austin_dern

Saturdays we usually divert from Cedar Point to go to the Merry-Go-Round Museum, skipping the busiest hours for this side trip. This was our plan this year too. But there was a side quest first.

A couple years ago Cedar Point started making collectible trading pins, buttons they could use to turn old art or ride signs or maps --- or some original art based on their rides --- into money. There's a stand that sells pins, as well as blind bags, the difference in the blind bags being, besides the blindness, that you actually get rare or ultra-rare buttons. (If rare ones are ever put on sale on the racks I haven't seen them, but there are a lot of buttons and it would be hard to spot one or two rares in the bunch.) Among the rare ones, last year: one that depicted a child version of the Iron Dragon mascot. She spent a lot of time trying to find one, never getting close. Finally she started looking to trading, a thing she could most easily do online since for as much as we talk about Cedar Point in these parts we don't actually spend much time there.

So there was someone willing to trade for the button she wanted. All he asked for was any rare or ultra-rare pin, doesn't matter what. She had a bunch of them --- all those blind bags bought last year and this --- but didn't think particularly about it since the guy preferred to trade in person and who knew when we would be at the park together? That he would be at the park this Saturday was communicated to bunnyhugger at some point, but in the rush to get school stuff done and get to the park and all she didn't think to bring any of her pins. And when she realized this on Thursday --- the pin stand was closed. Even if it hadn't been closed, the previous time we were at the park they had no blind bags, having somehow run out. I had forgot about bringing any buttons too but still spent time that evening searching my duffel bag and messenger bag just in case I'd forgotten about a blind bag I'd bought on some earlier trip. I hadn't, but it was a plausible thing to have happen.

Some good news Friday. The pin stand was open and, better, they had blind bags. My recollection is the guy was putting price labels on some new blind bags, so we could at least be sure there'd be some rare or ultra-rare pin. (She got a couple, just in case the rarity in one bag was something she wanted for herself.)

Now we just had the trouble of arranging a meetup. The guy figured to be there much of Saturday, but, given the Saturday-ness and the good weather there was concern it'd be a critical capacity day and if we left the park we couldn't get back before he had to leave. Fair reason and on reflection, I agreed, so figured we should meet the guy before going to the Merry-Go-Round Museum.

Catching up with the guy was a bit of a hide-and-seek problem even with both parties wanting to meet up and having phones to say where they were. The guy was with his kids, though, and they had other stuff they wanted to do (they'd both had jobs in amusement parks too and coming back to Cedar Point was a return-home for them), including eating lunch and shopping at the Halloweekends gift shop (normally the Top Thrill/Top Thrill 2 gift shop).

We didn't know what the guy looked like and yet when we saw him we knew we were looking at the guy. He just looked like a roller coaster guy with a trading pins hobby and he had a fearsomely organized set of pins in plastic baggies, ready to pull up and swap efficiently. And we talked a bit about his amusement-park-going and the pin collections and his family and at some point I noticed, oh, bunnyhugger was restraining herself from gossipping about things Cedar Point might be doing about Top Thrill 2 because the guy might never stop talking, and we'd be fine with that except the Merry-Go-Round Museum closes at 4 pm and we were already terribly close to 2 pm. So, finally, we bade farewell and got out to our side trip to see our fourth carousel of the weekend.

Also, with the possibility of actually trading these trading pins opened up we started looking at options. We had known vaguely that there were supposed to be corkboards around the park where you could leave a pin, take a pin, but never saw them. Now, we saw. There's one at the back of the Breakers gift shop, for example, and we looked over that at the end of the day. There's also similar boards in the Snoopy Gift Shop, to be reported on when I get to Sunday, and in the main gift shop at the front of the midway. bunnyhugger would examine all of these, now that they were suddenly visible. And, of course, had her desired pin at last.

Now back to Pinball At The Zoo for the usual array of pinball art and people you don't know looking away from the camera.

