The Writing Desk of Jakebe Rabbit

We finally took the time to bring our new pet rabbit, Columbo, outside. We'd taken Stephen out several times and he seemed to like sitting around in the portable wire cage, eating grass and dandelions and myrtle and scaring off all the squirrels from the yard. But we hadn't had the chance to take Columbo out yet and wondered what he would make of the outside world. That we finally re-found the harness encouraged us to take him out.

First step: would he put up with the harness around his chest? Some rabbits won't tolerate even this, and in that case we'd have to move the wire cage out. But, no, he was perfectly compliant as we snapped the harness around and that's made me belatedly remember that his shelter's folks said he was often taken on display for events. He either has the sort of temperament that doesn't mind harnesses or he's been trained to accept them. Second step: would he tolerate having a leash attached? And yes, turns out he does. Many rabbits, Stephen among them, don't know what to make of that, especially if they try hopping out of range and get tugged back by a mysterious force. Columbo had no trouble with this. It helps that he tends to lope, carefully, in an unfamiliar location, rather than try to run; it's easy to keep up with him.

Ah, but what does he think of the outside? And that seemed to be ... he could take or leave it. He did some prowling around, but was uninterested in eating anything. The grass before him? No. Dandelion or plantain leaves? Thanks, he's aware of their work. The rose bushes? He might poke around them, but otherwise leave them alone. He did want to get underneath some shrubs beside the house, and he wanted to explore down to the neighbors' yard, just as Stephen had. But he wasn't interested in tasting any of the world around. Nor in binkying or doing anything too expressive.

Still, this in hindsight ought not have surprised us. He's a more reserved rabbit, and more quietly investigative than Stephen was. He also seems more suspicious; at least, he's prone to distrusting things on first impression. I had quipped that he dislikes doing anything for the first time, much like me. That would extend to even the wonders of eating fresh, growing plants too. We've since had the chance to give him more time outside, on a live lawn, and he warmed up considerably to the experience. So while the day out might have technically been a disappointment, it was one that set him up for better days afterwards.

Trivia: Insurance premiums for newsreel cameramen on hazardous assignments, around 1938, were something like $15 per day and up to $6,000 per year for ten thousand dollars coverage. Cameramen also had a group-insurance plan, paid by their companies, for about $4,000 coverage per person. Source: The American Newsreel, 1911 - 1967, Raymond Fielding.

Currently Reading: The Story Of Story Book Land, Tina Skinner.

My strategy for Richmond Rollapalooza was to put up one score on each table, then look at the standings, and then play whatever my lowest-ranked table was, trusting that eventually I'd have a breakthrough game and get at least high enough to qualify. This is not a customized strategy; it's basically what I use for every tournament with this qualifying format. It's hard to think of an alternate sensible one, except maybe for playing the game you're most confident, for whatever reason, you're likely to have a breakthrough on. Or skipping a game you know has got you licked. I followed the process well, especially since I found I could use the bowling alley's Wi-Fi on my iPod. What never came was my breakthrough game, though.

I had some successes, grinding my way up slowly, but I never had the breakout game on anything that I needed. Looking over the statistics I don't seem to have broken the top ten on any game, Classics or Main. In Classics --- again, my traditional strength --- I don't even come close, finishing six spaces and twenty points out of qualifying for the B Division. In the Main tournament I fare better, failing to qualify for the B Division, but only by two points. Conceivably, another fifteen minutes to play might have got me at least into the B Division. Another half-hour and a couple breakthrough games and I might have launched into the bottom of A Division.

bunny_hugger had a worse time. She finished below me in Classics. In Main, she finished one point above me, tied for the last place in B Division. The tiebreaker game? FunHouse. This was one of the games mentioned repeatedly in the tournament's advertising, and was surely meant to lure us over. It's both our favorite games. It hasn't been treating her well today; she hasn't even broken ten million points. For a game set on tournament-level hard that's not awful, but it hadn't even got her into tenth place in qualifying. Still, it is the game she likes above all others. She ... puts up a lousy tiebreaker game, something like three million points. Her competition has two even worse balls, and there's some slender cause for hope. At least, I hope. She doesn't. She's justified in this. She watches him squeeze out a multiball and take the last slot in the finals.

