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Stollin' With the One Girl, Sighin' Sigh After Sigh

The past week on my humor blog featured a weird density of me remembering things, and you won't guess what's scheduled for tomorrow. So why not pause for what's been this past week through to today?

And now to our trip to France and Belgium! Coming up, my first picture on another continent.

You must recognize this iconic Paris setting, right? No? ... Well, it's just off the Metro near the carousel museum we went to while waiting for a train.

Through this passageway we ... got a little closer to the place we meant to go. We were pretty sure.

And here we are, the Musée des Arts Forains. The carousel centaur leaps over the entrance. I don't think this is a Boer War general but can you say for sure it's not?

The entrance corridor. The museum itself is past this in the green space there. The kid was just there.

Trio of horses lining the entry way while we gathered for the guided tour (the only kind offered).

The horses seen from the side, which the light makes look completely different.

And here's the start of the tour. The guide here was far more energetic and dramatic than we could have imagined and, despite this being a French-only tour, she kept giving us and a couple other English speakers short versions of what she was saying in the native tongue that didn't seem any shorter, really.

Tucked into many of the upper windows were busts of various figures. You know, people you expect to see busts of in a private French museum of carousel and fairground attractions, like past presidents of France.

Or here, Jimmy Carter and Mick Jagger, naturally.

Hidden in the trees were a number of figures too, some of them doing festive things like here playing a trumpet in a parade.

And here's a figure that seems too off-model to be an off-model Bugs Bunny, by a timepiece that suggests they're also badly mispainted to be the White Rabbit.

And now, into the museum! It was dim, of course, and I didn't yet have experience with how to take dark photos on this camera, although in this case it worked out perfectly.

Trivia: 16,508 truck loads of debris were carried away from the Empire State Building site before construction began. Source: Higher: A Historic Race to the Sky and the Making of a City, Neal Bascomb. That precision is extremely believable, yes.

Currently Reading: The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City, Kevin Baker.

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I'm on the Top of the World Looking Down on Creation

Back to Closing Day at Cedar Point, with a guest. As mentioned the weather was just nice enough, and the staff just short enough, that everything was closed or crowded.

Worse, though, is that MWS started to feel pained, and went back to my car to sit a while and drink ice water while painkillers tried to do something for him. We couldn't think how awful it would be to have the first trip to Cedar Point in years have the center knocked out like that. (And he's had similar problems before, one day at Kings Island being knocked out when he was nauseated after an hour or two and had to go back to the hotel room to sleep for hours.) bunnyhugger worried that the day was a bust, but I kept my usual optimistic self and insisted that it was going to be fine. If nothing else it was going to be a day at Cedar Point, what's terrible about that?

And after about 6 pm the crowds did seem to be diminishing, with the line to Top Thrill 2 looking short enough to be worth trying out. So we did, stuffing all our things into the same locker and everyone relying on me to remember the number (I could remember where it was but had to reverse-engineer the number from that). And got into a line that didn't look much longer than what we'd had during our Halloweekends visit; we might have time to ride both this and Siren's Curse. Then the ride went down.

A good number of people jumped out of line ahead of us, but they never played the ride-is-closed-for-the-rest-of-the-day announcement. No real word will ever go out about how long they expect the problem to be, but we were heartened when a train loaded with people did go out and ride successfully. That turned out to just be discharging the people who were already loaded up and there was more maintenance to do. We kept an eye on the clock and on the eventually launched test trains and were on the brink of leaving when they announced the ride was open again, to great applause.

Then, of course, the Fast Lane --- which had been empty --- filled up, probably with parkgoers who saw the ride had been closed and had a minimal line-cutter's wait. So our wait kept on waiting. Finally the 8:00 closing hour passed. We would get one ride on this, our one roller coaster of the day, and that only if the ride didn't go down again.

It did not. We got up to the station finally, where as usual the ride operator was assigning seats. Within limits: he offered the people in front of us the choice of front seat or back on the next train. They picked back. So he gave the three of us rows one and two. Front seat. We both deferred to MWS for the front row; we'll likely have more chances for a front-seat ride than he will, for next year at least. I tried to defer the other front seat to bunnyhugger, but she took the second row, so, there I was, having my first front-seat ride on a coaster of this size since, probably, that time at Great Adventure we got to ride Kingda Ka (RSVP) repeatedly at the end of that night.

Top Thrill 2 does not have the single acceleration of the original Top Thrill. But it does have three linear induction accelerations, and a nice long hang after the reverse one, peering down hundreds of feet and, for me this time, nothing obstructing my view but the track. And when we crested the top hat it felt again like we were being pitched out of our seats --- no seat belts, by the way; the restraints are just that cozy and good --- and could see the whole park, closing up, in the darkness. Then a rocket back down and a brake to a stop and applauding for what a fantastic ride that was.

We staggered off the ride --- the ride photos booth was unattended and it turns out you can't just buy a ride photo anymore anyway --- before remembering that we had to get our stuff out of our locker. And then we also had to get MWS's milestone photograph. We had all forgotten to get a sheet of paper with 100 on it, but he was able to type out 100 on his phone in a big typeface --- the thing I'm told the kids do --- and we got to the entrance of Top Thrill 2 for the scene. They had already turned off so many lights that our pictures came out lousy, unless we turned the flash on, in which case they came out lousy in a different way. Still, he reached his milestone, and on a quite good coaster, and from the front row, in a way that has a story behind it. Great stuff.

Still, it was a day that saw us ride only a couple of carousels, and the loaded-to-capacity(!) train from back of the park to the front, and one roller coaster, plus eat some cheese-on-a-stick and fries. It wasn't the good low-key riding bonanza we had been hoping for. Maybe opening weekend will be different.

Now? I have a couple scattered pictures from April and May as I tried to talk Motor City Furry Con's lost-and-found into acknowledging my existence and returning my camera. Not enough to be worth sharing, though. Instead, here's the first couple pictures with my brand-new used camera, and I bet you can guess what's first on that new photo roll.

It's Athena! Who doesn't see what the point of this thing shoved in her face is.

With the flash you get to see her eye color and her concern that I'm covering part of the flash rectangle with my finger.

