Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

Not much going on right now, besides my reporting What's Going On In Gil Thorp? Why is _Dennis the Menace_ in reruns? December 2025 - March 2026 so once you've looked into that please see what you think of Glen Echo Park. I promise I run out of photos someday:

I assume this building was historically the first aid stand --- why else have the neon? --- and suppose it still is or there'd be a lot of signs explaining to go somewhere else.

And here's the view inside the Crystal Pool, which had its frontage renovated but is clearly far, far away from being something usable as a pool.

Someone lost their frisbee behind it, too.

Back to the carousel! Have a bit of a view of the chariot here, and a bit of a view of the plaque explaining the carousel's history. Also while the lens exaggerates it you can see the horses leaning toward the center, particularly on the right, something valuable if you get the ride up to full speed (which this doesn't).

Signs for the carousel, with the rules, the National Carousel Association award, and the offer for noise cancelling earphones in case the band organ is too loud.

bunnyhugger getting to know a bunny.

Looking a bit closer at the head, and the detail carved and painted into it.

bunnyhugger unable to believe that some kid went and got the rabbit next to her, instead of leaving it open for me. Such happens.

She takes the ride seriously!

Look at that, three bunnies in a row.

And a photo of the two rabbits together. Oh, but wait ... what's this? Computer, enhance!

Noooo! They carved pawpads onto the rabbits' feet!

Trivia: Inside the human body iron is strongly bound by the protein transferrin, found in serum and other secretions, which is what transferres iron between cells. Because of this tight iron-binding it is an antibiotic, keeping iron from being taken up by invading bacteria. Source: Molecules at an Exhibition: The Science of Everyday Life, John Emsley.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 86: The Moon Glooph!, Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle. This is like the third story where Popeye and Pommy get sent into space. Ralph Stein needs to stop having Popeye be so stunned by the concept.

I mentioned the Pokemon game as one of the not entirely coincidental reasons we went to the RLM tournament in Grand Rapids on Friday. There was another tournament going on, at the Sparks In The Mall location in whichever exactly Detroit suburb it is, the one with all the Pee-Wee Hermans hidden around. We might have gone there instead, and while we couldn't have played Pokemon there it's not like the game won't be around everywhere soon enough.

But a deciding factor was the threats of weather. Eastern Michigan was under a heavy fog advisory, with visibility incredibly low and after a harrowing experience bunny_hugger had a couple weeks back she did not want to face that again. Western Michigan, though, and an hour later the central band where we live, would be facing severe thunderstorms. But the forecasts and radar projections suggested the heavy weather would hit while we were inside buildings, so we picked that as the likely-safer option.

It did not amuse either of us when, approaching Grand Rapids (annoyingly RLM Amusements is on the opposite side of the city), the sky dimmed to a quarter its previous brightness in around sixty seconds. We were driving into a heavy storm, with multiple lightning flashes at once, although fortunately it was at this particularly intense level for only a couple minutes. After that it was steady rain but not heavy enough to be threatening.

While we didn't encounter anything bad on the drive home, home did. There were reports of a hecking lot of flooding including in our area; apparently the gas station two blocks away was under four feet of water until someone got the drain unplugged. And people living downtown by the Grand River got hail smashing their car hoods. Our house, maybe a mile and a half away, got nothing but a full goldfish pond cured of the last bits of the ice cover. And personally faced nothing worse than the Taco Bell we hoped to get a post-pinball dinner from being unexpectedly closed. Wild.

I continue exploring Glen Echo Park here, with a half-dozen pictures going from the bumper cars all the way to almost the front of the park. There is a reason my photos are running like nine months behind ``current''.

The eyebrow roof of the bumper cars building, with pictures of bumper cars ready to bump. I don't know if this is (a restoration of, surely) what the ride had when the park last operated or if it's a modern construction to evoke what the art was like.

Standing by the bumper cars looking at the carousel building, left, and Pop Corn/the arcade, on the right.

Past the Pop Corn building we get a passage to the front, with a candy shop in front and what looks like a small castle out front. Note on the right the National Park Service shield.

Candy Corner there; I don't know when it last operated although the signs in the window suggest that maybe we were just not there on the right day to get something.

Very close to the front here! And I got a picture of someone else taking a dramatic photo looking up the rock wall. I don't know why but I failed to take a similar picture myself.

I swear, we're almost to the front. I just wanted to highlight the style of what would otherwise just be boring supports of the overhang; it really lets you know when they built this in the late 30s/early 40s they wanted to be in fashion. You could almost take this and drop it into the Emerald City sequences and with a coat of paint it'd fit .

Trivia: Between 1917 and 1918 Bridgeport, Connecticut --- with Remington Arms (making rifles, cartridges, and bayonets), the Locomobile Company (making trucks), Lake Torpedo Boat Company (submarines) --- grew from 114,000 people to 166,000. Source: A Call To Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II, Maury Klein.