We try not to act too heartbroken and maybe everybody distracted by being in finals is too distracted to notice. Among other things, there was an awesome thunderstorm rolling in, one that deserves its own entry because it got all kinds of crazypants. And we putter around a little, playing some of the games that aren't in the finals for either tournament. It's hard: while there are some games free, most are reserved. And they're tempting ones too, like Surf 'n Safari, a waterpark-themed game from Data East; or Spanish Eyes, with a compellingly bizarre backglass that apparently came from an art student happening to be carrying his portfolio near the Williams offices when a guy ``with a thin moustache'' and having a cigarette asked, ``Hey ... you an artist?''. Ah, the 70s.

After a while of consoling ourselves --- we ended up playing a round of Game of Thrones with someone who's apparently a regular at Flint contests and whom we didn't know --- and hearing that the (wedding?) MWS was at was running a little bit longer yet, we gave in for the night and went home. The Betrayal game we'd brought would end up unused after all.

Trivia: On the 25th of July, 1945, Jewish representatives from camps across Western Germany issued a proclamation demanding entry to Palestine. They did so from the Munich beer hall where Hitler staged his 1923 coup attempt. Source: Year Zero: A History of 1945, Ian Buruma.

Currently Reading: The Story Of Story Book Land, Tina Skinner.

We'd take the final leg of the park, working our way back to front, to close out the night. This let us get back to some old favorite rides like Corkscrew, and also to discover the disappointing news that Iron Dragon had shut for the evening without us. We did get our ride on Cedar Downs, the quite fast carousel with the horses that move forward and back in their rows. That we rode in anticipation of future excitement, though. We had heard how Rye Playland, which runs their counterpart to this ride even faster than Cedar Point does, had finally got its front-and-back mechanism working after years of the mounts being locked in place. We weren't thinking wholly of what we'd do next, though. We were paying attention to what we were doing.

With the disappointment that we couldn't ride Iron Dragon we went off instead to Blue Streak, the remaining wooden roller coaster and Cedar Point's oldest roller coaster. Always a reliable old friend and ready for us to get a front-seat ride again. And delightful with its chaser lights going in the evening twilight, too.

Adjacent to Blue Streak is ValRavn, last year's new roller coaster and something we'd only gotten a couple rides on because the queues were too long for us. That evening, the queue was estimated at a half-hour and we figured that was the best offer we'd get for a long while. And it was a good offer. The wait wasn't even the promised half-hour. This might be because the ride operators were challenging the riders to get settled in their seats and locked in so they could dispatch in under a minute, and there's a monitor that shows who is locked in correctly and how long the train's been in the station. We failed once again to do whatever it took to get a front-seat ride, but we carried on courageously, riding that roller coaster in the evening and taking in great views of the illuminated park in the night.

We'd hoped to close out the night on the Midway Carousel, but something weird happened. They closed the queue, and before the official closing hour of 10:00. In the past Cedar Point has normally closed the queue at the park's closing time and let whoever was in line ride. It's a common amusement park operation scheme to close the queue early, in the hopes of getting the last riders done close to the park closing time, but this was never their practice. Has that changed? If so how will it mutate the closing hours of a park night? Or did maybe the ride operator just set her watch wrong and thought it was just past 10:00.

Anyway, this diverted us to the Sweet Shop instead, with the hope that we might get a couple pieces of fudge before that shop closed. And this time, hey, what do you know but we could? They have a bunch of varieties of fudge there, pricey but incredibly worth it. bunny_hugger carefully rationed it out and we were eating impossibly good pieces for a week to come. Long enough that we discovered our local hipster farmer's market, the one we use to get vegetables for our pet rabbit, has the same flavors. This is a world full of surprises.

We drove home, safe and sound, listening to podcasts and getting in around 3 am, in time to sleep to a decent hour the next day.

