Milkman come in!

We went to lunch and I'm not positive which of two lunch experiences we had first. One of these was the Thursday lunch and one the Friday and I'll just trust bunny_hugger remembers better which is which or else it doesn't matter after all.

For one of the lunches we gathered in the Westin lobby to meet with the rest of the Michigan pinball folks. There we'd move in a huge, confused, lumbering mass toward some nearby restaurant, the way any large group that hasn't perfectly coordinated where we're going for lunch will. We missed out on MWS and CST, both of whom agreed they'd meet us at lunch, again without the perfect agreement about where lunch was going to be, and as it happened they went somewhere else entirely.

What the mass ended up going to was a Qdoba. And that's all right, possibly the best way to get a bunch of twenty or so people food that they want without being impossibly taxing on the wait staff or forcing a huge party to wait forever for everyone's meal to be ready and then eat fast so we could get back to the day. But it's also boring; I mean, we could go to Qdoba here. At least we could have gone to a chain that was present in Pittsburgh and rare in Lansing. And at that Michigan Pinball managed to slashdot the Qdoba. Our flood was enough that some of the first people through the line finished eating by the time the last of us (including me and bunny_hugger) could sit down. We could commiserate some with the folks we were sitting near, but mostly, it was a fast and confusing lunch. Still, I got to talk about my perfect 0-12 round (which is why I feel like this was probably Thursday's lunch).

The other lunch we went in a smaller mob back to Sienna Mercato and their meatballs, or as they put it, balls. They put it less insistently this time. The place was packed full and that seemed bizarre considering it was like 4 pm. And then we realized: oh yeah, the whole of Pinburgh got out at about the same time and surely every restaurant in a few blocks of the convention center was filled with pinball players.

And what pinball players! Someone pointed out to us a guy at one of the wall booths: Lyman F Sheats. I grant you may not know this name. If you see many pinball games after they've had their high score tables wiped, though, they'll often have his LFS initials as the default score. He's a pinball designer and programmer. It's his software behind games like Attack From Mars, Medieval Madness, Monster Bash --- there's an Easter egg there called ``Lyman's Lament'' which even includes his taunting of the player --- and modern games through at least to Iron Man. So, you know, an honest-to-goodness pinball celebrity. We let him alone, since that seemed the decent thing to do, although bunny_hugger did toss a few silly flirty moves when she was confident he wasn't looking. And if he (or anyone he was sitting with) noticed they didn't bring it up. Just silliness.

As I say, I forget which of those was Thursday's and which was Friday's lunch. I think it was that order but if it wasn't, it's only a slight difference.

Trivia: Many of the healers in France's Auvergne region, through the 19th century, were also blacksmiths, a profession traditionally associated with magic. Source: The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography, Graham Robb.

Currently Reading: DC Showcase Presents: Metal Men, Volume 1 Editor um ... will Peter Hamboussi do? That's close enough, I think. Probably. Boy does Dr Jerkface spend a lot of time ordering Platinum to stop getting her girl responsometry all over his semi-ept superhero team-leading.