Another game that is fortunately often at Pinball At The Zoo and that I will play every time. Strange Science is a late solid-state game with this mad-science theme that was one of the first games I played when I got into pinball in 1990 and, as you can see from the scores, I've learned a bare minimum of things to do on it.

The goal of the game is to cause, or prevent, the swapping of a woman's and a monkey's brains and there's lots of nice weird shots to do it. Again, I'm sorry that The Pinball Arcade died as this would have been so nice to have in digital form.

Another new, boutique, game they had was Ultraman: Kaiju Rumble. I can't say I got the hang of the game, but it did reaffirm my vague idea that I should learn more about this kind of show since it always seems like a lot of odd fun going on.

Playfield for Ultraman: Kaiju Rumble. Granting it doesn't photograph well but you can see this neat double-layer upper playfield that I'd like to understand anything about, someday.

Seven Seas is a more normal electromechanical game with a fishing theme and, of course, mermaids.

Sorry the overhead lights obscure part of the playfield. It's one of those things Pinball At The Zoo has to deal with. At least most of the tournament games are able to make some arrangement to avoid the worst spots.

Trivia: In 1881, the US Patent Office had granted 138 patents for lawn mowers. Source: The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession, Virginia Scott Jenkins.

Currently Reading: Got some comics books, that'll be something.

PS: the song doesn't reference anything in this post. I tried to find any song that might connect at all to the trading of tokens of small value like the pins were, and all I got was this this daft-enough-maybe-it-was-meant-to-be-funny Forbes.com piece about ``The Best Songs to Listen to While Trading Large Futures and Options Contracts''. So I'm just using a song I like instead.

We got back to Pinball At The Zoo frightfully close to the opening of Saturday morning qualifying. There were already lines long enough for the Main tournament that I didn't even bother trying; the only tournament-player thing I'd do is cadge some of the doughnuts provided to competitors. FAE was in respectable shape but still spent the morning putting up more games, managing only one game that bettered anything. MWS, whom I think I'd seen from afar on Friday, worked even harder, putting up 24 games somehow, three of which helped him any. FAE would get into the A Division, just barely. MWS would get second seed in B.

bunnyhugger would focus all her time and tickets on the Women's tournament, where she was hovering around eighth --- the last qualifying position --- or ninth. One good game with solid improvement would get her safely in, and if she were to be on the bubble time she spent on any game was time none of her competitors could use on that game. This is one of the cutthroat elements of Herb-style qualifying; it can be worth it to waste your time on a game, if you can aim your time well.

She was disheartened by all this. I maintained my confidence that she'd have the good game, or the good enough game, to land her in finals for sure, and even bet her $20 on it. And then I went off to the show, taking in the fewer-than-usual number of games people had brought to show off or trade. Sometime after 11 am, the cutoff, she appeared at my side and told me: I owed her twenty bucks.

She hadn't made it, and by a terribly narrow margin. Finishing one position higher on any of the four games that counted for her would have put her into a tie for the last position. It's not quite that one bad bounce cost her a place in finals, but it's terribly close to that, and did so much to leave her miserable.

So much of the rest of the day at the Expo Center was trying to find some consolation; between this and her flopping at the tournament the day after Women's North American Championship Series she was not up for consolation.

Still, people who didn't know how miserable she was (or didn't say so to me) did fine bits of seeing her and chatting with her. Vix, from Motor City Furry Con, was there, making good at last the convention promise to talk with us later. So was MJB, who had brought a bunch of games from Sparks Pinball Museum way out east of Detroit, where we haven't been to a match since before the pandemic began. (I was there one day, when Sunshine was getting specialist care nearby, but didn't see anyone besides staff.) It was great seeing him, and talking with him, and you know how it is when everything feels good for a while. He also gave us Sparks t-shirts; I felt awkward about taking them when he also had them for sale but I also realized he likes us and shirts he gives away are shirts he doesn't have to haul back to inventory.

I missed the hours when the people bringing out-of-state pops had bottles of Moxie.