Trivia: Nickel was first extracted from a reddish-brown ore named kupfernickel, devil's copper (or, St Nicholas's copper); it was useful for nothing except coloring glass green. Source: Nature's Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide To The Elements, John Emsley.

Currently Reading: Prime Mover: A Natural History of Muscle, Steven Vogel.

What's there to show for another week of progress humor blogging and comic-strip explaining? The chance to tell you all about this:

• Explaining Vacuum Cleaners, last week's big piece, some silliness.
• MiSTed: Galactic Federation Update, Part 4/4, closing out a giddy bit of fanfiction.
• Statistics Saturday: Books Making The Case Against to balance out with the previous week's cases for.
• What’s Going On In The Amazing Spider-Man? April – July 2017 And why has it gotten all Mary Worth in there?
• In Which I Question Santa’s Staffing Decisions featuring a Story Book Land picture from Egg Harbor, New Jersey!
• Phantom Enjoys Daring Last-Minute Escape From Certain Doom some legitimate comic strip news that I learned by having the guy who write The Phantom pop in to tell me.
• In Which The Retirement Community Billboard Baffles Me a piece which bunny_hugger knew what I was writing about from the title alone, because it's something we saw last week while up north.
• In An Imperfect World, a bit of existential dread that I bill as this week's big humor piece.

Next, finally: my pictures from the closing day of Michigan Adventure's season last year, in early September, which is how far behind I'm running. Maybe I should pick up the pace some.

Michigan Adventure's Mad Mouse roller coaster on a much more normal day, although at a pretty nice angle that makes it look as though it has a steep drop off the lift hill. (The ride is nearly horizontal at that point. The fun of a Mad Mouse ride is lots of sharp turns.)

The front entrance of Michigan's Adventure as seen on its closing day for 2016. Cedar Point's front entrance got a major --- and fantastic --- renovation a few years ago when the GateKeeper roller coaster was put in, and we got to wondering if and when Michigan's Adventure would get a similar modification.

And this is why an update to the entrance seemed likely: detail of the Snoopy figure on the Michigan's Adventure sign. That, must say, doesn't really look good. We somehow haven't been to the park yet this season so can't say if it's been replaced or repainted.

And then to reinforce the thought of maybe new signs being a good idea: detail of the sign showing the same sort of wear and minor rust damage.

The eternal frustration. Michigan's Adventure had put in a coffee stand, but we never saw it open all 2016. Peeking inside we could see the evidence of a stand maybe being in working order, but it was never a spot we could get coffee or any other hot drinks.

Trivia: When James A Pollack, of the Viking 1 imaging team, told a press conference on the 21st of July, 1976, that the Martian sky was pink and the wrongly-color-corrected images of the previous day were misleading, he got (friendly) boos and hisses. Source: On Mars: Exploration of the Red Planet 1958 - 1978, Edward Clinton Ezell, Linda Neuman Ezell. NASA SP-4212.

Currently Reading: Prime Mover: A Natural History of Muscle, Steven Vogel.

PS: Why Stuff Can Orbit, Part 12: How Fast Is An Orbit? and a scary bit of mathematics we dub approximations.

Cedar Point, like Michigan's Adventure, has a petting zoo. It's larger than the Michigan cousin, understandably, as Cedar Point's quite larger than Michigan's Adventure is. They're provided for by the same animal caretakers, though, and so there were some similarities in the animals there. The Cedar Point zoo is part of the Frontier Trail and purports itself to show something about what the farms of historic northwestern Ohio farming families might have had. It's the sort of light-educational self-promotion that amusement parks have always liked to use and it's a fine idea as long as you don't ask how many mid-19th century Ohio family farms kept emus. But this sort of touch of life is reliably nice, and you can't argue that goats and sheep and chickens and rabbits aren't credible farm animals, even if you can wonder about the particular breeds. The rabbit pen had a couple bunnies who'd worked out where they could flop out so they were near the bottles of cold water (it had been a hot day before the rains came) and be just out of reach for most of the smaller kids. Also where they could pile on each other.

