Matt McIrvin's Freaky Alternate Reality

After that first session came lunch, which I mention because it was a bit of a muddle. They set up the buffet line in a small room that served as seating for the building's snack counter, with a seating capacity of easily dozen of people, when there were closer to a hundred people attending. We happened to be among the first people in line --- they were running late setting up, and we were worried we were late, and it worked out that we ran off from someone needlessly --- and had absolutely no guidance where to sit. So we took one of the few seats on the three-person tables inside there and worried we were doing it wrong.

Readers with long memories might recall that we got seated next to Peter Singer an improbable number of times at the Animal Liberation 40 Years On conference in 2015. It looked like we might repeat that, as we saw him making a plate for himself and looking around awkwardly and wondered if we should wave him over. But he got one of the other few seats there, along with a woman he'd been talking with before, and that moment passed. We ended up getting a different pair of guys, grad students one of whom was about to start his postdoc position, and who sat on the sloped floor beside us since we were out of seats.

Most people, we would learn after finishing and getting out of the way, had taken their plates and gone out into the common area of the building. And the next day lunch would not make particular use of the snack counter room, but instead set the buffet up in the common area and let people use the much more generous space. The dinner that Wednesday and the other snack breaks were similarly organized, whether from foresight or from rapidly adapting to the problems of that first lunch I'll never know.

After lunch came more sessions, the first one being the longest with four presentations in a row. bunnyhugger went to --- and I accompanied her --- the English-language one, with talks that among other things introduced me to the thought experiment of would it be acceptable to breed an animal that was happy to be kept in industrial-agriculture conditions of misery? This is apparently an old chestnut among philosophers but there I was going with my meager instinctive ``wait, that can't be right'' unconsidered feeling.

Here, I'm shamed to admit, I started nodding off, which I blame on the combination of time zones (even after all my sleeping), maybe too much lunch, hours of sitting still in a darkened classroom, and that I've generally lost the sitting-at-a-lecture skills I had as a grad student. (Mind, I was pretty rotten as an undergrad.) bunnyhugger did her best, kicking me a couple times when I threatened to snore, but I was not presenting myself well.

At the coffee break I promised her I'd do better, and the next panel, the last session of the day, made that easy with some drama. The first speaker had been scheduled to talk on ``Care and Empathy of Dairy Cows as Tools of Biopower'' and then in the sort of move you never expect to see, said universities were failing their moral duty to speak against Israel's genocide against Palestinians. And so she talked about that for her half-hour, with a couple of mentions about the common threads between human disregard for animals and human disregard for humans. And, in an elegant throwaway moment, flashed through all the slides she had prepared for the dairy-cows presentation so folks could see what she had been planning to talk about before.

It's a bold move, and one I must admit so overwhelms my memory of the sessions that I couldn't swear I know what the point of ``Fairness Judgements About Animals'', the next paper, was. I think the final keynote of the day --- ``Psychological approaches to moral consideration for non-human animals'' --- had some interesting revelations about how people's attitudes toward animals change as they grow. If I remember right it included experiments done where young kids were challenged to save a boat with one human versus one dog, or one human versus ten dogs, or ten humans versus one dog, or so on. An attempted control question --- one human versus ten worms --- turned out to be more difficult than the experimenter imagined, because one of the kids found a moral dimension to that choice. Worms, after all, do good stuff for the soil. I may have attached this anecdote to the wrong lecture, but that's all right. There were several talks with fascinating psychological experiment results that show, if not what is moral, at least what people think they prefer in experiments.

Anyway fascinating stuff. After a dinner described in adequate detail above --- bunnyhugger got the chance to talk briefly with Peter Singer, though not to sit by him --- we left campus, in the early evening. And I had an idea for something we just might do.

More, now, of the Calhoun County Fair. We're into the really fun stuff here, by which I mean rabbits.

Here's some classic multi-level rabbiteering.

And one bunny doing their deadest bunny flop.

Here's the challenging Synchronized Rabbit competition.

Rabbit getting ready to lift up into the air, seen from above.

Albino rabbit with some resemblance to Roger in negotiations with bunnyhugger for a picture.