Our big bit of fun over the show was that someone brought Jersey Jack's newest game, Elton John, in and boy is that a fun table. I mean, I always like Jersey Jack games, so maybe I'm an easy touch. But, like, as you'd expect --- for a game based mostly in 70s Elton John --- the game has a little corner for Crocodile Rock targets, and it's got this adorable toy of a crocodile with star sunglasses rocking out, and the backglass animation has --- when you lock a ball for this --- a fun cartoony crocodile catching and sometimes swallowing a giant pinball. The game is delightfully funny, besides having what, in a couple of games, felt like a good fun set of shots to make and modes to play.

Anyway, the show ended, people started packing up, FAE made it through the first round of playoffs and ended something like 13th in the overall tournament, a great finish. MWS took second place in B, the traditional spot for someone in our household (back before Pinball at the Zoo got so big it draws a lot of out-of-state ringers). MAG, whom we've owed a translite as a prize for ages now, was at the tournament all three days and all three days we forgot to bring the translite with us.

When all that was cleared away --- I'm sure main finals weren't done, but the people playing were folks we were more remote from --- we went to the afterparty at MJS's pole barn. There we met up with JTK, who hadn't been to the expo center that day but did join us and FAE and some other people for hanging out and a postmortem on the competition and then dollar games. Here, now, you'd think I would at least have a chance not to come in last on everything. I usually do pretty well at the dollar games at MJS's afterparties. Not here; not only did I never take first, I finished last all but one game, I think it was. Even as I kept getting to pick them. FAE, now they won a lot. Me, I ran out of dollars.

We wouldn't close out the afterparty, for a change. I think that reflects our post-pandemic embrace of not needing to maximize every minute of a pinball event, and letting it be, instead taking just enough to enjoy. Or that it maybe wasn't fair to keep FAE, an introverted person, out all night just so I can try to grab the high score on MJS's FunHouse. (I would never come close.) Anyway we got home and could start the wait to see how this all affected our standings.

(We are still hilariously far out of competition for Michigan open tournaments; in fact, as I write this, I'm actually higher-ranked in Indiana, where I played exactly one tournament this year, than I am in Michigan. bunnyhugger has fallen to second-seeded among women in women-only events; had she qualified for finals, she would still be first-seeded.)

Now for pictures, let's get back to the Gilmore Car Museum. Last time I left off in the diner that ended up being the first indoor restaurant we ate in since the pandemic began. We're up to like two now.

Just because they moved the whole diner here doesn't mean they had every bit of it functional. Also, little surprised there isn't a working bathroom in the diner.

They did have a phone booth, though! We had no coins so couldn't say whether it functions. Guess it depends whether they still have copper lines.

Back to cars! Here's a number 28. I wonder if it raced.

Another shiny winged person on the front of one of these cars.

I think they're mis-applying their bumper stickers here. I don't know what the Hemmings Motor News Great Race is but I assume it's not a slightly overstuffed comic take on the 1908 New York-to-Paris race.

And here we move into shiny goosery! Or something with a great long neck, at least.

Trivia: There are 49 ``Devil's Bridges'' (ponts du Diable) in France. Source: The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography, Graham Robb. Mostly medieval stone bridges, not all of them commemorating terrible fates.

Currently Reading: Sign Painters, Faythe Levine and Sam Macon. An informal, oral-style history of a profession that can fairly be said to have vanished and the sort of thing that might be a great birthday gift for my dad and probably also yours, just saying. Anyway in the intro the authors mourn how much the role has vanished (a fair complaint), mentioning along the way how schoolchildren aren't even taught to write longhand anymore and ... I'm supposing they equate longhand with cursive which probably has some foundation but it was an unexpected word to me.