We stopped in at the glasswares shop, and joined the audience for one of the glass-blowing demonstrations just as it started. They were making a glass goldfish, which is one of those things neat to see and done in exactly the right spot that all 90 pictures I took of it are obscured by a column. So it goes. We did also learn that the fearsomely expensive, elaborate glass sea serpent, with multiple arcs of back emerging from the glassy 'water' surface, was still on sale but was now locked in a display case where some well-meaning idiot like me couldn't accidentally break it. No; if we break it, it'll be with deliberate effort now.

As we got farther in back of the park we poked into the other arcade, a small untended one. We knew there wouldn't be pinball there, but what would it hurt to check? There wasn't pinball there, but we did see a redemption-ticket counting machine flashing on its LED screen the mysterious and alarming message, 'tEror'. So, you know, we have that going for us.

The back of the park gave us the chance to see how close we might get to the former Mean Streak, and to see what if anything we could work out about what it's being turned into. Cedar Point still hasn't announced what Vicious Streak will be, although right around our visit they did drop a teaser ad that made an ambiguous suggestion that it might be something plural. This is baffling, but there is probably enough support length in Mean Streak to produce two steel-tracked roller coasters. Converted roller coasters don't tend to be as long as the original wooden ones for reasons that bunny_hugger knows and I don't.

Anyway there wasn't much specific that could be made out from the accessible areas. We could see what looked like spiral twists added to the taller hills. It's conceivable that some of this might even be a full helix, turning the ride over, but it's so hard to tell what a thin track at that distance is doing, especially with all the visual noise of the wooden supports in the way. I did spot that the ride photo booth still has the Mean Streak logo on it, which probably reflects the ride photo booth somehow not being a top priority for the reconstruction work.

When we had explored this, and gotten a ride on Maverick --- still a top-draw roller coaster, and with a reasonable queue thanks surely to the rain --- we had the choice to walk back the way we'd come or to complete the loop around the point. I chose the loop around the point and this is why we were too late to ride Iron Dragon.

It did let us get on Gemini, though, and the racing coaster's always good fun. We also hoped to get on the blue train, the rarer of the rides lately, but we got there just as they were taking the train out of service. Because for some reason they'd rather run two trains on a single track instead of a single train on two tracks of the racing coaster. It cuts the number of ride operators needed, but is otherwise a dumb choice, especially for light-crowd days. It did mean we got to ``race'' an empty Blue train, a fun novelty that raises the question of why in previous Halloweekend nights we've been stopped just before the station, waiting for enough people to get on the other train because they couldn't send that out empty?

But this let us continue in a nice little arc, in the back of Cedar Point, to the Monster ride where once again we failed to get a really good spin going. We also got to ride Magnum XL-200, right up front because I forgot what that can do to your knees. This gave us the chance to see the big renovation done to the hotel gate, the entrance we use second-most, and changed beyond recognition by the park's ongoing rebuilding of the water park and building of a new tower for the Hotel Breakers where they'd torn down a tower of the Hotel Breakers like two years ago. We had guessed rightly that this entrance would be renovated in our final visit to the park last year. It looks sharp, as anyone would have expected. It also obliterated Magnum's old ride photo station. The replacement's all right, but lacks the obvious period-dating of the new station.

Still, it does mean that now three of Cedar Point's four entrances are 2010s-era Art Deco Revival style, with roller coasters that arch above them. This would raise questions about what they're going to do with the last entrance, the Oceana Gate, last renovated ... sometime after 1870 and quite possibly remembered to exist at some point. I haven't got any ideas. We've never used the gate ourselves.

Trivia: After landing on the Moon, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin needed about an hour and a half of reconfiguring switches and setting systems so that in case of emergency the Lunar Module could manage a quick, orderly takeoff from the surface. Source: Where No Man Has Gone Before: A History of NASA's Lunar Explorations, William David Compton. NASA SP-4214

Currently Reading: Prime Mover: A Natural History of Muscle, Steven Vogel.

