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It's been cold this winter, which you could say about most anywhere in North America this winter. It's got us thinking about how the first weekend in freaking October we went to the beach and had a perfectly pleasant day. But to my point, it's been mostly hanging out between 0 and 10 Fahrenheit and if that weren't pleasant enough, we've been getting a fresh snow, a dusting to a half-inch, most every day. Usually right after I've gone out and brushed the snow off the sidewalk and as much of the driveway as still clears anymore.

So what has mildly annoyed me has been that the city never got around to plowing our street. We're a tertiary road, meaning they only get around to plowing us once every three major storms or so, and you understand them not going crazy over every little quarter-inch snow refresh. But you'd think they'd eventually have a light enough day on the main roads they can get the neighborhood streets, right?

bunnyhugger tells me no, and why not. Turns out Lansing, like a lot of northern cities, has a shortage of rock salt this winter. (Never mind that the standard formulation doesn't do a lot of good when it's this cold this long; it'd still do a little good if we could get it on a sunny day.) Apparently the southern states bought up all the rock salt this year for some reason? Like, I get MAGA states wanting to screw the sane people but that's a lot of money to put on the line for a prank that only pays off if it's a really snowy season. There's some dots here I'm not quite connecting but there's probably a confusing article about it on web site that calls their articles ``thinkpieces''.

Anyway this apparently connects to the conscious choice not to plow the side streets. There's a layer of ice down there, underneath the ever-refreshing snow, and annoying and slow as it is to drive on slush it's safer than driving on ice. Remove the slush and you remove the thing that makes people naturally drive slower, so in the absence of a clean street, this is the next-best thing. It's clever and I should admire the clever but I'm also really tired of it being this bitterly cold for this long.

Back to Kennywood. With very short lines for Exterminator we went back around a couple times and once I even photographed what was in the queue.

This may look like nothing, but that's why I photographed it: there used to be a bunch of old, 60s(?)-era industrial machinery here, part of the theming of the waiting area for the Exterminator (which has a premise that mutant rats have taken over the underside of the city or whatever). It looked likely to have been donated from Westinghouse or someone and I can't think any good reason to take it out, especially to replace it with nothing. It's not like it had to do anything besides be there.

But they did leave a couple pieces! Whatever those industrial equipments are, plus a new TV screen replacing the old tube TV that carried a local news anchor's reports about the mysterious things at the Kennywood Power Company.

See this guy? This guy's the ride operator. Do not disturb this guy. Okay? Why do you want to disturb the ride operator anyway? What's this guy doing that you want to disturb them?

Noticed that the Carousel Burger building now had a National Historic District sign on it, explaining a little something of its history. The building used to house the carousel but it's getting on a century since it last did.

Also a memorial tablet we don't remember ever noticing before, even though it apparently dates to 1928. McSwigan was one of the people that Pittsburgh Railways leased Kennywood to in 1907 when they got out of the amusement-park-operating business. McSwigan died in 1923.

bunnyhugger noticing that good-looking carousel over there and saying ``Hey there, horsies!''

Trivia: 46 BCE, when Julius Caesar reformed the calendar, ended up with 445 days: a Mercedonius of 23 days (a common intercalated month put near the end of February) and two extra months of 67 days total inserted between November and December. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.

Currently Reading: Michigan History, November/December 2025. Editor Amy Wagenaar.

Over on my humor blog the attempt to give titles to the separate parts of the FX Down To Mobius MiSTing, which doesn't have such natural break points as Arthur Scott Bailey's chapters, made it to its second week before becoming ridiculous. That plus two bits drawn from real life and a weather joke that absolutely killed in the Teams chat at work. Please, enjoy!

• MiSTed: FX Down To Mobius, Part 1 - Host Sketches
• In My Defense I Did Not Leave Out the Vegetarian Hamburger Part
• Statistics Saturday: Secondary Uses for Company Logos
• Robert Benchley: Mutiny on the ``Bounty''
• Fine, I'll Clean Out My Downloads Folder
• What's Going On In Prince Valiant? Why is Prince Valiant in Italy now? November 2025 - January 2026
• While I Dislike Giving Hot Takes I'm Going to Give One
• MiSTed: FX Down To Mobius, Part 2: A Moral Argument, Part 1

Well, this is awkward: I have enough Tuscora Park photos for half a Thursday photo dump. Please enjoy that half-dozen and then the next thing we went to on the Most Extreme Mid-Atlantic Parks Tour ...

