Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

This week my humor blog features some nonsense, some nonsense based on the English language, and even more MiSTing than usual, plus stuff you've seen before. And I get a bit of good news about Dick Tracy author Mike Curtis in the comments. Seek it in here:

• MiSTed: The Tale of Jimmy Rabbit, Part 11: The Tooth Puller
• Imagine My … My … Imagine My … Well, You Know
• Statistics Saturday: Some Nursery Rhyme Characters You Can’t Say From Text Are _Not_ Eggs Either
• Robert Benchley: Our Noisy Ghosts
• This Is a Long and Roundabout Excuse to Be Late With Recapping _Dick Tracy_ Tomorrow
• MiSTed: Safe Fun for Halloween
• What’s Going On In Dick Tracy? Is Mike Curtis ever coming back to Dick Tracy? August – October 2025
• MiSTed: The Tale of Jimmy Rabbit, Part 12: A Slight Dispute

Next up I'm going to be finishing off Christmas: we did a couple of tours of light shows and I refrained from taking a million blurry unfocused pictures of dots, so you're spared too much of all that. Let me show you.

This was bunnyhugger's Christmas jigsaw puzzle, featuring a bunny and squirrel interrogating the reindeer, and a raccoon watching just in case. A very SpinDizzy Muck situation.

Here's the Lake Victoria Light Show house, with something like half the lights on all at once. It's easier to watch in movie version but movies are hard to post.

Lake Victoria Light Show snowman, who several times during the show comes out to be brutally melted by some punny tune.

The house again, this time with at least all(?) the strands of light on the central tree lit and in a variety of colors. They're color-changing LEDs and synched up with the low-power FM broadcast.

And now down to Brooklyn, Michigan, for the Nite Lites display! Here, a crane hauls twenty tons of candy cane.

Would it be holiday lights without dentist content? Here's teeth pulling Santa's sleigh, or else all the reindeer have turned their rear ends to you.

The official entrance to Nite Lights, at the Michigan International Speedway. There's like a half mile of lights of mostly sponsors leading up to this so there's a show before you even pay for the show.

And a more ceremonial entry to the light show by driving through a castle walls, which in real life would be contra-indicated.

Nice wavy Michigan here with the hat on its thumb because they didn't know of a better place to put it.

I love those tunnels of light, and the slight streaking of my windshield adds surprising motion to the Christmas trees.

Finally, some of that fairy-tale content: Rapunzel pulling a boy up to the shoe she lives in with her giant shoelace or ... I'm not sure what's going on here actually.

And here's a Big Bad Wolf trying to blow out the Three Little Pigs' home, unaware that you can't just blow out LEDs! Silly wolf.

Trivia: The first attempted buyers of the Cunard Lines' Queen Elizabeth in 1968 were a group of Philadelphia investors who planed to moor the ship on the Delaware River and operate it as a hotel (as the Queen Mary was doing off Long Beach, California), but the group failed to check whether the cruise ship would fit in the river at that point (it would not) or how patrons would access the location (it would need a new highway built). Source: Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers, Simon Winchester.

Currently Reading: Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space, Adam Higginbotham.

All the way ago last Tuesday bunnyhugger hosted this year's Fear and Trembling pinball tournament. This is her pin-golf event, where the goal is not to score points but to complete objectives in as few balls as possible. This is a fun and frustrating format, for everyone. Us, for the challenge of figuring out what tables to use and what objectives to set on them. Everyone else, for finding that they can't manage to do something on purpose that they always do incidentally while playing. Sometimes your best approach is to ignore the goal and just play a good game, but people only resort to that in desperation.

Speaking of desperation: one extra challenge we put on ourselves is that the tournament offers a player's choice of objectives, so we need to find tables that have two clear objectives that aren't just ``get a bunch of points''. Ideally they should be objectives you can make progress on that's saved, ball-to-ball, and should make it really clear when you've made the goal so you don't have to guess what happened. The point of this is to make choosing, and knowing you might have succeeded if you'd picked the other objective, part of the game.

Ironically, we passed on the challenge of picking which tables, turning the choice over to a random number generator. Well, we feel like we always pick the same games and after long enough you run out of different goals. The random number generator picked an interesting enough course, though, including a couple games I really like, at least one that I don't but am somehow good at, and didn't repeat too many from the last couple years' of games.

Picking objectives was annoying, in part because many modern pinball games have gotten complicated to the point there are jillions of things to do and the video screens, for all the space they have, don't always persistently show you what happened. Ultimately we only had to bump one game from the main bank to backup for want of being sure we had a clean objective. And there was testing, because with stuff going on we didn't have enough time at our local barcade to try them all out. I went two days in a row in the leadup to the tournament to try out objectives I wasn't sure about, but still left a couple games --- like Medieval Madness, which I've played so many times in person and in virtual form that I doubt there's anything I don't know --- with objectives that were technically untested.

Still, what's the worst that could happen?

That teased, let's wrap up photos of our trip to Crossroads Village from the last week of last year. I'm almost up to within the past ten months!

Another intersection with a nice lighted fence and some really good reflections here.