Our first trip to Cedar Point for the season began with the snooze alarm. We agreed we were just too tired to get up as early as we had figured, and traded an hour of time at the park for being better-rested while there. That was probably a wise decision. What makes it not clearly a wise decision is what happened as we got there: rain. We had wanted to get to either Michigan's Adventure or to Cedar Point, and the weather forecast for Michigan's Adventure put it at a higher chance of rain for more of the day. So we got to Cedar Point just as a downpour started.

This wasn't all bad news. We have been to Cedar Point often enough, and expect to return again enough, that there's little we feel we must ride there, and after the soaking cold horror of Roller Coaster Appreciation Night, when almost nothing was open, a rainy day in June can't look bad. We got cheeses on a stick and some soda --- using our new free-soda-when-we-want privileges on our season passes for the first (and so far, only) time --- and sat in the Casino, hoping to wait out the storm, or at least to find some pinball machines in decently working condition. The state of things was pretty dire. Travel Time, which spent all last year broken as far as we could tell, was till out. Abracadabra was also down. The giant yet boring Hercules tables were both working and taking slightly delighted looks from people and quashing them, at least. We also tried some of the older shooting-gallery or mechanical contraptions, such as this strength-testing machine, and found they were in similarly scattershot shape. It's great that these machines are there, and a testament to how well they were built that after decades of wear they're as usable as they are. But it's hard not to think that they could be better still, especially given how much effort the park has put into balancing their attractions and making for a better-rounded experience lately.

As the rain gradually let up and the rides started to turn again we got to the Kiddie Kingdom carousel for our first ride of the year if you forget the Six Flags Over Texas trip back in March. Which is easy to do since it was so early and so weird a thing to do it hardly seems real. Sparrows seemed to have made homes for themselves among the carousel's top. I'm hoping they get through the season without undue harm coming to them or to the ride. Then we could start to walk through the park and take in lots of scenes of crews squeegee-ing dry the amusement park.

Our first and lasting disappointment for the day is that Iron Dragon, the suspended roller coaster, wasn't running. It's an old favorite, the first really grown-up roller coaster that bunny_hugger was able to ride. And it's being subject to a Virtual Reality ride makeover this season. We were curious, certainly, and wanted to try the experience. But the ride was closed when we first approached, and then we learned it would close for an hour in the very early evening to switch over to Virtual Reality operations. We moved on and by the time we got back, it was near the end of the night and the ride was closed because the nearby Luminosity open-air performance show needs the roller coaster to close for some reason. While we'll get back to the park --- I pointed out we could, literally, drive back the next day if we wanted --- it's frustrating to miss the thing we wanted to see, especially since it was my pretty much arbitrary choice at one point about which path to go down that set us on course to miss Iron Dragon altogether.

So our first roller coaster of the year at Cedar Point would be Rougarou, surely the least-loved of the park's attractions. It used to be Mantis, a stand-up roller coaster, and was converted to a normal sitting-style ride a couple years ago in the hopes of drawing more people to it. There was a surprisingly long line for it, possibly caused by most other attractions being down. It's a fair ride, pretty gentle considering all the looping and banking it does. That's surely a reflection of its old status as a standing coaster: if people are standing in harness for the ride it can't jump about too drastically. But it's still not a completely pleasant ride, because the over-the-shoulder restraints have these hard plastic shells around the head. The latter half of the ride is best spent leaning far forward and anticipating curves, lest your ears get boxed repeatedly. It's disappointing they fixed one nasty flaw of the ride and let the other stand.

Trivia: The National League granted the Brooklyn Dodgers permission to move to Los Angeles in 1957, on the proviso that Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley convince the Horace Stoneham to relocate the New York Giants also. The Giants would eventually announce their relocation first. Source: Bottom Of The Ninth: Branch Rickey, Casey Stengel, and the Daring Scheme to Save Baseball From Itself, Michael Shapiro.

Currently Reading: Prime Mover: A Natural History of Muscle, Steven Vogel.