Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

Thank you, dear bunnyhugger.

In the humor blog mines this week: strange noises in the neighborhood, a strange discovery over by the sink, I pick a fight with none of my readers in Gil Thorp, and Jimmy Rabbit gets a wheelbarrow shakes my concept of the whole Arthur Scott Bailey novelistic universe.

• MiSTed: The Tale of Jimmy Rabbit, Part 6: The New Wheelbarrow
• I Would Have Thought the Streetcars Stopped Running That Late Past 1947
• Statistics Saturday: The Secret Meanings Of These Band Names
• Robert Benchley: Nature’s Prizes
• I Did Not Come Here to Be Jump-Scared by My Soap
• What’s Going on in Gil Thorp? Why Is Gil Thorp All Political Now? June – September 2025
• I Have Absolutely No News About _Nancy This Week
• MiSTed: The Tale of Jimmy Rabbit, Part 7: A Narrow Escape

How about we look in on Marvin and the Mechanical Museum from back in Mnovember?

Stuff in the back, including a claw game and that large Mannequin Doctor who is both not electric and pleasant.

And here's someone trapped in a pillar. It happens.

Cardiff Giant beside some of Marvin's Tiny Staff. (That's the area with the grill and soda machine and such.)

This proclaims itself a replica of Thomas Edison's carbon filament lamp and I don't see any reason to doubt that, particularly. I like that because of the reflection you get to see the filament from two angles.

Never seen before! In my pictures. The men's room at Marvin's. Inside the toilet stall is a sign about John F Kennedy's record as fastest public speaker, once recorded at 327 words per minute if you believe that.

And some of the stuff on the walls, above the hand dryer that has ballyhoo about how it's an experimental jet engine. The tiles underneath this are four M's in a row, but you can't see them.

Back on the game floor. Alas, once again, the Cedar Point roller coaster simulator was down. The thing offers six rides, two of which --- Mean Streak and Mantis --- have been reconfigured into different rides (Mantis only slightly, by changing from a standing coaster to a seated one; Mean Streak by a total rebuild). Gemini, Blue Streak, Magnum, and Iron Dragon are still as they would have been when the video was recorded. Note the music's by Peter Frampton.

More stuff you see by looking up, including a pig and a railroad engine plan.

Not sure I ever photographed this before but the vestibule had a big M in the tile, partly obscured by the floor mats.

A full-on Marvin's logo mat. I don't know if they ever sold these but it would've made sense.

More stuff on walls, including for some reason a gorilla chauffeur that doesn't read even slightly racially coded in any way, and a poster from the 4th Exposition de la Locomotion Aerienne, 1912.

Humpty Dumpty dressed for Halloween and looking like Pac-Man. Also you see the slushies they had on tap.

Trivia: The 62-mile Lancaster Turnpike, completed 1794, was built by a private joint-stock corporation. Of 2,275 applicants for stock only 600, chosen by a lottery wheel, were allowed to subscribe. Source: Engineering In History, Richard Shelton Kirby, Sidney Withington, Arthur Burr Darling, Frederick Gridley Kilgour. The book says the price was $7,000 per mile, which seems like a lot if that's 1794 dollars but not enough if that's in the dollars of the book's 1956 publication. Like, I'm not sure there was $434,000 in the whole country in 1794.

Currently Reading: Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, Daniel Okrent.

Last Friday we got to RLM Amusements for another Grand Rapids all-night pinball tournament. We'd been thinking to get back there and see the regression to the mean from my second-place finish last month, and besides, a couple of Lansing Pinball League folks were also planning to go out. How could we not join in 517 night in Grand Rapids?

So, skipping to the results: I did not repeat my finals performance. I didn't even make it to playoffs. I started out with a loss on 300, a bowling-themed electromechanical, and that's one of the three games I consider my pocket games, the ones I can always pull out a win on. I got to play three of my pocket games this time --- 300, Fast Draw, and Genesis --- and lost on each of them. I also lost to fellow Lansing player DG on Indianapolis 500, a game that, if I may be immodest, I rule on in its Pinball Arcade virtual version. On the other hand, I did beat PCL, also from Lansing, when we played on Dune, a boutique pinball game that we're not sure actually exists. RLM Amusements has a bunch of games that seem like they can't be real (Labyrinth, Evil Dead, Baby Pac-Man) and this is just one more in the line. I had gone in figuring, we're playing fourteen rounds, if I get seven wins I'm in playoffs, and I started out losing six games of the first eight. So I had to win five of the last six and what do you know, but that last six started with me playing bunnyhugger.

