On my humor blog, as you know if it's part of your Reading page, I had a week of miscellaneous local events transmitted there. If you didn't catch it all on your RSS reader, here's the news:
- MiSTed: The Tale of Grumpy Weasel, Chapter 11
- The Trouble Is All the Clothes I Buy Look Like My Taste in Clothes
- Statistics Saturday: What's Lingering In My E-mail Box
- Appetite for Destruction, Satisfied by Spready Swiss-Almond Cheese
- Please Excuse Even More General Dazedness Than Usual
- What's Going On In Gasoline Alley? Why does Gasoline Alley have a talking bear? November 2022 - February 2023
- Statistical Nibble: What Was Popular Here In January
- MiSTed: The Tale of Grumpy Weasel, Chapter 12
Getting back into the roster of pictures from the State Pinball Championships (open, so both men and women could compete, although as it happens no women did, owing to bunnyhugger not playing enough to rank).

Can you believe this? No, it is never possible to believe what the pinball machine just did to you.

I loved this pinball machine when it was a DAW paperback cover in 1979!

Very sad that Blue Chip was out of order the whole weekend. For one, it's among my favorite games so we couldn't play it Friday. For another, it's a game I would have recommended bunnyhugger take opponents to since it's got a simple winning strategy that I think she could carry out and her opponent might not be able to dial in. (Light the spinners, shoot the spinners. But you have to know which targets light the spinners.)

The clubhouse doesn't only have pinball machines; there's a handful of video games, including these adorable little cabinets.

The control panel for the Ms Pac-Man mini-cabinet has this collage of figures.

A naturally-occurring diptych of the competitive room (to the left) and the non-competitive room. Also if you look close you can see at the far wall there's movie posters for The Goonies, Jurassic Park, King Kong, Rocky, and Star Wars. Three of those have been turned into pinball games; I don't know why King Kong hasn't. (Well, Data East made --- according to the Internet Pinball Database --- nine units of a King Kong game in 1990. I don't know why it didn't go into production.) I assume The Goonies is coming from Stern this year or next.
Trivia: On his appointment as Governor of New Jersey and New York in 1732 William Cosby pledged to spend half his time in New Jersey. The province assembly voted him a bonus of £200. He met the New Jersey Assembly once more in the four years before he died in offices, spending the rest of his tenure in New York. Source: New Jersey: America's Main Road, John T Cunningham. (I assume that's New Jersey local-paper currency but don't actually know.)
Currently Reading: Popeye The Sailor: The 1960s TV Cartoons, Fred M Grandinetti.