Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

Not really a harbinger of Christmas, but something that usually comes up around Thanksgiving, is MWS's Saturday tournament. This usually happens the Saturday after Thanksgiving but for whatever reason he was better able to time it for the Saturday before. Given the fine but persistent snow the Saturday after Thanksgiving, this turned out well. MWS has inexplicably greater pull with the owners of our local hipster bar than bunnyhugger ever has, and was able to call on special favors such as opening three hours early, and --- for those early hours --- getting the metal-detector screening waived. So it felt a little closer to the way the old days at the place went.

The format was group match play, setting people up in groups of three or four players and assigning ranking points based on the order they finish in the game. The plan was to have as many matches as could be started in the three-and-a-half hour or whatever it was from the start of the first round. This turned out to be five complete rounds. We were not close to a sixth. The top eight finishers after these rounds would go to the A Division finals, and the next eight into the B Division finals.

There were also prizes given away, several at the end of each round. This was done by a couple rounds of luck: first, a random draw to see who won a prize, then, they'd draw a playing card to see which of a dozen prizes they had. Then, if they wanted, they could trade that prize in for one of five Mystery Box prizes --- one with a big grand prize inside, others with pretty good prizes, and a couple with zonk prizes.

Well, dear reader, I had a surprisingly great qualifying. Despite facing SPM, one of the way-too-young-yet-way-too-good kids playing competitively, and FAE in the first round I got second place. In the second round, I managed to put together a third ball rally that let me win Monster Bash. In the third round I came back from nowhere to take second place by a whisker. The fourth round --- the new Star Wars: Fall of the Empire game --- I just flopped on, finishing third place. And then in the last round, Attack From Mars, I started out with a killer ball that made everyone else sit and wait and grow cold and demoralized, finishing off with another first place. This great finish left me in a three-way tie for the last two positions in A, and I got a solid second place on the tiebreaker game so I was in the main playoffs.

Finals, though, there I got to flopping. The games --- picked by SPM, as top seed --- were almost perfect for me; Pulp Fiction, John Wick, and Tron. Pulp Fiction I'd been putting a lot of practice time into, and for some reason I play John Wick well despite having no idea what's going on or why. SPM had a terrible game of Pulp Fiction --- coming very close to rage tilting, must be said --- and I thought I was in good until FAE and DMC both showed me who's boss. John Wick went similarly, except here I leapt way ahead on the first ball and then SPM and then FAE played killer second and third balls. DMC managed to squeeze me out on bonus on the last ball, too, so with a third-place and a last-place finish I was all but finished. Moving on would require a very particular lineup of finishers and a successful tiebreaker, and that didn't happen. I went down to a last-place finish on my old buddy Tron too, with DMC and FAE taking first places.

So it goes; I ended up tied for seventh place with one of the guys in the other group. SPM, despite his first-place finish in qualifying, was also knocked out by this; FAE and DMC would go on to finals. In the end DMC would take second and FAE fourth; a guy from Ohio would grab first place overall, and DOM --- one of the 100-top-ranked players in the world --- would get third.

bunnyhugger had a rotten tournament and was inconsolable. MWS had an okay day, finishing either in third place or first place in four-player groups. He got into the B Division finals, although that because several people ahead of him were --- as top players worldwide --- restricted into playing in A Finals Or Not At All, and didn't make A Finals because I had a freakishly good Attack From Mars. He had a better first round than I did, but was still knocked out. So it goes.

Continuing in pictures, our adventure in seeking out Nigloland, the amusement park:

Ah, there it is! See, they can't completely hide an amusement park in a tiny village of vineyards and hotels!

This sign did so much to reassure us when we were walking through a trail that we weren't perfectly sure wasn't trespassing. At least if it is trespassing, they're chill about it.

And here's the park! This intersection is one we viewed a whole bunch on google street view and apple maps and all as part of judging whether we could get to the park on foot, particularly, for the question of is there a sidewalk leading there?

As you can see, the answer is: uh, there's space where I guess they figure you're going to be walking on foot? Also there's not a lot of traffic at least.

And here's some gates! We hypothesized that these would be open during normal hours while the parking lot gates were farther down.

And there's a parking lot and, I notice now, public toilets. Good.