There we go, that's a slightly better camera flash. Yes, her food dish reads DOG.

She went upstairs in her hutch and sprawled out where she could look disapprovingly at me.

Got a little closer and got a slightly different look of 'what are you bothering me about?' picture.

I turned off the flash and turned up the ISO and got a more naturalistic view of our all-black rabbit in her hutch.

Trivia: The longest animation strike in the United States was the May-December 1947 strike against Terry Toons. Source: Terrytons: The Story of Paul Terry and His Classic Cartoon Factory, W Gerald Hamonic.

Currently Reading: The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City, Kevin Baker.

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After the Rain Washes Away the Tears

Small but long-running pinball tournament tonight, so before I give you the last pictures of Motor City Furry Con and my last pictures before going camera-less-except-for-my-iPod, please pause and ask yourself What's Going On In Mark Trail? What is with this tiger cult thing? And when you're satisfied you know what's happened from August - November 2025 in that strip, go on to read this:

Minimally arty shot looking out the window at the pond that's always there and just a little enhanced now.

The directional sign that's been with the convention through three hotels and I assume will be back in February for a fourth. Also the paid refreshments stand the hotel set up for people who needed more than hospitality's popcorn, Faygo, and beer.

Some fursuiters hanging out in the bar while everyone agrees it's probably too lousy to drive home.

The two games in hospitality: Pattie Cakes is a whack-a-mole-style game, just hitting whatever the lit button is. And Surfers, the pinball game, was down all day that we saw.

Mysterious list of numbers on a piece of cardboard attached to Surfers. The steadily ascending nature suggests high scores, although a score of 14,619 would take forever to do.

The Dead Dog Dance started maybe an hour late, and ran short (the deadline to start cleaning up was unchangeable even for acts of god), but it did start.

Fursuiter with a pride flag at the dance.

bunnyhugger posed all dramatically on the dance floor.

Though Discord and Telegram and such have taken over communicating with folks at the convention, they still had a wall of post-it-notes for people who needed, and it turned into art.

The tunnel to the dealers den had this tent that, we found, was fully closed up. Since nothing particular was under there I don't know what the closing up did. Maybe kept the space dry for things being moved from the outbuilding into the hotel.

The big schedule by the stairwell was removed, one more stroke of the convention being over.

And the ... toucan puffin? ... waves goodbye. End of con and shortly after this I left my camera in, probably, a bathroom and wouldn't see it again for months.

Trivia: After the Gemini IX Agena target vehicle crashed into the Atlantic Ocean rather than reach orbit, the very first production model, number 5001, which had been rejected early in the program as too trouble-ridden, was refurbished and used for the final, Gemini XII, launch. Source: On The Shoulders of Titans: A History of Project Gemini, Barton C Hacker, James M Grimwood. NASA SP-4203.

Currently Reading: The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City, Kevin Baker.

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If the Rain Comes, They Run and Hide Their Heads

Our big Halloweekends trip was not our last visit to Cedar Point for the year. We had figured to go Sunday, the 2nd of November for closing day. And we brought a friend along, MWS, who's been becalmed at a mere 99 roller coasters on his record ever since the 2019 road trip when both Altoona's Leap the Dips (the oldest roller coaster still standing) and Kennywood's Steel Curtain were down. He's had some tight budgets lately, but we had free Cedar Point tickets from Michigan's Adventure, offered as compensation for that park cancelling its Halloween events. So he could come in for nothing more than the inconvenience of meeting up at a park-and-ride. That park-and-ride is now hidden behind a complicated new traffic circle-plus-extra-cilia arrangement but it's not too much a price to pay.

The night before bunnyhugger noticed something in the fine print of the tickets: that they were good until the 1st of November. We were going the 2nd of November. Some research found that Saturday, the 1st of November, had been the scheduled close of the season up to a couple months before when the last day was added. I supposed that whoever was in charge of the schedule at Cedar Point failed to communicate this change to the person in charge of make-good tickets at Michigan's Adventure and everything would be fine. Even if the ticket-scanners at the gate had some issue with it, by the time we got to the park a couple hours into the day, they would have had enough people coming in with ``expired'' make-good tickets that they'd know what to do, and that would be to let people in, since the entire point of the tickets is to make people feel good about the chain after a disappointment.

bunnyhugger checked online, finding in Michigan's Adventure or Cedar Point forums that many people were very confident that of course the ticket would not be redeemable on the 2nd of November, what kind of doorknob are you? But could not find anyone who had actually asked anyone connected with the park. Well, as you might have expected, there was no trouble getting into the park; the ticket scanned as if they had printed ``good until December 31, 2025'' on them. The only hitch was MWS approaching the gate noticing the fine-print date and wondering if that was going to be a problem. I pretended I hadn't noticed it before. After getting through the gate without issue bunnyhugger explained that we had seen it, but figured not to tell him about it if we could because there was no sense worrying him if it wasn't needed.

And she took a moment to report back to the forums of very confident people that the ticket was no trouble at all.

Past experience has been that Closing Day, especially after Halloween, is a good one for riding. Past experience failed us here. Maybe it was the pretty decent weather, and the park having been (by reports) a ghost town on Halloween itself. But the park was busy, not helped by a lot of rides being closed. This included some roller coasters like Corkscrew and Gemini and Blue Streak that can handle a hundred thousand riders every fifteen minutes being closed. I assume that's staffing issues. Derby Dogs was also closed, as was the booth where they sell pins. Also a bunch of the gift shops on the exit side of roller coasters.

But the evidence on the ground, and of the online queue reports, was that it was going to be a terrible riding day; even Magnum, which normally can handle any number of riders in at most fifteen minutes, had a line estimated at 45 minutes. While we got rides on the carousels easily enough there wasn't much to do for the roller coasters, especially any of the three that could be MWS's milestone hundredth coaster, except hope that the line was less bad later on.

I've been promising photos of Sunday at Motor City Furry Con 2025, and delivering, but now we're up to the most exciting yet least photographically interesting part of the event.

So, a massive storm front rolled in, severe enough that tornado warnings sounded on everybody's phones and they shepherded everyone into the Main Events room as the largest tornado shelter in the hotel.

