The Writing Desk of Jakebe Rabbit

This week in my humor blog: Jimmy Rabbit kind of gets one over on his Mom, Mary Worth gets in a freak hot air balloon accident and is rescued by superpowers, and we see some Beetle Bailey Squirrel Resolution, who put on a great show at the Common Ground Music Festival back in 2018. Here's what you missed:

• MiSTed: The Tale of Jimmy Rabbit, Part 15: Boy Lost!
• They Were Not Available in Flaming Pop-Tart Strawberry, of Course
• Statistics Saturday: Some Tedious Arguments
• Robert Benchley: Do You Make These Mistakes?
• Speaking as a Person Who Tried to Do ‘The Popeye’ Dance
• What’s Going On In Mary Worth? So is Mary Worth just a fantasy universe now? September – November 2025
• We Know How the Guy Who Created _Beetle Bailey_ Would Draw a Squirrel
• MiSTed: The Tale of Jimmy Rabbit, Part 16: Telling Fortunes

That done, let's please enjoy a bunch of Musée des Arts Forain pictures, and something you won't see anywhere else! Probably!

So here was an unexpected surprise: a fairground Popeye on a rocket! We can explain nothing more about that.

And here's the third carousel, something we never imagined we'd see and that I didn't know existed: a velocipede carousel.

Docent explaining the velocipede carousel. It's got no motor; it's powered by all the people on bicycles pedalling.

If you aren't up to pedalling you can ride on the chair instead.

So the bikes are fixed-gear (they're basically 1890s bicycles, on a track), and the pedals move even if you don't pump; you're directed to stop pedalling altogether if your feet slip off because they will be going fast.

The docent gives instructions about what we're to do.

Getting onto the ride. It made a tremendous racket. Unfortunately there was a small group and so everyone fit on a single ride cycle, so I don't have video of what it was like in motion.

You can see how big the room is, compared to the carousel, in this shot.

I did my best photographing the velocipede carousel's decoration but I didn't know how to get the good low-light pictures.

One last shot of this remarkable construction.

And then there's Popeye on his rocket, whatever that means.

Some more figures that are definitely licensed figures based on PLuto and a Three Little Pig. I love this look.

Trivia: The United States prohibited the import of lemons from Argentina between 2001 and 2018. Source: Seriously Curious: The Facts and Figures That Turn Our World Upside-Down, Tom Standage. (Argentinian fruit had been quarantined most of the 20th century for fear of spreading pests, and after a trade liberalization American fruit-growers sued on the grounds that this still wasn't protecting American crops enough. After a visit by Obama in 2015 regulators were satisfied that Argentina was keeping export crops pest-free enough.)

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 75: Grand Poobahr of Smoochistan, Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

With the visit to Bronner's kicking off the Christmas season, what did we have to look forward to the next weekend but kicking of the Christmas season? Here it was at the Nite Lites show of so very many light fixtures at the Michigan International Speedway, down in Michigan's Brooklyn. In past years we've taken up driving through it, usually around Twelfth Night.

But before they open up to cars driving through they do a 5K, either a run or a walk as you like. I finally took bunnyhugger's invitation to do the 5K with her and signed up for the race, although too late to get a T-shirt or hoodie. All I would get is the official badge of entry, a foam crown of reindeer horns donated by Brooklyn Plastics and that will someday be something we have to throw out. Or turn into support for other projects; bunnyhugger thought this would be a good foam to use to keep costume masks from being to uncomfortable on the nose. And then moments before leaving for it bunnyhugger discovered she hadn't signed up yet, and she worried that there wouldn't be time for her to sign up on the spot.

There was time, though. The run/walk turns out to be very laid back, with on-the-spot signup maybe two lines long. The event is untimed, and you don't even get a number or anything, just the foam antlers mentioned above and you really only have to wear them to start.

The walk starts at a point that's midway through the course, as you see it driving through, but a point near the grandstands. Also a point where we got to see just how mid-century the styling of the support buildings of the raceway are; so much of it looks like a 1958 motel in ways that charmed us. It's almost worth visiting the place for the architecture alone.

