austin_dern | If you're living in a bubble and you haven't got a care

Tuesday after Christmas was time for Silver Balls In The City, the oldest of bunnyhugger's charity pinball tournament series. Thanks to the Christmas Eve disappointment she'd had most of her work done ahead of time, so all we had to do was wait for me to be done with work --- I was working from home, so we even had a little advantage in time there --- and head to the venue. The parking lot was nearly full, firing her anxiety that there was a big event at the bar that nobody had thought to tell her about. I offered that maybe there was something going on at any of the whole block of businesses, including another bar, that share the parking lot. Maybe even people practicing for the tournament; as it's one of the last of the year, it's a choice one for people hoping to get into the State Championship Series, or to better their seed. But it seemed too big a crowd for that and I suppressed the thought.

There was no big event at the bar. Just their usual Tuesday night movie starting at 9:00 --- Spaceballs, which somehow has taken over as the default movie on cable whenever I look at the program guide recently --- but that wasn't any too big or crowded. The bar was just as we'd hope; busy enough to feel healthy but not crowding out the pinball play. And not doing anything that would be too loud or attention-demanding to spoil the pinball playing.

Also the crowd was there for pinball. The tournament drew 36 people --- a 37th arrived, but too late to be able to play in any way that would be fun --- which made for the most successful tournament she'd ever run. A guy from Stern Pinball, who'd had to cancel a visit at an earlier tournament because of Covid-19, made it this time, bringing a really choice prize, a Batman '66 banner, to be raffled off. (It was won by a guy named Biff, which he noted only made sense, since his name was on the banner. Lucky nobody named Sock or Pow was there.) Between the crowd, and donations from Pinball Pete's and from Stern, and some extra donations from people moved by the season, bunnyhugger raised over seven hundred dollars for the Capital Area Humane Society. The only sad thing about this is that this wasn't the tournament for the rescue we adopted Stephen, Penelope, and Fezziwig from. Not that the shelter we adopted Sunshine from less deserves a bounty.

The hugeness of the crowd made bunnyhugger worry about the format: ten strikes progressive. That is, you play in groups of four or three people on a computer-chosen game. You get one strike for everyone who beats you, so, first place gets zero, second place one, third place two, and fourth place three. You keep playing until you collect a total of ten strikes, so you're guaranteed at least four rounds, but no more. The amazing thing about strikes tournaments is it turns out the number of people playing doesn't affect their length very much. The number of strikes affects the length far more. But, like, bunnyhugger's monthly women's tournaments are a strikes format very similar, and draw a half-dozen people, and run almost the name number of rounds as this 36-person tournament.

Those rounds are much shorter, though, since the pacing item is the length of the longest game, and if you have nine groups of people, many of them the best players in the state, competing, someone's going to be in the group that goes on forever. That was me, several times over, it happens. But the whole tournament took a mere twelve rounds and we were done close enough to midnight, which is as good as we could have hoped for.

When I saw the crowd --- when it was only 25 people or so --- I asked MWS, so just how tight is the competition for State Champion Series ranking? Since pinball tournaments resumed in the pandemic bunnyhugger and I haven't been competing seriously, and haven't even looked at who's in or near the top 24 spots. MWS admitted, while the top seeds are pretty solidly set, there was a tight pack for the last couple spots. It may be some of the crowd was folks hoping to get a good two or three rating points over the competition.

And then there bunnyhugger and I were, standing in their way ...

But before we talk about that, walk the Wonderland of Lights with me some more, in a rare-for-us pre-Christmas visit.

Oh, and here's just a part of the zoo that's a haunted forest, that's nice.

bunnyhugger getting ready to stamp a penny and not expecting it to get launched out into hyperspace. The dropping mechanism is a bit too enthusiastic.

Arrangement of trees and balls on a bit of empty field that I used to think was a pond because we always saw it covered with ice at my first couple visits.

This tree arrangement when I first saw it (you get a glimpse of it just a little up and right of center in the previous picture) looked like a prancing reindeer to me. As you can see here, that's just coincidence from how the tree's largest segments happened to be arranged. I did take a picture showing just the tree where the illusion was stronger, but the picture's too blurry to be worth sharing.

Snow-covered empty enclosure occasionally used for animal encounters. These are some of the enclosures built as Works Progress Administration improvements, back in the days we thought there were benefits to making the community better.

Another view of those WPA enclosures. The mongooses and meerkats are shown here in the summers, although the enclosures are very obsolete by modern zoo care standards and are scheduled for replacement with something better for the animals and easier to clean too.

Trivia: The first oil refineries in Bayonne, New Jersey, were built in 1875. By 1880 Standard Oil had built a pipeline there from the oil fields of Pennsylvania. Source: New Jersey: A History of the Garden State, Editors Maxine N Lurie, Richard Veit. (Also, wow, think of pipelines that long being built in 1880!)

Currently Reading: Standpipe: Delivering Water in Flint, David Hardin.