It took a bit to get everything organized, particularly to get the whole remaining population of the convention in one room and also leave enough space that should a chandelier fall down people wouldn't be immediately killed.

People hit on the idea of making chair circles to block off the most immediate danger zones, although it was hard for other people to resist grabbing a chair and sitting in comfort as the storm front rolled over Ypsilanti.

For a while they had radar updates going on screen, but that stopped for reasons I don't know; possibly from the expectation that people might decide the radar doesn't look bad to them so they were done with sheltering.

Somewhere around that last picture they announced that Main Events was officially a Headless Lounge, so that fursuiters could take their heads off without fear of being photographed breaking character, and I stopped taking pictures. Eventually the storm receded enough that they allowed us out; here's what the back of the hotel looked like. Note that, like, every chair is blown over outside.

And then bunnyhugger had to get back to work as she'd hoped to use the couple hours between closing ceremonies and the Dead Dog Dance as a chance to finish some stuff for school. That was impossible to do for the hour or so of sheltering so, back to the grind.

Trivia: Portugal issued its first national stamps in 1852. The first stamps celebrating the nation's history were issued in 1894, commemorating the 500th anniversary of Henry the Navigator. Source: The Invention of Tradition, Editors Eric Hobsbawm, Terence Ranger.

Currently Reading: The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City, Kevin Baker.

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Gonna Take Some Time to Do the Things We Never Had

What else to say for Sunday of our Cedar Point Halloweekends trip ... well, we got a ride on Magnum, the last of the roller coasters we'd needed for the trip. Also to ride on Calypso, a twirling ride much like a Scrambler but on a tilted platform, and from a vantage point where we could see the Skeleton Crew doing their acrobatics routine from the side, making it look novel again.

Also we got to see whatever the heck was the Peanuts show, the one cancelled for want of a Snoopy understudy(?) the other day. It was something about trick-or-treating and Snoopy's wild candy mania and the scary house at the end of the block with the Legally Distinct From Willy Wonka And Besides She's A Woman So There.

Also we saw something we'd have expected never to see: Derby Dogs, a hot dog and walking taco stand next to the Derby Racer, was open. Cedar Point, like any big amusement park, has more refreshment stands than it has staff for on any day, but I couldn't swear that I had ever seen it open before, and word on the forums is that no, it's just like never open. Given the staffing shortages they seem to be enduring, I don't know why Derby Dogs was open this of all days, but there it was. We didn't eat there --- nothing vegetarian even if we hadn't just had lunch --- but my photos of the phenomenon also show nobody in line.

Another thing we finally did was get to a show, this one at the Jack Aldrich Theater which we hadn't seen used for Halloweekends shows in a couple years. The theme this year was something about mutants putting on a rave, and they opened with a couple great tricks of the performers interacting with the screen and lighting effects --- like, having a bubble appear around them and swinging a hand to crack it --- and then otherwise carrying on as if it were a furry convention's dance. The only strange thing was not clearing the theater to the tune of Toto's ``Africa''.

I've conveyed already the sad news of breaking my Angel kigurumi; after we dealt with that we got a ride on the Antique Autos, and Blue Streak again, and even saw one of the other live performances, an extremely loud skeleton-themed band on the Bonewalk. These the sign explained were The Ska-Letons, a name I know bunnyhugger didn't see because she would have groaned at the wordplay.

For our last ride of the night, and of Halloweekends, we went back to Siren's Curse for another night ride, again beautiful especially in the settling evening, as most everything else in the park closed up. My photograph timer suggests we wrapped up about 8:30, a half-hour past close, and we did sadly have to hustle our way back to the car so we could drive home in time for our work the next morning.

Meanwhile, Sunday at Motor City Furry Con 2025, after closing ceremonies. Surely a bunch of average, calm, slightly-sad-for-the-parting-moments pictures with nothing remarkable to share, right? We'll just see ...

Some kind of robot-y creation that I saw a couple times during the convention. After closing ceremonies was the best view I ever got. What the reason for it is, I know not.

It folds up pretty easily into one of those strollers people use to carry loads of stuff around amusement parks, though.

Afterward, fursuiters wait eagerly for people to take pictures of them.

Here the fursuit's handler poses the Sims cursor above their head.

Over in the bar we see the results of a veritable tail'splosion.

And here's a picture of a piece of the post-closing-ceremonies schedule which was about to get blasted to smithereens.

Trivia: Around 1815 Joseph Henry, future pioneer of electromagnetism and first chancellor of the Smithsonian Institute, was a well-regarded member of Albany's Green Street Theatre, with the manager offering him a permanent, salaried engagement. Joseph had, according to his recollections, just discovered Professor George Gregory's 1808 Popular Lectures on Experimental Philosophy, Astronomy, and Chemistry, turning his interests to science. Source: Joseph Henry: The Rise of an American Scientist, Albert E Moyer.

Currently Reading: The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City, Kevin Baker.

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Peace Train Take This Country, Come Take Me Home Again

After reuniting with bunnyhugger the rest of Saturday night Halloweekend might seem anticlimactic. There wasn't anything so dramatic, anyway. There was some fun, though. On the swings ride we actually saw and heard Youth doing the ``six-seven'' thing for, for me, the first time ever, confirming it as a thing that happens outside the imagination of moral-panickers. This is also when I learned there's some hand-shrugging thing that apparently you're supposed to do to complete the phrase. bunnyhugger was aware of this and called back that she was going to do that and help make six-seven uncool at last.

And one of the kids went a step farther, not just trying to get people to do ``six-seven'' but also yelling out ``nine-eleven!'' Even jaded old furry trash me found that refreshingly transgressive and maybe two decades overdue. I can only hope that news of this causes some Fox News Person to head-burst.

This would not be the last six-seven of the night. At the other end of the park where Blue Streak was finally running we got a nice front-seat ride. And while waiting on the brake run some kids started yelling out ``six-seven''; bunnyhugger raised her arms to do the hand gesture thingy. On another six-seven call some adult type yelled out ``thirteen!'' And some wag followed with ``fourteen'' which was my chance to bid fifteen. The bidding got up to about twenty before someone else called out that they had no freaking idea what was going on, breaking up the whole train. This might be the most unanimously merry a roller coaster ride we've had outside ones where a downpour started after the ride started.

