Relax yourselves and drift into the regions of your mind

[austin_dern]

And while I'm uploading pictures, what the heck, why not some from the Silverball Museum in Asbury Park:

	This is a detail from the backdrop to the ``Flicker'' pinball game, manufactured by Bally in 1974-75. I assume the blackface figure to be Al Jolson, but the surprise (and, really, crudeness) of finding the detail is the sort of thing for which Tom Servo aptly said, ``What the heck, white people? I mean, seriously, what the heck?'' (Could they at least have made it look a little less like really bad blackface? I mean, by 1974 it had been about thirty years since you could use blackface in the United States except while making The Al Jolson Story, but a drawing can have the skin coloring be not hideous and unnatural.)
	In the more clean-spirited 1995 Bally pinball 'Theater of Magic' details show devilbunnies crawl around the playing field. They're also all over the cabinet.
	This is the backdrop to Williams's 1974 pinball Spacelab, also manufactured as Skylab, the difference being that Spacelab awarded extra balls rather than replays. These add-a-ball versions were made for areas where replays were counted as things-of-value and thus made pinball machines qualify as gambling devices. I'd had a fairly successful game of this one, and besides, how many Skylab-themed items have you ever seen? (The museum also has a Space Mission, based on the Apollo-Soyuz Test Program.)
	This 1978 Gottlieb Rock Star pinball game was unusual at the Silverball Museum for being subtly out of order: it never reduced the number of balls in play, allowing one to achieve all five (and more) ``Wow!'' hits. However, it also never rolled the score above 200,000.
	This is part of the coin slot for the 1979 Bally pinball Xenon, and provides evidence of how the pinball industry did its part to support the Susan B Anthony dollar coin. (Pinballs at the Silverball Museum are on free play, so I do not know how it would work with the new-issue dollar coins that nobody uses.)
	This is the backglass for the 1963 Gottlieb pinball 'Slick Chick', which adds to its vaguely bunny-dressed chicks the Guys From The Background Of Mary Worth Singing Quartet.
	Gottlieb's 1963 pinball Slick Chick looks peculiar from the backglass display, but when you look at the playing field it's ... at least as baffling. Sorry.
	Well, somebody had a good day playing Williams's 1994 pinball Road Show. (Note this was the daily high score table, not the all-time one and certainly not a record worthy of commemoration on the Silverball Museum's machine-attached cards.)
	This is just one row and the crossing row of some games at the Silverball Museum, which should give some sense of how the place is laid out. Note that most games include a sign on top describing the game's make and history, as well as a card showing the record scores.

Trivia: Ronald Evans, night shift capsule commander, woke up the Apollo 11 Lunar Module crew at 9:32 am Central Time, 21 July 1969, for a liftoff set for shortly after noon. Source: First Man: The Life Of Neil A Armstrong, James R Hansen.

Currently Reading: The Toothpick: Technology and Culture, Henry Petroski.

Comments

[xolo.livejournal.com]

Blackface is supposed to look unnatural. It's like the black analogue of clown white. It's not generally remembered now, but during the heyday of blackface minstrels during the 1850s, black performers as well as white performers wore blackface.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I know, and I'm aware that even vaudeville's first black superstars needed to wear blackface. It's still bizarre, especially looking at it a century after its heyday.

[c-eagle.livejournal.com]

It's the new illustrated look... wooot!!

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

It's striking to me that I recognize so many of the characters despite it being a 40-year-old game depicting characters a generation old for that. Clearly I learned well from Warner Brothers cartoons.

[moxie_man]

Now, I have an excuse to travel to NJ sometime. (chuckle) I grew-up in a mom & pop convenience store. We always had a pinball machine in the store and would spend the last hour of the evening playing it while cleaning/prepping the store for closing. We gained some notoriety with the local company that provided the machines on a 50/50 split basis (store gets half the money, company gets other half). We became the place they'd send machines to die. We also tended to go through flippers to the point that the company started installing metal flippers instead of plastic ones on the machines they delivered to our store.

We had put in a request for a specific machine--I don't remember if it was KISS or Haunted House or what. Anyway, we never got the machine in question. We were told by one of the company guys that they had it in the shop, did the normal service on it, whatever it was they do to prep it for a new location. The boss said to send it to our place, and it suddenly shorted out. Whatever shorted was unrepairable. So the joke was the machine chose suicide over being played by us.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

It is a pity pinballs take such maintenance; it's hard enough getting stores to keep them considering how much space they take up, but that the playability, particularly of modern games, drops so much as they fall out of order it's almost a plan to drive them out of anyplace but specialized arcades.

The SIlverball Museum has got Kiss, though. I don't remember seeing Haunted House, but there is a fairly regular rotation of machines so it may just be waiting its turn.

[mondhasen.livejournal.com]

When you image search Al Jolson you see a lot of pictures of him looking like the little caricature on the backglass. I'm assuming that the top-hatted gentleman is W.C. Fields, but not how I would remember him.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

It's certainly Al Jolson and after a couple moments of ``what the heck?'' I sorted out who it was and why he was there. I'm not sure what the playfield could have done to be less startling, though, other than have an audience (me) that isn't surprised to see blackface figures at all.

