Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow

I mentioned yesterday how Sunshine was having a great day. She had another good one today. We have to act on that. I'm putting the rest behind a cut because it is about pet health and while the news is very good, we are still dealing with serious problems that haven't gone away.

( Still, it is all very good. )

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Let's get back to the State Pinball Championships and see if we can spot a champion about to be made:

Gulfstream is a fun though not deep electromechanical game (like, not deep even for electromechanical games). At one point two other folks and I started taking turns to see if one of us could roll the game before JRA finished his game of Led Zeppelin. We could not, but not for want of trying; this was one of my good scores.

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ACE playing Deadpool, which you can see twice: look in the lower left and you see him at the machine, just like you see on the monitor.

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Another of the not-for-competition games was Break Shot, which was crashing almost every game anyway, This glitched-out display looked enough like Morse Code I wondered if it might actually be an error code, but that doesn't make sense; this would parse as either 'E S E G A S' or 'E S P A S' or, conceivably, 'E S P A K'. While it wouldn't be absurd to have an error code be cryptic --- letters could stand for elements diagnosed as faulty --- there's no good reason they wouldn't just show the letters for something complicated. (Williams games of this era will put a dot after the credits count --- like, show 'CREDITS 0.' rather than 'CREDITS 0' --- if they detect something serious enough wrong, but there's so many things on a table there'll always be something somewhere, so it's not a useful dot.)

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Another double view of the same player, here on The Munsters, a bad game to take JRA to. (They're all bad.)

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Oh yeah, and I stopped in to get a snap of the 'Special Preview Models - Video Clips Pending Licensor Approval' warning on the venue's 007.

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A sports story in one photo, here.

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Trivia: The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, before the 1951 nationalization of Iranian oil, was required to pay only 16 percent of the money the monopoly earned from extracting, refining, and selling oil. In all likelihood it paid less; no outsider was ever allowed to audit the books. (It made more profit in 1950 than it had paid in royalties since its start in 1901.) Source: Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawai'i to Iraq, Stephen Kinzer. (Wikipedia says 17.5 percent. Could be a difference in rounding from statistics. )

Currently Reading: Suddenly, Tomorrow Came: A History of the Johnson Space Center, Henry C Dethloff. NASA SP-4307.