Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

Friday I got up, finished packing, and drove ... not to Pinball At The Zoo right away. Instead it was over to FAE's place, to give them a ride to the event. They don't drive, and the only really practical way for them to get down there was to get a ride with someone or else take the train at a ridiculous early hour of the day given the show opened at 1 pm. They had gotten a ride down with bunnyhugger the day before, and taken the train back in the early evening, and they were planning to do the same Friday evening.

So thing about this and where it makes things awkward ... well, FAE had been figuring we would drive them down to the show and back, but never got around to actually specifically asking us, and we didn't want to just be the assumed drivers so we deliberately missed cues to ask ``so do you need a ride?''. Which is maybe a passive-aggressive jerk move on our part, but then (as another friend watching the situation pointed out) if we don't set the boundary of ``you have to ask us for a ride'' we'll be their designated driver to every pinball event ever. As boundaries to ``we'll only give a ride if you ask us for it'' seems gentle enough. And yet ...

Was there a particular reason FAE was going down to Kalamazoo and back every day? Especially on Saturday by train when it would arrive somewhere near 10:30 am, dangerously close to the start of the women's tournament (which they'd be playing in). Why not get a hotel room in town? Turns out they had to be back every evening to care for their mother, a thing we had no idea. They didn't volunteer further details and we didn't ask but it still left me feeling guilty despite the lack of any logical reason, especially since, again, my boundary was ``tell me you want a ride''.

Anyway, we talked a little bit during the drive. Not much, since I'm not much of a talker and neither is FAE. But some. I'd asked for example if they were figuring to focus on the women's tournament or --- since they're already assured of a place in next year's women's state championship on the basis of their winning this year's --- they'll focus more on the Open tournaments. They've always been good enough to win the Open, coed, championship, but didn't have finishes in the high-value tournaments for it, and Pinball At The Zoo offers the highest-value tournaments in Michigan.

This was, I admit, not just my building up their courage to stretch themselves. FAE's entering the women's tournaments at Lansing has sunk bunnyhugger's prospects of getting into the state women's championship, because the local women's league is worth enough to get one person into the state championship, but not really two. And FAE is more likely to be that person than bunnyhugger, even with bunnyhugger's playing more women's championships. FAE taking up a slot in the women's tournament at Pinball At The Zoo made bunnyhugger's position for that high-value tournament all the harder.

Well, reader, FAE entered the Open tournament but put in only a handful of games, and (perhaps for want of time) didn't even try the Classics or the Daily tournaments, instead securing a top seed for the 16-person playoffs. Shows my ability to nudge people.

That all said, the last two nights of the women's league in Lansing, which have been group matchplay --- the same group of three or four people playing each other five times over in the night --- have seen FAE and bunnyhugger quite closely matched. FAE has ended up ahead on points, but not by many. The question of who the league can send to state might be opening up. Maybe I'm optimistic; I often am.

Though we were coming near the end of our visit to Idlewild, we weren't there yet, so you're getting some more pictures now:

Probably the last horse that I rode; if not, it was the one bunnyhugger rode.

And the flip side, looking for identifying numbers on the inner side of their headgear. Doesn't look like there was any, or if there was, it was painted over.

I was correct about the ride being a The Spider and here's the art to prove it! You know this is a family park because it's a big friendly spider.

On the way out we saw there was a show going on! So we stopped to see what was going on and why they were throwing beach balls into the audience.

So the show was about a couple women deciding what to do for the perfect summer holiday and going through little vignettes of it turning horrible. Also we loved that they wheeled out this grille for a Pontiac Behemoth for the show.

This was some ribbon-twirling done as part of a ``what if we go camping'' scene. The ribbons started out as part of the 'campfire' which was a great gimmick.

Trivia: After Chicago movie entrepreneurs Balaban and Katz had a meatpacking refrigeration company install cooling in their Central Park Theater (in 1917) and the Tivoli and the Chicago movie theaters (in 1921) the city's Health Commissioner urged pregnant women and people with weak lungs to frequent these theaters as the air was ``purer than Pike's Peak''. Source: Cool Comfort: America's Romance with Air-Conditioning, Marsha E Ackermann. I don't know what's wrong with me, I wonder if the Health Commissioner came into any unexpected cash windfalls around the time of this announcement is all.

