We are coming up on the Michigan State Pinball Championship, in which I will not be playing. Neither will ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger. We don't play enough events, given how busy the Michigan pinball schedule is. Nor how competitive it is; even if we did do some pinball event every weekend we might not earn enough competition points to make the top-24 in the state.
But the day after the (open) Pinball Championship is the Women's Championship, which bunnyhugger runs and is also qualified for. And this week she's been calling news departments and such for tv stations anywhere that might be interested, and a few have got back to her. One of the Grand Rapids stations hopes to talk with her Thursday for a segment to air Friday. There's this Muskegon station that ... might or might not actually exist. She's been unable to tell, from their web site. And closer to home?
Lansing's Channel 10 interviewed her last week, for a segment that ran on today's 3:00 afternoon news show. This didn't talk about the state championship, though, just the upcoming start of the Lansing Pinball League season. bunnyhugger got to talk a fair bit about what's fun in pinball, and how the league is a pleasant, comfortable place welcoming to new players, and at the end of this she got cut off for mysterious reasons. I assume there was a time constraint that couldn't be worked around.
bunnyhugger was worried the video they took of her playing Attack From Mars would show off to any experienced player that she wasn't doing well under the news cameras. She needn't have worried; the editing cut up the flow of the game enough that all you could tell is she kept the ball from draining several times over. And that, in the end, she hit the shot that blew up a saucer, exactly the sort of visually distinctive and exciting thing you want to show on TV. There are more challenging accomplishments you can do on other games at our local hipster bar, but I'm not sure there are any so obvious to the novice that Something Exciting Is Happening.
Sunday we too De Lijn, an interurban that's been running the west coast of Belgium since the 19th century; the whole run is supposed to be an outstanding experience. Unfortunately we could only take it halfway, because we'd discovered late Saturday night that we had to leave De Panne early in order to make our plane flight home Monday morning. So we took half the line and you're going to see it.
Waiting for the train! We had our tickets and were just waiting to hop on.
On the train here, looking back at the Blue Ring that's surely the companion to that Golden Ring over in Royal Oak or whatever it is in Michigan.
One of many features passed on the way up the coast; I believe it was a memorial to Great War dead. Don't mess with that Nood-opening; looks dangerous.
We have no idea what that Ferris wheel's deal is.
And then we encountered this sign of these beloved(?) Belgian(?) cartoon(?) stars(?) on the side of this hotel(?).
I feel like I'm looking at a meme.
Trivia: The Chicago Tunnel Railway is a system of about 62 miles of track, almost all underneath the city. In the 1940s 150 electric locomotives and three thousand cars delivered coal and other freight to basements of buildings in the Loop and hauled away ashes and more freight. Source: The Story of American Railroads, Stewart H Holbrook.
Currently Reading: A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II, Maury Klein.
