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So we've had some rough stuff going on and I saved it to the end of the week when I might have some more time to focus on it, since I had work and pinball league finals and supporting women's pinball league finals and that's just a lot.

First round: bad pet news, including deaths. I'll put that behind cuts so people who do not need to deal with that right now don't have to. First, our goldfish.

Next, our very temporary we hope pets, the captured deer mice.

Well, here's lighthearted stuff. The Friday after Labor Day --- once upon a time the ``Bonus Weekend'' Friday --- we went to Cedar Point for what did turn out to be good riding; it was the first time we got to ride Siren's Curse, particularly. View, in obsessive detail.

Skipping the car establishing shot. The park used to have a bunch of Peanuts topiaries lining the causeway into the park, and a few years ago they put them in a green area outside the park.

Snoopy and the Woodstocks look pretty good in this form. Charlie Brown needs more detail.

The real trouble is the eyes don't come across this way and if the head has enough shape, like with Lucy, you can get away with that, as long as you're not looking them straight in the face.

So instead, yeah, Charlie Brown looks like the 2000s Hitchhiker's movie version of Marvin the Paranoid Android.

Seeing them like this makes you really appreciate how much Peanuts male characters don't have hair.

Now it's time to get into the park. I don't remember anything important being closed but maybe we didn't notice.

Trivia: Between the United States's declaration of neutrality in 1793 and 1805, the country declared that carrying any goods --- including provisions and naval stores --- to the warring United Kingdom or France (or their allies) was nevertheless neutral and inherently non-contraband traffic. Source: Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America, Peter Andreas. For a while Britain tolerated this, even though merchants were using this as a barely plausible loophole in the continental blockade. Eventually European merchants realized if they just claimed on the shipping labels that the goods had travelled to an American port they could avoid the bother of two trans-Atlantic journeys.

Currently Reading: The History of the Telescope, Henry C King.

Oh, a small pinball event of note. Last Saturday was the finals for bunnyhugger's women's league and while I was mostly hanging around just in case --- she can't make a ruling on a game she's involved in --- that case came up. In a four-player group on the game Rush, FAE was running way, way past all reason. They'd had something like a billion points on ball one, a thing I noticed as I went off to something else for fun and practice, and I wondered if this were going to be a case of FAE being tapped out for extraordinary play.

Well what do you know but a little bit later, on ball two as FAE topped one and a half billion --- and it's a high-scoring game but not that high scoring for most players --- one of the players in FAE's group asked if I would be willing to rule on whether the game had gone on long enough. I agreed, and thought it had, asking FAE ``Kinda overachieving there, aren't you?'' They demurred that, you know, you never know. But I tapped them, and explained to all what this meant: they were done playing this one game, and had a first-place finish for it. In the event that anyone else reached or topped their current score, those other persons would also be awarded a first-place finish.

No one else did, as it happened. But this was the first time I've tapped someone out. bunnyhugger has only tapped a person out once before (the rule for this is only a few seasons old, though). And FAE was giddy at the event, telling everyone on their socials about it. Well, glad to thrill some folks.

FAE picked Rush again later, in the playoffs to cap the season, and while they won it was with a more ordinary good game, somewhere around 300 million points over all three balls.

Closing out now the August trip to Michigan's Adventure.

This is the area they'd made into the petting zoo for a couple years, and were using as a performance space the two years they did a Halloween event.

This is about as bad as the line for Zach's Zoomer ever gets.

The Tilt-a-Whirl is one of the handful of Fast Pass line-cutting rides. I couldn't resist photographing the informational sign and hey, it's the Tilt-a-Whirl's centennial this year! We'll have to ride one at all the local parks.

The park long ago went to those annoying video menus. This day we noticed they'd left the Windows taskbar around.

Got a nice picture of the evening sun through the Ferris wheel.

And then a slightly different sparkling light.

We finally got to Mad Mouse and saw this cable trying to snake safely back to shelter despite the heat.

As near sunset as we'd get on Mad Mouse for 2025; they didn't have the weekend when the park is briefly open after sunset.

Train going overhead. I don't remember if it had anyone in it.

The Ferris wheel flanked by trees.

And the sun sets slowly somewhere past Zach's Zoomer and the hamburger place.

Outside, a kid was making his own fun climbing the flagpoles. At one point the kid even transferred from one pole to the other from up top of the poles.

