austin_dern | Everybody wants fame

When last I reported Pinball At The Zoo action, it was about how bunnyhugger was at the end of Thursday still qualified as one of the top sixteen competitors for Women's, but she feared that Friday's qualifying time, and new round of players, would knock her out. She'd have to spend Friday shoring up her position. This would eat up time and entries, among other things limiting what she could do to qualify for Classics or Main. Also taking her away from things like talking with WVL or walking around to see the games on the floor. I had the time that I could tease her with the promise that someone she wanted to see was in the far left corner of the expo hall. She did manage to find time for that, but was confused why I'd point her to a vendor who seemed faintly familiar but ... so what? And then she realized what must be going on, and saw the FunHouse game there. (For sale for $6,000, which seems a bit much, even for Rudy.)

Incidentally the vendor did have a worn but recognizable FunHouse playfield for sale, and if we didn't already have the Popeye Saves The Earth playfield it might have made a good surprise anniversary present. For the record, it will not, at least not from me and not this year, and I am not setting up some kind of fake out by doing this.

For Friday, bunnyhugger figured the strategy was to try playing the games she'd done weakest in --- in terms of the ranking she got, rather than how well she did compared to what she'd expect --- in the hopes of breaking through to a higher position. Or even getting a lucky game that really blows up.

This worked out exactly right a couple times. On Centaur, a 1980 game with a shockingly large number of multiballs (you can get five balls going at once, somehow!) she got a string of great play together and came up just under two million points, one of the ten best scores put on the game all weekend. On Venom she had a similar breakthrough, putting up nearly a quarter-billion points and again getting a top-ten position. (Aide whispers in my ear.) Sorry, a top-eleven position. Still, play like that on four games and you're in a great spot.

She did not play like that on four games, unfortunately. She played a lot of Wheel Of Fortune --- an early-2000s Stern that almost everyone has forgotten --- without improving her standing. A lot of Creature From The Black Lagoon with again only marginal improvement. When qualifying ended at 10 pm --- there would be like two hours more in the morning, but everyone would be there and playing as much as possible so she couldn't count on getting any games in --- she was in 17th place.

This made for a miserable drive to Taco Bell for dinner, as you'd think. Things got marginally better by the time we were there, though; bunnyhugger had bounced up to 16th place. This is the sort of weirdness that will happen with this sort of best-game qualifying, as person A's good game can cause person B's best-four-games standing to drop below person C who was not involved. Particularly since the top two finishers get a little points bonus, so if you had the best score on a game and someone else beats you, you drop three points while someone way down in the standings drops at most one.

Still, it meant our drive home was a lot of me promising bunnyhugger that she was a good player and that I believed she would be in the playoffs when Women's qualifying ended at 10:50 or whatever it was the next day. I was able to provide some very useful intelligence about Creature From The Black Lagoon: first, how to get the jackpot in multiball. Creature is a dot-matrix-display game, but it's early enough it still has the late-solid-state ethos of the jackpot being a huge payoff but at least as huge a pain to get.

So the theme of Creature is that you're at the drive-in, and multiball is starting the movie, where you're searching for the Creature and the Girl he's abducted. Once you do that --- by shooting two of three scoops on the playfield --- you're urged to shoot the snack bar, and if you do that the game urges you to shoot the jackpot. The game also urges you to shoot the left ramp, and that fooled bunnyhugger into thinking that was the jackpot. No: the left ramp is a shot that builds up to double scoring on the playfield. The jackpot is shooting the snack bar yet again. And then you can shoot into the pop bumpers to build a super jackpot that I have made, like, once ever and maybe three times in simulation.

Also, since she was having trouble shooting up the center for the ``Move Your Car'' points grab, I pointed out what you get if you shoot the left scoop to complete the K-I-S-S sequence. In a normal game, the second time you do this it lights an extra ball. In tournament mode, that second time around gives you five million points. That's maybe a tenth of what the jackpot is, but, especially in tournament conditions, a safe five-million-point shot is not to be sneered at.

I also learned that for all that I play Centaur pretty well at MJS's pole barn and also in simulator, I don't know as much about just what starts multiball as I thought. Back home I had to look up and learned how you can build the ORBS multiball up to three- or four-ball multiball. I felt scales falling from my eyes, at least.

But would any of this help bunnyhugger?

And now let's venture back to the Ionia Free Fair and admire the ... we're not up to the rides yet. Don't worry. We'll get there.

Here's the corn 'sandbox' used to lure children unsuspectingly into goat transformation. Why did you think they call them ``kids''?

Your classic Victorian cabinet of eggs, here.

In pigeon culture, this is considered a McMansion.

I guess we're a little early to see the peacocks.

Ah, and here's one of those goats I was telling you about earlier. Kid seems unsure about trampolines.

Among the things I can't explain about this statue: why is it leaking?

Trivia: One of the Sanskrit words for 'Thursday' was 'Saumayavara', honoring Jupiter and meaning 'great master'. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.

Currently Reading: Force: What It Means to Push and Pull, Slip and Grip, Start and Stop, Henry Petroski. Discussing the P-38 can opener Petroski writes, ``Veterans of World War II remember another kind of can opener'', this in a book published 2022 and therefore written as late as 2020, or the 25th anniversary of the 50th anniversary of the end of the war.