Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

Saturday, the day of the open pinball tournament, we got up early enough that had we hustled we might have got to the venue in time for the official calling of the roll, just in case enough people were absent that we could have got in as ``non-dead bodies''. It would transpire that that everyone who expected to play was there; I don't think there was even a need for the official alternates. (This is not to say I wasn't startled when I saw a list of matches and that there were multiple people who had no opponent. This is because I forgot that the 24-person championship gave the top eight seeds a first-round bye.)

But we did also miss the giving out of instructions and the group photo and the start of ceremonies. I blame that it was nice and cozy in a mattress much less worn-out than ours. Also little things like bunnyhugger going off to find coffee and along the way discovering the first dozen living rooms. Also I had my first cup-of-oatmeal instant breakfast in maybe forever and that reminded me that I do like oatmeal. It doesn't just have to be just for pet rabbits who aren't taking their regular food.

We got there in the middle of the first round, and joined the good number of people hanging around the front of the building. The back room had all the pinball games up for tournament play. And, as non-competitors, we did our best not to venture in back except to use the bathroom and hope the bathroom would hold up to the strain under it. It did, which was, pardon me, a relief. The port-a-potty brought in the previous Sunday was still in the parking lot, I assume for insurance.

So I mostly stayed up front. Some of this was working on little goals of my own, like playing Creature From The Black Lagoon well enough to get Super Mode started. I failed at this, although I did get to playing the game much more reliably well than I had before. Also I gave some fresh tries to Led Zeppelin, a modern Stern pinball game that I've never had a good time on. You know what? I still don't have a good time on it. I mentioned to KEG --- formerly of Lansing, now an out-of-stater who would the next day become the first non-Michigan woman to compete in the state women's championship --- how weird it was they made a game with absolutely no fun in it. She agreed, although she did manage to put together an actually good game. Still, it's a lemon of a table.

My other pastime was watching the stream of what was going on in the next room over. If you'd like to see that stream, you can watch all nine hours of it here and if you see me in the video somewhere it's news to me. But it was fun sitting around with other pinball people and talking about the games. One guy mentioned he was surprised to learn that I was funny. Maybe I'm being too reserved in my normal play.

There were people who filled out brackets to see who did their best predicting the championship. I was not among them, although if I had, I'd have put my money on JPJ who did, in fact, go on to be the champion for the fourth time in a row. But there were many matches that I would have called wrong, if I'd been asked. AJH losing in the first round, for example, or TY losing to DLO.

Also something I didn't imagine would happen? The march of JBS all the way to finals. JBS also made history by being I think the first non-Michigander to play in the Michigan state finals. He's from Toledo, apparently, so gets to a lot of southeast Michigan events. I won't say anything against him, though, as I'm not going to rag on anyone who's still masking. JBS goes farther than that, bringing with him some kind of disinfecting light gadget that I'm not sure actually does things, but that he does wave across the buttons of the pinball machine before his every turn.

Anyway, I felt enough that a Michigander should win the state championship that I was hoping someone would knock him out. And it took until meeting JPJ --- who's currently ranked the 10th-best player in the world --- in the finals for someone to do. JPJ knocked out JBS in four straight games, which is even better than I'd imagined. Still, heck of a finish.

We stayed through to the end of the day, of course, and closed the place out. And then had to turn around and come back because FAE had forgotten their laptop. Fortunately AJH was only a minute away and was able to come back to let them in. Could have gone much worse.

Now let's share some more pictures from Cedar Point back on Juneteenth.

Now here's something we haven't seen on the Frontier Trail before: a map! They've been playing up, some, the history of the park as part of nostalgia marketing and some of it's included this guide to what you can see if you take pictures and put them through that Photoshop filter that turns it into line art. The actual trail does not curve nearly this much.

And here's the sun coming out, as seen from near Thunder Canyon, the water rapids ride.

The former location of Snake River Falls, with the track of the shoot-the-chutes now gone.

The boats across the lake were used for the short-lived revival of the river boat ride, and now they're being props again.

New this year: they renovated the Happy Friar food stand out of existence and into this new structure. Instead of a walk-up stand you now go in, but they have trays full of the cheese-on-a-stick hot-dog-on-a-stick, and fries ready to pick up and go, which is speedier. I don't dislike it, but I'm sad they reduced the happy friar art from a large three-dimensional cartoon board to a restrained little sign. Maybe it's period-appropriate to the era of we've-heard-of-the-Tudors-but-aren't-going-crazy but it's less fun.

And look at that, a train running on Top Thrill 2!