Five kilometers is a pretty good walk, but not one that I'd normally need over an hour for. But this walk ended up not quite an hour and a half since it's so easy to stop and photograph things. So, in like eight months or so check in for a lot of pictures of sea serpents or the Twelve Days Of Christmas or an outline of Michigan with a Santa cap on the Thumb. But it'll save me feeling quite the same impulse to photograph everything when we get to driving through late in the upcoming Christmas season.

Now, for a couple more pictures from the Musée, and its wonders of carousel rides and fairground games:

Another carousel centaur! I don't know if this is a Boer War figure.

But here's the organ, all set for someone to start a waltz.

Near the organ was this sculpture of a horse with rider, pretty intimidating to stare up at.

And here's the second carousel! The horses look about like what you might see on any ride but what's that to the right?

Yes: it's a rowboat, that rocks back and forth as you go around. I'm a little sorry we didn't get a ride on that.

The docent showing something about one of the horses. Mostly I was getting a picture of the boat here, though.

Trivia: The 26th of November, 1963, was President Lyndon Johnson's first working day in the White House as President. He met with John F Kennedy's congressional liaison (Lawrence F O'Brien) and signed two bills which Congress had passed the 21st of November, after Kennedy left for Dallas. Source: From Failing Hands: The Story of Presidential Succession, John D Feerick.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 75: Grand Poobahr of Smoochistan, Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

Couple weeks ago I went to donate platelets. I've fallen into doing that this year, and it's kind of nice. It takes a couple hours, but they set up the TV for you to watch something and it's let me catch up on Mystery Science Theater 3000 some. Plus there's an almost unsettling number of gifts given for donating.

What takes a couple hours is that they can only remove the whole blood from you, so they do that, filter out the platelets, and return the rest to your other arm. And when I went to do that the start of this month, I had a curious failure. The needle in my left arm, taking out blood, was doing fune, but the needle in my right just wasn't making contact. The saline they were trying to inject wouldn't get into my vein and it just produced a small bruise. They tried a couple times but couldn't succeed. So I went home with a failed donation.

Thing is you can donate platelets in principle every week, and especially when there's nothing but the need for my elbow to heal up, and I went back in last Monday. Since I'd had the failure last time I figured the thing to do was draw blood out from my right arm and put the filtered blood back in my left, and give things the chance to balance. Getting the return needle in went just fine; apparently my left arm is really good for this stuff. But the right arm? They could figure where there were two veins either of which were viable but they bent off in weird directions, apparently, and while they finally got a needle into one of them, they also picked up some debris material so that none of the blood could get into the needle rather than make another bruise. The other vein might have been workable but it was too close to the already-present damage so there wasn't any using it. So that's two failures in a row and I'm plum out of arms to try donating with.

They did give me the Red Cross Pac-Man socks that are the gift for people donating platelets through to December 7th, though, which is kind.

More pictures here from the Musée des Arts Forains from our layover in Paris:

Swan-boat chariot on the the carousel with the fine steps. You can see hooks that I guess were once for reins, like a swan would let you get away with reins. That or it needs readers.

And a sheep, another rare animal for carousels.

Couple of figures on balconies that, it turns out, would move and 'sing' along to a massive organ, making this part of a huge mechanical performance.

More of the mechanism, part of a show that we got to see.

And a comic foreground, ready for you to poke your head into.

Looking back again at the carousel. You can see the sides of other chariots hug on the walls in the background.

Trivia: Shortly before accepting the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the quantum-mechanical model of atomic structure, Niels Bohr received a telegram from György Hevesy and Dirk Coster, who had just isolated the element hafnium on their first attempt, sifting through zirconium which Bohr's model predicted would have the not-yet-discovered element's closest chemical analogue. Bohr announced the discovery at his acceptance speech. Source: The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World From the Periodic Table of the Elements, Sam Kean.

