Saturday afternoon, after ERR's Celebration of Life, was also a women's pinball tournament, which was about three hours or so, and saw me put back in the commentator's booth to natter about pinball or whatever came into mind. But that wasn't especially burdensome apart from sometimes it'd be nice to just go play pinball for three hours uninterrupted. I have the chance to do this most every evening and never take it, though.
Sunday morning saw our other big social obligation for the weekend. PCL, the most enthusiastic member of the league --- and the one who's set up the streaming rig for pinball events --- wanted to hold an end-of-season pinball party. He suggested a couple dates which all made sense, except ... a weekend ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger and I would be out of town. Another weekend we'd be out of town. Memorial Day weekend when everyone might be out of town. Finally this past Sunday, after league finals but before the end-of-season zen (split-flipper) tournament, was the pick.
He had it at his and his wife's house, the one we visited a couple months ago. He particularly wanted to show off his pizza oven, some portable porch thing that heats up to like a billion degrees and will cook the pizza in a minute or less so don't stop turning it. Also to show off his new King Kong pinball machine, companion to the Godzilla game he got a few months ago, and got delivered just last Monday.
It was a pretty good party, with a healthy number of league people attending. Including, in a surprise, SCS, one of our old pinball friends from Grand Rapids. He'd had a birthday party the day before that we couldn't make, but he said that was fine, especially as something like fifty people did. And despite that he had several boxes of leftover cupcakes to give; we had some with coffee break today.
Part of the event was actually rolling out and making your own pizzas, although even with as many people who were there there was more pizza to eat than there was time or stomach available. bunnyhugger ended up making a simple margherita-style pizza we took home. FAE and MAG were among the people who leapt at the chance to roll out their own dough and make pies as well, and they looked like pretty good ones.
As to pinball. PCL tried holding a closest-to-the-pin tournament on Godzilla, seeing who could get nearest to a given score (their house number, times a thousand) without going over. As seems to always happen at these someone (PCL) got amazingly close, within a couple tens of thousands, on a game like this so close it seems impossible to do better. And then MWS went and did better.
The most astounding thing of the day was when MAG and FAE, playing King Kong split-flipper, didn't just have a great game, but had a game so good they set the Grand Champion score. Luckily, PCL has his game set to accept up to ten-character high score entries. Unluckily, FAE made a typo while entering their team name and now it stands there, MAG AN. Happens to us all.
When we arrived we weren't sure how long the event would run or how long we should stay even given that. We ended up spending about six hours there, and don't regret it, except that it was a lot of time this weekend doing stuff out and with other people, and it's weird to have the start of the workweek be the break.
But now we get to another century-plus-old-ride at Kennywood. Know what it is?
This is not the wishing well, despite the stones much like the well was made of and the water much like you find in a well. This is an artificial waterfall that's part of the facade of the Old Mill, the tunnel-of-love ride.
Despite it being a quite hot, sunny day the line for the ride was ... not ridiculously long, really, and we went for it.
The Old Mill's National Historic District sign now reflects past names including Panama Canal, Fairyland Floats, and Garfield's Nightmare incarnations.
Thinking it over I'm not sure there's any part of the ride where you see the water wheel in full or doing work or anything. It's just an obscured prop.
Boats ready for the loading. They've got good capacity so if people didn't mind sharing boats you could get a lot of people on the ride at once.
And here we are ready to take the ride. (Which I didn't attempt to photograph; it's dark and we're always moving not-quite-smoothly.) Sky Rocket is the coaster in back; more on that to come.
Trivia: The handbill, The Vertue of the Coffee Drink, promoting the opening of London's first coffee house in 1652 explained coffee's medical benefits, claiming it to be effective against sore eyes, headache, coughs, dropsy, gout, scurvy, and to prevent ``Mis-carryings in Child-bearing Women''. It also noted that it would ``prevent Drowsiness, and make one fit for business, if one have occasion to Watch'' and warned ``you are not to Drink of it after Supper, unless you intend to be watchful, for it will hinder sleep for 3 or 4 hours''. Source: A History of the World in Six Glasses, Tom Standage.
Currently Reading: The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore, Evan Friss. It's (so far) a chapter each on the history of particularly key bookstores so there's a lot of detail about neurospicy people.