All but one panel of the carousel building was closed, but I could still poke my hand in to get a picture of what it looked like.

And, of course, I can do a panorama of the closed carousel and just a tiny bit of the outside.

Kiddie Ferris wheel that's been put to bed for the night.

Historical marker explaining the park, with the startling revelation to me that while yes, Tuscora started as a private amusement park, it was only a private amusement park for four seasons. From 1912 it was taken over by the public.

So it turns out basically all the rides that were ever there were public property. It does give us tolerably believable dates for the carousel and Ferris Wheel's arrival at the park.

The sunset was gorgeous, by the way, and while I took a couple of pictures this is maybe the most representative, at least of how it looks as a photograph. The clouds were just grand.

If you guessed the next thing after Tuscora Park would be Kennywood, you guessed right! And remember the last like five times we went right from Tuscora to Kennywood. Learning from experience counts!

Establishing shot: the hatch of my car yawns wide to take in Kennywood in the distance.

And one sweet thing about Kennywood is you get nice long approaches with pleasant views like this.

OK, not so happy about having this many people in line ahead of us especially when we weren't 100% sure about our tickets (long yet boring story, we were fine, we accidentally bought duplicates because the park's web site was not telling us when the transaction successfully completed, they refunded the duplicates).

And we're in the park! Look at the Old Mill, a ride nearly 125 years old and ... wait a minute, what's that in the center? Mascots!

No, not Parker the Kennywood Arrow, we see him plenty of times, we want to see the other one, behind --- look, just --- get out of the way, we want to see ---

Yes! It's Kenny Kangaroo, whom we saw for the first time ever outside a KennyCon event! And he was going in after spending the park opening greeting people and posing for pictures!

Trivia: In 1966, Lunar Landing Research Vehicle Number 1 was upgraded with a cockpit enclosure with styrofoam roof, and simulated Lunar Module window openings, a prototype of the enclosure that would be used on the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle. Source: Unconventional, Contrary, and Ugly: The Lunar Landing Research Vehicle, Gene J Matranga, C Wayne Ottiner, Calvin R Jarvis, with D CHristian Gelzer. NASA SP-2004-4535.

Currently Reading: Volume 82: Wreck o' th' Pegaso D'Oro, or, The Ispano-Squweezer!, Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

FAE has been quietly using they/them pronouns for years now, without getting much attention. And dressing in more feminine garb on more occasions. And, on the explicit word that nonbinary people were welcome in the women's tournaments, started playing in them in October. Which retroactively made all the pinball play they'd done in open leagues and tournaments count them towards the women's finals. FAE plays only in Lansing, plus Pinball At The Zoo this last year. This meant they were both unknown and under-rated: consider that they got into the top eight of women in the state on the strength of two league finishes and a couple not-large tournaments, plus a mid-pack finish in Pinball At The Zoo. FAE was my and bunnyhugger's pick for person most likely to win it all, and nobody but us seemed aware of them.

And our forecast looked likely to pay off: they beat their first-round opponent in four straight games, and their second-round in five games. KEC was next and would put FAE to the strongest test they faced all day. But KEC beat FAE on Mustang (her choice), then FAE returned the favor on Lethal Weapon 3. On The Who's Tommy and then Uncanny X-Men FAE racked up two more wins, bringing KEC to the brink of elimination. Then on Scuba --- her pick --- she came back and handed FAE a second loss that round. On to FAE's last pick, Paragon.

Paragon is a game I want to like. It's a wide-body, usually a sign of so much good pinball idea they couldn't place it all. It's got a neat bunch of art this time I don't think plagiarized from Boris Vallejo. But it is a brutal game, prone to sudden, abrupt ball drains. Even the tutorial video the IFPA has shows the skilled player teaching you how to play the game unable to keep the ball alive.

And, somehow, FAE was keeping the ball alive, accomplishing such impossible feats as spelling out the word PARAGON in the lights, a feat good for like 80,000 points on a table where 50,000 will give you a good finish most of the time. KEC went up to her last ball down something like 150,000 points and the game just does not let you get that many points.

Yet ... somehow ... she didn't lose the ball. She just kept on shooting it up into as safe a shot as Paragon has, putting up small but reliable points over and over, the wood-chopping approach that will win you games if you don't have an unlucky shot. And she kept having lucky shots, right up to the point that she too completed the PARAGON spelling, all but eliminating FAE's lead. A little bit more play and she would bring this expert player to a seventh game, that would be KEC's pick.

