The Writing Desk of Jakebe Rabbit

After the Lansing Lightning Flippers (women's) pinball thing yesterday one of the players mentioned the league having the reputation for being woke (approvingly). Which, gosh, it does feel really good to know people say bunnyhugger runs inclusive, open, friendly pinball events. Really says you've been doing well.

Meanwhile, in Dutch Wonderland photos, I rode the Sky Ride back the other way. Here's how that looked, thanks in part to some lucky timing.

At the high-diving amphitheater there's a couple of different shows done, and here are the banners advertising both. Unfortunately I missed both shows on my Sky Ride trips.

Did notice walking around the after-show theater this guy who's probably not off-season Santa Claus but can we ever really be sure?

This grain silo-looking thing was actually one of the park's first rides, a helter-skelter slide. They took the slides off only a couple years ago but at least the center of it stands.

View of Merlin's Mayhem from above and from an angle where you can see where anything is.

There's a train nearly up top of the lift hill and I realized this was my chance for some slightly different pictures of other people having fun!

There's the train going down one of the first drops.

Here's the queue area for Merlin's Mayhem, which was about seventeen billion times what was needed for the day, but gives you an idea the lines they expect to have at the height of the busy season.

And here's the carousel, particularly, along with a couple other rides as seen from high up. I don't know if the gravel path represents the old path of the original Turnpike ride.

There's that Mayhem again!

And I get a picture of the train roaring right back at me.

There it goes diving into the short underground tunnel, beneath the train tracks.

Back to the ground, and I catch the performers going out to a show!

Trivia: As part of budget-cutting in January 1934 New York City removed what the mayor's staff regarded as excess clocks in city departments. Medical examiner Charles Norris paid to replace the clock in his office and complained to the city papers how the law required they record the exact time a case is reported to them, and an office clock is required for accuracy. Source: The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, Deborah Blum.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine Volume 87: Nonny the Equine Genius!, Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle. And wow, Sir Pommy who's been Popeye's like only companion the last four years of story announces his extremely abrupt retirement from adventuring as if Ralph Stein knows the new writer taking over (Bud Sagendorf) is not going to be interested in the character at all. (Which Sagendorf was not, but still, it's not like Pommy couldn't have been useful.)

We got to the second meeting of the revived Arcade Pinball league yesterday. This went well and even avoided the heavy rains we were worried might become a problem. bunny_hugger and I got assigned to the same group, something that came up several times in a row at Lansing Pinball League where group assignments are done by a random draw from a hat. Arcade League we're theoretically grouped by ranking.

Turns out we were well-matched, though. Over the course of five games bunny_hugger had three second-place finishes, while I had a first, a second, and a third; combine with with both of us having a first and a last place on other games, and we ended up tied for points for the night. This is not to say we're going to be in the same group next month, but we didn't do anything to prevent that.

The logic of the way Arcade League does things mean between the two of us we got to pick three of the five games we played, and we went for old-school games: Theater of Magic, Cirqus Voltaire, and Taxi. The two people we played with went for older games with their picks too: Attack From Mars and Creature From The Black Lagoon. It was a league night we could have had in the original Arcade league, which was neat.

Back in Dutch Wonderland pictures, we're almost off the monorail and going to another of the ride-while-looking attractions ...

Last picture on the ride, catching a little view of the Potato Patch. A couple years back Hershey's sold Dutch Wonderland to Kennywood (well, Kennywood's corporate overlords) and I think that's when Kennywood's ``Potato Patch'' name migrated out to Lancaster. Not sure; we tried to eat there but the line was impossibly long.

Back on the ground. Here's the best I could do photographing one of the other animatronic miniatures, a woodworking shop. Unfortunately the sun was making bright reflections against its glass so this is the best I could do.

Some ride sign/entrance queues here, one for the Double Splash Flume and another for The Twister, their trabant ride. You saw both in the distance from the monorail pictures!

And then we started having some Kennywood-grade mascotting luck! Here was Duke out and about a second time!