Currently Reading: The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe, Matthew Gabriele, David M Perry. Sorry, people normally have 20 baby teeth and not the 32 that would match their adult teeth? How have I gone over a half-century without hearing a word of this? (It comes up in a discussion of people's responses to the Black Death, one of them being that allegedly children were being born with more teeth, the change in human bodies matching the fundamental change God had wrought in the world.)

There's a new Pokemon pinball game --- amazingly, the first-ever licensed Pokemon pinball game --- and RLM Amusements out in Grand Rapids got one yesterday. So, not entirely coincidentally, we went there for the weekly pinball tournament. I was never called up on the game during the tournament, which was randomly-picked pairs for the fourteen-round qualifying session and then games picked by the quartet's highest-seed player for playoffs. But I did get one game in late, past 1 am, and it went pretty well. Along the way I caught a Stufful, which bunny_hugger --- who understood what I meant by saying it was a ``Stuffit'' --- explained on the drive home to be kind of a plush red panda, so at least the game knew who was playing it and what they'd look for. (I mean given the weird ongoing failure of Pokemon to make a good raccoon-based creature.) Also since I've never played the video games or the card games or any other spinoff of the intellectual property, this means that the 7th of March, 2026 saw me catch my first Pokemon ever and it was this.

Otherwise, well, this was the first time this year I've made it to an RLM tournament. Since my last visit they've put Scorbit data-gathering things on many of the tables. These allow for the results of matches to be logged automatically. And since the games are logged to Matchplay.events, we can go back afterwards and look at score versus number of balls and score versus ball time, and also just how long each ball was in play. Other than logging the results automatically, this isn't actually useful but I suppose will someday make prop betting easier.

bunny_hugger went in and put up what's got to be her best performance in qualifying, winning 12 of her 14 matches and coming in tied for second. The only person to beat her --- with 13 wins --- was a guy who's the 12th-highest ranked player in the world. She did great in the semifinals round, taking first-place finishes in two games (which is always going to let you move on) and a third-place finish on the other (for a little bonus). Unfortunately in semifinals (in a group led by that 12th-place-worldwide guy) she had a worse time of it, taking last places on everything and finishing the night in 8th place, just as she would if she'd decided to go home rather than play the next round. But there's never knowing that before you play.

And in every regard she did better than me: in qualifying I put up a mere eight wins, enough to get into playoffs, and the last win coming against JTK. In the quarterfinals I was playing RLM (top seed) and a woman I'd noticed all night --- CP --- wearing a shirt with what looked like a 50s-children's-book-watercolor-picture of a deer with a huge safety pin through its body. She would explain that it was the logo for a metal band. Anyway in this group I took last place on Harry Potter, and second place on Getaway. RLM had won both games so was assured to move on, and the rest of us were tied for the other advancing slot. RLM decided to toss a bit of chaos into the mix and deferred choice of game to JJL.

JJL picked Fast Draw, an electromechanical, and one of my pocket games that I can always pull out a good finish on. Reader, I did not. My first ball got a mere 10 points, the lowest possible. My second ball got five times that. It wouldn't be until the fourth ball that I got anything together and it wasn't much of that. Fifth ball drained without my touching it too, and I went not just to a last-place finish but a dismal one, literally a hundred thousand points behind CP.

So that came out dismal. But on the bright side we got to talking with CP and her wife --- bonding first over all of us wearing N95's or KN95's --- and quite liked them, and they seem to like us too. So hey, maybe new pinball friends? That's always nice to see.

In pictures, I'm going to spend today focusing on a specific aspect of the former bumper cars pavilion at Glen Echo Park. Why? You'll see momentarily.

Carving of a bumper car that's one of a bunch of sculptures hanging on the pavilion's walls.

Here's two people crammed into the bumper car.

And a picture of a car also being a Dutch wooden shoe.

And here's the fourth bumper car design seen in this array of pictures.

Finally, some cars bumping!

And one last design of bumper cars. I have no information about which of these body designs were ever on the ride here.

Trivia: After his first experiments with X-rays showed their ability to see through solid objects --- including seeing the bones of his own hand --- Wilhelm Röntgen locked himself in the lab for seven weeks to find what possible mistake he was making and to try to find a more plausible explanation than ``X-rays can see through solid objects''. At some point he joked to his wife that ``I'm doing work that will make people say, 'Old Röntgen has gone crazy!'.'' 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 Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe, Matthew Gabriele, David M Perry.

The big Six Flags/Cedar Fair merger has finally reached the point it's causing us personally to lose something. We've had some effects before, but most of them were neutral-to-good, like getting into Six Flags America cheap.

So the problem with the merger is that the much bigger Six Flags is still losing, like, all the money in the world, and things like closing Six Flags America and announcing when they're closing California's Great America won't change that. They're at the point where they're trying to raise money by selling off things, so they're probably at most two years away from going bankrupt yet again.

So this brings us to Michigan's Adventure, which for years has been the quiet, good little child of the Cedar Fair operation. Doesn't get much attention (it's not literally true that its big upgrade for 2024 was ``a new bathroom'' but it's very close), doesn't need much attention: families love it as is and more of them come, and spend a lot of money, every year. If every park in the chain were like this the chain would have no rational complaints. But this also means it's one of the parks that they could put up for sale and find a buyer for.

