Matt McIrvin's Freaky Alternate Reality

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.

So 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.

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.

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:

• MiSTed: All The King's Horses, Part 3: Prologue
• It Also Has a Problem When I Put Veggie Burgers on the Skillet
• Statistics Saturday: Some People You Could Swear Played _Doctor Who_ At Some Point
• We Know More About How the Guy Who Used to Draw _Beetle Bailey_ Saw Squirrels
• Did GoComics's Comment System Screwup Kill _FurBabies_?
• What's Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? Is that a space alien? April - June 2026
• Technically I Could Always Say This but Now? I Wouldn't Be Fibbing
• MiSTed: All The King's Horses, Part 4: Day One

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.

Before 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.)