She didn't. The ball bounced off a something or other and drained and when the bonus counted up she was just short. One more hit on the bonus-multiplier targets would have won it. One or two more shots up into the upper playfield where bonuses build up and letters get awarded would have done it. It would have been plausible that she'd have gone on to finals, but she did not. All she had was the strange consolation that everyone in the venue was congratulating her for an incredible rally and agreeing that it sucked it wasn't enough.

And finals. FAE versus two-time women's champion JL. The match started on her game, Jungle Queen, which decided it wanted nothing to do with her and gave FAE a win. Lethal Weapon 3 was similarly not giving JL nearly enough time to play. The next game, Space Shuttle, got interrupted on JL's last ball when, down a hundred thousand points or something, the spinner that's essential to any wood-chopping play got stuck. PH was able to open the table and fix it easily, but what flow JL had started gathering was gone and she drained the next shot. Finally, playing demoralized, FAE crushed JL on The Uncanny X-Men, beating the former state champion four games to nothing.

FAE had come from obscurity to win it all, and they never faced a closer match than KEC with her outstanding-but-not-enough Paragon.

And now, back to Tuscora Park. We'll get to carousel fun soon.

Something delights me in seeing the train wriggle its way back along the track here.

Maker's plate for the Superior Wheel.

And the ride sign for the roller coaster, which --- to my surprise --- I don't think we have any photographs of from up-close. No recent photographs anyway.

Several plaques dedicating the carousel and its building.

bunnyhugger enjoying a ride on the carousel. I had a feeling this was a ride it was okay to take a careful picture or two on.

I guess bunnyhugger did not think it was all right I was taking pictures during the ride. Sorry.

Trivia: Challenger astronaut Ronald McNair hoped to bring a saxophone into space on STS-51L, to play with electronic musician Jean-Michel Jarre (on the ground) a composition Jarre had composed, ``Rendez-Vous VI''. He was blocked from bringing the instrument to space, on the grounds of objections from ``someone in the chain of command''. Commander Dick Scobee would say it was his call: ``I decided Ron could bring his sax if Judy [ Resnik ] could bring her piano.'' Source: Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space, Adam Higginbotham. McNair had played his saxophone in space before, on STS-41B (also the Challenger), but accidentally recorded over the tape of his performance before landing.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 81: Steam Rocket to Infinity, Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

PS: What's Going On In Prince Valiant? Why is Prince Valiant in Italy now? November 2025 - January 2026 in case you missed my comic strip recaps sooner.

bunnyhugger called everyone together for final announcements, rules explanations, and a group photo --- I took the pictures --- at the scheduled noon, and we learned afterwards that Ypsi Pinball Podcast had supposed that all this stuff would be finished before noon and people would start going into games. Also bunnyhugger only started writing out the first round of matches --- top seed versus 16th, 2nd versus 15th and so on --- after the announcements, though either of us could have started writing that out as soon as we had the full attendance confirmed. It's always the things you think you don't need to coordinate.

bunnyhugger's first round, and the one the streamers chose to start with, was against KEC, and as everyone noted was a repeat of finals from two years ago. They would start later than the other groups, just because bunnyhugger was busy giving every other group the chance to start, and I think they ended up later than that because their first game --- Jungle Queen, one of KEC's picks --- was occupied. In the tournament format chosen every competitor chooses three games --- a classic, a middle-era game, and a modern game --- at the start of the match, before either of them have played anything against each other, and they will sometimes have to wait for another group to finish.

bunnyhugger won the classic Jungle Queen, thereby relieving my first worst fear, that she'd get swept. The next game was one of bunnyhugger's, Stranger Things, which she's played competently a fair bit locally but hadn't much touched in Fremont. But she had to have some picks for a modern-era game, and this seemed the friendliest of those available. It was not; she kept having trouble just timing the skill shot to start the game and took a loss. Back to KEC's games, the middle-era The Addams Family, where KEC had a disappointing game to bunnyhugger's really good in-the-groove play. This had the mildly embarrassing thing in bunnyhugger's last ball, where she overcame KEC's score, that while she had surely got the points she needed there were modes going one after another so she couldn't see the score to be certain. On to bunnyhugger's mid-era pick, FunHouse, which as the streamers noted was a game she just had to play and also that she'd be doing all the game's call-outs along with.