The white rabbit's turned up their chin at this while the rabbit's neighbor signals it's already five minutes to three o'clock.

Trivia: In accepting a French government prize of 12,000 francs for his development of canned (and, originally, bottled) food, Nicholas Appert agreed in 1809 not to patent his method in France. In London, Peter Durand gained a British patent for a very similar technique and it appears Appert communicated his ideas to Durand in order to get some patent fees from the work. Source: An Edible History of Humanity Tom Standage. If so the scheme failed; while Appert went to London in 1814 apparently to collect his proceeds he left empty-handed.

Currently Reading: Mission to Jupiter: A History of the Galileo Project, Michael Meltzer. NASA SP-2007-4231.

PS: What's Going On In Rex Morgan, M.D.? Is Rex Morgan still in Rex Morgan, M.D.? March - June 2025, and yeah technically there's a guy murdered but it's all been gentle, like you expect.

Now to Wednesday of our trip, the midpoint, and the start of the conference. We needed a moment to re-acquire our bearings, but it's pretty easy to get from our hotel to the University of Rennes 2 campus --- it's right on one of the metro lines --- and from there, while I set off in a wrong direction, bunny_hugger figured out where to go, and we acquired a companion who was also going to the same conference, which was in the same building it'd been in a decade ago.

I meanwhile had to buy my admission since I'd failed to do that ahead of time, and they would only take cash, so I'd had my first experience with European ATMs for the trip getting some folding money. This meant I went to the conference without a badge like everyone else had, and I held on to my receipt just in case I was challenged, which I never was. And bunny_hugger didn't even get to keep her badge, which ordinarily becomes one of those conference souvenirs, just like a furry con would do but with even worse art. In this case, no art at all. Nor any hint of academic affiliation, which on the one hand goes to the ideal of all being equal citizens of the Republic of Letters, but on the other hand means you might miss that, say, this person you're talking to is that person, the one with the paper you keep assigning your students.

Peter Singer, of course, gave the keynote address, and he took the historical approach of how the idea of animal rights moved from a fussy thing that Margaret Dumont-esque dowagers fretting over other people's dogs to a thing where everyone agrees we should have chickens that at some point in their lives get to see the sun, though not necessarily to live more than six weeks. So, you know, some cheerful news, some depressing.

Then it was on to the sessions, with two or three tracks most of the time, with each session room giving all their talks either in French or in English. bunny_hugger had the good fortune to be the first speaker in the first session in the first room listed on the schedule, although that does not mean Peter Singer stopped in to review her work.

Her presentation really engaged people, though; she got a healthy number of questions and all from people who were excited to learn about something they'd never considered before. She's the person to describe it in summary, but here's my attempt, and understand that she's got your obvious objection addressed, or will by publication time. It grows out of the question of what, specifically, does someone lose by dying? Yeah, ha-ha, the answer is ``days of life'', but, what is the point of those days of life? If it's just getting up to eat, poop, and sleep again, what's having more of that doing for you? (Not talking here about days of rest; talking here about an unending series of days just like that.)

In the 1920s by Moritz Schlick proposed that the purpose of life was play, by which he means things you do to accomplish them, rather than to carry on existing another day. This covers a wide range of things, including work you enjoy doing even if it supports your eating habit. But at heart, like, why read a book? Because you enjoy reading a book. Why join a softball league? Because you enjoy softball. Why run on a wheel? Because it's fun to run on a wheel.

And here's the insight. Animals play. More, we've been discovering, all kinds of animals play, not just the classically smart ones like apes and crows and dolphins. Bees play, something bunny_hugger had found in the scientific literature and that really fired imaginations. And so, if play gives human life meaning, what does play give animal lives?

The other paper in that session had the charming title ``What Would Miffy Do?'', Miffy here being that cute bunny from Dutch picture books that gets confused for a Hello Kitty character. This was about the challenge of how to justify making decisions on behalf of animals who, after all, can't express their preferences, even if they could understand decisions being made about them. We have models for that which work, more or less, for humans lacking full capacity for judgement. So extending that to animals seems like a reasonable stretch.

