My friend with the search for Parisian pinball arcades did get me to look at Pinball Map, just in case there were any in Rennes. It turned out there was a venue, Le Grand Huit, with a half-dozen pinball games and just on the other side of the train station from us! And in what they listed as a barcade. As far as I could tell from the web site it was a bunch of converted warehouses or something with a variety of amusement and arcade attractions put around. They even had a couple vintage fairground rides, although the hours when they were operating were vague. Pinball map suggested the pinballs here were new, or at least were first noticed just a couple weeks before we were in town. This would be a great place to spend the long evening after the conference ended Thursday! Except that the venue was closed for a special event Thursday. We had to go Wednesday evening, when we'd only have a couple hours, or else not go at all.

So and with rather too few coins in our pocket we set out and I led us confidently through roads that seemed a lot closer together in online maps. I was just getting worried we'd gotten lost, thanks to some construction on the south side of the Gare, when we reached a new corner and saw the big sign pointing to the new entrance! Perfect!

The collection of stuff at Le Grand Huit feels a little like What If Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum ran a barcade? It's not so crowded as a Marvin's thing would be, but it's also got more space than Marvin's old holdout-of-the-mall-food-court space would have allowed. They had some stuff that it sure looked, in the photographs, that adults might get to ride, including a swings and maybe a carousel that looks like a solid mutt of different mounts put together, but we were there by like 9 pm and they had long since stopped running rides for the day. The place has a couple salon carousel gondolas as dining booths, and has one carousel elevated, rotating eternally, passenger-less, fifteen feet above the dining floor. It's a pity to have a carousel be unusable for riding but it is also a heck of a thing to see it from that angle, without the platform always underneath. They also have a robot bartender, a coin-operated mechanical arm that the web site claims once did industrial manufacture stuff and that now will make a drink for you, but only on the weekends, which we were as far away from as it was possible to get.

And then, yes, pinball, two tables put next to each other beside the robot bartender, almost a normal arrangement, and four tables put way off (but near the actual bartender), radial spokes around a center pole beneath a canopy. It's an unusual but attractive arrangement. And the choice of games was ... wow. Weird. They were all old games, and not as some venues might have representing pinball's diversity of eras (electromechanical, early solid state, late solid state, dot matrix, LCD screens). No, they were all games from about 1989 to 1992, a range so tiny it seems like it must have been an aesthetic choice, but what was the aesthetic? It kind of smells of ``someone was given €15,000 and told to make it weird''.

The most normal games they had were Lethal Weapon 3 --- a slightly annoying game but one you can still find in tournaments --- and The Party Zone --- I've never seen this in tournament play, but it's a fun one. Also Riverboat Gambler, which you never see places. Gilligan's Island, which has some of the best integration of the theme into a game ever but that doesn't have much depth of gameplay, and has a little pranking move where you can give all your opponents points that makes it a courageous choice for tournament play. Surf N Safari, a water-park-themed 90s Gottlieb game so it's kind of fun but also not well-balanced a table. And ... Class of 1812.

Class of 1812 is another early-90s Gottlieb game so it's a little ramshackle in its design and rules. Its theme is that you're at the graveyard, digging up a comical-horror family, each of the major areas corresponding to one of the family you're recovering. Yes, there is a rapping granny. The most delightful piece, though, is that when you start multiball, which the game gives you eight billion chances to do, it starts playing The 1812 Overture. And after one round of the famous theme it goes back and starts over, only this time with chickens clucking the tune out. This is why people love the game, even though like nobody has it (The Pinball Arcade has it in simulation, though, and it's worth it). We had to play that.

So we did. I had an okay game; bunnyhugger nearly broke ten million, a great score. We played again and while I did better, she did better yet. She got a replay score at least once; I got a match, and we got to play another round. For only about three games each we were doing very well. For a time on our last game I started thinking one of us might reach the high score table but it turns out it started somewhere north of 35 million points, well beyond us. But for only a handful of games in a completely new venue? We had little to complain about.