The irony for all of bunnyhugger's love of FunHouse is she isn't a particularly strong player at it, and the table was playing tournament-grade hard. But she had a fair game put up and was ahead at the end of her three balls, as the podcasters noted, the first time this match someone might win their choice. And then KEC --- who, Addams Family stumble aside, was playing really strongly --- went on a tear and blew past bunnyhugger's score. On to game five!

This was KEC's modern pick, the Stern game Mustang, and she knew the game in a way that bunnyhugger just doesn't. We used to, well before the pandemic began, have the game locally, but nobody much liked it or knew what to do with it then either. I've since played it enough in The Pinball Arcade app to be decent at it, in simulation, but there's no transferring that knowledge or experience orally, especially given how much of it is that I don't know how to describe what I'm doing besides making the yellow-lit shot. So for the first time someone defended her pick and she had a three-to-two advantage on bunnyhugger.

On to bunnyhugger's last pick, the classic game Scuba, a 1960s table with the smaller-model flippers placed about four yards apart. The gimmick of this game is you get the big points if you complete a set of five mini-targets that are blocked from the flippers by pop bumpers, so you have to aim to the sides of pop bumpers a lot until you get lucky. This era of game is always one of bunnyhugger's relative strengths but again, that luck element ...

Still, the choice was working out nicely, bunnyhugger being ahead at the ends of the first several balls, and while KEC was coming up, that's an era where it's inevitable you'll get a house ball, or a ball that pings wildly and goes out the enormous drains. Or that just dies when the flipper touches it, and can't be sent anywhere but the center drain. At the end of who knows how many rounds of the competitors trading physical places the podcasters said that was it, ball five, and bunnyhugger had won and they were going on to game seven.

It was not the end of the game. There was one ball left, and bunnyhugger played a little, and KEC played more and got that fifth hidden target, opening up a world of more points. She would beat bunnyhugger and, oh dear, knock bunnyhugger out of contention. For the third time in four tournaments my dear bride wouldn't make it past the first round.

What she did make it to? Back in June? Tuscora Park. Here's pictures to prove it.

A nearly decade-old plaque from the National Carousel Association commemorating Tuscora Park for operating the carousel.

And a slightly older plaque in better shape from the same group commemorating the same thing, as if the National Carousel Association got the idea of commemorating Tuscora Park in its head and the park wasn't going to turn them down.

The carousel's chariot, a nice long lion-esque dragon.

A sign warning what the rules are for each of the rides. The roller coaster, alas, is only open to those under 17 years old. It's your standard Allan Herschell Little Dipper, a knee-banger from the very old days.

Some of the kiddie rides, your usual sort of flat rides of things that go in circles.

This would've been a more interesting ride to Young Me since the chains would make it feel more believably like flying.

Trivia: The word basmati, as in rice, derives from the Hindi for ``fragrant''. Source: Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World's Smells, Harold McGee.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Sundays Supplement Volume 19: 1957, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle. I know it's hard to build a narrative over the Sundays but boy, do Sims and Zaboly lean heavily on ``Popeye goes fishing'' or ``Oscar and Swee'Pea try to get Popeye to buy them an ice cream soda'' premises.

We got through the snow and unhappy roads to the Clubhouse Arcade, maybe fifteen minutes past the opening of the venue for practice. Nearly everyone of the invited sixteen competitors was already there, as were at least two of the invited alternates, so first thing was explaining to AJH's mother that she would not be needed to fill in after all. She took this news with courage and grace.

The challenges in setting up were small and mostly about table space. There were eight fewer competitors than the day before, and fewer mere onlookers, but still the front room was overcrowded. We needed table space for bunnyhugger's laptop, which would hold the official standings, plus space for the scoresheets I'd be passing out and collecting, plus the official printed rules, plus the plaque to be given to the first place winner, plus the trophies that RLM Entertainment had paid to have made for first through fourth place, plus the 3D-printed trophies that someone had made for fifth through eighth place, plus the Pinball Box, plus the sixteen paper bags of giveaway swag that bunnyhugger had gotten donated from various pinball-related businesses in michigan, plus the mugs that one of the places had made up for the competitors and that wouldn't fit in the bags. It was a lot of stuff and it would never all be together on a single table. I set up the computer and score sheets on a small round table, the pinball box and the championship plaque on the tall chairs beside, and then everything else went where people hadn't already filled up the place.