Trivia: Silent-comedy star Larry Semon (whose 1925 version of The Wizard of Oz was the first where the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion were the farmhands from Dorothy's Kansas home) was the son of a professional magician, Zera the Great; and was for a while a cartoonist for the New York Evening Sun. Source: The Encyclopedia of Vaudeville, Anthony Slide. You'll sometimes see Semon's shorts on Turner Classic Movies. He's very much second-tier but you might enjoy. You can easily find his The Wizard of Oz but I recommend reading a bit about it before deciding you want to see it because, uh, there's reasons it's not a beloved classic and flopped on release.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 91: The Parrot with the Gold Doubloons!, Bud Sagendorf. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

I finally took the time to clean out our pet rabbit's pen. For years we've relied on fleece on top of a rubber tarp as a way to keep rabbit mess off the wooden floor and Athena is a rabbit who likes to chew on and tug up fleece. So it's resulted in a pretty annoying mess plus she keeps getting the fleece wrapped around the bars of her pen, into an unmanageable mess.

A couple months back bunnyhugger got a low-cut rug cheap from Meijer's and we kind of left it in the pile of stuff to work on someday. Today, during lunch break while working from home, I decided it was time. So I pulled out the fleece --- it'll be shaken on the plants outside, as rabbit droppings are pretty good for plants --- and swept, and swept again, and swept a lot more. When it was finally clean I laid down the new carpet. I was worried it was too large for the area and no, it's about the right size. With a nice little margin.

Our pet rabbit ignored my doing all this, because she's not getting up just for me messing around. She's in love with bunnyhugger and is going to come down when she gets up, thank you. And when bunnyhugger did, my dear bride was thrilled by the look of the nice neat new carpet and perfectly clean area. Our rabbit ran downstairs, hopped out, looked around at this big change to everything, and gave one sound disapproving THUMP!. But after that she did a little exploring, and a nice dramatic leap over a bit of craft paper for her to chew on, and seems to be more or less okay with things. Now. Here's hoping this becomes easier to keep clean.

Now let's close out the Calhoun County Fair. Remember my challenging you to guess when we'd get to bunnies and a Himalaya? Keep watching for the surprise.

The last thing a strawberry sees.

And now on to the rides! Here's the ticket sheet; how many will we have left at the end of the night?

And isn't this a lovely picture of a Himalaya? NO! It is not! Because the Silver Streak here is not a Himalaya, although it is a similar kind of flat ride.

Here's the ride now called 'Remix', that's much like a trabant only running like they didn't know the electricity was 240V here.

Not sure I've ever taken a straight-on view of the Fun Slide before but this angle treats it well.

Here's the kiddie coaster seen from up front where it's clearly just an alligator at prayer.

This is a kiddie ride, with bird and bug cars, that I think was new and that had a style I just liked.

Well, here's the carousel, that's one of the never-miss rides for us.

See? Told you we never miss it.

And here's the carousel in slightly different lighting that makes it look completely different.

End of the night! They're turning off ride lights even as watch.

That bird-and-bug kiddie ride silhouetted against one of the midway games.

Trivia: The German surrender in World War II was announced on the radio from Flensburg by Karl Dönitz's ``leading minister'' Schwerin von Krosigk (who had been minister of finance since 1932, three chancellors before Hitler). Source: Germany 1945: From War To Peace, Richard Bessel.

Currently Reading: Miscellaneous comic books.

We have lights in the basement. Not a brag, here, just introducing the subject. In particular we got an overhead fluorescent light mainly so that the goldfish, wintering in the basement, would have light. And bunnyhugger noticed that the light was no longer going on, or off, as the timer dictated. We don't know just when that stopped. I have a suspicion it was one of the heavy rainstorms we were getting a couple weeks ago; we had a couple power fluctuations that did us no other harm. But the light fixture was off, now, and replacing the bulbs didn't do anything, so it was either get the fixture repaired or replaced.

Replaced was considerably cheaper. The catch here is turns out we couldn't get that kind of hanging fluorescent-bulb light fixture anymore, not without waiting for shipping to a nearby store. Since we wanted the fish, and plants in the tanks, to get light as soon as possible that was out. Instead we got an LED overhead fixture. This one is that integrated design that I'm not fond of --- I like replaceable bulbs --- although given that it cost less than we've spent at Taco Bell some nights I suppose we can bear it. (Still don't like the waste.)

Replacing the fixture was but the work of a moment, although I spent a few more minutes fiddling with the chain so it didn't seem to dangle quite so low. I don't want to bang my head against it just doing ordinary fish-care stuff down there. Also there was ripping out these U-shaped cord holders that kept the old fixture's wire running along the ceiling. The new cord is dangling a little more loose --- I couldn't get the old ones out cleanly to be reused --- but we can fix that when convenient.

The LED seems brighter than the old bulbs. I don't know how much of that is actual difference in lumens and how much is that it approximates sunlight rather than whatever a fluorescent bulb provides. I don't know if that's doing any good for the plants, but we'll find out.

The annoying piece of this is the fixture broke just after Recyclerama, the big chance to turn over huge pieces of scrap metal. Although this year I got to Recyclerama late enough in the day that they'd already closed their scrap metal collection.

Next up: the mystery of photos at the fair and we'll see just whether we get to bunnies and Himalayas today! (We don't.)