Currently Reading: Archaeology, May/June 2026, Editor Jarrett A Lobell.

Last weekend was the season again for Pinball At The Zoo, in Kalamazoo's Expo Center and not the city zoo. It ran Thursday through Saturday, and while I took Friday off for it, I didn't feel I could comfortably take Thursday off. The other programmer at work was on vacation this whole while and it seemed like a poor choice to leave them completely programmer-free for too very long. But everything work-wise turned out basically all right so maybe I should have tried for it anyway.

bunnyhugger, though, got a hotel in town, one just down the street from the expo center. It was probably walking range. She went down Thursday night, figuring that she would do much better particularly on Saturday when the show started at 9 am. Certainly we'd have a happier time of it not driving back Friday night after 10 pm and then getting up in time to make the 75-minute-drive into town by that hour, if we needed to put in any last-minute games to qualify. I think the logic of that was basically sound though as it turned out we didn't get as much sleep Friday-to-Saturday as we should, and didn't have any last-minute games that helped anything any.

My staying at the hotel with her Friday night was also the cause for a first with Athena, our pet rabbit, and a near-first for any pet rabbit: we left her alone overnight. We left her with a full-to-the-brim bowl of water, and several heaps of hay, and a tremendous pile of vegetables she probably ate right away, and three meals' worth of pellets most of them in her toy ball so she'd have to roll it around over time to get them all. This turned out fine, giving us reason to think future overnight stays without bringing the rabbit down to bunnyhugger's parents will be all right. (The mice we put extra food in their cage, and made sure both water bottles were full, but that's all they needed besides having the cage closed tight.)

While there without me bunnyhugger played, mostly, games for the Women's tournament, getting a spot for herself that wasn't great but at least had promise. She also put in games for the Classics tournament, the Main tournament, and the Daily tournament. She wouldn't qualify for playoffs in the Daily tournament --- only the top eight would, and her play put her in 27th place out of 76 entrants --- but that should be something near three points in the International Flipper Pinball Association ratings, not bad for playing four games of pinball.

Friday, I'd join her, and this time I'd be bringing the big spoiler ...

With that teased, let's enjoy a bit more Idlewild as we braced up to the need to finish the day and start the very long drive home.

Oh yeah so a thing about amusement parks that have been around forever, such as Idlewild, which goes back to the 1870s? They used to keep animals in gobsmackingly inappropriate conditions. Here's the sign, and some of the structure, for what used to be The Bear House. About a half-decade after this was built Rollo Coaster was put in, running right over it; I don't know when they last had bears but I can imagine with dread the captive bears also dealing with a roller coaster going over their home every two minutes.

Here's a picture into the afternoon sun of Rollo returning, approaching the far end of The Bear House.

Happier and less uncomfortable: the carousel's pavilion, in slightly dappled shade.

Some of the horses as we got ready for another ride on the antique.

I tried doing a tracking shot and it came out as well as possible, considering!

I think I aimed the camera wrong for this picture but there's something I like about having the nearest horses' heads falling outside of frame and only the most distant horses making eye contact.

Trivia: In August 1927 Smiles O'Timmons, a onetime circus acrobat who turned to wingwalking after losing a leg, had his wooden leg get stuck in the wing of a Canuck (a Canadian version of the Jenny) flown by Bob Clohecy. After a half-hour of effort O'Timmons got the leg detached, but in the process lost his pants to the wind, so that when Clohecy managed to land the unbalanced, damaged plane it was to an audience seeing a semi-nude one-legged man clinging to the plane wing. Source: Mastering the Sky: A History of Aviation From Ancient Times to the Present, James P Harrison. An event that colorful I assume is drawn from newspaper reports of the incident (which happened over Pennsylvania) and I will suppose there are elements that may have been exaggerated in the reporting.

Currently Reading: Archaeology, May/June 2026, Editor Jarrett A Lobell.