One of those weird little oversights is that while the International Flipper Pinball Association had mailed the championship trophy to bunnyhugger several weeks back we hadn't opened the box yet. As bunnyhugger noted, we didn't actually know that they didn't send us the plaque for Wisconsin or something. I thought it might make a nice moment at the start of instructions to open the box in front of all the assembled competitors. Also maybe to let people pose with me for pictures of their being handed the trophy, which would totally not be a way to trick them into touching the plaque beforehand and cursing them to a loss. But the Ypsi Pinball Podcast asked if they could get a picture of the trophy, for their on-screen graphics, and I obliged and it was opened (and for the correct state and year) and nobody made any kind of deal of it.

AJH had a microphone for the speaker system in the Clubhouse and set that up for bunnyhugger, saving her the inconvenience and embarrassment of using her own megaphone. Last time we used the megaphone we somehow got it into a mode where it recorded a couple seconds of audio and then played that back in unending loop. Why? No one knows. How to stop it? Again, none can say. The microphone system had no such trouble.

Another matter of figuring out where to put things: the paper printout with the full bracket, not just of the people still in the running for first (which was kept up on matchplay.events) but also the tiebreaker brackets, to figure out who would go to 12th and who to 15th place, that sort of thing. bunnyhugger got from somewhere a spreadsheet that has exactly who should play who, in what order, to get a logically satisfying resolution (like, if you lose your first round, you're playing for 9th through 16th place; win the second, you're playing for 9th through 12th; lose the third, you're playing for 11th or 12th; win the fourth, you're 11th place). The catch is that printing this spreadsheet out where normal people could see took us eight pages of paper and there wasn't any desk space near enough for that. (The day before PH and AJH had printed the same sheet out but smaller, fitting it into a mere three pages.)

They gave permission for me to post it, using painter's tape, on the glass wall of some redemption games that were not relevant, and that was satisfying except for the games themselves being behind some other tables so people needed to learn how to see where the sheets were and how to read them. But this slightly awkward placement, and that they couldn't get to the sheets without seeing me, did mean nobody went and filled in brackets on their own and so nobody messed up the brackets on me.

Final thing of setup was that one of the competitors had spent the last month asking bunnyhugger roughly every 75 minutes if there were any way she could help with the tournament. So, bunnyhugger warned, she would get turned over to me to do something with the day-of. Well, we met and I agreed with her that her offer of help was very kind and would be appreciated. Once the tournament began I never heard a word from her. That's all right. I was doing all right entering results and directing traffic by myself.

To pictures, now, please imagine that it's as hot as it is currently cold, and that we're in Tuscora Park, New Philadelphia, Ohio. Here, let me try and help you set the scene:

Some of the plaques for the Tuscora Park Carousel and one of its longtime operators. The National Carousel Association plaque indicates the ride might have had its centennial this year, although nobody can be perfectly sure of that.

bunnyhugger with our ride tickets, and wearing her shirt for the W.E. 'Bill' Mason carousel out in California that we'd visited back in 2023.

On the ride! And you can see the other rides, most of them for kids, outside.

Operator at work on the machinery at the center of the ride. And the long scrolls of text beside ...

... You can see are instructions on how to use the MIDI-controlled playlist, as well as favorites, such as The Washington Post March, The Animal Fair, Buttons and Bows, Parade of the Wooden Soldiers, and something called Spiffy.

Slightly arty shot slightly out of focus and catching highlights on the inner side of a horse while the outside world looms behind.

Trivia: Shortly after returning from his voyage on the Beagle, Charles Darwin offered a hypothesis explaining how coral reefs --- created by the carcasses of many small animals that lived only in shallow water --- were made: as volcanoes gradually sank, their now just-visible summits provided new places where coral could grow, so the reef was wrapped around a defunct mountain. Darwin (and everyone else that century) had no idea how a volcano could sink. Source: Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life, Adam Gopnik. The subsidence hypothesis would finally be vindicated with 1950s drilling, although (of course) the story is more complicated than this.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Sundays Supplement Volume 19: 1957, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle. Yes, I finally reached the end of World War II! Spoiler: it came out well despite the American public being an incredible bunch of selfish whining crybabies.

In my humor blog this past week? A brand-new MiSTing based on a comic book printed-text story that was never meant to be read, plus me falling behind schedule mostly because of the severe weather prolonged our stay in Fremont, a bit of stray 90s nostalgia loosely inspired by the Dilbert guy dying, and the start of a MiSTing that's been forgotten on the Internet for over 25 years now. Excited? Read on!

