Two weeks before March Hare Madness, the springtime charity pinball tournament ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger runs --- and the one supporting the charity from which we got beloved rabbits Stephen, and Penelope, and the mouse Fezziwig --- it was nearly scuppered. bunnyhugger discovered the tournament wasn't on the upcoming-events calendar. While she had --- after the scare of being several days late registering Silver Balls In The City --- picked dates for all the charity tournaments, and scheduled all the regular league and women's league events for the year, she had somehow overlooked actually scheduling March Hare Madness. We've had the event creep into early April before, much as the NCAA tournament does, but the thirty-day rule wouldn't even let it be early April; it'd be, at earliest, mid-April and very close to the pinball tournament behemoth that is Pinball At The Zoo.
For a second time, though, and an even more generous time, the Master of the Events at sanctioning body International Flipper Pinball Association granted mercy, and allowed bunnyhugger to schedule the event despite it being only a couple weeks out. Possibly they trust bunnyhugger's good intentions and that she is reliable and regular enough that no one could suspect she was sneaking in tournaments to fiddle with rankings. Possibly the 30-day deadline has always been squishy-soft and we're only learning this a decade into things.
Coincidentally bunnyhugger had been planning to get this event also sanctioned by the new Punk Rock Pinball Association, a group put together after the IFPA's big Trans Fail last year. The Punk Rock Pinball Association, with a different set of rules about how they rank people, doesn't mind double-listing events and the IFPA doesn't care, so, what the heck. Let's see what happens. This is how bunnyhugger came to run the first PRPA-sanctioned event in the new scene of ``Central, Michigan''. And it's given the 21 of us who played IDs and ranking positions on new leaderboards.
The time leading up to the tournament went as you'd expect: the tournament was forever away and then it was tomorrow. bunnyhugger ultimately had to order some elevator bolts, to secure the upcycled trophies together once she removed the old toppers, off Amazon since the local hardware stores have weirdly stopped carrying them, and she gave in to the time savings of getting a couple lovely gold-colored rabbit figures instead of finding what she might have in stock. This would give her the top three trophies with a refreshing minimum of work and stress. Then she remembered for this tournament she gives trophies to the top four finishers and had to put a fourth-place trophy together without the benefit of time for this stuff.
It would be a bit much to say everything was ready by the time I got home from the in-office day --- I was delayed by the construction zone around my office, too, cheating me of time to help with last-minute preparation --- but it was small things left over to work out. Figuring out which of the 40 games in the venue we were overlooking on the games list. Uncanny X-Men, turns out. Having a box to put discarded cards in. Finding a newspaper in case someone plays the card that requires the score display to be covered. Though we have a couple newspapers in the house waiting for recycling, we forgot them all, and I had to go out on the street to find an honor box and get a new copy. The only one left was the display copy, the one in the box's door's window, that had received all the insults of the elements. Finding the promotional stuff to give away. We have many translites but the most immediately available one was a Foo Fighters so, off it would go.
This sets the stage.
Now, let's get back to ZooAmerica a bit.
Those weren't just black vultures in that enclosure, though; there were bears, a bunch of them. Here's a brown and a black bear hanging out, looks like.
The bears pause to have a frank exchange of views.
Ground squirrels looking up to see what all the fuss is about.
Couple of ... I'm going to guess elk? ... hanging around in the quite large ground squirrel enclosure.
Oh, a photo sharing spot for people who like ... lions that can't give you The Finger?
As with any ample zoo enclosure you get a couple of wild rabbits making their home where the making is good.
Trivia: Apollo 8's astronauts were able to observe lunar surface details at sun angles as low as two or three degrees; prior to the flight, the lower limit had been thought to be 6 degrees. Source: Apollo by the Numbers: A Statistical Reference, Richard W Orloff. NASA SP-4029.
Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 88: Pappy the Beatnick!, Bud Sagendorf. Editor Stephanie Noelle.
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Date: 2026-04-08 01:14 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2026-04-08 02:43 am (UTC)