New computer, yes, but that doesn't mean I won't keep up old traditions, such as listing what all has been on my humor blog the past week. And after that, sharing pictures from --- well, it's not Pinball At The Zoo; that's all finished. Do you remember where we go from there? Put your answers down below the eight links not entirely to me complaining about comic strips here:

• MiSTed: The Rangers of NIMH II, Part 3
• In Which I Am Foiled as Usual
• Statistics Saturday: Maximum Safe Viewing Distances
• Why You Might Want to Not Read _Mary Worth_ a Couple Weeks
• In Which I Am One Again Shamed by _Funky Winkerbean_
• What's Going On In Olive and Popeye? Is Olive Oyl dead? March - June 2023
• Fear of Throwing Out
• MiSTed: The Rangers of NIMH II, Part 4

That's right! After Pinball At The Zoo we went to MJS's polebarn for the afterparty, and enjoyed a couple of hours hanging out there. Here's proof we were there:

MJS's simulated bowling machine, a fun one that's always in heavy demand. The walll banner on the floor there features various monsters from video games and pinball.

Maybe our favorite corner, with Meteor, Galaxy, Cheetah, and Stargazer, a great set of circa-1980 games. Except you may notice the Galaxy 2021 sign above Galaxy: it's now got a new ROM that changes the game some, adding particularly new sound effects and audio clips. I'm not sure how I feel about it, but I also haven't got a handle on how much the rules have changed (other than that there's now a ball saver).

Yeah so I started playing Whitewater as though it were the pinball version and I had pinball-like results, here knocking back 200,000,000 points --- itself a score that would normally win a game easily --- with a single super jackpot shot.

So I got to like triple my best score on the real-world Whitewater here, and I'm not ridiculously far from my best virtual-pinball score on it.

You get the feeling Gottlieb really wanted to make a jewel-thief pinball and only gradually accepted that they had the Pink Panther license, they were somehow going to have to fit the Pink Panther in with a jewel-thief thing?

Playfield for The Pink Panther pinball. You may notice all the jewel thieves, but I believe she is outnumbered by the Pink Panther, thanks to the art on those lane dividers. Just.

Trivia: Elizabeth was the largest municipality in New Jersey in 1775, with a population of about twelve hundred, and two significant churches, both Anglican and Presbyterian. Source: New Jersey From Colony To State, 1609 - 1789, Richard P McCormick.

Currently Reading: Archie 1000-Page Comics Dream, Editor Jamie Lee Rotante.

I'm trying to get stuff written and ready for Wednesday and particularly Thursday, a day I don't expect to be functional at all, so sorry, all I have for you right now are pictures. Oh, also a chance to tell you What's Going On In Olive and Popeye? Is Olive Oyl dead? She's not dead, but she has been more solid in the past.

While the tournament carries on, the show gets carried off; most of the tables had been turned off and were moving out by now.

Mind, it was after the posted end of the show so this is only fair. bunnyhugger gets a game in on the new Jersey Jack table, The Godfather.

Un-auctioned games being loaded up. The poster offers prices for the tables; for example, for the Alvin G Soccer Ball? $4,500 or best offer. Or two thousand bucks for a Target Alpha. Bally's Mr and Mrs Pac-Man, one of the games to make Namco ask Midway, ``Wait, did we actually license that?'', looks like it's listed at $2,500.

bunnyhugger racking up the day's fourth-highest score as she plays The Godfather. Nearly six million points, and on a Jersey Jack game where the scoring's by single-digits; who's going to match something like that?

Uhm. Sorry.

Back to cocktail pins! What do you think of Night Moves past that it seems to be someone's very funny idea of what swinging adults do? Love the retro-Deco typeface on the playfield there.

Trivia: Big Ben had over four million striking cycles before the catastrophic failure of the shaft of its fly governor in 1976. Source: To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design, Henry Petroski.

Currently Reading: The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human, Siddhartha Mukherjee.

Please, enjoy some more Pinball At The Zoo pictures. They won't last forever, believe it or not! (They should be finished Wednesday night/Thursday morning.)

Fan-Tas-Tic features more hip than any other single backglass at the Zoo.

Fan-Tas-Tic also has a quirky circa-1970 thing where the flippers are separated by a pop bumper. If the ball goes between the flippers, don't give up and don't flip. There's an excellent chance it'll pop back into play, especially if you give the game a gentle nudge as the ball hits either the top of the pop bumper or the two small fixed bands underneath; the actual gap under there is very thin. But there's nothing underneath the flippers, so if you lift them, the ball can drain and it's your own fault.