We got in a good bit of riding in the last hours of the day and I think by this time we had got on all but one of the roller coasters, so we'd had all the most essential things done. We would get back to our room not quite a half-hour past midnight and we figured to sleep in as close to checkout as possible.

You've heard something of our Sunday, though, sleeping in late enough that we were very late for checkout. And rushing enough that we both failed to spot that we had left bunnyhugger's Halloween vest, since returned safe and sound, behind. And bunnyhugger was furious that the hotel's express-checkout-by-phone did not work --- she can accept a thing not being offered much more than she can accept the instructions on a thing being wrong --- and was sure the desk clerk was surly to her when she returned our keycards a half-hour past checkout time. (I did not witness this so can offer no informed opinion.)

But we went into the park, in Angel and Stitch kigurumi again, and went right to this Puerto Rican grease truck for a plantains-and-rice meal. Someone sitting at a table near us asked me if it was good and I did say how I liked it and found it pretty filling, but admitted it was a bit dry. I'm not sure what sauce it could use but I think that might complete it.

More, though, the table where we sat happened to be near a small performing stage, one of several set up this year, and we were there in time for one of the Cedar Point Youth Programs. This was a group of maybe a dozen high school(?) girls in sparkly outfits doing dances. It's great seeing things like that returned to the park. If we could get parades back, that'd be fantastic.

In other Sunday news here's Sunday pictures from Motor City Furry Con, from before I lost my camera.

Hanging out in video gaming where there's Wii Baseball going on.

And then the guy who printed photographs of everyone who was in the fursuit parade had the selection out there. You could almost reconstruct the order of the parade just from the layout which shows how remarkably good people were about not messing up photos they looked at but didn't take.

Went back outside to see who all was there and also I think we might have made a failed attempt to get into the vendors building.

Lot of fursuiters milling about outside. It was generally pleasant apart from the nagging feeling that rain might come.

And now is it closing ceremonies already? Yes, so here I get arty about photographing it.

And that's it! With no official announcement that the con was moving or anything we get to the end of what would be the last Motor City Furry Con in this Ypsilanti incarnation.

Trivia: The state of Louisiana extends east of the Mississippi River owing to American forces in 1810 seizing the westernmost end of what was then Spanish Florida, taking territory out to the Pearl River. Spain, dealing with many independence-seeking colonies in Central and South America, acquiesced to this in the 1819 Adams-Onis Treaty selling Florida to the United States. Source: How The States Got Their Shapes, Mark Stein.

Currently Reading: The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City, Kevin Baker.

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All I Know Is That to Me You Look Like You're Having Fun

After exhausting but not quite closing out the Merry-Go-Round Museum Plus, we went back to Cedar Point. bunnyhugger went into the park for but a moment, after this, though. She had to do some more school work and going into the park to get a coffee from the grease truck with the really good variety of coffees and hot chocolates was the best source for one.

On my own, I figured I could do some of the rides bunnyhugger is particularly disinterested in, like Windseeker ... which was closed because of high winds, victim of its own success. Or like the Power Tower's drop side, which ... was closed. I don't think it's as vulnerable to wind as Windseeker so this may have been a staffing shortage. I got a Sky Ride back to the front of the park, though, so that succeeded. Then I remembered about Ocean Motion, the swinging ship ride, that we always forget about and it too was closed. It was doing test cycles, but showing no evidence of emerging from test cycling. All told, not my most successful bit of riding on my own.

Then I remembered that MaxAir, the giant Disk'O ride that seats you on a rotating platform itself swung back and forth, was right there and bunnyhugger doesn't enjoy that movement anymore. So I joined what I figured was a slightly-more-than-three-person queue and from my position was even able to kind of see most of the Skeleton Crew acrobatics performance over by the Giant Wheel (which was not running, another thing I couldn't do on my own).

And perhaps oddly, I got to talking with a woman who sure seemed kind of aunt-y to the kids with her, impressing her by forecasting that yeah, we weren't going to get on the next cycle after this but would probably be right up front for the following ride. I don't know, sometimes you can just tell form the line lengths. They were up from southern Ohio, for what sounded like some kind of sports tournament the next day. Their model for an amusement park is Kings Island so they understood the grammar of Cedar Point pretty well, but it was all new to them. The kids were hoping to talk their aunt(?) into letting them stay at the park until 1 am, and I had to say that since the park closed at midnight the lines would probably get quite reasonably short after that.

I also offered the advice that of all the rides in the park they should get on Cedar Downs, the racing carousel, because they aren't going to see another racing carousel like this. This is a fib, depending on how generous you are about ``like this'' --- Rye Playland and Blackpool have racing carousels of the same model, but neither is currently racing --- but I had the feeling going into further detail would make me sound creepily over-informed. But I did feel like the racing carousel is the thing Cedar Point has that's most unlike anything at Kings Island.

As we stood near the front of the queue waiting for the next cycle, something weird happened. Not that the ride operator got on the PA to scold someone for something or other; it's drearily common that people will take their phones out on a ride however intense the ride motion. What is unusual is that they stopped the ride, and didn't just eject him. The ride operator explained they were being held there until security could escort the scolded person away and, sure enough, they held everything right where it was until a couple park security people came in and ... I didn't see this part. Apparently the scofflaw was on the other side of the ride from the queue.

After that, the ride was an anticlimax, really, as fun as it was getting spun around and upside-down. Still, bunnyhugger did miss some curious events.

Now on to the next and most surprising day at Motor City Furry Con, and also the day that saw me misplace this poor old camera with the dodgy zoom.

Sunday morning! Last day of the convention and a rare freak-interruption-free last day of Motor City Furry Con. We did not know this would be the con's last day at this Marriott, but somehow, there was this feel, too.

I did a sketch of Austin with BunnyHugger in the hospitality suite. You can see my discovering ``drawing long paws'' and ``maybe have something like a chin'' moves here.

Big ol' dinosaur/dragon-oid hanging out by the stairs.

Trying to go up the stairs means sometimes being stopped while a fursuit parade comes the other way. It's all right.

Did some walking out back. Here's the other side of the hotel and a bunch of people gathered around where it doesn't drizzle on you.