Vintage historical photo of Dutch Wonderland from when the Double Splash Flume opened; if I was making out the locations right the giant balloon was about where Kingdom Coaster is now. I don't know how long a hot air balloon was part of the park's stuff, but note that Great Adventure in the 70s relied on a captive hot air balloon for some of its ballyhoo.

Another vintage photo, of the Dragon's Lair Log Boats, a boat ride that actually runs outside the park grounds, where you can see things from the highway. It's been renovated away from this model, though ... will you see? Well ...

Here we are on the Dragon's Lair boat ride! While things like the hippo and elephant in the above picture are gone, there's still ``animals'' planted around the lagoon with signs telling you who to look for. The monorail track is above, and you see the highway sign in the background.

Most of the animals appear on the ride after the sign announcing them, like Tucker the Tortoise, but there's signs all along the ride so some of them you have to look back the way you came to see.

The park is unafraid to have some of their fiberglass animals be political, rather than male!

There's Ally! We thought the jaw might move and I'm not sure we were ever sure we saw it do so.

There's a big dragon hidden in the mound that seems like should be Duke except it's a completely different purple altogether. The sign asks if you can spot Fred and Fanny Frog.

I think I found them! I wonder which one is Fanny.

Trivia: After the Civil War, around ten thousand Confederates migrated to the Amazon in a vague idea of creating a new cotton-plantation slave state. All but a few hundred soon fled back, with the diehards congregating in the town of Santarém, Pará, Brazil. Source: 1943: Uncovering the new world Columbus created, Charles C Mann. Wikipedia's essay on the Confederados says around twenty thousand US citizens entered Brazil from 1865 to 1885, but there's no way of knowing how many were these.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine Volume 87: Nonny the Equine Genius!, Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

In the absense of much very interesting going on around here --- how interested can you be in my reaching the end of the Paxlovid prescription? --- enjoy please a double dose of Dutch Wonderland pictures and the start of another big orbit-the-park ride.

Here's the Wonder House just rocking a bit. I'm sorry the picture doesn't have the full text of the message about now come in onc't.

We did not take a picture of ourselves at this My First Trip To Dutch Wonderland display since it was neither of ours first trip.

The Kiddie Whip ride. It's kind of weird that so many parks kept the Kiddie Whip rides going when the Adult Whip rides are almost all long gone; I wonder what in the economics of it makes the one so much more appealing than the other.

And now? On to the monorail ride! Don't worry, there'll soon be something joining all these rectangles in perspective and whisking us away at a slight elevation.

We got lucky and were put in the booth up front, just behind the operator (who was out talking with someone about something when I took this cabin photo).

Close-up of the control panel. There's a couple reminders of things like closing-door announcements affixed permanently to the dashboard.

And here we are, in motion!

Way down there is the bumper car ride and, past that, the honeycomb/bear flat ride from a couple days ago.

The sign to/from Exploration Island, seen from above!

Here we cross over the water to the part of the ride over Exploration Island, which has me wondering what the monorail went over before the current Exploration Island construction. Maybe I have photos from a similar ride from our 2010 trip. No way to know.

Here's one of the spirals of Kingdom Coaster, with the launch station in the background.

Kingdom Coaster in the foreground and the log flume in background. And more of Kingdom Coaster in the farther background.

Trivia: Washington crossed the Delaware in flatboats called Durhams, after Robert Durham, who developed the design in 1757 in Pennsylvania. The flat-bottomed boats could be as long as 65 feet and as wide as eight feet in the beam, with excellent cargo capacity, able to carry as much as twenty tons of iron or 150 barrels of flour on calm waters. Source: Wedding of the Waters: The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation, Peter L Bernstein. (You can see why this kind of boat might be of interest in a book about canal-building.)

Currently Reading: Inspired Enterprise: How NASA, the Smithsonian, and the Aerospace Community Helped Launch Star Trek, Glen E Swanson.

