This past weekend saw the Michigan State Pinball Championships for the International Flipper Pinball Association. Championships because Saturday was the day for the Open tournament, and Sunday for Women's. We had nothing to do with the Open tournament, as we don't play enough to rank anymore. The field has gotten tight; even MWS, who in past years was a strong candidate to win, didn't make the cut.
Making the cut and then getting a terrible disappointment this year: JAB, from the Lansing Pinball League. Just days before he would have competed in open --- and just days after he played in league --- he came down with Covid-19, another reminder that the plague has not been defeated by society just deciding to take the loss on this one. Sad for him, certainly, but not touching us directly.
What did nearly touch us directly was one of the women invited to the Women's Tournament dropping out. YAO, who'd knocked ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger out of competition at the first Michigan State Women's Championship, also came down with Covid-19 a couple days before the tournament and had to bow out. This opened a chance for one of the alternates, at least, and the story of that is to come. But not right now.
This is all part of the stage-setting for the State Women's Pinball Championship. As before, bunnyhugger was running it, as the State Women's Representative of the IFPA. This would be a source of considerable stress in the weeks leading up to the tournament, in the wrangling of people to accept or decline their invitations to the tournament, in thinking belatedly to ask if anyone wanted to sponsor anything and then getting PayPal to let her actually access her account so she could receive sponsorship, in getting trophy proofs and then the final sculptures from the local trophy shop, in the alternates vastly overestimating the likelihood they'd play, and more. (Following the Open tournament's practice, she asked down to the 50th seeded women to consider attending. Someone who was like 47th-ranked seemed to have the impression she was a heartbeat away. If the weather had been truly awful this Sunday she might have got in anyway, as both bunnyhugger and the IFPA wanted there to be sixteen competitors if there were any way to do it.)
But the most stressful thing was that, based on their seeding, bunnyhugger would in her first round face HLC. bunnyhugger saw danger in several of the competitors but was certain that she couldn't beat HLC. Much of the last months of the year she spent watching the standings hoping for a change in the standings that would get her out of there, but the women's standings would not budge. But there was one hope, and it depended on the Detroit Lions.
For HLC works for the Lions, in some capacity, and she has to go into work on game days. So if the Lions could just make it to the conference championship, and the championship game were a Sunday, HLC would have to excuse herself. What are the odds of that? Well, it's what took HLC out of the tournament last year, when bunnyhugger won.
bunnyhugger was overjoyed when the Lions won their way into the NFC championship. Surely TV would demand the Lions play the Sunday night game and then all was set. When the Lions won the division championship HLC's husband even, prematurely, said HLC would have to bow out.
But then the National Football League and whoever was airing the Lions games betrayed us, scheduling the NFC championship game for a Saturday. HLC would be able to play, and to face bunnyhugger first round, after all. Unless someone got sick. Or missed the tournament for some other reason. YAO's Covid-induced withdrawal, sadly for our side, wouldn't affect either bunnyhugger's or HLC's seeding or that they would face first round. bunnyhugger would have to face the last player she wanted to see.
The Lions lost, too.
Not quite done with Camden Park yet; here's some more photographs trying to document the stuff at the park I don't want to forget was there.
More of the horses on the carousel here. The other chariot's coming into view.
Here's the other chariot, a dragon-based one much like we've seen on other carousels this vintage. In fact I'm not sure we haven't seen an identical dragon on another ride but leave it to bunnyhugger to remind me that, of course, it's at the Merry-Go-Round Museum or whatever.
Now we're finally getting to weird other perspectives, like here, of the carousel from the ground, and in motion.
Also adjacent to the carousel is this kiddie car ride. The track looks so much like a Roller Coaster Tycoon layout.
More of the car track. It looks very reconfigurable but I wonder how much it actually ever does change. There is that little loop of asphalt just above the center of the picture that looks like a former track location, though, and there's grass in the little gap on the straightaway on the right. Maybe the course has changed recently?
And here's that classic kiddie ride of the spaceships that go in a circle and have a stick to be a machine gun on them.
Trivia: In 1946 the American Zone of Germany distributed questionnaires to every German eighteen years or older, part of the process of identifying the five classes of Nazi. The five classes were adopted in the British and French Zones. Source: 1945: The War That Never Ended, Gregor Dallas.
Currently Reading: Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum, Leonard Susskind, Art Friedman.
PS: What's Going On In Judge Parker? Who snuck Ann Parker into town? October 2024 - January 2025 has my guesses about a mystery that Judge Parker probably isn't all that interested in.