Trivia: In the final Congressional debates for what would become the 25th Amendment Senator Robert F Kennedy inquired what the proposed amendment meant by a President's ``inability'' to perform the duties; was it total inability? Physical? Mental? Senator Birch Bayh, speaking for the amendment, offered that it should be taken to be anything which presented an inability to perform the constitutional duties of President, and should not be limited to mental disability: ``It is conceivable that the President might fall into the hands of the enemy, for example''. Source: One Heartbeat Away: Presidential Disability and Succession, Birch Bayh. Kennedy also pressed on the question of how long a disability should be expected to last and Bayh offered that it should not be specified in the Constitution lest it complicate a crisis.

Currently Reading: A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II, Maury Klein.

This weekend saw a lot of Michigan under winter storm advisories and watches and warnings and an ever-escalating series of concerns. Which would have been fine enough to sit out, except that we had business taking us to the western end of the state. I mean the lower peninsula. In particular, to Fremont, home of the Clubhouse Arcade (formerly Special when Lit), the exact same spot we were at the weekend before. Friday would be the last day of practice time at the venue hosting the Michigan State Pinball Championship Series (Saturday's event) and then the Women's Championship Series (Sunday's). As state women's representative bunnyhugger had to attend Sunday, and as one of the qualifying competitors she had to attend Friday. The least ridiculous to do would be to spend Friday through Sunday there. Especially as it's a two-hour drive in ordinary circumstances and we had the threat of bad weather, basically, from Friday morning through to tomorrow morning.

As another element to things, we had a carpooler. FAE, a non-binary player who the past few months started playing in bunnyhugger's women's tournaments and sweeping them all with unsettling ease, by virtue of those appearances in women's tournaments gained a state women's rating. And their finishes in Lansing Pinball League and in Pinball At The Zoo --- coed events --- gave them a high enough 'open' rating to qualify for one of the eight positions reserved for open-tournament players. (bunnyhugger had her position from women's-only events; she needed a couple better finishes at RLM tournaments, or in Lansing league, to get an invite for her open finishes.) But FAE doesn't drive, whether for lack of a car or lack of learning how to drive, and asked if we could give them a ride and it would be churlish to refuse.

While we set out close to our noon target Friday, we were not close to getting to Fremont by the 2pm expected. This was the snow's fault. It was heavy enough to be annoying, though not so heavy as to cause traffic hazards. Just slowness, especially once we got past the Grand Rapids outskirts and were on two-lane county and smaller roads. The drive lasted three hours, meaning that we got into town just in time to check in to our bed-and-breakfast/AirBnB (turns out the place works both legitimate and Internet bookings), the Gerber Family Guest House. So we moved our stuff into there first.

The house turns out to be something like forty houses grown together. It is so large. There are a whole bunch of rooms, each with a person's name, suggesting the most prominent resident of each, and the rooms all have their own bathroom, inviting the question of what these rooms were before they were bathrooms. For our room (Sally) I think the answer was ``nursery room''. It has the bathroom sink on the outside wall, which made sure the water started frigid for the first couple minutes after you turned it on, so that can't be the original plan. Bathroom sinks get interior pipes where possible. The room also has more closet space than our actual house, one a good-size walk-in closet and one a charming little shelved closet with a three-quarters-height door. It gave me such strong feelings of being at the home my grandparents built in the 40s, right down to the sloped ceiling in the bathroom.

Also the place had an estimated twenty living rooms, all connected to one another, plus multiple kitchens. One was probably a servant's kitchen. One --- the yellow one --- we were invited to use and was where they had the snacks available for free use. Also at least two sinks and two four-burner stoves, one next to each other, as if I were making a joke about the brobdingnagian nature of the place. The many rooms were also decorated with Gerber family photographs and trinkets from the history of the Gerber baby food factory, so you could have some idea of who the people who had guests in this house were. They were in black-and-white and dressed like your grandparents' wedding pictures.

It was a neat place, large and open and with a seeming never-ending number of new rooms to discover. Also apart from bunnyhugger, FAE, and this one person I think was doing housekeeping Saturday morning I never saw anyone else in it. bunnyhugger had better success, spotting some other pinball players hanging out in common areas Friday night, but I had stayed in our room catching up on my Internet friends and whatnot, so missed all of that. Really fun, charming spot, though, and already at the top of our list for if we ever have to stay overnight in Fremont again.

Finally we reach the next event on my photo roll, back in the United States but without setting my camera back to Eastern Time! So please take the metadata on this with a grain of salt and conversion from Central European Summer Time to Eastern Daylight Time. This was Juneteenth, which we thought might be a good day for riding at Cedar Point. It was ... mm, there's been better. It looks like Father's Day might be the better mid-summer amusement park day.

This would also be our last visit to the park before Siren's Curse, the roller coaster dropped into the park to distract from the problems Top Thrill 2 was having, would open.

And, as you can see from the park sinking under six inches of water, maybe they shouldn't have invited the Siren to Curse the park. We weren't sure any roller coaster would open through this. ... Also note that the park had replaced its Cedar Point 150 sign erected for the sesquicentennial.