Almost as my post went live last night we heard the 'snap' of the live trap in the dining room. We'd caught a mouse. A deer mouse, the first time we've seen one this close and personal. Also: a female deermouse. This invites the question, is it a nursing mother? Like, is there a nest of baby mice somewhere we should let her out to care for?

We couldn't find one, or hear one, and not being confident that what we saw was definitely a nursing deermouse we set the animal out in the (detached) garage where she's welcome to set up. My supposition was that if she does have a nest of babies inside the house, she can make it back to care for them without too much stress, after all.

Still, we failed to prove the babies didn't exist. So several times last night and today we've turned off all sources of noise and just listened, in case we can catch the squeaks of hungry baby mice. Nothing yet, but consider what we discovered yesterday at about the time a post like this went live ...

Back on Dutch Wonderland Exploration Isle. Let's explore a little more.

Good warning sign, if you smoke the pterodactyls will tip you over. I think that's the warning?

Hey, everyone's old buddy the T-Rex, looking ready to start multiball on Jurassic Park!

The whole family of whatever this kind of dinosaur is is startled by how fast I drained out of multiball!

That's the dinosaur trail. So what next to look at ... well, some playground and picnic space and ooh, hey, how about a boat ride?

So here we are, setting out to orbit Exploration Island by boat!

Nothing like the water color in an amusement park's boat ride except the water color in other amusement parks' boat rides.

Here's those dinosaur rumps that I bet are delighting the first kid in the boat to spot them!

Remember that cow statue? Well, there it is.

And those dinosaurs that were standing in front of the cow statue? Here's their rumps.

And so we return to the launch station, with the monorail and the Turnpike track to our left.

The Turnpike ride, meanwhile, proclaims itself Closed and and we suspected it was fibbing. Also I like catching that picture of the kid checking their height against the sign.

Back side of the Turnpike's ride-height sign. The heights are marked by 'jewels' of different kinds, and they let the light shine through the costume jewels in a way that looks pretty good in real life. Photos don't capture the glitteriness of it all.

Trivia: In 1860 New Jersey had a free Black population of 25,336 people out of a total population of 646,699, proportionally twice the size of any other free state. Source: New Jersey: A History of the Garden State, Editors Maxine N Lurie, Richard Veit. Shamefully, New Jersey had disenfranchised Blacks and women in 1807.

Currently Reading: Inspired Enterprise: How NASA, the Smithsonian, and the Aerospace Community Helped Launch Star Trek, Glen E Swanson.

Recovering, grumpily, after that 19-hour sleep that did do me a lot of good. When bunnyhugger got up she wanted to know why Meijer's hadn't filled my Paxlovid prescription. I had assumed they were getting a supply from another store and figured to give to later in the afternoon (when I'd assume everything got transferred around locally). She pressed me that this was way too long a wait, and I called the pharmacy and learned there was some problem with the prescription. They wouldn't say what. bunnyhugger, working from her experience, supposed this was the doctor's office not providing adequate instructions on how to take the medicine. Our doctor's office tends to just suppose that, like ``take per the box says'' or ``take per the schedule we worked out'' is enough and our local Meijer's tends to see that as ``not nearly enough instruction''.

And, yes, part of the point of separating doctor from pharmacist is to have an independent set of eyes looking at medicines and possible interactions and whether the instructions make sense. And you kind of want a pharmacist who's going to be hard on ``can we trust the patient has the information needed to take this right?'' But then, ``take like the box says'' ought to be enough. And, more, my doctor's office, which is like three minutes down the road from Meijer's, should know by now that this pharmacy is going to be the stickler and shouldn't be letting sloppy instructions through.

Anyway, the Meijer pharmacist called my doctor's office and got the on-call physician and straightened out whatever the issue was. (I am only assuming it was insufficiently precise dosage instructions.) bunnyhugger went to the store and got the medicine and I've taken my first round as I write this and plausibly the second by the time you read it. We'll see how long I spend asleep after this.