And here's a bunch of people gathered around the ... uh ... the spot where people get their weddings done.

Trivia: The first presidential veto, issued by George Washington in 1792, was of an Alexander Hamilton-supported bill which would have expanded the House of Representatives to 120 members (the greatest number the population of the time could have constitutionally supported) with each state getting their population divided by 30,000 and rounding off the number of representatives to the nearest whole number. Source: The Sum Of The People: How the census has shaped nations, from the ancient world to the modern age, Andrew Whitby. Washington's veto message noted that this method could result in a state having one representative for fewer than 30,000 of its residents, contrary how he saw the intention of the population limit.

Currently Reading: The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City, Kevin Baker.

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The Words Will Make You Out-And-Out

This week on my humor blog besides getting annoyed by a deceased comic strip I worked out why I kept hearing versions of Yes's ``Roundabout''. Can you figure out why it might have been?

Now I'm going to close out Saturday at Motor City Furry Con. You won't believe what Sunday brings to bear! Unless you remember.

Velveteen looks over the crossroads of the convention, as it ran after midnight or so.

Here she gets in a bit of pinball. (Actually, she's faking: at this point the game was turned off because something or other was not working on it. But the pose was good.)

Velveteen wishes you to know that THE COUNCIL HAVE ALREADY DECREED YOUR FATE.

The full-size mirror gave Velveteen a rare chance to appreciate herself.

But she is a natural at posing with her own image. Also here you get to see the bows on her back.

Velveteen gives people the chance to admire her; whether they take it is their problem.

And now she's done with the mirror and is pantomiming holding a bowling ball.

Quick stop outside to see who might be there and if the spotlight works for her. I think it does.

Stopped in the fursuit lounge for her to recover a bit. I noticed little wisps of fur had got caught on the fans and were blown by them and really liked that image.

So here's what the dance looked like that far after midnight.

And here is literally the dance floor.

I can't be at the dance and not get at least one picture of this supernova-effect look.

Trivia: England and Germany are the only European nations to have had their first printing presses made by a native. Source: Paper: Paging through History, Mark Kurlansky. Yes, Germany is a difficult concept for the era when printing presses came into being there.

Currently Reading: The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City, Kevin Baker.

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We Meet by the Tower of True Love

Besides pieces of Dorney Park's 1901 carousel and Band Organ Guy the Merry-Go-Round Museum had something else new this year: another museum tucked inside it, spilling out over the space that used to be the event room. I don't know where they hold events now. The museum is labelled as a second one that you get into with admission to the Merry-Go-Round Museum, and maybe someday it will have its own space, but for now it is also the Cedar Point Historical Museum.

This has no official connection to Cedar Point, which sold off nearly everything it used to have in its actual historical museum, the Town Hall Museum in the park itself, back around 2019. This is something the Cedar Point Historical Museum docent was a bit testy about; he agrees, you'd think the park would support them, or at least be interested in having some of this stuff on its own. (The rumor I hear from bunnyhugger is that the Town Hall Museum was found to require too much renovation to be worth it, scotching the circa-2019 plans to remake it. But that's hard to square with the building being used, this year, for a walk-through haunted house attraction. In fairness, I suppose it is plausible that a building might be okay to use [parts of?] for a couple weeks in the year and not okay for the long-term museum-grade storage of historical items. Especially if they figure the building is okay for five years but not twenty, or something.)

But what they do have is a collection. Just a staggering amount of mostly small memorabilia from the park, going back to an 1893 ribbon from a company's picnic day at the park. Buttons, shot glasses, postcards, souvenir photos, so many little dust-collecting memories for the park. And maps, including ones for every couple of years going back to the early 60s. Some are even listed for sale, I imagine New Old Stock since if anyone were reprinting 1960s Cedar Point souvenir maps for sale, it'd be Cedar Point. But also banners, pennants, promotional materials. They have a nice little display of stuff for the roller coaster Cedar Point was going to call the Banshee, along with The Memo that explains someone looked up what a Banshee was and decided that was maybe inappropriate for an amusement so please destroy all buttons and signs and stuff that you have that says that. (The ride that would have been Banshee became Mantis, later Rougarou. In an unrelated move sister park Kings Island later installed a roller coaster named Banshee, despite this experience. It's the one that an unfortunate person got killed by back in 2024.)

They also have what appear to be two horses from the Town Hall Museum. They're not; they're replicas of the ``Ghost Horse'' of the Frontier Carousel (formerly Lake Lansing Park's carousel, since Dorney Park's replacement carousel) and the King Armored horse of the Kiddie Kingdom Carousel. (Frontier Carousel and Kiddie Kingdom Carousel have other replicas.) And in a corner especially precious items --- spilling out of the event room, into space just curtained off from the main Merry-Go-Round Museum walls --- they have some stuff like old employee newsletters and memory books, hand fans, and some hefty-sized book called 'Experience '74' that looks like a particularly thick souvenir guide to the park.

And then there's delightful little things. The wood carving guy at Cedar Point has been making miniature replicas of old cartoon ride signs and the many varieties of trash bin the park has had with different logos and also the old parking lot signs, from when the rows were marked with ride names rather than just numbers like '33E'. bunnyhugger pointed out how you could see a bit of park history in the signs. Most of them --- Wave Swinger, Blue Streak, Wild Cat --- have monochrome photos of their named ride on them, while Iron Dragon has just the ride's logo in full color. Iron Dragon was built in 1987 so we can conclude the parking lot ride signs got reassigned some around then.

The museum is small, and it could use more labelling and contextualizing of what things are. But it was just the sort of thing bunnyhugger and I could spend almost forever in, given a chance.

Now back to Motor City Furry Con and Saturday night or Sunday morning depending on your point of view.

Bird left out all alone, looking for the action.

This is after midnight already --- I'm really hustling through the event --- so the charity's area has only the tables and shelving still set up overnight.

Stickers for whatever the charity was. I think something wolf-supporting.

Some folks in the hallway posting for wizard fights.

Purple bunny wandering off in the general direction of the dance. You know what that means.

Yes, it's time for Velveteen to come in and set this all in order!