Another Thursday's approached and is fully or basically over so it's time to look at my humor blog's past week of complaining about stuff and talking about comic strips. Here's what you could have seen there:

• MiSTed: FX Down To Mobius, Part 13: Two Weeks Before Doomsday
• Statistics March: Yes, I Remembered to Check
• Statistics Saturday: Months Ranked By How Strong A Statement It Makes As A Name
• _Mark Trail_ Is Old, Nature-y
• It Has Been a Day of Minor Adventures
• What's Going On In Prince Valiant? Where did these Norse warriors come from? January - April 2026
• The Logic Puzzle
• MiSTed: FX Down To Mobius, Part 14: Sonic Panics!

When last we left Idlewild we were approaching the Wild Mouse. And how's that working out?

Here we are by the station and you can see, the cars are mice! Whiskers and big ears and everything. Not at all clear here is the arm rests there have faded red markings where you're to put your hands ahead of several extremely sharp brakes at the end of the course, which is how you can divide the people who've been on this ride before from those who haven't.

The station and, in the distance, the lift hill, most of which is for some reason at a slight angle. Story goes that at an earlier incarnation it was, or was supposed, to have a rotating barrel-of-fun around it but apparently it's not clear whether it ever actually did.

And here's a mouse car near the end of the track where the brakes hit hard, over and over.

Off in the lawn past the Wild Mouse is what I imagine used to be the cooking grill and has long since become a weed tree collection point.

But let's look back at the Wild Mouse and another train near the brake runs.

Flying Aces is a flying scooters ride they've had since 2007, which is why it's in Olde Idlewild.

Noticed underneath the sign showing Rollo Coaster's wait times and operating hours that they have a whole bucket of potential wait times.

Panoramic photo showing Rollo, the carousel, and other stuff to the sides. Flying Aces is off to the left of the picture.

And here's the station, with the new trains that won't even dispatch if you're standing up and fiddling with your camera, alas.

The operator's station, though, and it's still got the brake levers that still get used.

Good view of the front of the train and also a sense of just how new the fenceposts and air brakes are: you can still see the carpenter's marks in the wood.

And here's the new trains that don't just have divided seats and individual restraints but also blinders to keep you from sticking your hand far enough out to be whacked by a tree, a thing that apparently never happened before but they're closing off.

Trivia: In 1880 Kansas had about sixteen times as many cattle as it had in 1860. Nebraska had thirty times. Source: Food In History, Reay Tannahill.

Currently Reading: Archaeology, May/June 2026, Editor Jarrett A Lobell. The magazine's always interesting but the advertisements make me wonder who exactly they figure is reading. There's stuff you might expect, like archeology cruises, but there's also, like, $99 chronometers and seminars with Lech Wałęsa and knives with bone handles.

The Capital City Film Festival is, well, just what you'd think from the name. It's been running sixteen years now, although for no particular reason we've never gone to one of their showings. We have been in our hipster bar when something for the festival got going, but we were there for our own purposes, understand. This not-particularly-intended skipping ended a week ago Sunday when we went to one of the venues --- a church just north of the Capitol --- for a showing of Animal Farm. Sort of. They'd be doing it with a live soundtrack playing, on jazz instruments, a form we've never seen a movie do before. They did the show by stripping out almost all the soundtrack to the 1954 film --- you know, the CIA one --- a process that left the event's composer with a deeper appreciation than he already had for the music, as he talked about in the question-and-answer session afterward that didn't go too badly.

On the way in we happened to see old pinball friends PHD and RED, although we quickly got separated and didn't catch up with them later. (bunnyhugger even missed seeing RED as the ticket-taker wanted to say something to her.)

It's probably not weird that I hadn't seen the movie before, and only slightly weird that I've never read the book. This is when I learned the movie was animated by Halas and Batchelor, who also animated some of the Gene Deitch Popeye cartoons of the 60s, so I was thrown by recognizing their style only not in ``picture moves like one out of every three seconds''.

So the movie, famously, alters the end of George Orwell's downer of a story, resolving with the Animal Farm animals deciding the time for revolution has come again. I can't say it doesn't fit the logic of the story, though, especially since I got to live through the late 80s where that kinda actually happened, with stunningly less bloodshed than your average revolution.

