I've kept my humor blog going and somehow have found something that's on theme to the pandemic for yet another week running. I don't know how these things are true. But run in the past week have been:
- More Thoughts While Doing My Daily Walk Around Town which was last week's big piece, a bunch of disconnected little observations.
- In which I am jolly well fed up with the counties of Iowa a mood I got to really quick considering this is the first time I've written about the problem.
- Statistics Saturday: Where More Comic Strips Are Set as a second useful guide for people.
- Some Thoughts About Gene Deitch who died late last week.
- 60s Popeye: how to be a Matinee Idol in a cartoon directed by Gene Deitch that, have to admit, isn't one of Deitch's great bizarre ones.
- What's Going On In The Amazing Spider-Man? Have they hired new cartoonists yet? January – April 2020 recapping three months of the Sub-Mariner being a jerk but not exactly being wrong about the surface-dwellers ruining the world either.
- Why does Heart Of The City look weird now? Who's drawing Heart Of The City? which is me getting ahead of the situation since the comic strip does not look weird now, but is scheduled to start looking weird this coming Monday when a new artist takes over the strip.
- On the Problem of Identity During the Plague Spring which is about one of those things that might low-key have you bothered through the quarantine.
On to my photo dump. After the Jampot and Jacob's Falls we drove a little bit farther north and ended up at the Eagle Harbor lighthouse, which includes a bit of a museum, which is the kind of thing we could never resist.
The Eagle Harbor Lighthouse, one of the fewer-than-you'd-expect lighthouses that we visited on our week up there. Great skies, I'm sure you agree.
And a look at the grounds leading up to the lighthouse. The fog horn building, I think, is the thing off to the right there.
We did indeed pay our museum and lighthouse admiKioskside.
We entered the lighthouse in the kitchen, with a great old-fashioned decor that I'm glad we don't have to cook with.
Great old Monitor-top icebox, too.
So here we get a pretty well-explained chair. Not explained: did ... did they just fire up a copy of Print Shop Pro from 1989 to dig out the Napping Mexican In A Sombrero image like that and print it out? Or did they have, like, a thousand of them printed out so when one page gets worn out they can replace it with a fresh new one ?
The lighthouse had a great 1910s(?) vintage record player, here showing a medley of patriotic airs, plus Dixie. The exposition referred to was the one held in 1915 in San Francisco.
And here's the serial number and manufacturer's label for the Victor Talking Machine.
Stereoscopic slides! 
bunny_hugger's father was really into them when I first met him, although then one day in about 2012 he just decided he was done and sold it off. Anyway, here's a potentially 3-D picture of Central Park, New York City.
The Monarch-brand stereoscopic viewer set up with a view of US Capitol.
And, always fascinating, the 4th-Order Fresnel Lens which back in the day was not used to make this lighthouse visible from much farther away. Why do I say this was not used?
Well, there's the story: the orignal lens was lost during renovations, somehow, and the Keweenaw County Historical Society was, seventeen years later, loaned another one.
Trivia: The first aluminum baseball bats were made in the late 1960s by Anthony Merola, who had been manufacturing aluminum pool cues. Source: A Game of Inches: The Story Behind The Innovations That Shaped Baseball, Peter Morris.
Currently Reading: The Plastic-Man Archives, Volume 1, Jack Cole, Archive Editor Mike Carlin(?).
PS: Reading the Comics, April 13, 2020: More Words At Play Edition, one of those lightweight comic strip review posts that I get to do sometimes.
