Saturdays we usually divert from Cedar Point to go to the Merry-Go-Round Museum, skipping the busiest hours for this side trip. This was our plan this year too. But there was a side quest first.
A couple years ago Cedar Point started making collectible trading pins, buttons they could use to turn old art or ride signs or maps --- or some original art based on their rides --- into money. There's a stand that sells pins, as well as blind bags, the difference in the blind bags being, besides the blindness, that you actually get rare or ultra-rare buttons. (If rare ones are ever put on sale on the racks I haven't seen them, but there are a lot of buttons and it would be hard to spot one or two rares in the bunch.) Among the rare ones, last year: one that depicted a child version of the Iron Dragon mascot. She spent a lot of time trying to find one, never getting close. Finally she started looking to trading, a thing she could most easily do online since for as much as we talk about Cedar Point in these parts we don't actually spend much time there.
So there was someone willing to trade for the button she wanted. All he asked for was any rare or ultra-rare pin, doesn't matter what. She had a bunch of them --- all those blind bags bought last year and this --- but didn't think particularly about it since the guy preferred to trade in person and who knew when we would be at the park together? That he would be at the park this Saturday was communicated to ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger at some point, but in the rush to get school stuff done and get to the park and all she didn't think to bring any of her pins. And when she realized this on Thursday --- the pin stand was closed. Even if it hadn't been closed, the previous time we were at the park they had no blind bags, having somehow run out. I had forgot about bringing any buttons too but still spent time that evening searching my duffel bag and messenger bag just in case I'd forgotten about a blind bag I'd bought on some earlier trip. I hadn't, but it was a plausible thing to have happen.
Some good news Friday. The pin stand was open and, better, they had blind bags. My recollection is the guy was putting price labels on some new blind bags, so we could at least be sure there'd be some rare or ultra-rare pin. (She got a couple, just in case the rarity in one bag was something she wanted for herself.)
Now we just had the trouble of arranging a meetup. The guy figured to be there much of Saturday, but, given the Saturday-ness and the good weather there was concern it'd be a critical capacity day and if we left the park we couldn't get back before he had to leave. Fair reason and on reflection, I agreed, so figured we should meet the guy before going to the Merry-Go-Round Museum.
Catching up with the guy was a bit of a hide-and-seek problem even with both parties wanting to meet up and having phones to say where they were. The guy was with his kids, though, and they had other stuff they wanted to do (they'd both had jobs in amusement parks too and coming back to Cedar Point was a return-home for them), including eating lunch and shopping at the Halloweekends gift shop (normally the Top Thrill/Top Thrill 2 gift shop).
We didn't know what the guy looked like and yet when we saw him we knew we were looking at the guy. He just looked like a roller coaster guy with a trading pins hobby and he had a fearsomely organized set of pins in plastic baggies, ready to pull up and swap efficiently. And we talked a bit about his amusement-park-going and the pin collections and his family and at some point I noticed, oh, bunnyhugger was restraining herself from gossipping about things Cedar Point might be doing about Top Thrill 2 because the guy might never stop talking, and we'd be fine with that except the Merry-Go-Round Museum closes at 4 pm and we were already terribly close to 2 pm. So, finally, we bade farewell and got out to our side trip to see our fourth carousel of the weekend.
Also, with the possibility of actually trading these trading pins opened up we started looking at options. We had known vaguely that there were supposed to be corkboards around the park where you could leave a pin, take a pin, but never saw them. Now, we saw. There's one at the back of the Breakers gift shop, for example, and we looked over that at the end of the day. There's also similar boards in the Snoopy Gift Shop, to be reported on when I get to Sunday, and in the main gift shop at the front of the midway. bunnyhugger would examine all of these, now that they were suddenly visible. And, of course, had her desired pin at last.
Now back to Pinball At The Zoo for the usual array of pinball art and people you don't know looking away from the camera.
Another game that is fortunately often at Pinball At The Zoo and that I will play every time. Strange Science is a late solid-state game with this mad-science theme that was one of the first games I played when I got into pinball in 1990 and, as you can see from the scores, I've learned a bare minimum of things to do on it.
The goal of the game is to cause, or prevent, the swapping of a woman's and a monkey's brains and there's lots of nice weird shots to do it. Again, I'm sorry that The Pinball Arcade died as this would have been so nice to have in digital form.
Another new, boutique, game they had was Ultraman: Kaiju Rumble. I can't say I got the hang of the game, but it did reaffirm my vague idea that I should learn more about this kind of show since it always seems like a lot of odd fun going on.
Playfield for Ultraman: Kaiju Rumble. Granting it doesn't photograph well but you can see this neat double-layer upper playfield that I'd like to understand anything about, someday.
Seven Seas is a more normal electromechanical game with a fishing theme and, of course, mermaids.
Sorry the overhead lights obscure part of the playfield. It's one of those things Pinball At The Zoo has to deal with. At least most of the tournament games are able to make some arrangement to avoid the worst spots.
Trivia: In 1881, the US Patent Office had granted 138 patents for lawn mowers. Source: The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession, Virginia Scott Jenkins.
Currently Reading: Got some comics books, that'll be something.
PS: the song doesn't reference anything in this post. I tried to find any song that might connect at all to the trading of tokens of small value like the pins were, and all I got was this this daft-enough-maybe-it-was-meant-to-be-funny Forbes.com piece about ``The Best Songs to Listen to While Trading Large Futures and Options Contracts''. So I'm just using a song I like instead.
