukon Striker at Canada's Wonderland. And, like, it's not like the Rakshasa are heroic figures of south/southeast Asian mythology or like the park already had a ride literally named Demon just across the path. But the carnival-sideshow theming --- however well-received it is --- makes me feel uncomfortable.
Going to now finish off Nite Lites, with not just a half-dozen photos but some bonus extras.
OK, so this would be seven (checks notes) swans, a-swimming.
Eight maids a-milking, although the overlapping does make them a little hard to make out now.
Nine ladies a-dancing; the curve of the track makes it easier to see them all more clearly.
And there's (counting) ten lords a-leaping.
If I had a tripod here you could see eleven pipers a-piping!
But this time I got a solid twelve dummers a-drumming.
And now, at the end and beginning of the track we have a moment photographing bunny_hugger in the reindeer costume she made for the holiday. Looking good, right?
And here's a picture of my shadow. The horns are from a cute set of foam antlers they gave everyone to later throw out.
Trivia: Sodium and praseodymium can slow the speed of light passing through them to six miles per second. Source: The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World From the Period Table of the Elements, Sam Kean. Kean mentions this as being slower than the speed of sound, though I'm not sure if he means the speed of sound in sodium or praseodymium.
Currently Reading: Animation by Filmation, Michael Swanigan and Darren McNeil.
selki at 05:42pm on 2026-06-28
happyaustin_dern at 12:10am on 2026-06-28 under amusement parks, holidays, nite lites, old northwest tempest, six flags great america, trip reportChicago's Great America started from the same plans as California's Great America, back as an early-70s idea by Marriott to build more or less the same regional amusement park in many regions. They were always a little different, and they diverged faster when Marriot got out of the amusement-park business and sold the Great Americas to different companies. Neither park still has the Yankee Cove area; Chicago's Great America turned it to a Gotham City Or Something section and California's I forget what. But I swore that I recognized spots that were still the same in both parks, with one of the important ones being they both had a large food court in what my sense of geometry told me were about the same place.
The food court had different places than its parallel in California, but it did have the best concentration of variety for stuff we were up to eating. We got lunch from the Chop Six, the Chinese place, and had the deeply weird experience of both of us putting in the same order for the tofu bowl, the staff getting one out, then noticing there were two orders and so taking the first one away while ... things seemed to be happening, but slowly, and without our being at all sure that they were going to lead to our getting food. They did, eventually, and it was plenty of food that got charged to our prepaid season-long meal plan so we can't fault the expense. Just felt confused by not knowing why they didn't give us the bowl that was actually prepared and ready right away.
Also this is a weird miscellaneous bit but for some reason every time we looked for a bathroom all day we ended up back at the one by this food court. At one point I asked if the park even had another and yeah, there was one right up front of the park. We also at the end of the day found one in the Old West themed section. Still, it's kind of weird we kept finding this as the most accessible one considering it's a pretty big park from an era when park design philosophy was ``walk four minutes in any direction and you're in a bathroom''.
Another miscellaneous, slightly odd thing? There was a part of the park hidden behind construction fences, which is ordinary enough. I reached my arm up to take a couple blindly-aimed pictures over the top of the fence. It looks like construction over there and you can't see anything. Just as I was doing this a really tall guy --- and my RL instance is a tall guy already --- asked if I wanted him to take a couple pictures. He probably could see over the fence himself. I thanked him but, nah, this wasn't all that important. I just like having a couple pictures of the hidden, even though they're boring.
The park had a couple of historical markers, always an attraction to us, put up for the 50th anniversary. This helped draw our attention particularly to rides that were there from the park's origin. One of them was Logger's Run, a log flume, that we might have gone on if it were open. Maybe not, though: Logger's Run opened as a pair of interlocked flumes and the other one, now known as Aquaman Splashdown because its entrance is in the DC Superhero Universe section, was open, and we didn't ride that. Maybe it was too crowded; the day was pretty hot and muggy and a lot of people would like a water ride for that.
Also historic and a ride I kept giving the wrong name for? Fiddler's Fling, a Calypso-like ride that's one of the other 1976 Original Series rides for the park. This was one of the first things we got to after things reopened following the rain. I believe this was one of the rides where the operator noticed our out-of-the-area park T-shirts and chatted with us. I know it's one where we were confused by the ride height sign, which had regions for 'Can't Ride', 'Ride With Adult', 'Yes, you can ride' and then a fourth height of 'Can Accompany', which makes it sound like if you're tall enough you can only ride if you're accompanying someone small. But no; as we'd learned on Little Dipper --- with a similar sign --- they just mean if you're that tall you can ride by yourself or with someone who needs supervision.
I didn't realize but my photos have brought us to the last major display of Nite Lites. Let's see how far in we can get before you recognize the theme ...
So that's a partridge in a pear --- oh, you've got it, then? All right.
So here's the two turtle-doves.
How to show a hen is French is always a fun challenge. Here, we display three giant hens at Kings Island!
Nite Lites comes down on the interpretation ``four calling birds''.
Give gold rings, that apparently I wasn't got to break my stride for, so enjoy the motion blur.
When we start getting to six geese it starts getting easier to photograph them in fun overlaps.
Trivia: In reporting the Gettysburg Address the Centralia [ Illinois ] Sentinel claimed Abraham Lincoln began by saying ``ninety years ago''. Source: Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life, Adam Gopnik.