So that's what happened. Six Flags sold Michigan's Adventure and six other parks to EPR Properties, a real estate investment trust, which has got hastily set up --- bunnyhugger noted their initial logo was clearly AI slop and now it's cleaned-up AI slop --- Enchanted Parks. For this year that won't change anything, since season passes were already sold, but for 2027 and beyond? Who knows?

And the scary thing? Beyond having to change what's our home park for our long-standing season passes, and having to buy a season pass for a second chain? EPR Properties has mostly run water parks in the past, and there's a reasonable fear that they're looking to shut down the dry parks and just keep the wet. Besides losing the amusement park in an easy day-trip drive, losing Michigan's Adventure would also cost three wooden roller coasters.

Globally, the sale is probably a good thing in that an industry is usually healthier when it has a lot of comparably-sized companies rather than a handful of big ones. And to get that means things like Six Flags with an estimated 2,038 parks in the United States and Canada should be shedding places. It's just always sad when the thing you think would be good for the community is bad for you personally.

Also it's going to be really sad if we lose Shivering Timbers and Six Flags goes bankrupt anyway.

Speaking of shuttered parks, here's stuff from Glen Echo Park.

The Cuddle-Up pavilion now gets some use as a performing stage and there's bleacher seating for extra audience space.

Way off past the end of the old midway is this fountain; I don't know if it ever had water or was always a garden.

Here's the view back from that fountain along the midway.

Small and surprisingly haunted-looking building next to what had been the bumper cars building.

The bumper cars building has this section hazard-taped off, I guess for the trap door?

I suppose it's now an event space; you can imagine dances and wedding receptions and all fitting in here well.

Trivia: Bell Aircraft's X-16 was not a legitimate research aircraft but an attempt to hide the development of a spy plane. Though 28 of the craft were ordered, none were completed before the Lockheed U-2 demonstrated it could serve the spy flight missions. Source: American X-Vehicles: An Inventory - X-1 to X-50, Dennis R Jenkins, Tony Landis, Jay Miller.

Currently Reading: The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe, Matthew Gabriele, David M Perry.

On my humor blog there's some bonus comic strip content, some complaining about LLMs stealing my writing, one of my favorite Robert Benchley pieces, and a bit of nonsense about CHiPs because I was thinking about them for some reason. Enjoy!

• MiSTed: FX Down to Mobius, Part 6: Freddy Finds a Meteorite
• What's Going On In _Phantom 2040_? Are you going to start covering _Phantom 2040_? September 2025 - February 2026
• Statistics Saturday: CHiPs Spinoffs You Don't Know Whether I Made Up but Also Aren't Concerned Enough to Check
• Robert Benchley: Keep a Log
• Not Sure How My Plate Could Get More Full Unless I Had to Do a Thing
• What's Going on in Rex Morgan, M.D.? Wasn't _Rex Morgan_ Supposed to Start Looking Weird? December 2025 - February 2026
• Statistics February: The Month LLMs Just Blow Me Up
• MiSTed: FX Down To Mobius, Part 7: The Gathering Storm

And now let's continue with pictures from early July and the photographic beauties of Glen Echo Park.

Here's a view of the park's carousel, looking up a bit so you can see the arch of the carousel building, and also the slightly artistic touch of the outside reflected in the rounding board mirrors.

Better view of the tiger and two rabbits behind. So, how much does it remind you of Cedar Point's Kiddie Kingdom Carousel?

Some more of the horses on the carousel; you see what having National Park money behind the restoration will get you.

Also look at that jester's head; seen one anywhere near that on, like, my Kiddie Kingdom pictures?

Of course they have a band organ off to the side and it looks precious too.

bunnyhugger looking eagerly for tickets and it turns out you get them nowhere near the carousel because ??? ?? ?????. Anyway look at that great old rock-wall cladding at the base of the carousel building.

So we had to go past the Pop Corn stand, which is now in use for some artistic inspiration thing ...

And which is connected to the Arcade (no longer an arcade) and The Puppet Company (which is where we get tickets). Also, gads, what a beautiful building.

And past The Puppet Company are a bunch of fronts that were probably once midway game stalls but now host things like placards explaining the history of the place.

Here's one explaining the old arcade, from before the one you see here. Yes, I too am interested what was in the Lot O Fun.

bunnyhugger explores what had been the ride building for the Cuddle Up (a small teacups-type ride).

We couldn't be there at night, in case they still ever turn the neon on, but at least we can look at what had been the ticket booth beneath the lights.

Trivia: Between 1750 and 1786, Toulouse's spending on public roads increased from 1,200 livres per year to 198,000. Source: The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography, By the end of this era Toulouse had postal services operating for up to 90 miles from the city.

Currently Reading: Prehysterical Pogo (In Pandemonia), Walt Kelly.