Hey fifteen, there's never a better wish than this

So what's been happening with my humor blog? If you didn't already know?

• Uncle Chuck on How To Get Three Cars To The Same Place At The Same Time which was last week's big piece and is about something we all lived with before we had satellite navigators or cell phones.


• Statistics December: How The End Of 2018 Looked Around Here the usual end-of-month statistics review.


• Statistics Saturday: Some Movies Set Wholly Or Partially In 2019 in case you needed to settle an argument!


• What's Going On In Gasoline Alley? What happened for the Gasoline Alley centennial? October 2018 – January 2019 A long time spent recapping what was at heart a recap. I don't know.


• Yeah, But What *Is* The Deal With The Comic Strip Graffiti Anyway? It's weirdly dated even by the standards of comic strips.


• I Guess I'm Just Reviewing Popeye's Island Adventures Now and hey, they published a cartoon I just plain like.


• Where I’m At Today in my productivity cycle.


• In Which I Cannot Honestly Say I Dodged A Bullet Here, this week's long-form piece, inspired by some local news I just heard about.

And a last bunch of pictures from our drop-in at Cedar Point!

More stuff being set up for Halloweekends. In this part of the park they'd set up a County FairFear. Each little stand like this would evoke some carnival game but be a joke based on it, and not a game at all (sad to say). Here, for example, the Cow would be a bartender, with a tip jar nearby.

Another joke fairground stand for the County FairFear. Knowing that this is a joke, do you know what would be erected here in a couple weeks' time?

Inside the Town Hall Museum we discovered this old friend! This statue of Mercury, readying his sword to go slay something or other, used to be at the Marina Entrance but vanished when that area of the park got renovated for the ValRavn roller coaster. Now it's in a weather-protected area but also not inside a fenced-off area so anyone can just go up to and touch it and whatnot.

bunny_hugger casting a surprisingly deep glimpse at ol' Merc here. Well, I'm sure one of them would say if something were going on that I needed to have a reaction to.

Scale model of the Mean Streak roller coaster on display at the Town Hall Museum. You get from this an idea of just how much roller coaster it is, or was. Not visible: how much time it spends inside its own support structure (which is a cool part), or how it ends in a braking area that then drops to go into the station, a testament to how the drive to make this a tall wooden roller coaster was ultimately foolish: the ride ends with gravitational potential energy unused, except to strain all those pieces of supporting wood.

Another scale model in the Town Hall Museum, this one of White Water Landing, a log flume taken out a decade-plus years ago to make room for the Maverick roller coaster. Note the simulated water in the trough there.

Armored Horse, removed from the Kiddieland Carousel and put somewhere safe. This is one of the famous carousel horses; you can find its picture on the cover of any book with a title like The Golden Age Of Carousels. Also on the Merry-Go-Round stamps back in the 80s. Or if they ever make new merry-go-round stamps.

And the three horses removed from the Kiddieland Carousel as being pieces too precious to have in actual operation. But they're still nicely available to be seen; just a bit disappointed there's no mirror so we can see the other, albeit less decorated, side.

Coin-operated attractions on display at the Town Hall museum. None of them work anymore, although given their basic mechanical nature any of them should be able to be made operable. One of the coin-operated horse-racing machines worked recently enough that bunny_hugger and I played it, a couple years ago. Anyway, can you imagine a world where Tom Mix was a movie star? Weird idea, huh?

Trivia: In 2004 India exported 299,000 trailer-equivalent-unit (about twenty-foot long units) cargo containers to the United States; it imported 148,000.
Source: Box Boats: How Container Ships Changed The World, Brian J Cudahy.

Currently Reading: The Reshaping Of Everyday Life, 1790 - 1840, Jack Larkin. For some reason Larkin seems to view ``cigar'' as an alternate spelling and he uses ``segar'' for the bulk of the book and I'm sure there's a reason and that reason is ?.