Currently Reading: Vector: A Surprising Story of Space, Time, and Mathematical Transformation, Robyn Arianrhod.
sorcyress at 11:04pm on 2026-06-27austin_dern at 12:10am on 2026-06-27 under amusement parks, holidays, nite lites, old northwest tempest, six flags great america, trip reportLet me try listing things we did at Six Flags Great America that didn't involve getting angry that the important wooden roller coaster wasn't running, or that Maxx Force was running slow. Well, we got there in time to see Foghorn Leghorn and Daffy Duck doing photos with the crowd, so our streak of seeing amusement park mascots was holding up. (We of course saw Santa, and Buttons, at Santa's Village.) We did go over for pictures ourselves getting there just in time for Foghorn and Daffy to go in and Petunia's shift to start. I did tell her, honestly, that I liked her in the movie (The Day The Earth Blew Up) and there's not the remotest chance she heard me or knew what I was on about.
We also got, early on, a ride in the Hall Of Justice, this Justice League-themed interactive dark ride where you get thrown around randomly while shooting a laser target at I don't really know what. Something that Joker and Lex Luthor are invading Metropolis with. It's the twin of the ride we were on at Six Flags Mexico years ago --- the building layout is identical as far as we can tell, down to the animatronic of the character Cyborg giving a very long safety spiel and computer-animated Joker and Lex Luthor taunting him and you the people in line. (bunnyhugger pointed out how much Lex Luthor looks pained every time Joker says anything, the familiar ache of being chained to the annoying coworker for an interminable project.) Anyway we got tossed around a lot and I don't think I hit anything, but somehow our car was announced as one of the top 1% of shooters for the day(?). ... Which was only like two or three hours at that point but still, either the three kids in the front row seat were really good or they just make up superlatives for every car that goes through.
And though the most important wooden coaster, American Eagle, wasn't running, there was still a wood-ish coaster which had a line not unreasonably long. This is Goliath, a coaster built with Rocky Mountain Construction's ``topper track'', which puts a steel cap on otherwise wooden roller coaster track. The goal of this is to make wooden roller coasters that ride with the smoothness and lower maintenance of steel; it also makes practical things that are difficult to do with pure wood, like inversions. Despite its promise the stuff has only got sold to a couple of parks, including Dollywood where it's part of what makes Lightning Rod that good. (Although a lot of Lightning Rod topper track was replaced with IBox Track, that's more steel.) Also I was weirdly delighted that the logo for Golith had the feel of the graphic design for Atari's oversized 1979 pinball machine Hercules.
Another definitely wooden roller coaster, of some note, was certainly running and was the last thing we got on before the rain came through. This was Little Dipper, a roller coaster that opened in 1950 at KiddieLand Amusement Park and that was, incredibly, moved after the park closed in 2009. Wooden roller coasters don't get moved, for the most part, and yet in 2009 two wooden roller coasters from closed parks got relocated to Great America and --- we'll get to the other. The ample queue area had some signs that promised to explain Six Flags's history of ride preservation, although the actual line was short enough not to get near there. We both wanted to read more about this, especially since when you think of amusement parks with respect for the field's history Six Flags doesn't make the top thousand names on the list, but we never did get back to hang out in the unneeded queue space and maybe photograph their explanations. Maybe if the rain hadn't through things for a loop.
Speaking of the rain. We'd been in line for ... whatever their name for a Wicked Twister-like shuttle coaster was, and were maybe one or two ride cycles from riding it when they called it for weather. (Also, wow, Wicked Twister never got a line at Cedar Point, but here just a couple hours away a near twin of it had a respectable line.) We got some pop and sat down in a sheltered patio behind the drinks stand, overlooking a small pond with, turns out, a remote-controlled boat area that was lacking the actual boats. They had some props set up, lighthouses and islands and all, just nothing for people to pilot. Maybe that'll come back later in the year, or when they convert the control posts to take credit cards.
Continuing the walk through about three miles of Michigan International Speedway track here:
The Star of Bethlehem is at the end of the drive-through Nite Lites experience, but it's only the midpoint of the 5K run/walk tour.
It is a spot where you can bail out early, though, if it's long enough or inclement enough to call it off.
This is the entrance proper, at the end of the long windy path of sponsor lights you can see for free.
And one of the signs up front explaining just what you're getting into.
Since it's Michigan winter of course we have tulip-watering.
I believe this is a picture through a neon light display of the state of Michigan (the ribbon going through is roughly I-75), but mostly I liked the framing of the truck in back with the promise of Merry Christmas Happy New Year tucked inside.
Trivia: On the last day of his 1953 trial (for assaulting the barracks at Moncada) Fidel Castro delivered a fifty (single-spaced) page speech denying that the Batista regime could be constitutionally constructed, and quoted for support not just heroes of Cuban history but also of the French, American, and English revolutions, and cited Thomas Paine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Scottish reformers, German and Spanish jurists, even a Virginia clergyman. Source: Cuba: An American History, Ada Ferrer. He was sentenced to fifteen years in prison.
Currently Reading: Vector: A Surprising Story of Space, Time, and Mathematical Transformation, Robyn Arianrhod.
twistedchick at 09:29pm on 2026-06-26mrs_sweetpeach at 06:11pm on 2026-06-26 under birthday sick hopefultwistedchick at 01:47am on 2026-06-26
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