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austin_dern

July 2025

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Apr. 19th, 2019

Despite some surprising events which ate up almost all my free time this week, in adventures of such import that they cannot yet be revealed, I did get something published each day this past week on my humor blog. And here's what it all was. Thanks for reading.

And now, let's close out the VFW Ann Arbor Pinball Hall of Museum visit.


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Playfield for the 1986 Williams table Grand Lizard, and source of the immortal question, why does a lizard-empress have mandril bodyguards? The answer is why would she NOT?


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Games in for repair, including two early-60s tables. They were likely working by the next time we visited but there is something wonderful about a game that's challenging despite all the rules and all the playing options being right there, obvious for anyone to see.


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Playfield of Strange Science, another of the pinball tables I first learned the trade on.


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Playfield for Quicksilver, an early solid state game with the blobbiest artwork in pinball.


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So when Stern pinball released Iron Maiden in 2018, wiseacres like me naturally asked how we were supposed to differentiate it from the 1982 Iron Maiden, featuring art by Keith Parkinson doing some Hajime Sorayama stuff.


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[profile] bunny_hugger making her way out the door while people check out the food donations which gave the night its ostensible theme.


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Oh, and a couple of the not-quite-pinball mechanical attractions they have there, and which I don't think were turned on: a couple of devices built around the theme of rolling a ball into place using controls that make this needlessly hard. They're fun but nobody plays them enough to be good at them.


Trivia: Cincinatti and Saint Louis did not play each other at all for the first half of the 1882 American Association baseball season. They played each other 16 times in their final 36 games. Source: The Beer and Whisky League: The Illustrated History of the American Association --- Baseball's Renegade Major League, David Nemec.

Currently Reading: DC Comics: Sixty Years of the World's Favorite Comic Book Heroes, Les Daniels.

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