The carousels were running! We got some damp rides to the Midi-enabled band organ.

And Blue Streak would be our first Cedar Point coaster of the year. I'm inexplicably fascinated by the channel dug into the ground for the dispatch of the coaster trains.

The park was doing brisk business selling rain ponchos.

This uncharacteristically empty restaurant used to be a Chickie and Pete's, the only one I ever ate in (I guess it's a chain), and before that, was a sports bar where Dad could hang out while the kids were having fun. It's empty this year except for the person sitting on the porch there. Probably something will be done with it eventually but who knows when or what it'll become? (Another restaurant.)

Trivia: In debating whether and how to ask Vice-President Chester Arthur to assume the office of President following the shooting, but before the death, of James Garfield, the only strong precedent the Cabinet could agree was relevant were the periods of insanity of British King George III, when the Prince of Wales only accepted the regency following an Act of Parliament. The first of those periods was November 1788 through February 1789, when a Regency Bill was approved by the Commons but not settled by the Lords; the second, in October 1810, when a Regency Bill was passed, ultimately with the King's assent. Source: From Failing Hangs: The Story of Presidential Succession, John D Feerick.

Currently Reading: A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II, Maury Klein. I swear to you all, I am reading this book, it's just over 800 pages and I haven't had much time to simply sit and read.

In pictures, I'd like to share the last of our photos at Oostende and then getting back to our hotel, as we had to leave early and get to Amsterdam for our early-morning flight.

Here's what it looks like when you'd think you could just hop onto a drawbridge as it closes. I bet if you tried all sorts of people would be tense at you, though.

And we're back and traffic can move freely again!

Under the overhang here are those portals to the bicycle dimension, and far in the background is De Lijn.

Unfortunately they have vehicle-wrapping advertisements in Belgium too, but at least the ones in Dutch read funny. (It translates something like 'So that's the taste of pleasure'.)

Here's our train! It looks so very narrow but it's an extremely normal size once you're in.

Unfortunately the ride back was so packed there was no good photograph-taking, or even sitting. But we got back to our home station and hey, here's that blue ring again!

Statue standing outside the welkom-in-De-Panne center of a woman who looks like she's seen better days maybe, but so have we all.

Also found in De Panne: funny supermarket names!

Really big fans of American television networks here.

And this was our hotel. I think we were on the second floor, so you could actually see our hotel room from here.

There comes a point where you have so much fire extinguishing technology on display at the hotel that it becomes unsettling. I know you're asking why that second fire extinguisher is chained up but don't worry, there's a guy comes around with the key every like five minutes.

The view out our window, which makes this corner of De Panne look like a SimCity 2000 location.

Trivia: By 1777, thanks to Lavoisier's research, France was able to produce two million pounds of saltpeter per year, with a yield considered the best in the world. By the 1780s it could propel cannonballs 50 percent farther than British powder did. Source: The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America, Steven Johnson.

Currently Reading: A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II, Maury Klein.

In my humor blog this week, as you've seen on your Reading page or perhaps in your RSS reader (LiveJournal Friends Pages count) you've seen the end of one MiSTing, a whole brand-new one, two panels from a dumb comic book, some comic strip action, and me complaining about AI scraping. Want to live it all again? Here's your chance:

• MiSTed: The Tale of Jimmy Rabbit, Conclusion
• Statistics December: Another Month Wrecked by AI Scammers
• Statistics Saturday: Steps in Using an Analog Clock as Makeshift Compass
• Robert Benchley: Lights, Please!
• Starting to Think Mad Scientists Are Just Trouble
• What's Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? What's coming for The Phantom? October 2025 - January 2026
• As We Consider the Legacy of Scott Adams, the Dilbert Guy
• MiSTed: The Invisible Planet

And in pictures, we're as far along De Lijn as we would get and walking around some before heading back to our hotel. Take a look.

And here we are at Oostende's famous Cathedral ... uh ... something. Just love all that spikiness, though; it's very soothing to keep looking at and spotting new detail.

And a monument nearby to the soldiers and dead of the World Wars.

Not sure if the smaller structure, left, is the old cathedral or merely a church.

The older cathedral has this text explaining it, although the shadow of the inset makes it a difficult thing to photograph and so transcribe.

Another view of the cathedral, looking even richer with detail than before.

Small sign letting you know about the mausoleum here too.

Sometimes you just need to get really close to an enormous building and look up.

Sometimes you just need to get not quite so close to an enormous older building and look up.

Found the Hidden Mickey! Up on top of the frame there, turned upside-down.

Huh! Now what would a heraldic shield and a pointing brass arrow mean for us?

Well, look at that, we're being led around the cathedral right to ...

... a big communal space? I'm not sure we needed the guidance here. Maybe it makes sense if you've got the pocket guide. Please note that this is a duly-posted Zone.