But we had less change, our euros now exhausted. We thought a bit about getting a drink from the bar, and more change, and playing on ... but ... it was also getting closer to a time when we should be responsible and get to bed. So, regretting that the venue was closed for a private event Thursday when that would have been perfect for our needs, we made the sad way back to our cozy hotel.

Had enough rabbits yet? Of course not, but we will run out of Calhoun County Fair rabbits soon. In fact ...

Another Californian loaf looking suspiciously at me.

Rabbit conference threatening to get out of hand when one rabbit has the insight: you can just step on the others!

Rabbit wondering if anyone else knows about this ``just step on them'' move because it will change everything!

Here's a chicken stunned by the stepping-on action.

This kid was proud of his chicken and wanted us to take pictures of him with them and did not care that neither of us knew the other and we'd never get pictures to him. So, here, in case you have a google face alert going. I think it's a pretty good picture at that.

Here's one of those rare chickens that can lay an egg through their own bars, which is what gets you best-of-class.

Trivia: New York City radio station WEAF (later WNBC, now WFAN) aired its first paid advertisement in August 1922; by late 1923, the National Carbon Company sponsored the Eveready Hour, promoting its batteries. Source: Wih Amusement For All: A History of American Popular Culture since 1830, LeRoy Ashby.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 64: Olive Oyl's Dilemma!!, Ralph Stein, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

Now to Wednesday of our trip, the midpoint, and the start of the conference. We needed a moment to re-acquire our bearings, but it's pretty easy to get from our hotel to the University of Rennes 2 campus --- it's right on one of the metro lines --- and from there, while I set off in a wrong direction, bunny_hugger figured out where to go, and we acquired a companion who was also going to the same conference, which was in the same building it'd been in a decade ago.

I meanwhile had to buy my admission since I'd failed to do that ahead of time, and they would only take cash, so I'd had my first experience with European ATMs for the trip getting some folding money. This meant I went to the conference without a badge like everyone else had, and I held on to my receipt just in case I was challenged, which I never was. And bunny_hugger didn't even get to keep her badge, which ordinarily becomes one of those conference souvenirs, just like a furry con would do but with even worse art. In this case, no art at all. Nor any hint of academic affiliation, which on the one hand goes to the ideal of all being equal citizens of the Republic of Letters, but on the other hand means you might miss that, say, this person you're talking to is that person, the one with the paper you keep assigning your students.

Peter Singer, of course, gave the keynote address, and he took the historical approach of how the idea of animal rights moved from a fussy thing that Margaret Dumont-esque dowagers fretting over other people's dogs to a thing where everyone agrees we should have chickens that at some point in their lives get to see the sun, though not necessarily to live more than six weeks. So, you know, some cheerful news, some depressing.

Then it was on to the sessions, with two or three tracks most of the time, with each session room giving all their talks either in French or in English. bunny_hugger had the good fortune to be the first speaker in the first session in the first room listed on the schedule, although that does not mean Peter Singer stopped in to review her work.

Her presentation really engaged people, though; she got a healthy number of questions and all from people who were excited to learn about something they'd never considered before. She's the person to describe it in summary, but here's my attempt, and understand that she's got your obvious objection addressed, or will by publication time. It grows out of the question of what, specifically, does someone lose by dying? Yeah, ha-ha, the answer is ``days of life'', but, what is the point of those days of life? If it's just getting up to eat, poop, and sleep again, what's having more of that doing for you? (Not talking here about days of rest; talking here about an unending series of days just like that.)

In the 1920s by Moritz Schlick proposed that the purpose of life was play, by which he means things you do to accomplish them, rather than to carry on existing another day. This covers a wide range of things, including work you enjoy doing even if it supports your eating habit. But at heart, like, why read a book? Because you enjoy reading a book. Why join a softball league? Because you enjoy softball. Why run on a wheel? Because it's fun to run on a wheel.