Trivia: Benjamin Franklin was the second almanac-maker in his family; his older brother James Franklin published Poor Robin's Almanack from 1728, five years before Poor Richard appeared. Source: Marking Time: The Epic Quest to Invent the Perfect Calendar, Duncan Steel.

Currently Reading: The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City, Kevin Baker.

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They Oughta Give Me the Wurlitzer Prize

The Merry-Go-Round Museum has band organs, of course. One that's always working is the one for their operating carousel, and which as usual was on its Halloween scroll of spooky music. We weren't there in time for the Scooby-Doo Theme, but I believe we made it in time for the Theme From Alfred Hitchcock Presents. But besides that they have a couple other band organs, free-standing things showing off the decorative fronts and usually not played.

But. I came back from something or other to find bunnyhugger talking with a guy, something about Kennywood and their carousel and band organ. And then about Idlewild and its band organ. I couldn't imagine how bunnyhugger got to talking with a stranger; Kennywood made an obvious subject given he was wearing a Pittsburgh hoodie but how did she get to this point? So it turns out no, he started talking to her, because turns out he's a band organ enthusiast and he had come all the way from somewhere in the Pittsburgh area hoping to see the carousel sure but especially to hear an early-production Wurlitzer model number (insert model number here) like this. You could tell it was early-production, he explained, by the shape of the frontage or also by listening to the museum docents who were able to give an estimated date of manufacture. Anyway he promised bunnyhugger, and me, that he had talked the museum staff into playing it some since it is a rare piece and you never get to hear it played.

They did not leap right away to the encouragement of the Band Organ Guy, but they did eventually find the person who knew just how to use the laptop that controls that particular band organ. Many band organs these days have a MIDI interface, rather than relying on the music scrolls that do wear out and have to be remanufactured every couple thousand plays. But this leaves them vulnerable too; the Merry-Go-Round Museum docent explained how they'd gotten this set up just before the winter season last year, but something was wrong and the guy who knew what to do was in Florida until spring. Or, according to Band Organ Guy, one of the antique organs at Silver Beach, Michigan, had a ``cyber-attack'' that left one of their machines out of commission. We were able to give him the good news that we had been there not three weeks before and heard both playing.

And as said, he did coax them into playing their early-production-run Wurlitzer Something, and it was loud and alive as you'd hope. And it's great seeing a person younger than us being obsessively into a corner of Americana like this. As he noted, a lot of the real experts in historic band organs are dying out and if someone new doesn't pick up the obsession, there's information going tobe lost forever.

The one catch is ... you know how conversations naturally come to a close? He did not. He kept finding one more thing to talk with bunnyhugger and, for a while, me about, and bunnyhugger came to realize that she was going to have to pull that move where she says ``well, I have to go now'' and break it off. She's known other people who don't know when someone else is signalling that, like, they need to go to the bathroom now please let the conversation pause some. (It feels rude to just leave but then you remember, people with that particular condition don't realize that isn't the polite way to end conversations. They've never seen one end any other way.) But as she was building up her courage for that he apologized and said he needed to go take video of something, so she was free.

Later we saw he had started a conversation with the in-house wood carver, the guy who works on carousel building or renovation projects and who, sometimes, is there on-site where he can show off how carousel carving and renovation works to interested parties. And we realized that the carver was going to be trapped by Band Organ Guy, and we were thinking how we might arrange rescue. But that proved unnecessary: the carver was just as good at talking without pause. It's possible they have trapped one another and are still there to this day.

And on this day, it's still Saturday at Motor City Furry Con. Please enjoy what it looks like:

Out in the common spaces an opossum fursuiter went and did what you expect when there's a car nearby. Note the guy poking the opossum with a stick just to be sure.

With this, the car makes a getaway.

And of course, you get one opossum being all dramatic what's going to happen but other opossums will join in? (They did have to break kayfabe once as con staff made sure that yeah, they're just having fun.)

Someone set up a good-size train set in a side room used for informal event planning.

Evening setting in near the elevators. I just liked the composition of half-schedule, half people looking for something to do.

And then here's a couple fursuiters with wide hips.

Trivia: The banana seems to have originated in Malaysia. The name comes from Africa. Source: Bananas: How The United Fruit Company Shaped The World, Peter Chapman.

Currently Reading: The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City, Kevin Baker.

PS: What’s Going On In Gasoline Alley? Did the Health Inspector Close the Diner Down? August – November 2025 in some mild lighthearted folly.

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All Centuries Passed Down Upon Your Smooth Venetian Skin

Saturday would start with a minor manual triumph. This is the time of year that my hands turn painfully dry unless I apply skin lotion every twenty minutes and the only skin lotion I could find in my duffel bag of travel stuff was a sample size of Oil of Olay. I don't know how I got it, and I don't know what Oil of Olay is good for, but making dry skin less dry is not it. If anything it made my hands even more misshapen lumps of burned flesh. But I finally rooted around in my messenger bag's pockets and found a travel size bottle of some actual working skin lotion and my hands started the slow journey back to having normal skin covering.

This was also the day of our planned trip to the Merry-Go-Round Museum, which I overshot in a rare moment of getting lost while driving. But I found my way back to it without too much peril. Since our last visit the Merry-Go-Round Museum has had some developments too. The first is that it's got some new exhibits and especially has new labels. Instead of the venerable old signs they've got lots of cheap computer monitors, showing a rotating slide of narration about the various exhibits. I'm of two minds about this. I generally don't like using more tech than is necessary for the task and, really, a sign should be enough to explain what things are. But this does mean they can have more than one screen of information about an item, and the screens include a picture of the item they're describing so you don't end up unsure that you are reading about the right animal. I can also say now that that British centaur figure, made by the C J Spooner carvers circa 1900 --- ``a `U.K.' Carver'', their screen explains, scare quotes around U.K. --- was of Joseph Maria Gordon, chief staff officer of the Overseas Colonial Forces during the Second Boer War. The signs also allow for the easier correction of information; they've found, apparently, a third custom-built rocking horse made by the Philadelphia Toboggan Company circa 1914.

