Some people I know

Last weekend was the season again for Pinball At The Zoo, in Kalamazoo's Expo Center and not the city zoo. It ran Thursday through Saturday, and while I took Friday off for it, I didn't feel I could comfortably take Thursday off. The other programmer at work was on vacation this whole while and it seemed like a poor choice to leave them completely programmer-free for too very long. But everything work-wise turned out basically all right so maybe I should have tried for it anyway.

bunnyhugger, though, got a hotel in town, one just down the street from the expo center. It was probably walking range. She went down Thursday night, figuring that she would do much better particularly on Saturday when the show started at 9 am. Certainly we'd have a happier time of it not driving back Friday night after 10 pm and then getting up in time to make the 75-minute-drive into town by that hour, if we needed to put in any last-minute games to qualify. I think the logic of that was basically sound though as it turned out we didn't get as much sleep Friday-to-Saturday as we should, and didn't have any last-minute games that helped anything any.

My staying at the hotel with her Friday night was also the cause for a first with Athena, our pet rabbit, and a near-first for any pet rabbit: we left her alone overnight. We left her with a full-to-the-brim bowl of water, and several heaps of hay, and a tremendous pile of vegetables she probably ate right away, and three meals' worth of pellets most of them in her toy ball so she'd have to roll it around over time to get them all. This turned out fine, giving us reason to think future overnight stays without bringing the rabbit down to bunnyhugger's parents will be all right. (The mice we put extra food in their cage, and made sure both water bottles were full, but that's all they needed besides having the cage closed tight.)

While there without me bunnyhugger played, mostly, games for the Women's tournament, getting a spot for herself that wasn't great but at least had promise. She also put in games for the Classics tournament, the Main tournament, and the Daily tournament. She wouldn't qualify for playoffs in the Daily tournament --- only the top eight would, and her play put her in 27th place out of 76 entrants --- but that should be something near three points in the International Flipper Pinball Association ratings, not bad for playing four games of pinball.

Friday, I'd join her, and this time I'd be bringing the big spoiler ...

With that teased, let's enjoy a bit more Idlewild as we braced up to the need to finish the day and start the very long drive home.

Oh yeah so a thing about amusement parks that have been around forever, such as Idlewild, which goes back to the 1870s? They used to keep animals in gobsmackingly inappropriate conditions. Here's the sign, and some of the structure, for what used to be The Bear House. About a half-decade after this was built Rollo Coaster was put in, running right over it; I don't know when they last had bears but I can imagine with dread the captive bears also dealing with a roller coaster going over their home every two minutes.

Here's a picture into the afternoon sun of Rollo returning, approaching the far end of The Bear House.

Happier and less uncomfortable: the carousel's pavilion, in slightly dappled shade.

Some of the horses as we got ready for another ride on the antique.

I tried doing a tracking shot and it came out as well as possible, considering!

I think I aimed the camera wrong for this picture but there's something I like about having the nearest horses' heads falling outside of frame and only the most distant horses making eye contact.

Trivia: In August 1927 Smiles O'Timmons, a onetime circus acrobat who turned to wingwalking after losing a leg, had his wooden leg get stuck in the wing of a Canuck (a Canadian version of the Jenny) flown by Bob Clohecy. After a half-hour of effort O'Timmons got the leg detached, but in the process lost his pants to the wind, so that when Clohecy managed to land the unbalanced, damaged plane it was to an audience seeing a semi-nude one-legged man clinging to the plane wing. Source: Mastering the Sky: A History of Aviation From Ancient Times to the Present, James P Harrison. An event that colorful I assume is drawn from newspaper reports of the incident (which happened over Pennsylvania) and I will suppose there are elements that may have been exaggerated in the reporting.

Currently Reading: Archaeology, May/June 2026, Editor Jarrett A Lobell.

Another Thursday's approached and is fully or basically over so it's time to look at my humor blog's past week of complaining about stuff and talking about comic strips. Here's what you could have seen there:

• MiSTed: FX Down To Mobius, Part 13: Two Weeks Before Doomsday
• Statistics March: Yes, I Remembered to Check
• Statistics Saturday: Months Ranked By How Strong A Statement It Makes As A Name
• _Mark Trail_ Is Old, Nature-y
• It Has Been a Day of Minor Adventures
• What's Going On In Prince Valiant? Where did these Norse warriors come from? January - April 2026
• The Logic Puzzle
• MiSTed: FX Down To Mobius, Part 14: Sonic Panics!

When last we left Idlewild we were approaching the Wild Mouse. And how's that working out?

Here we are by the station and you can see, the cars are mice! Whiskers and big ears and everything. Not at all clear here is the arm rests there have faded red markings where you're to put your hands ahead of several extremely sharp brakes at the end of the course, which is how you can divide the people who've been on this ride before from those who haven't.

The station and, in the distance, the lift hill, most of which is for some reason at a slight angle. Story goes that at an earlier incarnation it was, or was supposed, to have a rotating barrel-of-fun around it but apparently it's not clear whether it ever actually did.

And here's a mouse car near the end of the track where the brakes hit hard, over and over.

Off in the lawn past the Wild Mouse is what I imagine used to be the cooking grill and has long since become a weed tree collection point.

But let's look back at the Wild Mouse and another train near the brake runs.

Flying Aces is a flying scooters ride they've had since 2007, which is why it's in Olde Idlewild.

Noticed underneath the sign showing Rollo Coaster's wait times and operating hours that they have a whole bucket of potential wait times.

Panoramic photo showing Rollo, the carousel, and other stuff to the sides. Flying Aces is off to the left of the picture.

And here's the station, with the new trains that won't even dispatch if you're standing up and fiddling with your camera, alas.

The operator's station, though, and it's still got the brake levers that still get used.

Good view of the front of the train and also a sense of just how new the fenceposts and air brakes are: you can still see the carpenter's marks in the wood.

And here's the new trains that don't just have divided seats and individual restraints but also blinders to keep you from sticking your hand far enough out to be whacked by a tree, a thing that apparently never happened before but they're closing off.

Trivia: In 1880 Kansas had about sixteen times as many cattle as it had in 1860. Nebraska had thirty times. Source: Food In History, Reay Tannahill.

Currently Reading: Archaeology, May/June 2026, Editor Jarrett A Lobell. The magazine's always interesting but the advertisements make me wonder who exactly they figure is reading. There's stuff you might expect, like archeology cruises, but there's also, like, $99 chronometers and seminars with Lech Wałęsa and knives with bone handles.