As the wizards play down on Pinball Way on the Boardwalk way past dark

[austin_dern]

Since we had some spare time on Saturday and the weather was nice we visited East Lansing, hitting up a couple of the record stores (I again found some things that were interesting but not quite right, particularly as bunny_hugger has been going through my backlog of ironic records and been increasingly horrified at the stuff she married into). I also remembered that one of them --- Flat, Black, and Circular --- is in the Channel 6 news B-roll of footage to represent ``local businesses'', as a report showed someone buying a record from there, and used the footage twice over the course of the report. The other record store owner complimented bunny_hugger on her buying a Sparks album, which made her remember the owner also complimented her for buying a Wall of Voodoo album, implying they either have similarly eccentric tastes or she finds something nice to say about everyone's selections.

We also went to Pinball Pete's, the arcade, for what was surprisingly our first time. We'd been to the one in Ann Arbor repeatedly, but just never made it to the original location, practically in our backyard. It's a smaller spot than the one in Ann Arbor (which itself is recovering from a burst water main), and it had a mere ten or so pinball machines, but they're an excellent choice of games: besides The Addams Family (Special Edition) they also had Star Trek: The Next Generation, Pin-Bot, Theater of Magic, and Medieval Madness, a Murderer's Row slate.

The Medieval Madness would vex us mightily, in part because one of the lanes above the pop bumpers didn't work, spoiling skill shots and bonus multipliers, but also because it just didn't like us. Seriously. This is a pleasantly open game, with a number of appealing shots, and we just couldn't get them to work. Maybe we're over-trained on the machine in the pinball league's hangout (although I also play Medieval Madness on the iPad and have no trouble there), but, we just couldn't get anywhere with it.

The arcade also had something new to us: a kid-sized pinball-like contraption called Ticket-Tac-Toe. It's got flippers and inlanes and all that, but the objective is just to shoot the ball into nine holes, which correspond to a tic-tac-toe board, with tickets paying out if you do line them up any. It's from Bally/Williams in the mid-90s, so I guess they were thinking of ways to use their pinball expertise and get into the redemption game racket. It's a neat idea, but, we weren't tempted into playing.

Trivia: A 1976 study by the Maritime Administration of a shipment of $25,000 worth of wheel rims from Lansing, Michigan, to Paris, France, found they incurred $5,637 of freight costs ($3,600 in ocean freight, Detroit to Le Havre; over $600 in trucking costs; and $1,300 in fees and insurance). Source: The Box: How The Shipping Container Made The World Smaller And The World Economy Bigger, Marc Levinson.

Currently Reading: Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War, Stephen R Platt.

PS: Peer Gibberish, about an embarrassing little discovery in the Springer and the IEEE publication archives.

Comments

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

That's a *lovely* range of pinball machines there. If you threw in The Party Zone and Superman, I'd be tempted to road trip.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Huh. I wasn't aware of either of those pinballs. They seem to be a bit old or obscure for the Pinball Pete's mission, though; they sadly haven't got a museum-type focus on older games.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Both were at the Pacific Pinball Museum, and both in my top five.