And here's the insight. Animals play. More, we've been discovering, all kinds of animals play, not just the classically smart ones like apes and crows and dolphins. Bees play, something bunny_hugger had found in the scientific literature and that really fired imaginations. And so, if play gives human life meaning, what does play give animal lives?

The other paper in that session had the charming title ``What Would Miffy Do?'', Miffy here being that cute bunny from Dutch picture books that gets confused for a Hello Kitty character. This was about the challenge of how to justify making decisions on behalf of animals who, after all, can't express their preferences, even if they could understand decisions being made about them. We have models for that which work, more or less, for humans lacking full capacity for judgement. So extending that to animals seems like a reasonable stretch.

Back now to the Calhoun County Fair, which we visited on the last day of that fair.

Yes, these aren't just bales of hay, they're bales of hay so good as to get extra-special complicated ribbons and in one case a plaque. I'm glad I don't have to judge what makes a best-of-show-worthy sheaf of alfalfa.

Which is not to say that I'd have any idea how to judge the prizes for, like, ``old hardware store calendar''. Note the old Polaroid in the middle that apparently didn't get anything.

And here's some arts, including the raccoon watercolor that gets a first place.

Now on to the rabbits! Here's one of the many Californians that look rather like Penelope.

And here a nice old white rabbit invites us into their schemes.

The guinea pigs, meanwhile, don't see why they should have been brought in on any of this.

Trivia: In a meeting on the 4th of March, 1953, about plans to overthrow the government of Iran, US President Dwight Eisenhower wondered why it was impossible ``to get some of the people in these downtrodden countries to like us instead of hating us''. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles conceded that Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was no communist, but, ``if he were to be assassinated or removed from power, a politcal vacuum might occur in Iran and the communists might easily take over'', with dire consequences for world oil production and the world's strategic balance. Source: Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawai'i to Iraq, Stephen Kinzer. Raising the question: has anyone ever tried going back in time to divert the Dulles boys to, like, painting landscapes or something instead of screwing up the world completely? Maybe let's give that a try one we get the Hitler thing resolved?

Currently Reading: Mission to Jupiter: A History of the Galileo Project, Michael Meltzer. NASA SP-2007-4231.

When I finally roused myself enough to get up, on the day that should have been our Nigloland visit, it was already like 6 pm. bunnyhugger was getting consoling texts from the friends she'd dared tell. (We wouldn't tell our parents until we got back home.) About all there would be left to do is take a walk --- bunnyhugger was not going to abandon her daily task even for this --- and find dinner. For the walk we wondered if we were allowed into the Parc du Chateau, past the gate behind the hotel. I said I'd seen people going in earlier in the day and as I watched again some more folks went in, so we would follow.

This let us have some time exploring the grounds of the hotel which, as mentioned, used to be a working windmill, on a small river. There were a couple buildings that looked like they were probably once the mill owner's home and maybe a guest house. There was also a fence blocking off fields and other houses, we assume from land being sold to other owners. But the parc itself was this pleasant garden, a chance for us to walk around in mostly shaded paths on a none-too-hot evening, looking at the water and this little boat dock(?) underneath a shelter so you went into a tunnel to get down to the water surface, like some fantasy novel. Also a couple large decorative pools with the water turned off, unfortunately, as they looked great. Some statues, classical stuff like cherubs and Venus and the like. We also could see people dining outside, overlooking the water wheel (fixed in place, as far as we could tell) and the river (changing).

For dinner we had two choices, hunger or the hotel. There wasn't even a convenience store in town. So I put on one of the shirts I wear to work, and figured to wear to the conference, while bunnyhugger put on the blazer she figured to present in and got extremely nervous about dropping food on herself. It turns out the restaurant, though offering two- and three-course meals that looked like what you expect from a fancy French restaurant was much more generally chill than that. We saw people there in if not jeans and a t-shirt and least not much more dressed than that. (Those were outliers, though, and most people were at least dressed up a little bit.) We didn't need to worry, possibly because anyone in town who didn't want to drive to eat out was coming here.

