And on my humor blog? I had a week with a weird, pretty big spike in readership numbers and I don't know why. I can't figure out what source drove people there, or what they were searching for that they found. But here's the things they did find while there: Some Unconventional Beliefs, last week's major piece, which somehow has completely evaporated from my memory even though I wrote it eight days ago. Is The Spider-Man Comic Strip Ending? Is Ballard Street Ending? and you'd think people were searching for this comic strip news but, no, apparently? Statistics Saturday: The Seven-Day Forecast one of those trifles that suggests without saying that I was on deadline. What's Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? What's that weird Bangallan Navy ship? December 2018 – March 2019 (It's Australian, which is not exactly why it looks weird but contributes.) In Which I Am Not Alone At The Checkout Aisle, some found comedy. Popeye’s Island Adventures: wait, spinach causes transmogrifications? This changes everything! so if you ever needed to see Popeye turn into a giant sponge here you go. A Further Update From My Bathroom Fixtures, following up a weeks-old piece. Everything There Is To Say About Grinding Coffee Beans, this week's major piece, built on the fact I broke our coffee grinder somehow. Back to Halloweekends! Saturday 2017. I'm almost out of pictures of just this. bunny_hugger looks over some of the buildings of Frontier Town. These were relocated to Cedar Point in the 1960s as the park tried to set itself up as having historical and educational value. The buildings are actual 19th century constructs although they probably weren't always costume-jewelry shops. Maverick, and the sunset clouds, converging well enough you'd think I set up the picture. Nighttime at Cedar Point. The Halloweekends sign here looks uncannily like the ride sign for the former Mantis roller coaster --- but that ride sign is still there. So, what, they had a duplicate ride sign ready to be transmogrified like this? There's just no way to know. The fun part of Top Thrill Dragster in the twilight. Among the many Halloween decorations are these plastic-pumpkin-based snake sculptures that never photograph as well as I want them to. And here's the sunset sky looking out over Top Thrill Dragster's non-fun parts, in the foreground, and Millennium Force, which is all fun parts, in the background. Well, Top Thrill Dragster is going like a hundred miles per hour at these flat horizontal stretches, so there's still fun in that. Headless Horseman updated for the 20th century here. I think that the figure occasionally rises up so as to pop an animatronic wheelie. bunny_hugger tried taking some pictures of the main corkscrew on the ... Corkscrew ... roller coaster while twisting the camera, to produce a neat blurry spiral effect. That seemed like a great idea so I tried it. It turns out my hands are not nearly as steady as I always imagined they were. I gave it a fair number of tries. This one, where I didn't try to center it on the center of the spirals, came out fairly good actually, and if you look hard you can even see the roller coaster spiralling around. Trivia: The Hale-Bopp comet's last pass through the inner solar system, before 1997, was around 2214 BCE; the uncertainty in the date is about a decade. Source: Marking Time: The Epic Quest to Invent the Perfect Calendar, Duncan Steel. Currently Reading: Gotham Unbound: The Ecological History of Greater New York , Ted Steinberg. PS: Six Or Arguably Four Things For Pi Day, mathematics content, where the best is a trio of videos that I did not make.