Back now to the Calhoun County Fair, which we visited on the last day of that fair.

Yes, these aren't just bales of hay, they're bales of hay so good as to get extra-special complicated ribbons and in one case a plaque. I'm glad I don't have to judge what makes a best-of-show-worthy sheaf of alfalfa.

Which is not to say that I'd have any idea how to judge the prizes for, like, ``old hardware store calendar''. Note the old Polaroid in the middle that apparently didn't get anything.

And here's some arts, including the raccoon watercolor that gets a first place.

Now on to the rabbits! Here's one of the many Californians that look rather like Penelope.

And here a nice old white rabbit invites us into their schemes.

The guinea pigs, meanwhile, don't see why they should have been brought in on any of this.

Trivia: In a meeting on the 4th of March, 1953, about plans to overthrow the government of Iran, US President Dwight Eisenhower wondered why it was impossible ``to get some of the people in these downtrodden countries to like us instead of hating us''. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles conceded that Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was no communist, but, ``if he were to be assassinated or removed from power, a politcal vacuum might occur in Iran and the communists might easily take over'', with dire consequences for world oil production and the world's strategic balance. Source: Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawai'i to Iraq, Stephen Kinzer. Raising the question: has anyone ever tried going back in time to divert the Dulles boys to, like, painting landscapes or something instead of screwing up the world completely? Maybe let's give that a try one we get the Hitler thing resolved?

Currently Reading: Mission to Jupiter: A History of the Galileo Project, Michael Meltzer. NASA SP-2007-4231.

Next morning we got up a bit earlier; we'd have to catch a train. Still we had the breakfast nook to ourselves (when we avoided some uncleared tables) and bunny_hugger observed about the TV news crawl that there was a delightful lack of people talking about Trump and his insanities. This was the week that Elon Musk had his messy breakup with Trump, mind, so I had seen some of the funny bits of that on social media, but we didn't have the oppression of this being all the news and that was surprisingly refreshing. Also, such soft, melty brie. So much brie.

This time around we asked the hotel staff to arrange a taxi for us and they were able to get one with the same company we'd gotten on Sunday, but for less than half the price. We also reflected that we should have asked the hotel ahead of time if they would arrange for taxi service, which they probably would have been able to do and would have been able to get cheaper for us.

The train back to Paris and Gare de l'Est was on time and fast and then all we had to do was go up and down four hundred different stairwells on an underground path running from Ile de France to the Norman coast and back to get to Gare du Nord, the train station that's the next one on the metro line. This because our connection to Rennes left from there. Gare du Nord also lacks adequate seating space for people just hanging around waiting for a train, although at least one block of what looked like seats was closed off for construction so maybe they're a little less at fault.

While we were getting a snack and finding our next train a guy, an American by accent, came up to ask if we could help him understand where his own train might be. We were and are novices at this but we'd more or less figured out where on the overhead boards they showed the several different train number identifications, and which of the kinds of icon it showed when they had assigned a track number. In his case, they hadn't yet assigned one, but it should be coming within minutes. We hope we were right or that he asked someone better-informed.

Now up to this point every train we'd been on had been not just speedy but on time, like, to the minute. And we had even commented on this, maybe foolishly, since now there was some kind of problem and the train stopped for what ended up being about a half hour total, and moved at mere American train speeds for a while after that. bunny_hugger saw guards standing at road crossings halting traffic so it looks like there was some important signalling problem hitting our line. Well, even Jove nods, I guess.

When we got to Rennes bunny_hugger said she'd get walking directions from her phone, if we needed them because I might well remember how to get to our hotel, the same one we stayed in ten years ago, all right. I think that overstates my memory for how to find places I've been once before but oh, yes, it did get to be pretty familiar pretty fast. And yes, it was the same hotel we stayed at before, with things stunningly similar to what we had known. With one difference: last time, the breakfast nook had a small bowl with a poor lone goldfish in not remotely enough water. bunny_hugger checked, from trip review photographs, that they no longer kept a goldfish in such terrible conditions before rebooking this hotel. (They now put some miniature bottles of jam in the space.)