Trivia: One of the Sanskrit words for 'Thursday' was 'Guruvara', meaning 'Teacher'. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 77: The Lost Prince of Effluvia!, Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle. Getting Swee'Pea back into the comic strip after a couple years and also giving him another ridiculous little nation for Swee'Pea to be the lost royal family member of.

This is not particularly a start to the Christmas season, but it is a coincidentally seasonal event. We had to bring the goldfish in from the pond. At least as many as were willing to be trapped. We don't have a good population estimate but we do suspect we haven't got them all.

We got everything organized later than we really should have; properly, we should have had the basement tanks filled up by the end of September and been trapping all October. But while this year wasn't as warm as 2024's --- when we were still able to trap as late as December --- it was warm enough to stick above freezing and, well, we really only had the basement ready for them around the first week of November. Then into the pond went traps, bated with cat food, and we waited. Unusually, between various things going on, we didn't have time to check the traps for almost a full week. This did allow us a handy haul of almost twenty goldfish at once, including the one we most recognize and will mourn when that bad day comes. We had another solid week of the trap in the pond but retrieved only a couple more fish from that. And now the pond has iced over; it's looking to be at least a week before the temperature is above freezing so we're not likely to have the chance to bring any more in --- unless it's a very warm winter after that, in which case we won't need to bring anybody in.

Always a challenge after the fish are put in the tanks is the ammonia cycle. It takes time for the bacteria in the filters to grow well enough to handle turning all the ammonia the fish produce into nitrites and then nitrates. We do put the filters into the pond outside so they soak up bacteria all summer, but even so, there's always a spike early on and this year was not an exception. It was a high enough spike bunnyhugger was anxious we might need to do emergency water changes, and she stayed up later than she really ought one night trying to hook up an extra water pump, one that actively feeds through a filter and that hosts plants. The filter may or may not have done anything for the ammonia --- while its ammonia dropped to almost zero, like you hope for, so did the ammonia in tanks without pumps --- but the plants hopefully are going to help the nitrate situation. Nitrates just stay in a water tank, unless something scoops them out, which is wither abundant plantlife or water changes.

We'd had a good crop of water lettuce in the pond this year, and I tried bringing in buckets of it with the fish. But we'd also had a freezing snap before I harvested them, and most of them died, so they couldn't do anything useful in our ponds. Maybe the filter-potted plants will be able to do something, although the most we're hoping for is to reduce how often we need to change the water. Mostly, we have five months or so when we hope they'll do okay enough we can bring them back outside.

And now in photos, I'm about to close up the pictures of our layover in Paris; somehow, I didn't take pictures of the Metro or the airport or anything, but I did get photos of ...

Hey, any interest in a long Mickey Mouse? With a built-in saddle so you can ride? No? Mm?

How about Popeye on a rocket with handlebars, like a motorcycle? I believe it's the same figure as was hung from the ceiling in the other room.

And here's a Pluto that you could ride, if you were much smaller and this were the 50s Or Something.

And now we leave the Musée des Arts Forains. It's really cute how the characters are parade-goers.

A look straight up at that carousel centaur that opened the day here.

And here's what the place looks like. Note the busts in the windows, and the mannequin stencils all over the other doors. You can also see the next tour group going into the first room back there.

Trivia: King George III drafted a letter of abdication after Lord North's ministry resigned in 1782, following the recognition that Great Britain could not quash the American rebellion and the difficulty finding an acceptable replacement government. Source: The Diplomacy of the American Revolution, Samuel Flagg Bemis.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 76: More Private Lives of a Privateer!, Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle. Also the story that, if I'm not wrong, reintroduced Bluto to the comic strip after a quarter-century away.

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.

We've made a tradition of going to Bronner's Christmas Wonderland for bunnyhugger's birthday. This year, her birthday was a Wednesday, with the weekend before occupied by a pinball tournament in Grand Rapids and our disappointing Closing Day at Cedar Point, and the Saturday afterward occupied by another pinball tournament, so late as the next Sunday was, it was go then or not at all.

A more substantial break from tradition is we didn't eat just when we arrived, because it was way too crowded. Instead we went shopping for a pre-lit Christmas tree, something for our bedroom. The idea here being that we always have a hard time finding a real live tree that's the right size --- like, five, five-and-a-half-foot --- to put up there. With the artificial trees we found there's not actually much choice in the five, five-and-a-half-foot range we wanted. But the state of artificial trees has improved remarkably since the 1980s, when my family had a couple of trees that wished they could be cell phone towers.