I know you're disappointed not seeing Dutch Wonderland pictures. Let me try and make up for it with some here:

Cute little kiddie ride (it is a kids park, mind) of bears orbiting a beehive. That's nice seeing.

Array of heraldic-ish shields decorating the bathrooms. I don't know if they're referencing anything particular; I haven't played enough Crusader Kings to recognize particular shields well.

Hey, want a Dutch Wonderland Driver's License? I was a little tempted, must admit; you don't get custom-printed souvenir nonsense like this anymore.

Exploration Island was new to us since our 2010 visit. What does this slightly three-dimensional Duke see? Well ...

A gondola ride, an antique autos ride, and the monorail all in one picture! I don't think there's a spot where all three are atop each other but they do come close.

As Dutch Wonderland is in Pennsylvania yes, it's required to have a Turnpike ride.

Trivia: The medical applications of sugar and spices is reflected, by the end of the 13th century, the terms ``spicers'', ``pepperers'', ``apothecaries'', and ``spicer-apothecaries'' selling the preparations that, mixed with sugar and spices, became bearable to swallow. Source: Sweets: A History of Temptation, TIm Richardson.

Currently Reading: Inspired Enterprise: How NASA, the Smithsonian, and the Aerospace Community Helped Launch Star Trek, Glen E Swanson.

Time for the weekly recap of my humor blog, by listing titles and nothing to tempt you into actually reading stuff. Well, the titles of the pairwise bracket contests give you a good idea whether that one's going to be of interest, I suppose.

• MiSTed: FX Down To Mobius, Part 8: A Call To Arms
• March Pairwise Brackety Contest Thing: Folksy Expressions vs Being The Drummer
• Statistics Saturday: Some Popular Math Number Days
• March Pairwise Brackety Contest Thing: Ides vs Allergy Relief
• March Pairwise Brackety Contest Thing: Regular Daily Exercise vs Pig Latin
• What's Going On In Judge Parker? Who arrested Randy Parker and what for? December 2025 - March 2026
• March Pairwise Brackety Contest Thing: Tea Kettles vs Secret Compartments
• MiSTed: FX Down To Mobius, Part 9: The Squadron Assembles

It's a full day of pictures at Dutch Wonderland! Hope you like.

The maker's plate, as promised for the carousel Dutch Wonderland has. Maximum speed of five and one-half rotations per minute which would be a great ride. I think it was running at an ordinary four.

Some of the carousel horses as seen from the inside. Also oh, caught a picture of a kid looking happy for the ride.

The park has a couple of animated puppet shows, like this one showing a quilting bee among Pennsylvania Dutch women.

The new roller coaster: Merlin's Mayhem. Mayhem is the dragon.

Merlin is the guy in the video screen here, doing the safety spiel while explaining the premise, which is that Mayhem has gone missing and you might be able to spot him from the ride. (If you can I missed it.)

Couple of pictures of Mayhem growing up (there's also one of him hatching) and causing cute pudgy dragon trouble.

The loading station, startlingly, blocks you off from the ride, the doors opening only when the train is ready to load. It's done up in a Tudor Or Something style, and is much darker than you'd think from this picture (you can infer the sensitivity and duration of the exposure from the girl's hands blurring), so it really does kind of look like you're off in some medieval castle and then suddenly there's a roller coaster through the doors.

Joust is another of their roller coasters and fortunately we rode it last time, because it was out of operation the day we visited.

Here's the lift hill of Kingdom Coaster (formerly Sky Princess), and a drop for their old-school log flume.

Train freshly dispatched. While Kingdom Coaster is in the main a wooden coaster, they've replaced part of the track with metal box and, for some reason, done it on the segment leading from the station to the lift hill, the least rattling and stressful part of the ride. Maybe they wanted to test the material out without risking anything.

Here's Kingdom Coaster, seen from the front. It's a logo that says, ``we were on deadline''.

Kingdom Coaster is next to Joust and here's the inactive coaster from the one we rode.

