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austin_dern

June 2025

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We brought Sunshine to the vet, for an appointment that went from 'euthanasia' to 'checkup' yesterday, and the news is happy! Her breathing is considerably better than it had been, and that's not just our fooling ourselves. Her underlying problems remain, yes, but everyone is amazed by the turnaround and how much happier things look than they did this time last week. As you might imagine we're doing a fair bit of telling her how happy we are to have her around yet.

Speaking of last week, since that time I've had a week's worth of stuff on my humor blog. Here's the highlights, which is to say, all of it:


And with all that happiness out there let's close out the Michigan State (Open) Pinball Championship photos.

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Despite both JRA and TY being really good players they were not having any luck getting a good score on Road Show.


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And then the ball got stuck! This resulted in a complicated thing where PH had technically made an incorrect ruling where he wanted to put the ball on the flipper instead of the plunger lane, but the game decided to drop the flippers so the ball drained (and JRA got a compensation ball), making the missed call moot.


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TY considering the rough state of this game; if I remember right, JRA had just put up a hundred-million-point bonus. The game reels off this whirring noise, increasing in pitch, while it counts up the bonus so this let us learn just how far up it does go and got hilarious as it wavered around the maximum note for about forever.


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I failed to photograph the tremendous bonus but realized photographing the game and the laptop streaming the game would be a fun shot, so here it is, and you see I am correct.


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Still no luck rolling Gulfstream. Game is easy to do well on, hard to do outstanding on.


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Plunging off: JRA didn't have to play the final ball, so, there's just plunging the ball to do.


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The trophy moment! Well, the memorial plaque moment anyway. The Pong table in the background is a modern make but it's cute to see and even has a four-player, four-wall version.


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Winner and runner-up sharing the triumphant moment.


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The final scoresheet: JRA beats TY, four games to three. The sheets ask for the scores of games, but I'm not sure why, except that for single-player games (as many older electromechanicals are) you need to record the first player's score anyway. When people don't play electromechanicals they often don't bother filling that out. (I, of course, always do.)


Trivia: The word 'hangnail' derives from 'agnail' or 'angnail', which originally meant a corn on the foot. The word came from 'ange', a now-obsolete adjective meaning 'painful' and 'nail' meaning an iron nail or something like it. In the 16th century 'angnail' shifted to mean a variety of ailments of the finger or toe, suggesting to people that 'nail' referred to toenails and fingernails. Source: Webster's Dictionary of Word Origins, Editor Frederick C Mish.

Currently Reading: Suddenly, Tomorrow Came: A History of the Johnson Space Center, Henry C Dethloff. NASA SP-4307.

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