Been another week of slightly fuzzy nostalgia and nonsense wordplay on my humor blog. If you skipped it from its RSS incarnation and want to catch up, here's your chance.
- MiSTed: The Rangers of NIMH II, Part 2 which by the way I found an old web page cache which implies dates to January 1998. I'm not confident about the specific date, but late-1997/early-1998 feels right for the original publication.
- Again, in Case You Need to Know Exactly Who I Am
- Statistics Saturday: Ranking of I-995’s
- This Budes Very Well
- Truly, the Most Funky Winkerbean of Feelings
- What’s Going On In Judge Parker? Why is April Parker out of CIA jail? March – June 2023
- The Synthesizer Lifts From Gustav Holst, Though, Those Will Stay Timeless
- MiSTed: The Rangers of NIMH II, Part 3
Now let's return to Pinball At The Zoo, and pinball pictures, no bunnies in sight except for ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger.
One of the oldest games brought to Pinball At The Zoo ... uh ... Chubbie, a 1938 table from ... Stoner Manufacturing. That's the game's name and the company's name, that's all. No flippers, as you see, and those aren't pop bumpers, they're just fixed coils. You have to plunge hard enough to tap the coils, and nudge them around.
See? The Stoner Corporation. If you can touch all fifteen coils, and then touch the number 7 coil, you get an extra ball.
Slightly expired Detroit licence for the game. 3902 Joy Road, Detroit, is now an unremarkable building opposite a Family Dollar and an electric supply building.
Instructions card for this game of skill (not chance), laying out the straightforward rules. It doesn't say you're supposed to nudge, but if you don't, there's no way you have a chance; remember, the bumpers are passive, so won't kick the ball anywhere. The ball will just dribble off it.
Coin wrapper and ... I don't know, maybe an old M & M? .. .trapped underneath the glass. The wrapper looks old.
And here's the whole table. I believe this was after bunnyhugger's game, as she got all the targets hit and you can see the promise of an Extra Ball for hitting coil 7 there.
Trivia: The calculating prodigy, and future civil engineer, George Parker Bidder was at age ten challenged to calculate how many times a coach wheel five feet, ten inches in circumference would revolve in running 800,000,000 miles. He needed a minute of (mental) calculation to answer 724,114,285,704 times with 20 inches left over. Source: How The World Was One: Beyond the Global Village, Arthur C Clarke. That's the figure Clarke gives, although my calculation, aided by Matlab, says it should be 724,114,285,714 times with 20 inches left over. I have no explanation for the discrepancy but Clarke's notes do not include the usual disclaimer that any errors are his doing, so we must suppose that his references failed him rather than that the keyboard on his Archives III computer foiled him.
Currently Reading: The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human, Siddhartha Mukherjee.