After a bunch of looking around and discovering that you can switch the LED lights to different patterns, including some that are definitely too irritating to use in a bedroom, we picked out and bought one! Or at least, we got the order slip that we would, at the end of the day, bring to the register and then go to the pickup window for. It's a modest-sized box, one that our rabbit chinned several times before I took it up to the bedroom, so I guess it's her tree now.

This got our visit to Bronner's off on the ``wrong'' side of the big Christmas complex. We spent the day going around it in a more scrambled version than usual and, you know, that felt pretty good. We did spend a little time looking for a customizable mouse ornament, since we have four mice as pets this year, and the strangest thing is we couldn't find one. We did get a custom ornament for bunnyhugger's father's dog, and then we realized that her mother has a cat, why don't we get something for her? Again we didn't find a customizable cat ornament that really worked.

We had got off to a late start, part of why we arrived at Bronner's in time to see the lunch rush at the snack counter. Yet somehow we felt like we did have about the right amount of time to spend wandering around in the teaser to the Christmas season. We would go on after this to the Cheese House and get possibly too much in cheese spreads and blocks (there are ones we haven't opened yet, two weeks afterward), and then to a rare restaurant meal in town. Made for a nice Sunday and even got done early enough we didn't technically close out any of the three places. That never happens.

In photos, I'm still on our layover in Paris on the first day of our trip but, y'know, how often are you going to see things like this? So please pardon the occasional boring photo because we're soon going to be up on things you won't believe.

Now we're moving into the second of the big exhibit halls. The door here has an archway that looks like a carousel's scenery panels above it, though I don't know if they really were.

Little stand outside the venue with the promise of information pamphlets, though my recollection is we were roped off from this.

The astronaut suit was, I believe, constructed a couple years ago for publicity and tied to the anniversary of the French launching of a cat into space.

Close-up of the angel-like figure ready to clobber you with a wreath.

And, farther off down the hall, I hope this all needs no explanation because I don't remember that we got one for the fairy-wing gown or the mannequin legs dressed for a can-can.

Around this time I noticed there was a nice silhouetted view of the courtyard.

Trivia: Austro-Hungarian Empress Maria Theresa's 1770 order that all houses be given numbers specified that the numbers were to be red in Vienna, black everywhere else in the Empire, and in Arabic numerals, except for Jewish persons' homes, which would be in Roman numerals. Source: The Address Book: What Street Adresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power, Deirdre Mask.

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

Today I was busy until past 10 pm attending a pinball tournament and then having dinner so please, instead, enjoy a double dose of Musée des Arts Forains pictures.

More of pinball's ancestors here, with bagatelles where you try to shoot a ball around the obstacles.

And isn't that a fun obstacle, shooting through the legs of a jester-y type?

One of the attractions was a big roller-ball-racing game, dating all the way back to the 1970s (whimper). Everyone got a chance to roll balls in one of two races.

The docent explains the rules. bunnyhugger would come within a whisker of winning. When I got my turn, I was in no danger of winning.

Another picture of the floor here in the first building. On the left is a gondola like you'd find on a salon carousel.

Seeing the promise of The Original Marvelous Mechanicals put us in mind of Marvin's, of course.

Cat figure on one of the carousels we got to ride. This was on a multi-level carousel that went very slowly but, as you can see from the floor, looked almost oppressively deluxe.

Looking over bunnyhugger's shoulder at the mermaid serving as a central figure. You can see a woman sitting on a mere bench reading the guide pamphlet.

We've been on a couple carousels with more than one level before, such as at Denver's Lakeside Park, but few with steps that look like they belong in an early-20th-century luxury hotel.

Out the door we saw the occasional cat walking by.

A look at the central platform and the inner ring of benches.

A game, here, your classic toss-the-ball-in-the-mouth game. I think there's something French people would recognize about these figures, but I don't.

Trivia: The gold-colored United States dollar coin issued from 1999 was made of 88.5% copper, alloyed with zinc (6%), manganese (3.5%), and nickel (2%), with each coin costing about 13 cents to make. Source: Nature's Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements, John Emsley. By the time of the book's writing (the book is copyright 2001, so this can't have been later than mid-2000) about fifty had been minted for every person in the United States.

Currently Reading: The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City, Kevin Baker. I really am enjoying this read a lot. I'm just finding so little time to read.