Two hearts that beat as one

So last Tuesday we had another pinball league event. I don't think it's unprecedented to have two league events week after the other but it's rare and a little exhausting. But because of that cancelled league night thanks to legally purchased firearms depriving many Michigan State University-based people of their rights, stuff got bumped around.

This was a small thing, the for-fun split-flipper ``Zen'' tournament, the seventeenth Super-Ball match. Once again bunnyhugger and I teamed up, taking one flipper each, even though that hadn't paid off for us the previous fifteen seasons. It wasn't looking very good for long for us either: we were kicked out of the winner's bracket in round two by the dream team of DAN and RED, and would have to fight through the second chance bracket. This was not so fearsome as might be since there were only five teams total. Two of them shared a player, the result of the inevitable circumstances that have an odd number of people show up for the split-flipper night.

We were playing well as a team, though. Like, our first round we went up on Tales of the Arabian Nights --- my pick --- and we put up an epic game. The other team did too; they had fifteen million points, which would be a satisfactory game by any standards except that we somehow managed thirty million. bunnyhugger said that's more than twice the best score she ever put up by herself so, you know, I figure she's entitled to half the points of this. We had similarly and surprisingly good results playing Metallica split-flippered; that was another of my suggestions when we started running out of ideas what to play. The tournament set the rule that a team could pick any one table only once per night and so the games we were obviously strongest on went early, us going for the ``don't bother saving the games for the boss battle at the end''.

Ah, but this did put us in trouble when we got to the boss battle. We managed to win our way through the second-chance bracket and had to face the undefeated winners-circle team ... DAN and RED again. For a wonder, we won our second two-out-of-three match, and both of those were on games they had picked. This did not give us the championship, though, because the team of DAN and RED had only lost once. They had to lose twice to be eliminated and so we played them a third time in the night. There, we had to go to three games and, particularly, had to pick the final game of the night. I nominated Cactus Canyon, one of the newly-made reissues of a barely released 1990s Williams pinball. bunnyhugger professed to know nothing about what to do; I have a good deal of knowledge what to do from playing the game in simulation on Pinball Arcade. (There are big rule differences --- the remake finished off code that hadn't really been completed back in 1998 --- but nothing too important by these standards.)

Well, reader, this again turned out to be a good choice. We put up a pretty decent game and most importantly got started the quick draw multiball, a two-ball multiball that lets you keep adding a third ball if you play it right. We ended up winning, taking home the trophies we had just brought to the league. And bringing home the second matched pair of Zen Tournament trophies; our first was way back in season two of the league, back in 2014, when nothing seemed as hard or bad as it is now.

Trivia: At a 1756 mustering of the Pennsylvania militia unit he had assembled the troops saluted Benjamin Franklin with gun volley as they marched past his house; Franlin wrote that they ``shook down and broke several glasses of my electrical apparatus''. Source: The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin, H W Brands.

Currently Reading: Gemini 4: An Astronaut Steps Into The Void, David J Shayler.

PS: What's Going On In Olive and Popeye? Is it enough to make a regular feature of this? December 2022 - March 2023 And how are we starting to get enough Popeye stories that I can consider writing about them regularly?