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

Pausing a moment from things directly about my life, there's a scandal going on in the competitive pinball world. It says a lot about when I got into the competitive pinball scene that my first reaction to learning of it was ``thank goodness it's not Michigan this time''; the state used to have an outsized reputation for causing Drama. But this drama is more about an unfolding sad mess rather than things you can look and snicker about from the safety of being uninvolved.

In short: at a North Carolina pinball contest, one of the venue staff decided --- against the explicit direction of the tournament organizers and the venue owner --- that she was going to be the Vagina Inspector. This chased off a nonzero number of transgender people from the event, and disrupted things for everyone else.

The International Flipper Pinball Association, the body that sanctions competitive-pinball tournaments, ruled that the venue would not have any sanctioned events for twelve months and would be subject to annual reviews until they were confident it was an open, welcoming place for all players. Okay enough there. But they also ruled that the tournament, broken as it was, would be allowed to stand as a sanctioned event. They did not ask, particularly, the IFPA Women's Advisory Board, set up to provide guidance on how to make pinball events less misogynist, their opinion before this quick ruling.

And the IFPA has responded to criticism of this like a cishet guy being told for the first time that ``gyp'' is a racial slur. Insisting they have made their decision, it's not going to be altered, and if you bring it up in the IFPA Discord you're banned.

The sympathetic reading to this is that they want to avoid the precedent that if someone hollers loud enough they'll de-sanction anything. It's easy to see how the malicious will abuse that, and there's few things with as much malice as a transphobe who's noticed a project to combat sexism. So far as I know, and I am getting all my juicy gossip secondhand as I'm not in the IFPA Discord, nobody has actually said this, though. And it is hard to distinguish the actions taken from what someone who didn't actually care but wanted the fuss to go away would do. The resignation of the entire Women's Advisory Board suggests what they, people in closer touch with the IFPA management than most, believe.

So it's an enormous mess with a lot of people threatening to quit the IFPA, or at least asking what it's good for. Mostly, from the player point of view, it's a way of getting sanctioned events which draw players to them, in the hopes of winning renown for their play.

At one point bunnyhugger said there was talk of a schism, breaking off a new sanctioning body. There's no reason in principle there couldn't be one. But the IFPA does have a considerable lead in having a lot of people already registered, and a rating system in place and tried by experience. Also a lot of personal ties with Stern, the one big maker of pinball games, as well as with the second-tier makers like Jersey Jack (and don't let's get started on that) or Spooky Pinball or American Pinball. (The lack of separation between the makers of pinball games, the organizers of tournaments, the judges of tournaments, and competitors has been a minefield competitive pinball has so far not set off.) The practical objections might be insurmountable, unless the organization really does fracture along some natural fault line.

Mercifully this hasn't required bunnyhugger to take a big stand yet. It does suggest that we need to do a little prodding around to see if there've been problems people haven't been willing to bring up, though, and that won't be happy to learn.

Now, venturing into the Musée des Arts Forains, during our little layover in Paris.

Some of the many exhibits there, including a (Bayol, I assume) rabbit leaping above them all.

And hey, pinball! At least, one of the ancestors of pinball, where you roll the ball into holes for points. These are about the length of a dinner table.

And here's a rabbit posed over a heck of a garden vase.

Ooh, hey, what's this? When did we get to a Middle Eastern castle?

Ah, there we go, it's an elaborate model displaying some street scene. Oh, but wait ... computer, zoom out.

There we go! It's an elaborate miniature street scene riding the back of an elephant!

Trivia: In 1645 Blaise Pascal introduced his Pascaline mechanical-addition machine in a pamphlet entitled Advis Nécessaire à ceux qui auront curiosité de voir la machine arithmétique, et de s'en server (Advice necessary for those who will be curious to see the arithmetic machine, and to use it). The last paragraph directed orders to Sieur de Roberval, a resident of Paris, who could provide demonstrations. Source: Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, Keith Houston.

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

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.

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.

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.