[(Anonymous)]

As someone who uses them all the time, the new dollar coins work in machines exactly the way Susan B's do. In fact, that was one of the legal criteria for their design.

I use them in Coke machines all the time; most modern vending machines take 'em.

--dang bunni

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Ah, thanks. That's nice to know.

I haven't got any new modern dollar coins since they took the cash-operated stamp machine out of the post office. I was even spending the Presidential Dollars I got from there, but if nobody's giving me any I can't use any.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Oh, when I go to the bank to get cash I request all they have. Mind, this only occurs about every.. five weeks, roughly. I have direct deposit, and I tend to get sufficient cash from K's paycheck most times for my meager cash-using needs. Except on those occasions when K signs the check to me and I cash it- which K thinks is a really good idea for ideas that escape me. My bank is twenty minutes away by driving; K's is ten by walking.

But I digress. So, not even every month I hit the bank, and asks the teller for something akin to eighty dollars, "And do you have any dollar coins? Twelve? Oh, I'll take ten of those please." Oft times there are Sues in the mix, which are just as well.

The only time I ask if there are $2 bills is in the month before Anthrocon, where I'm also asking for $100 in Dollar Coins, because they're inordinately fun to have at cons.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

The bank would be a practical way to go, but I've gotten so acclimated to online banking that when my home bank finally opened a branch in my state (and not quite an hour away) it was more of a shrug than anything else.

The only real problem is I can't ask the Wawa ATM for anything but $20 bills.

I don't get K's preference for the bank thing unless your bank can be gotten to on the way to other tasks.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

It sometimes can, but.. payday is every other Friday. K does not want direct Deposit[*1], but is content to wait until.... say, a Thursday when I go to Momgoose's (where my bank is nearly-on-the-way). Instead of handling it Saturday morning, or even Monday. that said a fair amount of the time K will go to the bank and then turn money (K's half of the rent, you see) over to me, but that it happens at all is.. just odd to me.

[*1] nor an ATM card, because K thinks these are just ways to further tempt fate and ensure the evil banks steal fees and mangle things.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Hm. Well, I can understand resisting Direct Deposit; I did for years for no good reason (and really adopted only just because Singapore didn't give me a choice in the matter and I acclimated to not thinking about it). The ATM card is odder and a bigger constraint on normal life.

Of course, I made it to age 30 without anything but a debit card, and to age 36 without getting a second credit card. I'm thinking of maybe taking one of the American Express offers so I have a whole three cards just in case I should need the alternatives.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

Heh. My big victory and pride is that I now have only one credit card, by choice, as I triumphantly closed the others (or jettisoned them in the divorce). It's big enough to charge plane tickets and hotel rooms to it (and for that matter, big enough for a fairly major catastrophe), and I keep it paid off each month. It's a delight to contemplate this state of affairs, even now. I can't see why one would want more rather than fewer credit cards.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh, I should've answered sooner. I want a couple of credit cards, from different issuers, just so that in case one of them throws a hissy fit I won't be stuck. I do keep to awfully good habits --- a steady use of both cards, and paid off in full each month --- and don't expect that to change anytime soon, but I'd like, in the case of emergency, say, my need to rent a hotel room and a car in Pine Ridge, Arkansas, to not be completely vulnerable to the fight I'm having with Chase Visa.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

I had a good four credit cards in college. which.. may not have been a good thing. I've got about a dozen now, which mostly fall into categories of Places I Shop At A Lot (Best Buy, Amazon, Target*) Gas Rewards (Hess*, Gulf, ExxonMobil) They Had A Great Signup Deal (Home Depot, Kohl's, Chase Rewards) and Wow That's A Nice Low APR (BoA*, Navy Federal, Capital One).

Of these, most really aren't in active use. Amazon, Gulf, and Exxon I use quite regularly, as the rewards on them are very favorable.

[*] The original reasons no longer valid. BoA hiked their rate, I barely shop at Target anymore since moving, and Hess is far enough away and changed their rewards plan so that I never see any of the money back.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I was thinking seriously of getting a Wawa Visa mostly because gas is one of my steady, predictable charges and they had a decent cash-back offer. But I already had a Visa and already had a cash-back card, so it didn't quite fit any niche, and then Wawa got rid of its credit cards anyway. Too bad.

I think the dopiest thing I've done was not get a United Visa when I was regularly flying Newark to Singapore two or three times a year. I have an impressive frequent flyer mileage as is, but there are all kinds of multipliers I missed out on.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

I'd say the real problem is that you have to pay for all your ATM transactions! That's something I wouldn't put up with.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

It's a nuisance, yes, but it's just been a small one.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

But, but... you're paying money to get your money! That's not a nuisance, it's... something worse than a nuisance by my reckoning.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

There may be developments on this count. Too soon to know just yet.