• MiSTed: The Invisible Planet
• Statistics 2025: The Year AI Scrapers Made It All Meaningless
• Statistics Saturday: Steps in Using The FedEx Logo as Makeshift Compass
• Robert Benchley: Did You Know That —
• Please Do Not Use the Information in Here to Do Mean Things
• In Which I Admit I’m Late With _Dick Tracy_ This Week
• What’s Going On In Dick Tracy? Why does Dick Tracy look weird? October 2025 – January 2026
• MiSTed: FX Down To Mobius, Part 1 – Host Sketches

And now, I bring you the final dozen pictures from our Juneteenth visit to Cedar Point.

Live entertainment! By the Giant Wheel they had a small band playing as the Wild Mice. You can see their instruments; what's less obvious here is they also had tails and ears, and were color-coded to the mouse characters of the Wild Mouse roller coaster int hat part of the park.

Here's Chase, for example, whose recorded audio for the safety spiel makes him out to think he's the leader. Here, he's playing trumpet.

And a couple of the mice mid-playing. There were seven in the band, despite there being only six cars and assigned characters. Who's the seventh?

Here he is! Gary, representing the gray mouse who's on the ride sign but unrepresented with a train car. And once bunnyhugger revealed that I understood of course he had to be named Gary; it's an anagram of gray.

Back to Siren's Curse, here seen doing a test run pointing straight down, from behind the return leg of Iron Dragon.

Here's the Siren's Curse first drop seen from the other side, with Top Thrill 2's reverse spike and the Power Tower behind.

As you see, the car comes out to the end and all the brakes get put on.

And then it pivots ever so slowly ...

... and the track reconnects, and you wait a bit (there's audio of the Siren saying something incomprehensible) and ...

Whoosh! And the people beside you on the ground say uh-uh, I am not going on that.

Into the evening now; here's GateKeeper going past a golden-hour Giant Wheel.

And a last picture for the day of the Giant Wheel in the not-quite-sunset sky. Feels so weird to leave the park while it's sunlight.

Trivia: A 1920s study of Muncie, Indiana, found that 76 percent of working-class families purchased no books apart from those required for school, and when they did buy books, it was usually one or two, typically a picture book or Christmas gift. Source: The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore, Evan Friss. Sure glad it's completely different today!

Currently Reading: A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II, Maury Klein.

Saturday, the day of the open pinball tournament, we got up early enough that had we hustled we might have got to the venue in time for the official calling of the roll, just in case enough people were absent that we could have got in as ``non-dead bodies''. It would transpire that that everyone who expected to play was there; I don't think there was even a need for the official alternates. (This is not to say I wasn't startled when I saw a list of matches and that there were multiple people who had no opponent. This is because I forgot that the 24-person championship gave the top eight seeds a first-round bye.)

But we did also miss the giving out of instructions and the group photo and the start of ceremonies. I blame that it was nice and cozy in a mattress much less worn-out than ours. Also little things like bunnyhugger going off to find coffee and along the way discovering the first dozen living rooms. Also I had my first cup-of-oatmeal instant breakfast in maybe forever and that reminded me that I do like oatmeal. It doesn't just have to be just for pet rabbits who aren't taking their regular food.

We got there in the middle of the first round, and joined the good number of people hanging around the front of the building. The back room had all the pinball games up for tournament play. And, as non-competitors, we did our best not to venture in back except to use the bathroom and hope the bathroom would hold up to the strain under it. It did, which was, pardon me, a relief. The port-a-potty brought in the previous Sunday was still in the parking lot, I assume for insurance.

So I mostly stayed up front. Some of this was working on little goals of my own, like playing Creature From The Black Lagoon well enough to get Super Mode started. I failed at this, although I did get to playing the game much more reliably well than I had before. Also I gave some fresh tries to Led Zeppelin, a modern Stern pinball game that I've never had a good time on. You know what? I still don't have a good time on it. I mentioned to KEG --- formerly of Lansing, now an out-of-stater who would the next day become the first non-Michigan woman to compete in the state women's championship --- how weird it was they made a game with absolutely no fun in it. She agreed, although she did manage to put together an actually good game. Still, it's a lemon of a table.

My other pastime was watching the stream of what was going on in the next room over. If you'd like to see that stream, you can watch all nine hours of it here and if you see me in the video somewhere it's news to me. But it was fun sitting around with other pinball people and talking about the games. One guy mentioned he was surprised to learn that I was funny. Maybe I'm being too reserved in my normal play.