We haven't had to play head-to-head much at RLM, and we prefer it that way because c'mon. The game was Total Nuclear Annihilation, a retro 80s style game with a theme of ``light up a nuclear reactor and blow it up, nine times over''. It had been one of her strengths when the game was at The Pyramid Scheme in Grand Rapids, but at RLM Amusements she hasn't got its wave. This time around, I had the groove. I so had it. My first ball I got a nuclear reactor lit and blown up, and the second ball I got a multiball going that let me blow up a second reactor. bunnyhugger tried but, demoralized, couldn't get much of anything together. I beat her horribly, and then, with ball three --- and my best game ever, in that I'd never gotten a second reactor blown up --- I kept on going. This irritated her because I ran up what was already a ridiculous win. And I ended up on the high score table, both for points and for speed in blowing up reactors two and three, which I didn't even know was a possible achievement.

This set me going on a bit of a winning streak; I was able to beat JTK --- who'd come out when he heard we were visiting --- on Uncanny X-Men next, and I'd go on to beat PCL and someone else on Buck Rogers. But I took a loss on Evil Dead, where I couldn't find the shot to get anything started, and in the last round lost on Fast Draw, somehow.

And bunnyhugger? We kept comparing notes over the night; she started with a pair of disheartening losses, and then it became four losses before she finally got to Fast Draw and won. She got another win after that, but then took three losses in a row, sinking her below where she could expect to make playoffs. But then she started winning, racking up three victories in a row before the final game, on Terminator 2, an early-90s game that's always something of a coin flip on location like this. And she lost the flip, ending up just below me. (For the curious, we've played at RLM Amusements six times this year; I've finished ahead of her four times, she's finished ahead of me twice.)

We hung around a while, particularly because both JTK and PCL did make playoffs. Both lost in the first round. DG didn't make playoffs either. But we talked some, gossiped some, played against each other some --- we did a four-player game of Dune where once again, somehow, I know how to play Dune? For some reason? I don't know.

In other pinball, before and after the tournament I did a lot of playing on Baby Pac-Man, hoping to figure out something about that cursed game in case I get called up on it, during qualifying (random draws) or during playoffs (when specific games are chosen). I can't say I'm good at it, but I did put up a couple respectable games and one really good one, getting to the third maze, which is farther than I've done playing Ms Pac-Man. Possibly a few more sessions and the game won't be an easy loss for me.

I also finally played some of the video games, in-between rounds, trying to soothe my disappointment at lost pocket games. That Bust-A-Move/Puzzle Bobble game? That's pretty fun, I like that.

Now, more of my antepenultimate visit to Marvin's at the former Hunters Square mall, back in November:

A sequence of Broom Hilda drawings to support someone's Academy of Music. I'm curious how the Academy came to seek Russell Myers's attention.

No Smoking sign alongside a giant cigarette.

Big Head that I can't swear was ever used in a Detroit Thanksgiving Day Parade. Probably not; it's a bit big even for the Big Heads.

King Cobra, once again not up to the challenge of striking at anyone's hands.

Some of the old magician posters, like the renowned ... Virgil, I assume with the astounding Aeneid. Plus a reprint of one of those Beatles at Shea Stadium advertisements.

And it wouldn't be a Marvin's visit without a picture of the Cardiff Giant tucked away in his box.

Trivia: In 1917 the draft bureau reported that about one-third of all the American men called to serve were physically unfit, many with diet-caused conditions like rickets or bad teeth. Source: A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression, Jane Ziegelman, Andrew Coe.

Currently Reading: Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, Daniel Okrent.

No time to write stuff today, so please enjoy a double dose of Marvin's pictures from back in November. We're finally almost inside! Also please read up on What's Going on in Gil Thorp? Why Is Gil Thorp All Political Now? June - September 2025 as I get all the politics going.

Pinball playfields used as decorations on the vestibule. Left to right theese are F-14 Tomcat, Fire, and Ali.

These I don't know as well because they're Gameplan games and who ever sees them? The one on the right is Captain Hook, from 1985. The one in the center is a game called Agents 777, from 1984, like you'd imagine.

Sorry to spend so much time on Agents [sic] 777, but I think you'll agree the more you look the more you're mystified, starting with the three 7's in the car.