Also changed: they don't give you wooden nickels to pay for the rides anymore. Instead you get plastic cards, in a variety of colors, with a hole punched out when you actually ride. You get to keep the card as a souvenir, which I suppose is nice, but I'm losing my fondness for plastic things you get to, someday, throw out. The reused wooden nickels felt easier on my conscience.

They had a neat piece of quasi-local interest to me: several animals from Dorney Park's historic Dentzel carousel. Dorney, of course, being the eastern Pennsylvania park that Dad rarely wanted to drive to because we have Great Adventure like half as long a drive away. This is not remnants of the carousel that Dorney had up until the 90s when a fire destroyed its antique. This is instead the carousel they had before getting the PTC carousel they bought in the 30s. Turns out, after they replaced the original Dentzel carousel with the PTC, Dorney kept the old one around for a couple decades, bringing it out for special occasions, including the park's 70th anniversary and for its centennial, and also for the United States bicentennial, when the animals were painted red, white, and blue. The screens had pictures of this, which bunnyhugger found appallingly bad. But in 1985 Dorney Park was sold to the guy who owned the neighboring automobile racetrack, and demolished the racetrack to build Wildwater Kingdom --- giving the park the jingle I most remember, ``Let's do Dorney, and Wildwater Kingdom too!'' But the guy also sold the 1901 carousel, which was broken up. The Merry-Go-Round Museum several of its animals but there's no realistic way it would ever be reassembled, much less work again.

And then there's the band organs.

But on that teaser let me give you a half-dozen pictures of Motor City Furry Con's Saturday, as I saw things going on.

At a panel for plushes and inflatables and I guess also puppets someone brought in an inflatable husky. Here it is getting up to pressure.

It was hard to resist putting plushes on top for that capybara-cool pose.

This is another plush on top, a fox large enough to need its own seat in the car.

And here's my guinea pig puppet riding on the husky's head, an inversion of the capybara chill pose.

Not sure where the beach ball came from but the inevitable happend with that.

My guinea pig puppet cautiously approaches a plush rabbit.

Trivia: Portugal, which provided 60,000 soldiers to the Western Front, had one official delegate to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Brazil, which sent a medical unit and some aviators, had three. Portugal complained. Source: Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed The World, Margaret MacMillan.

Currently Reading: The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City, Kevin Baker.

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motor city furry con

Pull the String and I'll Wink at You

Spent the day at Bronner's, report to come. Please meanwhile enjoy pictures from Motor City Furry Con 2025, Saturday edition.

Some of the books on display for the furry comics panel. Yes, that's an Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters there.

They even had some really old funny furry comics. The Fawcett's Funny Animals appears to be one that is, or has elements that are, somehow still held under copyright, but the Funny Films you can read and even (with free login) download from here if you want.

And some more old furry comics, from Omaha to Miami Mice. You know what it was like.

Turned out there was a talent show at the con, and if we'd had any idea we'd have jumped at the chance, especially given there were puppets too!

Sheepdog puppet looking over a bunch of the in-person performers here.

There's the Rock And Roll Dragon.

And a full(?) cast lineup, including the giant cardboard head of Akali.

The three puppet performers.

One of the tables with its flyers for, mostly, other furry events.

The video gaming room, alas, didn't have pinball this year, just video games.

Well, and also the Quick N Crash light-gun shooting game which other people were better at than me again.

Oh yeah, and also crane and wheel and other kinds of vending prize machines. Mostly it was pinball they didn't have is all. Maybe next year.

Trivia: In 1727 James Franklin, Benjamin's nephew, brought the first printing press to Newport and published the first codified edition of Rhode Island's laws. He attempted in 1732 to found a newspaper, the Rhode Island Gazette, which failed as people got the news by ship or stagecoach from Boston. Source: Rhode Island: A History, William G McLiughlin.

Currently Reading: The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City, Kevin Baker.

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Now, You Talk About Your Childhood Wishes

Halloweekends Friday was a pretty good day for riding, at least the things that were open. The first day of Halloweekends had always been one of limited rides, and the expansion of the weekend to include Thursday I had thought just pushed the limited-rides-day back. But Friday, though less limited than Thursday, still saw surprising numbers of rides including big ones not running. Gemini, for one, and Blue Streak, which I believe we ended up seeing open only on Saturday. The general difficulty of getting staff since the pandemic began, what with the disease having killed so many otherwise able-bodied persons, can't be helping them. Also not helping, as bunnyhugger pointed out to me: Cedar Point has always drawn people from outside the United States to staff the park, and I sure wouldn't come from another country to work in this version of the United States. It's amazing they could get as much staff as they have, given ICE's eagerness to just shoot people.

Not everything we did required a lot of staffing. We stopped in by the petting zoo, for instance, and while there was a disappointing shortage of rabbits and turkeys, there was one of the goats in a dress, with a skirt featuring black cats and witches and that sort of thing. The goat, eating hay, seemed unbothered by this. I'm curious why there was just the one; the only goat they could put something on, or the last goat they had to take things off from?

We happened to be in the Kiddie Kingdom when I noticed a parade of the Peanuts character mascots heading out toward the midway stage, and I called bunnyhugger over, telling here, Peanuts! But there would come disappointment ahead: because of circumstances beyond their control, they explained, they had to cancel the Peanuts Halloween spooktacular show or whatever its exact name was. This seemed odd; I wondered if they had information that a big storm was rolling in. But surely they'd have said it was because of weather if that were the problem. While they did the consolation meet-and-greet with the kids who'd gathered for the show and costume contest I noticed the immediate problem: no Snoopy. From this we infer that their Snoopy performer wasn't available and I guess they didn't have an understudy?

Also we had some time trying to figure out, again, what Charlie Brown's costume was. We would find out another day that weekend, when we did catch bits of the show, that he was dressed as Frankenstein's Creature. The show was something about going trick-or-treating at the weird house on the end of the block with a Legally Distinct From Willy Wonka And Besides She's a Girl at the door, and also something about Snoopy going crazy when he knows there's candy around and this all adds up to enough of a plot for a mascot characters song revue.

Once again I was in Kiddie Kingdom just as they finished a ride cycle on the Junior Whip, and the ride operator rotated to other rides, and I still don't know how it whips. I have hypotheses but someday I'm going to see how it actually does operate.

