Beware of the Queen of Spades

So a week ago Tuesday bunnyhugger ran the March Hare Madness charity pinball tournament, the only one of the regular quartet not devoted to the Capital Area Humane Society. Instead, this one goes to support the rescue from which she adopted Stephen, the giant among bunnies. Also from whom we adopted Penelope and Fezziwig. The format of this tournament, to keep with the madness theme, is to use the Critical Hit deck. This is a set of 54 cards which allow players, in collectible card game fashion, to do mischief during games. Have the flippers covered. Steal someone else's game after the first, or after the second, ball. Force someone in the group you're playing in out of it. These are rare events, as the card deck wasn't produced for long, and while the International Flipper Pinball Association sanctions play using these cards --- a burst of whimsy it seems determined never to repeat --- there's no getting more cards and if you didn't buy a deck in the short window they were open you never will.

These tournaments usually start slowly, with people saving their cards for the very end. I resolved to be more aggressive with my card-playing and got early on a couple cards that ... didn't really let me do much. But this would change after bunnyhugger, in her role as tournament director, studied the exact text on the card for replacing any player in a group with a randomly chosen one in another group and decided it implied that a person could replace themselves, that is, jump into a different group. Since scoring for the night was being done by whether you finished first, second, third, or fourth place, this meant that when I faced a really tough group --- including two of the league's best players on the sort of game they know perfectly and I don't --- I was able to jump out and go to a game that, it happens, I took first place on.

I had some other strokes of luck too. The big one would be a game of James Bond 007 against RED and BJK, two players who can absolutely clean my clock on anything they want. Somehow, in the past two weeks, I've picked up The Knack for playing this game, though, regularly putting up scores in the hundreds of millions and, here, putting up over a half-billion points. BJK attempted to use his card to swipe my game after ball one --- he had a terrible first ball, while I had one good enough they applauded, and he even told me he was leaning towards swiping the game --- but I had one of the precious cancellation cards. In his last ball RED threatened to overtake me, so I pulled out the card that requires a person to stop playing. He had a cancellation card for that. It happens he didn't overtake me, but it was a closer thing than I'd have liked.

The conclusion to all this? When the last round finished at a little past 10 pm --- the designated hour --- RED had finished in first place, and I was in second, and bunnyhugger was annoyed to find herself in fifth place. But RED declared he was out late enough and had to work in the morning (he's the guy who fixes the pinball machines, and he does usually take off quickly once that hour rolls around on normal league nights) so he was forfeiting. This bumped me up to the highest seed, and brought bunnyhugger into the four-person, three-game finals. During which, by the way, cards were still active and in play.

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Now to some more pictures of ham radios from the Jackson County Fair, where they were not being judged, just shown.

Boy, remember Heathkit? They started out in west Michigan (lower peninsula). The Seneca here would be a late-50s/early-60s model for the two- and six-meter bands (144 MHz and 50 MHz).

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And some more of the shelves of radios, plus a duplicate picture of that Sparton or Spartan or whatnot.

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So are you getting an idea of what this corner of the exhibition hall is, with all this glorious 50s/60s amateur radio gear is?

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That's right! It's a ham radio club, as you can see by the bearded old guy in the background. Weirdly, I'm not in a ham radio club, though they'd love to get some young blood like mine in. We did admire some of the QSL cards (not photographed) as those are great folk art pieces.

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Wartime radio from the National Radio Company, which I never heard of either.

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Now here, the Turner Crystal Microphone? That's how you design a microphone to be as much microphone as possible.

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Trivia: Cuba's Constitutional Convention of 1900 was opened by Governor Leonard Wood, who was a US General (and commander in the Rough Riders), descendant of Mayflower pilgrims, and onetime surgeon turned warrior. Source: Cuba: An American History, Ada Ferrer. (Although he did, after wishing them well, leave, and not be explicitly involved in its writing. And he professed himself impressed with the work done. Still, you get a feeling for the situation.)

Lost Popeye Volume 36: Boogerman, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.