There were people who filled out brackets to see who did their best predicting the championship. I was not among them, although if I had, I'd have put my money on JPJ who did, in fact, go on to be the champion for the fourth time in a row. But there were many matches that I would have called wrong, if I'd been asked. AJH losing in the first round, for example, or TY losing to DLO.

Also something I didn't imagine would happen? The march of JBS all the way to finals. JBS also made history by being I think the first non-Michigander to play in the Michigan state finals. He's from Toledo, apparently, so gets to a lot of southeast Michigan events. I won't say anything against him, though, as I'm not going to rag on anyone who's still masking. JBS goes farther than that, bringing with him some kind of disinfecting light gadget that I'm not sure actually does things, but that he does wave across the buttons of the pinball machine before his every turn.

Anyway, I felt enough that a Michigander should win the state championship that I was hoping someone would knock him out. And it took until meeting JPJ --- who's currently ranked the 10th-best player in the world --- in the finals for someone to do. JPJ knocked out JBS in four straight games, which is even better than I'd imagined. Still, heck of a finish.

We stayed through to the end of the day, of course, and closed the place out. And then had to turn around and come back because FAE had forgotten their laptop. Fortunately AJH was only a minute away and was able to come back to let them in. Could have gone much worse.

Now let's share some more pictures from Cedar Point back on Juneteenth.

Now here's something we haven't seen on the Frontier Trail before: a map! They've been playing up, some, the history of the park as part of nostalgia marketing and some of it's included this guide to what you can see if you take pictures and put them through that Photoshop filter that turns it into line art. The actual trail does not curve nearly this much.

And here's the sun coming out, as seen from near Thunder Canyon, the water rapids ride.

The former location of Snake River Falls, with the track of the shoot-the-chutes now gone.

The boats across the lake were used for the short-lived revival of the river boat ride, and now they're being props again.

New this year: they renovated the Happy Friar food stand out of existence and into this new structure. Instead of a walk-up stand you now go in, but they have trays full of the cheese-on-a-stick hot-dog-on-a-stick, and fries ready to pick up and go, which is speedier. I don't dislike it, but I'm sad they reduced the happy friar art from a large three-dimensional cartoon board to a restrained little sign. Maybe it's period-appropriate to the era of we've-heard-of-the-Tudors-but-aren't-going-crazy but it's less fun.

And look at that, a train running on Top Thrill 2!

Trivia: In the final Congressional debates for what would become the 25th Amendment Senator Robert F Kennedy inquired what the proposed amendment meant by a President's ``inability'' to perform the duties; was it total inability? Physical? Mental? Senator Birch Bayh, speaking for the amendment, offered that it should be taken to be anything which presented an inability to perform the constitutional duties of President, and should not be limited to mental disability: ``It is conceivable that the President might fall into the hands of the enemy, for example''. Source: One Heartbeat Away: Presidential Disability and Succession, Birch Bayh. Kennedy also pressed on the question of how long a disability should be expected to last and Bayh offered that it should not be specified in the Constitution lest it complicate a crisis.

Currently Reading: A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II, Maury Klein.

This weekend saw a lot of Michigan under winter storm advisories and watches and warnings and an ever-escalating series of concerns. Which would have been fine enough to sit out, except that we had business taking us to the western end of the state. I mean the lower peninsula. In particular, to Fremont, home of the Clubhouse Arcade (formerly Special when Lit), the exact same spot we were at the weekend before. Friday would be the last day of practice time at the venue hosting the Michigan State Pinball Championship Series (Saturday's event) and then the Women's Championship Series (Sunday's). As state women's representative bunnyhugger had to attend Sunday, and as one of the qualifying competitors she had to attend Friday. The least ridiculous to do would be to spend Friday through Sunday there. Especially as it's a two-hour drive in ordinary circumstances and we had the threat of bad weather, basically, from Friday morning through to tomorrow morning.

As another element to things, we had a carpooler. FAE, a non-binary player who the past few months started playing in bunnyhugger's women's tournaments and sweeping them all with unsettling ease, by virtue of those appearances in women's tournaments gained a state women's rating. And their finishes in Lansing Pinball League and in Pinball At The Zoo --- coed events --- gave them a high enough 'open' rating to qualify for one of the eight positions reserved for open-tournament players. (bunnyhugger had her position from women's-only events; she needed a couple better finishes at RLM tournaments, or in Lansing league, to get an invite for her open finishes.) But FAE doesn't drive, whether for lack of a car or lack of learning how to drive, and asked if we could give them a ride and it would be churlish to refuse.