Trivia: When first distilled in the mid-1600s the drink was known as ``kill-devil'', but by 1651 was also called ``rumbullion'', from southern English slang meaning ``a brawl or violet commotion'', before being shortened to ``run''. Source: A History of the World in Six Glasses, Tom Standage. Englishman Richard Ligon described it as ``infinitely strong, but not very pleasant in taste''.

Currently Reading: The Book on the Bookshelf, Henry Petroski.

Sunday we had the time and chance to visit bunnyhugger's parents. Not for any special occasion, past that we hadn't seen them in a while and the next obvious time to visit, early April, will also have us busy with egg-dyeing. So it was a good chance to visit and talk with them and we were totally ready to bring board games except. You know how I mentioned the weather Friday was extremely windy to the point of being dangerous driving? The weather Sunday as extremely windy to the point of driving being annoying, but not actively hazardous. But they were warning about thunderstorms rolling in over the evening and our choices would be either to leave early enough we missed them or late enough that they passed. Given that I had to be up at 7 am, leaving early seemed the less bad course.

Still, there would be time for some pleasant ordinary stuff, like finding out just what had gone wrong with the iPad bunnyhugger's mother was using to read electronic books. (The system had logged her out and she didn't know how to tell that.) And they have a new induction stove, paid for by some federal program for energy efficiency that also saw them get a heat pump for the house. The heat pump we didn't see so much of except that the house was at 74 degrees which, even granting that the outside was at 70 degrees, seems like a lot. But I'll sometimes set my car that high while driving, if it's cold out, so I'm hardly a thermal innocent.

One side effect of the new stove is that they were very anxious to explain just how it would work should I make tea (which, somehow, it ends up I didn't). It turns out to be that you turn the dial, and use the induction-friendly tea kettle, which isn't really different from the old process. I think they're just anxious; they said they hadn't made anything with it yet, although they'd only got the new stove/oven two days before.

The other side effect is they offered us first dibs on all their old, induction-hostile, cookware, which, sure, we can use some new pots and pans. Also one of those big spaghetti pots with the built-in strainer which is going to change everything. Mostly pasta, and in small ways.

Her father, having sworn off weird impulsive eBay purchasing obsessions, has what are allegedly foghorns. When I got the chance to confirm I heard this right it turned out there was controversy about whether he had a legitimate foghorn. He demonstrated and it sounded, really, more like scooting the stool backwards in shop class, but I guess there are circumstances that might be a useful noise?

We set out so very early, and missed all but light sprinklings of rain getting home, when we discovered bunnyhugger had left her favorite travel mug with her parents. It'll be safe.

So on in to Dutch Wonderland. Hey, remember when I said I was going to be sharing fewer photographs so I could pick the better and more interesting ones instead of sharing five views of the same Tilt-a-Whirl ride sign? Me neither.

You enter the park through the castle building and on the side is this event space, where we saw what looked like the mascot performers doing a pep rally.

Right? You'd only be doing a Simon Says sort of thing to get everyone in synch at the start of a walkaround shift, right?

Duke the Dragon is the mascot we're most interested in, of course, but they have a knight and a princess and royals and all and, most recently, Merlin.

Clock tower as we enter. Note that it had the time correct.

And here's Duke, getting a picture with some kid! This is three parks in a row we've seen the mascots for!

So we got a picture with Duke and learned that actually, he was going in so somehow what we saw in the event room was the end of their shift? But they were taking spot photos while that lasted.

Trivia: Vanguard I had the highest apogee of any International Geophysical Year satellite. Source: Project Vanguard: The NASA History, Constance McLaughlin Green, Milton Lomask. NASA SP-4202.

Currently Reading: The Book on the Bookshelf, Henry Petroski.

PS: What's Going On In Judge Parker? Who arrested Randy Parker and what for? December 2025 - March 2026 in one of the last two comic strip plot recaps still touching the long-ago distant past year of 2025.