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bunnyhugger called everyone together for final announcements, rules explanations, and a group photo --- I took the pictures --- at the scheduled noon, and we learned afterwards that Ypsi Pinball Podcast had supposed that all this stuff would be finished before noon and people would start going into games. Also bunnyhugger only started writing out the first round of matches --- top seed versus 16th, 2nd versus 15th and so on --- after the announcements, though either of us could have started writing that out as soon as we had the full attendance confirmed. It's always the things you think you don't need to coordinate.
bunnyhugger's first round, and the one the streamers chose to start with, was against KEC, and as everyone noted was a repeat of finals from two years ago. They would start later than the other groups, just because bunnyhugger was busy giving every other group the chance to start, and I think they ended up later than that because their first game --- Jungle Queen, one of KEC's picks --- was occupied. In the tournament format chosen every competitor chooses three games --- a classic, a middle-era game, and a modern game --- at the start of the match, before either of them have played anything against each other, and they will sometimes have to wait for another group to finish.
bunnyhugger won the classic Jungle Queen, thereby relieving my first worst fear, that she'd get swept. The next game was one of bunnyhugger's, Stranger Things, which she's played competently a fair bit locally but hadn't much touched in Fremont. But she had to have some picks for a modern-era game, and this seemed the friendliest of those available. It was not; she kept having trouble just timing the skill shot to start the game and took a loss. Back to KEC's games, the middle-era The Addams Family, where KEC had a disappointing game to bunnyhugger's really good in-the-groove play. This had the mildly embarrassing thing in bunnyhugger's last ball, where she overcame KEC's score, that while she had surely got the points she needed there were modes going one after another so she couldn't see the score to be certain. On to bunnyhugger's mid-era pick, FunHouse, which as the streamers noted was a game she just had to play and also that she'd be doing all the game's call-outs along with.
The irony for all of bunnyhugger's love of FunHouse is she isn't a particularly strong player at it, and the table was playing tournament-grade hard. But she had a fair game put up and was ahead at the end of her three balls, as the podcasters noted, the first time this match someone might win their choice. And then KEC --- who, Addams Family stumble aside, was playing really strongly --- went on a tear and blew past bunnyhugger's score. On to game five!
This was KEC's modern pick, the Stern game Mustang, and she knew the game in a way that bunnyhugger just doesn't. We used to, well before the pandemic began, have the game locally, but nobody much liked it or knew what to do with it then either. I've since played it enough in The Pinball Arcade app to be decent at it, in simulation, but there's no transferring that knowledge or experience orally, especially given how much of it is that I don't know how to describe what I'm doing besides making the yellow-lit shot. So for the first time someone defended her pick and she had a three-to-two advantage on bunnyhugger.
On to bunnyhugger's last pick, the classic game Scuba, a 1960s table with the smaller-model flippers placed about four yards apart. The gimmick of this game is you get the big points if you complete a set of five mini-targets that are blocked from the flippers by pop bumpers, so you have to aim to the sides of pop bumpers a lot until you get lucky. This era of game is always one of bunnyhugger's relative strengths but again, that luck element ...
Still, the choice was working out nicely, bunnyhugger being ahead at the ends of the first several balls, and while KEC was coming up, that's an era where it's inevitable you'll get a house ball, or a ball that pings wildly and goes out the enormous drains. Or that just dies when the flipper touches it, and can't be sent anywhere but the center drain. At the end of who knows how many rounds of the competitors trading physical places the podcasters said that was it, ball five, and bunnyhugger had won and they were going on to game seven.
It was not the end of the game. There was one ball left, and bunnyhugger played a little, and KEC played more and got that fifth hidden target, opening up a world of more points. She would beat bunnyhugger and, oh dear, knock bunnyhugger out of contention. For the third time in four tournaments my dear bride wouldn't make it past the first round.
What she did make it to? Back in June? Tuscora Park. Here's pictures to prove it.
A nearly decade-old plaque from the National Carousel Association commemorating Tuscora Park for operating the carousel.
And a slightly older plaque in better shape from the same group commemorating the same thing, as if the National Carousel Association got the idea of commemorating Tuscora Park in its head and the park wasn't going to turn them down.
The carousel's chariot, a nice long lion-esque dragon.
A sign warning what the rules are for each of the rides. The roller coaster, alas, is only open to those under 17 years old. It's your standard Allan Herschell Little Dipper, a knee-banger from the very old days.
Some of the kiddie rides, your usual sort of flat rides of things that go in circles.
This would've been a more interesting ride to Young Me since the chains would make it feel more believably like flying.
Trivia: The word basmati, as in rice, derives from the Hindi for ``fragrant''. Source: Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World's Smells, Harold McGee.
Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Sundays Supplement Volume 19: 1957, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle. I know it's hard to build a narrative over the Sundays but boy, do Sims and Zaboly lean heavily on ``Popeye goes fishing'' or ``Oscar and Swee'Pea try to get Popeye to buy them an ice cream soda'' premises.
