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This week my humor blog saw me get all upset about a typeface, get baffled by a question about a movie I never saw, started a serious-ish conversation about an amusement park ride's depiction in the comics, got a kind word from the guy who writes The Phantom comic strip, and saw nothing happen in a fan fiction crossover between the Rescue Rangers and The Secret of NIMH. All this and more waiting for you here:

• MiSTed: The Rangers of NIMH II, Part 5


• Did Gary Larson Know What a Particular Amusement Park Ride Looks Like?


• Statistics Saturday: Some Words From JRR Tolkein's _The Lord of the Rings_


• In Which I Don't Know What This Means Either


• In Which Pittsburgh Obliterates My Chain of Thought


• What's Going On In DePaul and Mike Manley's The Phantom (Weekdays)? Who is John X and why does Jungle Patrol care? April - June 2023


• My Chance to Make History


• MiSTed: The Rangers of NIMH II, Part 6

And now that we're out of the fair it's on to ... that's right, amusement parks! Here we start with pictures from the Mother's Day trip to Cedar Point, which is already three Cedar Point trips ago.

Establishing shot. Exterior, early afternoon. My car on the extreme right, hatchback opened up. Cedar Point's new roller coaster visible in there ... do you see it? You will.

They're sticking with the Cedar Point 150 sign, even though the park is up to 153 now, I suppose because they didn't want to buy new numerals every year for a decade.

The Boardwalk is the new name for the renovated area that used to be the Oceana midway. It's got a 50s theme and lovely old-fashioned styling.

Troika Troika Troika is one of the rides that didn't get moved, but did get absorbed into the Boardwalk theme, with new safety sign and all that match the area theme. Also, they're getting area themes back together, which is great.

Troika Troika Troika's new sign retains the old, 70s-era unexplained tripling of the name while putting in the retro-50s seafoam green boomerang flair.

The new restaurant/bar that opened behind the Giant Wheel, eating up space where Wicked Twister used to be, we worried was going to close off space that had only just been opened up and made a pleasant view. (It had previously been blocked by the Oceana stadium and to a lesser extent Wicked Twister.) And maybe it does, but the building looks so very good, and so very much like something that had ``always'' been there, that it's hard to fault it. Look how handsome a view this is; it's hard to complain that there could have been Lake Erie behind it instead.

Trivia: Sailing ships cannot travel north in the Red Sea against the prevailing headwinds, and have to be towed in both directions through the Suez Canal. Source: A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World, William J Bernstein. (This as part of making a point about the Suez Canal bringing about the end of wooden ships in favor of metal hulls.)

Currently Reading: Come Fly With Us: NASA's Payload Specialist Program, Melvin Croft and John Youskauskas.