Save me, save me, save me from this squeeze

[austin_dern]

The great storm has, as of this writing, been a bit of a bust. We've got freezing rain, yes, and I will agree it'd be awful to go driving in this. And our cars are glazed over. But the promised Brobdingnagian snowfall hasn't arrived, and doesn't seem likely to before the temperature jumps (briefly) to the mid-40s tomorrow. It's absolutely right that bunnyhugger stayed home, as it would have been horrible to do a long-distance drive through this. But me, for a two-mile drive? I could certainly have made it in the morning and the way things looked at actual 4:30 pm? That would have been a little slow but probably not bad, given that nearly all this would be on a major road. I feel a bit like I wasted the chance to show when I'd draw the line at going in for safety reasons.

While upstairs, talking on the phone with my dad, I heard this terrible thunderous crash that I take to be a tree falling under the weight of ice and frozen rain. I can't see anything from the house, but that's not much of a range. And bunnyhugger didn't hear anything, a surprise considering she's much more sensitive to sounds than I am. But if it were a few blocks away I'd have a clearer line of sound to the origin. Tomorrow or Friday, when the sidewalks are not sheets of wet ice, we can prowl around and look for signs of something exciting having happened.

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Now for the excitement of something happening a month ago: the Women's State Pinball Championship draws to an end! Let's give the exciting action some attention.

Never mind the exciting action here. You see this Atlantis, a late-solid-state game with alphanumeric displays? You notice the replay score there, ``beat 7,859,221 for 3 replays''? Well, (nearly) all pinball scores end in zero. The 1 there is a little hack to allow the game to show scores between ten and a hundred million. The 1 at the end means to read this score as 17,859,220. Why not, you may ask, just make the minimum score 1 instead of 10 points and avoid the inconvenient hack and the answer is but then the scores would be one-tenth as big as they are. (Though Jersey Jack games have mostly gone for 1-point scoring and people don't mind that much.)

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Finals going on, and drawing a couple people out to watch the action.

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Totally not creeping on the action here.

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Triumph! The top four pose for group photos.

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And bunnyhugger proclaims the spell which ends the tournament and shrinks her computer to the size of a tablet.

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Trivia: The ``Ford'' of Libby-Owens-Ford, a major glassmaking firm (since bought out by the Pilkington Group and, in turn, Nippon Sheet Glass) was a Detroit-area family of chemical manufacturers unrelated to the carmaker Fords. They owed their prosperity to the salt beds of the Wyandotte area. Source: Ford: The Men and the Machine, Robert Lacey. (Wikipedia notes the Libbey-Owens was the first company to produce automotive laminated safety glass, getting a contract to supply Model A windshields. Libbey-Owens merged with the Edward Ford Plate Glass Company in 1930.)

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

Comments

[selki]

I heard this terrible thunderous crash that I take to be a tree falling under the weight of ice and frozen rain.

Amazingly, the top half of a dead tree fell over in my backyard, but neither my sister nor I heard it happen. We must have been asleep during a storm. Happily, it didn't smash anything but some bushes.