Trivia: In 2017 World Bank chief economist Paul Romer was stripped of control of the research division after declaring he would not clear any report for publication if the word ``and'' made up more than 2.6% of its text. Source: Seriously Curious: The Facts and Figures That Turn Our World Upside-Down, Editor Tom Standage. Romer claimed to be trying to improve the readability of reports by discouraging complex compound sentences. The 2.6% margin was apparently chosen so the texts would match the readability of academic papers.

Currently Reading: A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II, Maury Klein.

I know what you really want to know is What’s Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? What’s coming for The Phantom? October 2025 – January 2026 so after reading that, please enjoy a double dose of pictures from our ride on De Lijn:

We've reached the portion of the shore where there's parasailing, that's nice to see.

Quick stop to have detraining passengers get eaten by a crocodile.

Here's a hotel, I believe, that has this mesh wrapping that caught my fancy, I think because it looks like those mesh bags they'll put an orange in to carry.

And the Atlantic Ocean, seen from the other side from what we were used to back in New Jersey.

Nice and tolerably centered view of the shoreline and I'm guessing a parking payment station.

There's those parasailers again.

Is it really the Spilliaert House? Sign says so. I can't tell you anything more than that.

And here's the station at Oostende, roughly the halfway point and where we had to stop to turn around.

It was a multimodal station, buses, interurban, trains, probably boats, and as you can see, portable holes.

The portable hole, you can see, leads to a dimension of bicycle parking.

Also a drawbridge, raised and lowered as boats moved along the channel.

Here at the fabulous Belgian Hall of Justice ...

Trivia: New Jersey's constitution of 1844 expanded male suffrage to all adult white male citizens who had lived one year in the state and five months in a particular county. There was no move made to restore the voting rights of Black people or women, which they had enjoyed from 1776 through 1807. Source: New Jersey: A History of the Garden State, Maxine N Lurie, Richard Veit.

Currently Reading: A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II, Maury Klein.

We are coming up on the Michigan State Pinball Championship, in which I will not be playing. Neither will bunnyhugger. We don't play enough events, given how busy the Michigan pinball schedule is. Nor how competitive it is; even if we did do some pinball event every weekend we might not earn enough competition points to make the top-24 in the state.

But the day after the (open) Pinball Championship is the Women's Championship, which bunnyhugger runs and is also qualified for. And this week she's been calling news departments and such for tv stations anywhere that might be interested, and a few have got back to her. One of the Grand Rapids stations hopes to talk with her Thursday for a segment to air Friday. There's this Muskegon station that ... might or might not actually exist. She's been unable to tell, from their web site. And closer to home?

Lansing's Channel 10 interviewed her last week, for a segment that ran on today's 3:00 afternoon news show. This didn't talk about the state championship, though, just the upcoming start of the Lansing Pinball League season. bunnyhugger got to talk a fair bit about what's fun in pinball, and how the league is a pleasant, comfortable place welcoming to new players, and at the end of this she got cut off for mysterious reasons. I assume there was a time constraint that couldn't be worked around.

bunnyhugger was worried the video they took of her playing Attack From Mars would show off to any experienced player that she wasn't doing well under the news cameras. She needn't have worried; the editing cut up the flow of the game enough that all you could tell is she kept the ball from draining several times over. And that, in the end, she hit the shot that blew up a saucer, exactly the sort of visually distinctive and exciting thing you want to show on TV. There are more challenging accomplishments you can do on other games at our local hipster bar, but I'm not sure there are any so obvious to the novice that Something Exciting Is Happening.

Sunday we too De Lijn, an interurban that's been running the west coast of Belgium since the 19th century; the whole run is supposed to be an outstanding experience. Unfortunately we could only take it halfway, because we'd discovered late Saturday night that we had to leave De Panne early in order to make our plane flight home Monday morning. So we took half the line and you're going to see it.

Waiting for the train! We had our tickets and were just waiting to hop on.

On the train here, looking back at the Blue Ring that's surely the companion to that Golden Ring over in Royal Oak or whatever it is in Michigan.

One of many features passed on the way up the coast; I believe it was a memorial to Great War dead. Don't mess with that Nood-opening; looks dangerous.

We have no idea what that Ferris wheel's deal is.

And then we encountered this sign of these beloved(?) Belgian(?) cartoon(?) stars(?) on the side of this hotel(?).

I feel like I'm looking at a meme.

Trivia: The Chicago Tunnel Railway is a system of about 62 miles of track, almost all underneath the city. In the 1940s 150 electric locomotives and three thousand cars delivered coal and other freight to basements of buildings in the Loop and hauled away ashes and more freight. Source: The Story of American Railroads, Stewart H Holbrook.

Currently Reading: A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II, Maury Klein.