The photographs exhibit spilled past its normal bounds and had this extra tall poster board off at the end of the embroidery/knitting/etc stuff. The most mysterious thing about it is this big empty space; shouldn't there have been pictures there? They were where someone standing at the railing could have grabbed, but there's other pictures in range that weren't.

The Future Adults of America did their best to label the elements in one of those little decorative skeletons. Note that they do not address the figure's bone-ear-tis.

Here is the Fair Lake. Not pictured: the Unfair Lake.

And here's a duck with plans of mischief against Fair Lake. (The cord runs into the water and I believe is powering the fountain at Fair Lake's center.)

I said this was the photo I was going to enter in this year's County Fair, under the 'County Fair' category.

Here's a group of ducks discussing their plans.

Trivia: National Cash Register sold 359 registers in 1884. It sold over a thousand in 1886. Source: Before the Computer: IBM, NCR, Burroughs, and Remington Rand and the Industry They Created 1865 - 1956, James W Cortada.

Currently Reading: Miscellaneous comic books picked up on Free Comics Book Day, some of them free and others bought.

For ages now the outdoor water faucet has been leaking. Just a little, but the rate was accelerating. A year or two ago we had someone out to look at it and they said they weren't willing to replace the faucet because there's no shutoff valve to it except the house's main shutoff, and all our plumbing is 50s-grade galvanized steel. It's not showing any signs of being naughty yet, but they warned the effort to cut off the end and replace the faucet might end up breaking the pipes and require an emergency re-plumbing of the whole house. This was more work than we were willing to do for a garden faucet, so we put it off and wondered how we could tell how far our plumbing is from needing a full-body replacement. (As best we can tell, our pipes are in pretty good shape considering their age and that the house has mostly been owned by people who are optimistic about their home repair skills.)

With the faucet getting worse, though, we had to do something and that was: see what the other plumbers we ever use think. They came on Monday and were much more optimistic about things. They needed to replace the faucet, but were confident they could cut off and replace the end of the garden hose pipe --- and install a shutoff valve for it --- with no more risk than any plumbing job presents. It was not the work of a moment. But it was only an hour or so of the water being off and the plumber making a lot of alarmingly loud noises down there. Cutting, I suppose, maybe drilling into the basement to loosen the pipe leading outside.

And what we have now is a proper shutoff valve down there. And a replacement end of the pipe done in modern materials that will surely have no problems which only become apparent twenty years down the line. Also the new end of the hose points downward a little, so it should naturally drain when we turn the water off and maybe prevent some incidental wintering damage.

Also a side benefit: clearing out space in the basement for the guy to get around allowed for a little bit of consolidation and throwing-out that made the basement more navigable, and that sets us up to do a couple more rounds of tidying-up before we have to make it a major project.

Let's now enjoy a little more of the Jackson County Fair and their bunnies.

From behind the bars a little red-eyed white rabbit wants you to ignore that they have like three separate backsides back there. Some rabbit-taur nonsense, I don't know.

And here's a Californian neatly boxed in but enjoying the sun and air.

Another Californian boxed in where they can judge you.

Californian stretched out curious to see if I knew where their legs went.

And here's another rabbit enjoying their outer-row cage.

Turkey! We got to pet this one's head.

Trivia: Harvard College Observatory hired its first female person as computer in 1875. By 1880 the entire computing staff was made of women. They were paid half what their male predecessors were. Source: Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, Keith Houston.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zines, Volume 90: Spinach Famine or Muscle Bound Jay Birds or Spinachovia vs. Creamatonia, Bud Sagendorf. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

Fresh update on the deer mice situation. Since we caught two of them and put them in a bin, anticipating future release somewhere outside return distance, we have ... not caught any more. We also haven't seen or heard evidence of any more. This seems improbably small a family but perhaps between being set in the garage, and the outside getting warmer and more pleasant, and bunnyhugger stuffing rather unpleasant metallic clutter in what seem like plausible ways to get into the house the mice outside have decided they don't need to be in our breakfast nook that much.

The mice indoors we've been keping so that they come to see one or both of the birdhouses as a safe stable home, so when we relocate them we can leave them with a food cache and they'll have somewhere to serve as a base while they set up in actual nature. They took a couple days before they seemed interested in doing anything with the house. Mostly they would, if they thought no one was around, come outside, sometimes, and hide if detected.

They've been getting a little more used to the current state of affairs. bunnyhugger got a small running wheel that we don't know they use. And found that they will chew the toilet paper off a cardboard tube, but do nothing with the tube itself. Nor with paper towels; they want the softer stuff. They have also reached a state where they're comfortable staring at bunnyhugger rather than hiding.

Today, though, bunnyhugger discovered they are not content to live in a cage until we set them loose in a couple weeks. They've chewed on the plastic surrounding one of the storage bin's latches, and if unimpeded would chew their way to freedom soon. bunnyhugger caught that, though, and has stuffed some more of that unpleasant metal stuff around the hole dug out. Also we've advanced slightly the vague schedule about when to release them.