So it all made for a good experience and I'm more interested in seeing the original movie as it actually appeared. Might even read the book sometime. I certainly felt smart identifying all the allegorical elements in the movie (you can't tell me the pathetic showing of the farmers trying to retake Animal Farm isn't mocking the Allied invasion of Russia in 1918) and given the book is such a favorite choice for high school classes they can't be that much harder to pick out in the actual text.

Now, let's enjoy some pictures of Idlewild.

Comic foreground asking you to picture yourself on the Lincoln Highway, which Idlewild is. You might dimly recall that so is Dutch Wonderland.

And here's Rollo Coaster, one of the few roller coasters built in the 1930s. It's a really good terrain coaster, hugging the landscape for its fun.

Since our last visit the park had (because of an accident) replaced its old cars with these, that have seat dividers, lap restraints, and even side restraints keeping hands away from trees. When we last rode it, the train had nothing, just a bar to grab onto if you felt unsure.

We'll get back to Rollo. Here's the carousel, (one of?) the last Philadelphia Toboggan Company original-build carousels.

There's the rounding board with an eagle icon on top.

Here's the historical landmark plaque and one of the three PTC Shield horses on the ride.

Trivia: In the October 1678 issue of his Le Mercure Galant newspaper editor Donneau de Visé observed that ``in the past two years, two colors have come into existence'' and that ``this is something that happens very rarely''. One of the colors was straw; the other, Prince, some manner of near-black with hints of midnight blue and crimson fire. Source: The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafés, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour, Joan DeJean. The color Prince was consistently written with a capital P. It seems to have faded out of common parlance in the 18th century and fortunately there's no trouble searching the Internet for ``Prince color''. Oh.

Currently Reading: Michigan History, September/October 2025, Editor Kristen Brennan.

Other and sadder mouse news. We've been getting the live traps out to catch the mother deermouse, and what we suppose are children. bunny_hugger has already caught what seems to be the mother and one child, moved outside to the detached garage where they're welcome to hang out.

In getting out the live traps, though, we went to the basement to find one of the tin cats that we had loaned to a friend whose house was, a year or so back, overrun with mice. It was closed, and what we most feared had happened. A mouse had gotten in and, with no food, water, or way to escape, died. This is why we try to leave them open, ideally with some prop inside that makes it impossible to close. We don't know how we failed to notice it was put away unsafe. It's possible our friend gave it back to us closed and unaware a mouse was trapped inside, but that doesn't relieve us of responsibility to open it and make sure it's safe.

You can imagine how we feel, which isn't a patch on how the mouse must have. We buried it near our pet mice, as much kindness as we can offer at this point.

On merrier news, let's get back to Idlewild and fairy tales.

Red Riding Hood pondering whether she dares go into Grandmom's house, which is inducing a delay that's probably just making things worse.

Well, there's the wolf dressed up as Grandmom and in her bed so I suppose things can't get worse than this.

Some more scenes set up but the centerpiece here is an American Elm tree, like you never see anymore. Trust me, that's what the sign on it says.

Here's the Seven Dwarves, of Snow White fame.

And their house. Yes, there's seven little chimneys coming out the top.

And here's Jack B, the nimble one jumping over a candlestick. He doesn't seem to be unscathed quite.

Here's a clock that has both a mouse running up and down it but also one that pokes its head out as the hands rotate.

You can see the other mouse at the base of the pendulum and also see they made their own choice about spelling 'Hickory Dickory Dock'.

Here's a pretty solid Humpty Dumpty. The wall looks like it's ancient, although that probably actually means they rebuilt it from scratch in May.

Here's Old King Cole, with pipe and bowl.

And here's a talking tree; there's a speaker in the mouth there and it reels off, if I remember right, a bunch of tree puns.

The giant keyhole I think is tied to Alice In Wonderland/Through The Looking-Glass.

Trivia: It's estimated that in 1849 Americans ate about 139 pounds of pork per capita. By 1889 this had dropped to 119 pounds. Source: Down To Earth: Nature's Role in American History, Ted Steinberg.

Currently Reading: Michigan History, September/October 2025, Editor Kristen Brennan.