Friday we got to ride Iron Dragon finally, and even got to wait for a front-seat ride since they weren't assigning seats for a change from recent operations. Similarly we got a back seat ride on Raptor. And then, according to my camera's timestamps, that's when we went to Siren's Curse for our first night ride on it, and for a decently short wait for an after-closing-hour ride. Really good experience. We haven't been lucky enough to get a front-seat ride on it, so we haven't had the experience of looking out and seeing nothing in front where the track should go. But we have gotten seats farther back where you are higher up and have a farther drop when the track finishes its hinging and lets you drop straight down. Really looking forward to how this ride develops.

And that's more or less enough detail on Friday. Soon: Saturday.

Bit more Motor City Furry Con, Saturday edition, now here.

Here a noodle dragon asks to speak with someone's manager.

The big crowd after the parade, though; it was tough moving through the halls.

I believe this is ... uh ... Paul Digimon giving some high-threes out.

There wasn't a big gathering outside after the parade because of the wet track conditions, as you see.

Back inside. One of the panels we attended was this furry comics history thing with such figures of legend as Steve Gallacci and this 'Albedo' thingy.

The organizers had a table full of furry comics, some of them books I'd collected in the 90s, and invited people to come up and carefully look through them.

Trivia: In 1700 Britain imported about 10,000 tons of sugar a year. In 1800 it was importing 150,000 tons. Source: Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire, Roy Moxham.

Currently Reading: The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City, Kevin Baker.

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Although It's Always Crowded You Still Can Find Some Room

Halloweekends Friday started with a bit of work. Not for me, but bunnyhugger had a school obligation that couldn't be put off, just done by an online meeting. I went outside and used the time to talk to my dad, whom I'd owed a phone call for embarrassingly long a time. It happens I caught him on the road and the time until he arrived wherever he was going was almost exactly the time bunnyhugger needed to wrap up the meeting.

This unfortunately ate up our early-admission time, but the riding was pretty good anyway. And we did something special for it. We spent the whole day in kigurumis, bunnyhugger as Stitch and me as Angel. We were adorable, of course, her more than me, and we got a fair number of people liking our looks. This was also my first experience using a fanny pack. While I wore my regular cargo pants underneath the costume, it's hard to get stuff out from them on short notice, for example, at the metal detector screen at the entry gate or in line for Steel Vengeance, Top Thrill 2, and Siren's Curse. (The Angel kigurumi has hilariously tiny pockets not usable for anything.) Last year I'd got away with this by putting my credit card and season pass --- the only things I really need for a day in the park --- in my camera bag, but my new camera's bag doesn't have the convenient side pocket that made for a secure holding spot. bunnyhugger warned that now I'd had a taste for the convenience of fanny packs I could never go back. It is indeed very convenient, especially for the rides where you have to empty your pockets completely, although I didn't end up using it on Saturday or on our closing day trip to the park.

The real drawback of the kigurumi is that it's, ironically, less flexible than my cargo pants; I realized there were some horses on the carousel that I couldn't flex my leg far enough to climb. On Sunday I would try anyway and experience the unmistakable feel of a tear. And after the ride yes, there it was, a tear between the legs. bunnyhugger thinks she'll be able to patch it, when she someday has the time, so I should be in better shape for Motor City Furry Con. But that did mean my Sunday suiting ended early, with a trip back to the car and quick doffing of Angel. bunnyhugger stayed in her Stitch costume, and would all the way home, which oddly would be a mistake. At least, we would have avoided a brush with catastrophe had she changed out of it then, and she would spend a couple days cursing herself for not changing.

For a quarter-century or so bunnyhugger has had this great Halloween vest, a purple thing with appliques of pumpkins and witch's hats and all sorts of things like that. It's great; she gets a lot of compliments about it, including on Saturday when we went to the Merry-Go-Round Museum. But in packing up Sunday, in another of our year of Failing To Bring Things Back From The Hotel, she left the vest hung in the closet area of our room, and neither of us noticed. Had she changed out of Stitch, she would surely have gone to put the Halloween vest on and noticed it was gone, and since the hotel was still open we could probably have gotten them to let us in, or at least send someone in to check for the lost vest. But she didn't, and we didn't, and we didn't even notice it was gone until Tuesday night.

She called but the hotel was closed, as it is Halloweekends between Monday and Thursday. She left a message without much hope of getting a call back, and she never got one. Nor did she get a response from her online lost-and-found form submission. I also tried calling and filling out an online lost-and-found form and, in a great moment of mercy, got word Friday that they had sent someone into the room and they'd found it. (This implies also that our room hadn't been housekept --- reasonable given that who would check into the room Sunday evening when the park was closing at 8 pm? --- or that Housekeeping didn't pay attention to the vest hanging up there.) I was enthusiastic that we might be able to pick it up that Sunday, when we made our closing-day visit to the park, but the hotel would be closing for the season before we got there. They had to mail it to us, and given our struggles with the post office ...

(I did wonder if they could turn the vest over to the amusement park's lost and found office, but worried that this would go wrong. Following the normal process as closely as possible seemed least dangerous.) Well, anxious days of waiting aside, the vest arrived this past Thursday, looking not really worse for its wayward days.

Still, we have got to get more serious about our hotel-leaving gear checks. This year has been too sloppy.

Back now to Motor City Furry Con, Friday and more. ... I was hoping this year to take fewer but better pictures so that's why Friday was so short.

Friday night's dance, full of lights and blurry motion! But that isn't everything going on in the after-midnight fun at Eagle Crest ...

There's also this robot cat! A cat shell over a remote controlled car, zooming around the floor space outside.

Saturday already! And here's people gathering for the fursuit parade in the same spot where the remote-controlled cat had been.

Still from the middle of the video I took of the parade, with bunnyhugger marching past.

And then here's another bunny marching into view ...

And one last dignified white rabbit there to share the excitement.

Trivia: 'Bussola', an Italian word for compass, is first recorded in a 1380 manuscript, a commentary by Francesco da Buti on Dante's Divine Comedy. Source: The Riddle of the Compass: The Invention that Changed the World, Amir D Aczel.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Sundays Supplement Volume 18: 1956, Tom Sims, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.