In pictures, now, let's get back to the Jackson County Fair.

There were a variety of fairy garden displays and here's one with a large chicken or a small raccoon.

bunnyhugger looking over one of the exhibition rows while underneath a 4-H sign.

One of the larger exhibitions, a vegetable-sales stand. That's a heck of effort and money to put into a competition but it did win a blue ribbon and a payout of, I think, like $11.

The local ham radio people had stuff on display but weren't set up when we happened to visit.

Ah, but there's the second-most important thing, the rides, in the evening-to-sunset sky. But first ...

Bunnies! We couldn't miss taking a good look at the animal exhibits.

Trivia: The first airship to reach the North Pole did so in 1926. Source: When Giants Ruled The Sky: The Brief Reign and Tragic Demise of the American Rigid Airship, John J Geoghegan.

Currently Reading: This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong (And Why It Matters), Mark Cooper-Jones, Jay Foreman.

PS: What’s Going On In Mark Trail? Why _were_ the Grungey Boys following Mark Trail? February – May 2026 in woodsman action and such nature as Las Vegas has to offer. Enjoy!

Happy Doctorversary, dear bunnyhugger.

Next big thing we did after Pinball At The Zoo was ... Pinball at the VFW. The VFW Ann Arbor Pinball Museum was having one of its occasional open weekends and for the first time since, I think, before the pandemic began we went. We got there at like 11:30 Sunday, when they were going to be open to 5 pm, cheating us of maybe an hour and a half but we weren't up to getting up any earlier.

bunnyhugger tried signing up right away for a tournament. This would be a 'blind Herb' tournament, where you could, I think one time, call a tournament official over to have your score verified, but you could never know what other people's scores were. I didn't sign up for it since I figured the tournament would eat up all the time I might spend playing weird games. As it happens, this ... probably would have happened? Because bunnyhugger was not able to get tournament officials to come when she was ready, no matter what she did with pressing the tournament app's 'Summon Tournament Official' button. I don't know what all was wrong with it, but I suspect inadequate testing, or inadequate testing under load, and I would not be surprised if the whole thing were vibe-coded.

I ended up just going around appreciating pinball art and weird games, many of which I had seen in past VFW shows. I also got surprisingly into this carnival-themed 1989 Gottlieb game named Hot Shots, which seemed at first like your generic late-Gottlieb ``rules? Who knows anything about rules?'' game. But when I started to get the point of it --- there's this V-shaped corridor on the upper middle playfield with drop targets; knock them all down and you can lock for multiball --- I started having a lot more fun. I could stand to play that more.

Also, they had something I don't remember from past shows: a 1947 Gottlieb Humpty Dumpy, the first game with electromechanical flippers. In fact, six flippers, although pointed the 'wrong' way, to the outside of the table. It's a convention we didn't use but could have.

Several Lansing Pinball League folks were at the show, as were people we knew from elsewhere in the pinball world. Didn't get to talk with them as much as we might have, but we got to see them at all. So maybe we'll do it again whenever the next show is, which probably will be Black Friday.

And now, believe it or not, I've finally reached August of last year in pictures and you know what that means: it's county fair season! First up, Jackson County.

Banner out front explaining the themes of each of the days. Note that Superhero Day declares that first responders get free admission, so they're using Higglytown Heroes rules.

One of the first-prize winners: a Holiday Inn ``Sing Along With Lenore'' book. I don't know what this means and I'm glad I'm not the person who has to rate it as blue-ribbon-worthy in whatever the heck its category was.

And a third-place winner in, I imagine, the same category (and from the same collector): a simple guide to filling out your income tax, provided by W Burr Thorne's hardware and groceries store on something 25 Main Street, phone 22.

Over now to photos. In 2024 the big theme had been the Eclipse; for 2025, the Aurora.

You don't suppose the picture of the wedding(?) couple got first place specifically so it would make the cross-looking person in bottom center look funnier when they got not-first, do you?

And here's some pictures and memorabilia from past Jackson County Fairs. From this we learned the fair has a Thing for petunias thanks to a longtime groundskeeper who was into them.

Trivia: Before the SL-7 class container cargo ships entered service in 1972 the US Army Corps of Engineers in Vicksburg, Mississippi, built a large hydrostatic likeness of the approach to Newark Bay, and the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken built a nine-foot model of an SL-7 that officers could use to test (remote-control) navigating the port in the new craft. Source: Box Boats: How Container Ships Changed The World, Brian J Cudahy. Apparently the SL-7 ships turned out more maneuverable at low speed than anyone anticipated.

Currently Reading: This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong (And Why It Matters), Mark Cooper-Jones, Jay Foreman.