While we set out close to our noon target Friday, we were not close to getting to Fremont by the 2pm expected. This was the snow's fault. It was heavy enough to be annoying, though not so heavy as to cause traffic hazards. Just slowness, especially once we got past the Grand Rapids outskirts and were on two-lane county and smaller roads. The drive lasted three hours, meaning that we got into town just in time to check in to our bed-and-breakfast/AirBnB (turns out the place works both legitimate and Internet bookings), the Gerber Family Guest House. So we moved our stuff into there first.

The house turns out to be something like forty houses grown together. It is so large. There are a whole bunch of rooms, each with a person's name, suggesting the most prominent resident of each, and the rooms all have their own bathroom, inviting the question of what these rooms were before they were bathrooms. For our room (Sally) I think the answer was ``nursery room''. It has the bathroom sink on the outside wall, which made sure the water started frigid for the first couple minutes after you turned it on, so that can't be the original plan. Bathroom sinks get interior pipes where possible. The room also has more closet space than our actual house, one a good-size walk-in closet and one a charming little shelved closet with a three-quarters-height door. It gave me such strong feelings of being at the home my grandparents built in the 40s, right down to the sloped ceiling in the bathroom.

Also the place had an estimated twenty living rooms, all connected to one another, plus multiple kitchens. One was probably a servant's kitchen. One --- the yellow one --- we were invited to use and was where they had the snacks available for free use. Also at least two sinks and two four-burner stoves, one next to each other, as if I were making a joke about the brobdingnagian nature of the place. The many rooms were also decorated with Gerber family photographs and trinkets from the history of the Gerber baby food factory, so you could have some idea of who the people who had guests in this house were. They were in black-and-white and dressed like your grandparents' wedding pictures.

It was a neat place, large and open and with a seeming never-ending number of new rooms to discover. Also apart from bunnyhugger, FAE, and this one person I think was doing housekeeping Saturday morning I never saw anyone else in it. bunnyhugger had better success, spotting some other pinball players hanging out in common areas Friday night, but I had stayed in our room catching up on my Internet friends and whatnot, so missed all of that. Really fun, charming spot, though, and already at the top of our list for if we ever have to stay overnight in Fremont again.

Finally we reach the next event on my photo roll, back in the United States but without setting my camera back to Eastern Time! So please take the metadata on this with a grain of salt and conversion from Central European Summer Time to Eastern Daylight Time. This was Juneteenth, which we thought might be a good day for riding at Cedar Point. It was ... mm, there's been better. It looks like Father's Day might be the better mid-summer amusement park day.

This would also be our last visit to the park before Siren's Curse, the roller coaster dropped into the park to distract from the problems Top Thrill 2 was having, would open.

And, as you can see from the park sinking under six inches of water, maybe they shouldn't have invited the Siren to Curse the park. We weren't sure any roller coaster would open through this. ... Also note that the park had replaced its Cedar Point 150 sign erected for the sesquicentennial.

The carousels were running! We got some damp rides to the Midi-enabled band organ.

And Blue Streak would be our first Cedar Point coaster of the year. I'm inexplicably fascinated by the channel dug into the ground for the dispatch of the coaster trains.

The park was doing brisk business selling rain ponchos.

This uncharacteristically empty restaurant used to be a Chickie and Pete's, the only one I ever ate in (I guess it's a chain), and before that, was a sports bar where Dad could hang out while the kids were having fun. It's empty this year except for the person sitting on the porch there. Probably something will be done with it eventually but who knows when or what it'll become? (Another restaurant.)

Trivia: In debating whether and how to ask Vice-President Chester Arthur to assume the office of President following the shooting, but before the death, of James Garfield, the only strong precedent the Cabinet could agree was relevant were the periods of insanity of British King George III, when the Prince of Wales only accepted the regency following an Act of Parliament. The first of those periods was November 1788 through February 1789, when a Regency Bill was approved by the Commons but not settled by the Lords; the second, in October 1810, when a Regency Bill was passed, ultimately with the King's assent. Source: From Failing Hangs: The Story of Presidential Succession, John D Feerick.

Currently Reading: A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II, Maury Klein. I swear to you all, I am reading this book, it's just over 800 pages and I haven't had much time to simply sit and read.