We were set up nicely in the hotel and more or less ready for the conference the next day, although bunny_hugger was irritated her shirt had got a crease in it despite everything and there was no method at all for flattening a shirt; no iron, no pressing board, not even a hangar that could be used to let it absorb moisture from a hot shower and then settle out.

But we also had the question of what to eat and when we found there was a grocery store a couple blocks away, sure, we went for that. We had notions of getting some nice little sandwiches (all that we could find that was vegetarian was fake bacon, tomato, lettuce, and vegan mayo, billed as Le British for some reason) and exotic flavors of potato chips and something called ``Monster Munch'' (original flavor, though they had variations) and a couple small bottles of Coke Zero. They had some more exotic, more interesting-looking flavors but all at room temperature and without a fridge or ice we weren't confident we would get a fair taste of it.

So this would be our quiet, personal meal back in the hotel room. While bunny_hugger got ready for bed, a friend on Telegram started looking up where you could find pinball in Paris, their helpful nature failing to register my explanation that we were not in Paris except as a transit point. But it did make me wonder: was there somewhere in Rennes, or in our Belgian destination of De Panne, where we might find a game? That seemed worth checking ...

And now to check in on the Calhoun County Fair, which had no photographs from bunny_hugger --- we had expected us both to be out of town when they were to be dropped off, so she didn't sign up --- but had other things to look at. For example ...

Nice little water fountain statue set up to make the fairground rides look more permanently decorated.

I'm sure I said this before but that rhino looks like they're taking stuff for medical purposes only.

Big Top Circus is one of the kiddie funhouses (really they're all kiddie funhouses) but it has got app splash screen energy.

Over to the crafts barn where we once again failed to convince bunny_hugger's mother to enter anything. Still, here's some nice patterns of fat rabbits and small birds.

More crafts, including a bunch of needlepoint and other felt fixtures and some really great castle playset that's got stuff in every room.

More of the embroidery and needlepoint and stuff. Note the knives with movie killers on them.

Trivia: The United States's 1960 Census was the first to ask about air conditioner ownership. It found about 12.4 percent of all households had air conditioning, ranging from less than five percent in New England to more than 27 percent in the West South Central division (Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Arkansas), with nonwhites having air conditioning at under a third the national rate. Source: Cool Comfort: America's Romance With Air-Conditioning, Marsha E Ackermann.

Currently Reading: Mission to Jupiter: A History of the Galileo Project, Michael Meltzer. NASA SP-2007-4231.

PS: It's a bonus story strip recap as I look at What’s Going on in Flash Gordon? Are We in Some Time Travel Story Now? Enjoy!

When I finally roused myself enough to get up, on the day that should have been our Nigloland visit, it was already like 6 pm. bunnyhugger was getting consoling texts from the friends she'd dared tell. (We wouldn't tell our parents until we got back home.) About all there would be left to do is take a walk --- bunnyhugger was not going to abandon her daily task even for this --- and find dinner. For the walk we wondered if we were allowed into the Parc du Chateau, past the gate behind the hotel. I said I'd seen people going in earlier in the day and as I watched again some more folks went in, so we would follow.

This let us have some time exploring the grounds of the hotel which, as mentioned, used to be a working windmill, on a small river. There were a couple buildings that looked like they were probably once the mill owner's home and maybe a guest house. There was also a fence blocking off fields and other houses, we assume from land being sold to other owners. But the parc itself was this pleasant garden, a chance for us to walk around in mostly shaded paths on a none-too-hot evening, looking at the water and this little boat dock(?) underneath a shelter so you went into a tunnel to get down to the water surface, like some fantasy novel. Also a couple large decorative pools with the water turned off, unfortunately, as they looked great. Some statues, classical stuff like cherubs and Venus and the like. We also could see people dining outside, overlooking the water wheel (fixed in place, as far as we could tell) and the river (changing).

