Would you know just what to do or where to keep it?

Continuing on Sunday at Motor City Furry Con. bunnyhugger as I believe I've mentioned picked up her sketchbook, with a wonderful illustration of her stretched out. Just a beautiful piece. And then we got to the last of the panels we'd attend, Vix's ``How Do Arcade Machines Work?'' The presentation was a little undercut by the projector not being bright enough, or the room not being dark enough, for overhead stuff to be clear. And he was able to show off some of what goes into hardware and to talk about building and rebuilding various machines.

Including, particularly, the most interesting thing in the arcade room. You may have noticed by its absence that I haven't talked about spending time in the arcade room. We hadn't spent much, because there wasn't any pinball. Earthshaker!, resident attraction for the previous two Motor City Furry Cons, was still in too rough a shape for a weekend's play. It's not like we deliberately avoided the games room this year but somehow we didn't find ourselves there so much.

Except that Vix revealed the secrets of that target-shooting game that's also been a regular attendee at the convention. The centerpiece of this is its final target, a coffee cup which, when you shoot, flies apart into dozens of shards. It's a trick, done by a Pepper's Ghost illusion, and Vix shared the secrets of how it works --- including bringing the panel to the arcade room, taking the game open, and showing how it all works. The Pepper's Ghost illusion is ingenious enough, but the cleverness goes deeper, including into how the light gun works. Everyone, but everyone, took their turn looking at the machinery from behind, and looking at the chips of the mug that result from the final shot (if you make it). They're simple cut-outs from a PVC pipe, or the equivalent, but at the distance and lighting you get they make an effective ``shards of a ceramic mug''.

With it all reassembled we took turns playing and so bunnyhugger and I had our somehow-first-time-ever chances on the shooting game. It's rather fun. bunnyhugger unfortunately used up her twenty ``bullets'' on the first couple levels and didn't get to shattering the mug. I went more slowly --- figured there was no chance I'd get on the high-score table for rapid shooting anyway --- and used the gunsight and, while my time was nothing big, I did get the mug to explode. It's as fun to play as it is to watch and maybe next convention I'll see if I can get my time any better. Still hope that we'll have a pinball machine back, though.

Somewhere around this is when bunnyhugger discovered that she had lost her driver's license. I had earlier, in writing about the various things we'd lost, written this as her credit card and that's just wrong. Credit card would be bad enough but driver's licence would be a real pain: not just for the fear of having an hourlong commute three days a week without one, but also because without it --- or any other proof of age --- she never would get to try any of the beers or wines or ales or whatever on tap in hospitality, and the whole convention would have been two-thirds as long as it should have been, squeezed between work she had to do in our hotel room, and ending early even after the Dead Dog Dance as I had to be readying for bed by midnight.

Her own searches turning up nothing I went with my best guesses. These included yet another visit to Lost and Found, as well as going out to my car to search the cabin floor. My best guess was that it might have fallen out the night before, at Taco Bell, when she took her credit card out to pay at the drive-through. We've had things go missing between the seat and the car door often enough. But there was no luck there. Nor at the convention's hotel lost-and-found, nor at the lost-and-found of the hotel we'd stayed at. I had driven back to the convention hotel, bracing myself to give the sad news that I had no ideas what to do. Then my phone rang.

Trivia: The Golden Apple was a musical that opened at the Alvin theater on the 20th of April 1954, and closed after 125 shows. It adapted Homeric legend, resetting the events to Angel's Roost, Washington, in the first decade of the 20th century. Ulysses was made a veteran of the Spanish-American War. Paris arrived in a balloon from neighboring Rhododendron. Mother Hare offered a golden apple as prize for the best pie, with Paris chosen to judge the contest. Source: Not Since Carrie: 40 Years Of Broadway Musical Flops, Ken Mandelbaum.

Currently Reading: Managing Previously Unmanaged Collections: A Practical Guide for Museums, Angela Kipp.

PS: What's Going On In Dick Tracy? Why didn't the last two stories finish? January - April 2023 with special guest appearance by Nero Wolfe, so that's fun.