The Tuesday after Christmas was set aside for a pinball tournament. Our oldest charity tournament, Silver Balls In The City, the one originally founded in the hope of a last-minute tournament that would get ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger into state finals ahead of MJS, who also started a traditional last-minute tournament that year. There is no state championship for 2021. There's supposed to be for 2022, but we'll see.
The format would be, again, strikes. This year we switched to ``group strikes'', in which the computer would group people into groups of three or four, and the last- and second-to-last players (by score) would get strikes. Three strikes and you're out of the tournament. bunnyhugger picked this format, and this number of strikes, as the number most likely to get us out of the bar before midnight. They close at 1 am these days and we did not want things going longer than they had to.
The tournament would get attacked by energy vampires before it started. One was the thing I told you about, the Entitled White Pinball Guy trying to call the International Flipper Pinball Association cops on us for having a pinball tournament in a bar. Another was a couple Covid supporters harassing bunnyhugger on Facebonk for her ``dictatorial'' insistence on people wearing face masks. You can imagine how happy things were around here after that.
And then there were further issues. Stern Pinball had a representative who happened to be in the Detroit area and he was planning to attend ... until he got exposed to Covid-19 and had to quarantine. (Also spoiling his promise to bring some new Stern merchandise to raffle off.) RED, the guy who fixes all the machines, also had a Covid-19 exposure and had to quarantine. MWS ... did not have fresh pinball exposure. But he did have a health crisis the day before and planned to stay home to recover. And, then, there was also a threatened snowstorm moving in. It turned out not to be much --- we still haven't had a big snowstorm this season, because we destroyed the climate to make the Dow Jones hit 36,000. But the fear was reasonable.
So between plague and weather we expected a depleted turnout. Sixteen people (counting bunnyhugger and myself) did attend, a decent and manageable group. We also remembered at the last minute we'd meant to have a side tournament. This we did as a ``closest to the pin'' tournament, where the objective was to get as close as possible to 100,000,000 on Road Show without going over. Mostly we wanted people to play Road Show more. But it turned out to be a great objective. Road Show is a game where scores in the hundreds of millions are routine. You can avoid the big-scoring modes easily, but then it takes forever to put a hundred million points together ... but if you start a big-scoring mode it's easy to go over. A good number of times over the night someone would play carefully and strategically and then hit one target too many and finish at 102 million, which made for good, frustrated fun.
Frustrating and not fun: my actual play. I got knocked out in three rounds, the fastest anyone got knocked out. (One person had to leave after the second round and so officially was recorded as knocked out first, but still.) And it wasn't even that I was put on games I was weak on; the computer drew me on tables that I love, like Guardians of the Galaxy or the Stern Star Trek. I just failed, early and often, and really hard, and will admit to taking it badly. After being knocked out and while nothing was happening with the tournament I went to some other games and played them and, relieved of the pressure of competition, put up a long string of lousy games. I ended up spending hours at this, playing worse and getting myself into an even more foul attitude, and missing the gradual dwindling-down of the active players, to 13, then to nine, to five, then to three and then to the final match. Which was on Willy Wonka, which I so like and which, given the choice, I should have gone and watched instead.
Other people, besides me, had good times, though. And the tournament ended with admirable speed. The first Silver Balls they were threatening to close the place (at 2 am!) on us; this, we were done by 11:00 at the latest and I'm not sure it wasn't earlier than that. And despite everything, it raised about two hundred dollars for the Capital Area Humane Society, so there's appreciable good to have come of it.
Now, more of the Potter Park Zoo.
One of the lionesses, also asleep, for the evening.
The Theio's Restaurant bench! I'd wondered if it was still in the felines-and-primates house. Theio's has been closed for years, and was torn down ages ago so that the property owner could have a vacant lot that does nothing for anybody. Here's a fossil of the venerable Lansing 24-hour eatery that never learned how to make coffee and one time just ... couldn't make waffles anymore.
And here's a snow leopard that I bet knows that isn't a real mountain behind them.
Trivia: Harvard College attempted public subscriptions in 1805, 1816, 1822, 1823, and 1825 to fund an observatory. All failed, although they did draw a $1,000 pledge from John Quincy Adams. Source: The Long Space Age: The Economic Origins of Space Exploration from Colonial America to the Cold War, Alexander MacDonald.
Currently Reading: Miscellaneous comic books sent me by a friend. And I know this sounds like a lot of comic books but, you know what? They're nice and easy to read and I like that.
PS: How December 2021, The Month I Crashed, Treated My Mathematics Blog, which was: worse than November did, but also, worse than average for the preceding twelve months. Hm.