For dinner we had two choices, hunger or the hotel. There wasn't even a convenience store in town. So I put on one of the shirts I wear to work, and figured to wear to the conference, while bunnyhugger put on the blazer she figured to present in and got extremely nervous about dropping food on herself. It turns out the restaurant, though offering two- and three-course meals that looked like what you expect from a fancy French restaurant was much more generally chill than that. We saw people there in if not jeans and a t-shirt and least not much more dressed than that. (Those were outliers, though, and most people were at least dressed up a little bit.) We didn't need to worry, possibly because anyone in town who didn't want to drive to eat out was coming here.

The one serious drawback to the meal was it wasn't vegetarian. There were individual vegetarian pieces --- including the Avocado Toast appetizer --- but for the main course it was something an animal had to die for, and we accepted that, resolving not to tell anyone at the conference this. (Not that anyone asked or would be likely to.) I had my first meat-based sausage in years and in a sauce so creamy that I'm still tasting it three weeks on. And then dessert was more wonderful yet. bunnyhugger got an ice cream, but served within some sort of bread shell that soaked it up spongelike without overwhelming the taste or feel of the melting ice cream. Me, I went for the more basic plate of local cheeses, and I wouldn't be sad to have a plate of cheeses for every dessert. Or main course. Really you could pretty well sum up me by just putting up a sign, ``Bit more cheese''.

After a good while including after-dinner coffee they ... didn't seem to be bringing us a bill, which, sure, is the non-American-restaurant way. I had noticed several other people leaving simply by departing the table so figured that was the thing to do; there wasn't tipping and they knew what room to charge it to, so there. So after some assurances that we weren't dining-and-dashing we got up and walked slowly back to our room and then had some worries that we had done the wrong thing.

Well, on the hotel bill there was a charge for about what we estimated the dinner would cost, although it wasn't billed anything obvious like ``dinner'' or ``meals'' or ``restaurant''. It instead had a name of something like ``floor charge'', and google translations managed to make the purpose of that charge even more vague and ill-defined. It's been a couple weeks now, though, and we haven't heard any trouble, and they certainly have our e-mail and credit card information so we probably got away with it all right.

After dinner ... you know, strange as it may sound, I wasn't quite ready to go to bed. I got my camera out. I wanted to walk some, and alone, and I ended up taking by night the walk we'd hoped to do that morning down to Nigloland, to look at the gate and just ... be alone with my thoughts about this accident.

I would not stay alone. While walking along the long fence of the park someone stopped his car to ask if I needed anything. I told him no, I was fine, we just had come for the amusement park and found it closed and I needed to be sad. This he understand, but he did tell me the park would be open Saturday, which, yes, but I'd be gone by Saturday. I thanked him and he left. (We spoke in English, after the first sentence or two. I had actually thought out ahead of time what I might say if someone stopped by me, and I think I had the basics of it ready, except that in my mind I was saying dimanche [ Sunday ] instead of samedi [ Saturday ].)

The second time this happened I had basically the same conversation, and I guess it says something about the population of Dolancourt that a person taking a walk at like 10 pm on a Monday [ lundi ] might draw two cars stopping to ask if I needed a lift.

And that's how the day that should have seen us at Nigloland ended.

Now in photos let's look again at the Calhoun County Fair, as the day was ending but there was still plenty of Fair left ... we thought.

Here's the Wiggle Worm, which I believe was a junior caterpillar ride. Also there should be grown-up caterpillar rides again.

First picture of the carousel, and you can see bunnyhugger getting snaps for her 2025 calendar.

Somehow this angle makes the canopy lights look like there's more than there are, and arranged more randomly than their actually strongly-symmetric arrangement were.

Hey, Sea Ray was a fun pinball game, I didn't know they turned it into a swinging ship ride!

Turning around again to face the carousel and at least a couple horses with the distressed/wide-open mouths meant to suggest they're straining for their speed (which at like five rpm is respectable).

Some of the landscaping the rides operator puts up to give the place the impression of a more permanent park. Which suggests they pick up this mulch after the week is over and bring it to the next fair.

Trivia: Mexico City has more than five hundred streets named after Emiliano Zapata. Source: The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal about Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power, Dierdre Mask.

Currently Reading: Mission to Jupiter: A History of the Galileo Project, Michael Meltzer. NASA SP-2007-4231.