Happy Doctorversary, dear ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger.
Next big thing we did after Pinball At The Zoo was ... Pinball at the VFW. The VFW Ann Arbor Pinball Museum was having one of its occasional open weekends and for the first time since, I think, before the pandemic began we went. We got there at like 11:30 Sunday, when they were going to be open to 5 pm, cheating us of maybe an hour and a half but we weren't up to getting up any earlier.
bunnyhugger tried signing up right away for a tournament. This would be a 'blind Herb' tournament, where you could, I think one time, call a tournament official over to have your score verified, but you could never know what other people's scores were. I didn't sign up for it since I figured the tournament would eat up all the time I might spend playing weird games. As it happens, this ... probably would have happened? Because bunnyhugger was not able to get tournament officials to come when she was ready, no matter what she did with pressing the tournament app's 'Summon Tournament Official' button. I don't know what all was wrong with it, but I suspect inadequate testing, or inadequate testing under load, and I would not be surprised if the whole thing were vibe-coded.
I ended up just going around appreciating pinball art and weird games, many of which I had seen in past VFW shows. I also got surprisingly into this carnival-themed 1989 Gottlieb game named Hot Shots, which seemed at first like your generic late-Gottlieb ``rules? Who knows anything about rules?'' game. But when I started to get the point of it --- there's this V-shaped corridor on the upper middle playfield with drop targets; knock them all down and you can lock for multiball --- I started having a lot more fun. I could stand to play that more.
Also, they had something I don't remember from past shows: a 1947 Gottlieb Humpty Dumpy, the first game with electromechanical flippers. In fact, six flippers, although pointed the 'wrong' way, to the outside of the table. It's a convention we didn't use but could have.
Several Lansing Pinball League folks were at the show, as were people we knew from elsewhere in the pinball world. Didn't get to talk with them as much as we might have, but we got to see them at all. So maybe we'll do it again whenever the next show is, which probably will be Black Friday.
And now, believe it or not, I've finally reached August of last year in pictures and you know what that means: it's county fair season! First up, Jackson County.
Banner out front explaining the themes of each of the days. Note that Superhero Day declares that first responders get free admission, so they're using Higglytown Heroes rules.
One of the first-prize winners: a Holiday Inn ``Sing Along With Lenore'' book. I don't know what this means and I'm glad I'm not the person who has to rate it as blue-ribbon-worthy in whatever the heck its category was.
And a third-place winner in, I imagine, the same category (and from the same collector): a simple guide to filling out your income tax, provided by W Burr Thorne's hardware and groceries store on something 25 Main Street, phone 22.
Over now to photos. In 2024 the big theme had been the Eclipse; for 2025, the Aurora.
You don't suppose the picture of the wedding(?) couple got first place specifically so it would make the cross-looking person in bottom center look funnier when they got not-first, do you?
And here's some pictures and memorabilia from past Jackson County Fairs. From this we learned the fair has a Thing for petunias thanks to a longtime groundskeeper who was into them.
Trivia: Before the SL-7 class container cargo ships entered service in 1972 the US Army Corps of Engineers in Vicksburg, Mississippi, built a large hydrostatic likeness of the approach to Newark Bay, and the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken built a nine-foot model of an SL-7 that officers could use to test (remote-control) navigating the port in the new craft. Source: Box Boats: How Container Ships Changed The World, Brian J Cudahy. Apparently the SL-7 ships turned out more maneuverable at low speed than anyone anticipated.
Currently Reading: This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong (And Why It Matters), Mark Cooper-Jones, Jay Foreman.