Here's the village's central tree and the reflections in the slush around it.

Not Santa! Just one of his many statues waving around the place. Note the over-decorated tree in the background, one of the village's centerpiece items.

The opera house and the coffee shop here, near the end of the night. The gift shop has already closed and is dark.

The tree wrapped up tight in lights. I think this is the time we overheard someone asking and told them that yeah, we'd been here in the summer and the tree was still wrapped, just unlit.

And a parting view of the train station and a lot of wet planks of wood.

Trivia: When developing the first periodic table of the elements Dimitri Mendeleyev supposed that the atomic weights of either tellurium (128) or iodine (127) must be wrong because tellurium clearly preceded iodine in order. Mendeleyev was correct about the ordering, but did not know of isotopes, or that there is enough abundant tellurium-130 that an unrefined sample's average weight will be closer to 128, while iodine-127 is the only common isotope of that element. Source: Nature's Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements, John Emsley.

Currently Reading: Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space, Adam Higginbotham.

So skipping ahead a little bit in what I mean to report here: we just got back from our Halloweekends vacation at Cedar Point. I had filled out, online, the Post Office's form to Hold Mail. Sunday night we got home to a mailbox stuffed full of un-held mail.

You might remember that we had a problem holding mail this spring, when we went to France and they delivered one day's mail in the middle of the hold period, and then just ... like ... never really got around to delivering the held mail. Not in full, at least. So this time I had specified that I would come to the post office and collect the held mail, in person, and I did that today. Yes, I had a bunch of mail already, including some today --- theoretically the last day of the hold --- but how did I know there wasn't any more?

The clerk took my printed-out hold mail form back, and disappeared for a long while, during which (he would tell me) he looked in the various mail hold compartments, and talked with a supervisor, and with some carrier who wasn't ours but who knew something about the hold mail process, and they had nothing. So I asked why. With two hold-mail fails out of two tries (I forgot our Extreme Heat road trip) I wanted to know if I was somehow doing something wrong.

The clerk did not know why, as they never do. But he did ask if I'd filled out the hold mail form in person. No, I'd done it online. And so it turns out this was probably my problem. Because you know what you need when you have data in an online system about whose mail should be held and on what days? You need someone who can access the system and apparently our local post office currently does not have anyone who can access that system. This is a sufficiently ridiculous explanation that I believe it.

But they think that filling out a physical form, at the post office, will make it less likely that something goes wrong, I guess because someone at the post office will actually be able to read any of this. We'll see whenever our next multi-day trip out of town comes up.

Next thing on my photo roll is Crossroads Village, so we're in the Christmas-to-New-Years stretch of lots of lighting, so, please enjoy that. I am again trying to limit myself to sharing pictures that look better than usual.

bunnyhugger looking like she's having a great time already as we get to Crossroads Village.

Someone ahead of me peeking at the train as it arrives and isn't that a great halo around their hat?

Here's the holiday train going into warp right past us.

Inside one of the Crossroads Village preserved buildings. Here you see Santa Claus's Willy Wonka hat.

There's a shuttle that runs from the front of the village back to where the carousel is. We never take it because waiting for it would be slower than just walking back there, but you can see here at least four of the same guy wearing the same blue jacket and cap taking the ride.

But we're already back at the carousel building and looking back at the village, here.

Trivia: The fastest flight of the first-generation Bell X-1 aircraft was 960 miles per hour, Mach 1.45. Its highest was 69,000 feet. Source: American X-Vehicles: An Inventory - X-1 to X-50, Dennis R Jenkins, Tony Landis, Jay Miller.

Currently Reading: Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space, Adam Higginbotham. I should say if you haven't figured this out. Given how for the past week I haven't had time to write up what I've been up to, and that we were at Halloweekends all last week, I haven't actually had time to read one page in like a solid week now.

I am once more asking you to bear with me and look at photographs as I don't have the time to write things. Please enjoy the Potter Park Zoo Wonderland of Lights from ten months ago.

A peek inside one of the large animal veterinary buildings. I'm sure that you, as I, would really like to rub your back against that big brush.

Skating bear illuminations, much like ones we see at the Crossroads Village lights display.

A gazebo with its own lights. This looks out over an actual if small pond that was frozen over.

See? Pond both small and frozen.

The twin swans illuminations, which have been around forever and in a series of new locations.

This is the bottom of the curtain of vertically hung strands of light. I love how the loose ends form these pools of color. The horizontal strand in front is a couple feet off the ground, there to discourage people going up to the wall of light.

One of those illuminated swans with trail lights around them.

Corvid Corner is a new thing but I think you'd all agree you'd like to hang out there.

Here's another portal of light ready to engage and whisk you off to an alternate universe.

bunnyhugger getting a close-up picture of a couple trees heavily wrapped up to about what a tall guy could reach without a ladder.

Construction of the new Polehenge is looking good.

And here's a couple illuminated deer/reindeer that are looking good.

Trivia: In 1403 King Taejong of Korea initiated the printing of the country's laws using copper plates in the printing press. Source: A Place For Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order, Judith Flanders.

Currently Reading: Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space, Adam Higginbotham.