The one serious drawback to the meal was it wasn't vegetarian. There were individual vegetarian pieces --- including the Avocado Toast appetizer --- but for the main course it was something an animal had to die for, and we accepted that, resolving not to tell anyone at the conference this. (Not that anyone asked or would be likely to.) I had my first meat-based sausage in years and in a sauce so creamy that I'm still tasting it three weeks on. And then dessert was more wonderful yet. bunnyhugger got an ice cream, but served within some sort of bread shell that soaked it up spongelike without overwhelming the taste or feel of the melting ice cream. Me, I went for the more basic plate of local cheeses, and I wouldn't be sad to have a plate of cheeses for every dessert. Or main course. Really you could pretty well sum up me by just putting up a sign, ``Bit more cheese''.

After a good while including after-dinner coffee they ... didn't seem to be bringing us a bill, which, sure, is the non-American-restaurant way. I had noticed several other people leaving simply by departing the table so figured that was the thing to do; there wasn't tipping and they knew what room to charge it to, so there. So after some assurances that we weren't dining-and-dashing we got up and walked slowly back to our room and then had some worries that we had done the wrong thing.

Well, on the hotel bill there was a charge for about what we estimated the dinner would cost, although it wasn't billed anything obvious like ``dinner'' or ``meals'' or ``restaurant''. It instead had a name of something like ``floor charge'', and google translations managed to make the purpose of that charge even more vague and ill-defined. It's been a couple weeks now, though, and we haven't heard any trouble, and they certainly have our e-mail and credit card information so we probably got away with it all right.

After dinner ... you know, strange as it may sound, I wasn't quite ready to go to bed. I got my camera out. I wanted to walk some, and alone, and I ended up taking by night the walk we'd hoped to do that morning down to Nigloland, to look at the gate and just ... be alone with my thoughts about this accident.

I would not stay alone. While walking along the long fence of the park someone stopped his car to ask if I needed anything. I told him no, I was fine, we just had come for the amusement park and found it closed and I needed to be sad. This he understand, but he did tell me the park would be open Saturday, which, yes, but I'd be gone by Saturday. I thanked him and he left. (We spoke in English, after the first sentence or two. I had actually thought out ahead of time what I might say if someone stopped by me, and I think I had the basics of it ready, except that in my mind I was saying dimanche [ Sunday ] instead of samedi [ Saturday ].)

The second time this happened I had basically the same conversation, and I guess it says something about the population of Dolancourt that a person taking a walk at like 10 pm on a Monday [ lundi ] might draw two cars stopping to ask if I needed a lift.

And that's how the day that should have seen us at Nigloland ended.

Now in photos let's look again at the Calhoun County Fair, as the day was ending but there was still plenty of Fair left ... we thought.

Here's the Wiggle Worm, which I believe was a junior caterpillar ride. Also there should be grown-up caterpillar rides again.

First picture of the carousel, and you can see bunnyhugger getting snaps for her 2025 calendar.

Somehow this angle makes the canopy lights look like there's more than there are, and arranged more randomly than their actually strongly-symmetric arrangement were.

Hey, Sea Ray was a fun pinball game, I didn't know they turned it into a swinging ship ride!

Turning around again to face the carousel and at least a couple horses with the distressed/wide-open mouths meant to suggest they're straining for their speed (which at like five rpm is respectable).

Some of the landscaping the rides operator puts up to give the place the impression of a more permanent park. Which suggests they pick up this mulch after the week is over and bring it to the next fair.

Trivia: Mexico City has more than five hundred streets named after Emiliano Zapata. Source: The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal about Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power, Dierdre Mask.

Currently Reading: Mission to Jupiter: A History of the Galileo Project, Michael Meltzer. NASA SP-2007-4231.