See, a gambling-theme game makes sense as it is, and a heist or gangster-themed game, sure. Cops-versus-gangsters, yeah, I get that. And then ...

You know it's pinball because there's a sexy bell.

I assume, given the slot machine theme, that's a cherry that has those cherry breasts.

Enough of that. Getting inside here, and the Pinball Row lineup ahead of league night.

The airplanes on the conveyor belt ready for someone to put a quarter in and make them go. Those darned zeppelins, always tipping over.

From over near the men's bathroom, lots of stuff, including two carousels that might or might not be for sale.

And trophies! These would be awarded the next month, as league finals, to the top three finishers in A and the top finisher in B. You know the champion of B.

League night getting organized, so much as it ever does.

More of those planes and, of course, Ghost Homer choking Pirate Bart.

Trivia: On 23 September 1948 the FCC issued ``the freeze'' of new TV channel authorizations. Source: The Forgotten Network: DuMont and the Birth of American Television, David Weinstein. 123 already-authorized stations were allowed to continue, although only a couple dozen were on the air in 1948. A bit over a hundred of them were on by the time the freeze was lifted in spring 1952.

Currently Reading: Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, Daniel Okrent.

I mentioned this the other day but wasn't explicit about it. Last weekend we went to bunnyhugger's parents to spend a day grilling-and-chilling, as the phrase goes. At one point her mom had asked us to go to Meijer's and get whatever vegetarian burgers or whatever we wanted cooked, but that changed by the time we actually went down there. They provided way too much to eat, several burgers each and two or three hot dogs each and so much potato salad and so many baked beans that we are still, over a week later, finishing off leftovers.

As usual the highlight of the day, for their dog, was bunnyhugger walking the dog. She takes the dog on an extra-long walk, all the way across the river (they're on the riverbank) to the park opposite it, and over to where we're in sight of downtown but not really there. She gets so many chances to smell interesting things and to pee and then scratch at the ground in completely random directions, like she knows you can use this motion to spread your scent around but not how to do it effectively. Also to meet other dogs and show every possible reaction from being really chill to being surprisingly offended that the dog is there.

Two curious things happened along the walk. One is that near the end of the walk bunnyhugger tried to turn down a different street than she always uses, and the dog wasn't having it. The dog just stayed on the correct sidewalk until we shrugged and figured if it was that important to her, fine. You wouldn't think a dog would get that particular especially about a walk she gets every couple weeks at most. The other strange thing is at one point I got ahead of bunnyhugger and the dog and turned back toward them, and the dog got very suspicious of this, growling as if she didn't know who I was or what I was doing there. She shook it off, but, wow, I've been visiting this dog every month or so for close to a decade. You'd think I'd have made some impression.

Last time we had gone over we wanted to bring a roleplaying board game, Aftermath, but couldn't find it. This time, we found it --- I thought bunnyhugger had found it while looking for something else, but she didn't, so I guess we have to suppose it was the Eternals hiding something and returning it so we would make a bad decision differently --- and didn't have anywhere near the time to play. Maybe next time, unless it goes missing again. We should get back to them in the next couple weeks.

Next up: a visit to Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum, as it stood in early November last year. Hoping its replacement stands soon.

The front door of Marvin's, promising nothing nicer anywhere and advertising the recommendation of its owner.

One of or maybe the Marvin's truck, in case you need mechanical stuff delivered somewhere.

The ghost of the Hunter's Square sign, reflecting the ancient history of this as an indoor mall that became a strip mall and now a nothing, replaced with a Meijer's or something.

I know you're thinking that's a big red-bodied spider up there.

But no, it's the Marvin's clock, which has the hours run backwards. The second hand runs backward too. It wsa nowhere near 11:00 when I took this photo; I'm not sure whether the hour and minute hands didn't work at all or if they were just so far out of time it didn't matter.

And the hours for the museum, including the note about how they intend to be open through the end of the calendar year (they got past that by a couple days) and intended to reopen in a new location.

Trivia: NASA's seal and ``meatball'' logo were principally designed by James J Modarelli, head of the Research Reports Division at the NASA Lewis Research Center (now the Glenn Research Center), with the assistance of the Heraldic Branch of the Army Office of the Quartermaster General (now the Army Institute of Heraldry). Source: Emblems of Exploration: LOgos of the NACA and NASA, Joseph R Chambers, Mark A Chambers. Monographs in Aerospace History no 56.

Currently Reading: Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, Daniel Okrent.