![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
After I finished using some old Robert Benchley essays I turned this week to using my humor blog to grouse about little stuff from real life. You might like it! Or at least want to disagree with me about the North Tonawanda stuff. We'll see. Here's what you've been missing:
- MiSTed: All The King's Horses, Part 10: FLASHBACK
- Robert Benchley: Fun With Animals
- Statistics Saturday: Some good Rush lyrics
- Not to Brag, but I Knew About North Tonawanda Even Before I Visited the Place
- They Also Carry Some of Those Foreign Potato Chips With Weird Flavors Like Shrimp and Curried Chicken if That Helps
- What's Going On In Rex Morgan, M.D.? Since when does Rene Belluso have nieces? May - August 2026
- I Have Also Heard Way Too Much About That Concrete That's 17 Times as Strong as Concrete, Too
- MiSTed: All The King's Horses, Part 11: Her Horsiyashi Maru time
Now please enjoy a whole bunch of pinball pictures.
Big Valley is a 1970 Bally table that shows how Christian Marche is maybe not the go-to guy for ... going to say bobcats? Given the short tail?
Still, he does do a fox that has a pretty sharp face and ... eyemask?
Dragon is of course always a favorite no matter how much it seems like it should be Hydra.
The playfield is deceptively simple; it's a good challenging table. I'm sorry it never got a simulator version.
Ah, and then we know who's behind these smiling people in space. (It's Gordon Morison.)
You know, we failed to check whether Dollywood had the Dolly Parton pinball game anywhere. We'll have to go back and check.
And a quirky rarity: the Mr and Mrs Pac-Man pinball game, which actually does have an in-game way of playing something like Pac-Man, although it's so cryptically explained I needed to session the game before I started to understand it and I might have already forgot it all again.
A lot of the pinball play is about qualifying mazes to even play, and to make Pac-Man 'aggressive', that is, able to eat the ghost in the maze. Also, lot of round bodies in all this.
The lower playfield, showing off the extremely 80s inlane-outlane reversal that was so in fashion then. Also, in Pac-Man sitting on top of the segmented LEDs there, just how much of a nudist he is wearing only sneakers and gloves like that.
The whole playfield, so you can see how it all fits together and start to wonder: why does the fire hydrant have a face? The grid of lights is here spelling 'B-A-L-L-Y'; it also spells out 'P-A-C-M-A-N' in attract mode.
The five-by-five grid of lights in the center is the 'maze' you light; you start at the center, and use one flipper to set direction (up, right, down, left) and the other to move one in that direction. The goal is to cover the whole maze without being caught by the orange light that's the ghost. It works better than you'd expect.
And here a game made by Original Stern when they figured, what the heck, themes are for cowards.
Trivia: The albumen in an egg, a difficult-to-penetrate microbial barrier, is about 90 percent water, with most of the rest proteins for the developing embryo. Source: Slime: A Natural History, Susanne Wedlich.
Currently Reading: DC Archive Edition: Superman The Action Comics Volume 3, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster. Editor Dale Crain. Picked up a copy at the used book store and thought I'd see what the stories were like in the days Superman was becoming a phenomenon. They're ... a mix of rushed and shaggy.