Who doesn't like to go to the Super Circus and climb the giant clown? Note the strong-man holding up the Gottlieb logo on the upper left there.

Super Circus's playfield promises a bunch of slapstick about to be delivered to clown rear ends.

And here's jubilee, an early-70s Williams table where --- wait a minute. Computer, Enhance.

Is that Eugene the Jeep as a sphynx? The heck? (It's not, although the two-toed feet and bright yellow color are evocative.)

Trivia: In 1623 the Pilgrims attempted to establish a fishing station in Gloucester; it failed. They tried again in 1625; it also failed. Eventually merchant-adventurers from England taught enough of them to fish well that they could survive. Source: Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, Mark Kurlansky.

Currently Reading: The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human, Siddhartha Mukherjee.

So at last to the concert. How was the show?

It opened, as promised, with the Buggles. Or at least with a Buggle, Trevor Horn, wearing a 'Solitary Buggle' t-shirt under his most shiny jacket. There was also a backing band, people wearing 'Best Buggles Ever' t-shirts that would be great merchandise too. I have no idea their names or whether they're regular backing band for Seal. I'm sorry. You know me and names.

They came on stage to recorded music that I thought sounded like the opening riff from Frankie Goes To Hollywood's ``Two Tribes''. Could be wrong. I had expected the show would step outside the strict confines of the two Buggles albums and, of course, it did, but not when the band started playing. After that riff, though, they played a bit of the ``Polythene Symphonia'', that is, the long instrumental outro to ``Video Killed The Radio Star'' that gets snipped off the radio play.

They opened with ``Living in the Plastic Age'', which is a good candidate for the most typical Buggles song. As often happens the band's biggest hit is a slightly unusual sound for them; if you like ``Plastic Age'', you'll like the whole of both albums. Then Horn introduced everyone and thanked us for being there. This led into ``Elstree'', another nostalgic song in which a movie actor remembers having been wanted once; if you want to know more than one Buggles song, this is a strong second choice. Here I got my moment of nerd rage: while the song opened with an off-stage voice calling ``Action'', it didn't end with the voice calling ``Cut''. Never mind. Åter this Horn talked a bit about the time the Buggles joined Yes. This was the lead in to playing ``I Am A Camera'', a song that in its Yes incarnation was the small epic ``Into The Lens''. (It's the other strong choice for the second Buggles song to know.) They took a few licks off of the much longer Yes version of the song in ``I Am A Camera'', and bunnyhugger was overjoyed that her favorite song of the second album made it into the show.

Around this point two people came in, rather late to the show, and sat down beside bunnyhugger. She told me they kept talking, too, which underscores why we should have sat in the other seats; I was on the aisle and had nobody to bother me.

The next step outside the Buggles canon was for one song you'd think Trevor Horn would absolutely have to play, ``Owner of a Lonely Heart'', as fun in live performance as you'd hope. And then he started to talk about sampling, and working with a bit of noise from something starting up and from Yes backup vocalist Chris Squire's burp (or something like that) and that, since Detroit was the home of techno music, they were going to play something they had never played live before. This was a live cover of Art of Noises's ``Close To The Edit'', a great avant-garde piece that doesn't quite sound impossible to do live, but does sound distinctly like studio music. bunnyhugger checked playlists later --- she'd wanted no spoilers going into the show --- and found that, indeed, they had not played this at any concerts on the tour before. So we got an extra-long Buggles show, featuring a second extracanonical tune. (The tune has been played live before, including at a 2004 celebration of Horn's career, but still. Live for something this complicated is a wonder.)

And then finally: Trevor Horn shared an anecdote about coming home and finding Boris Johnson's kid hanging out with his, and throwing Johnson's kid out. And then sometime later meeting Boris Johnson, who was very concerned that Trevor Horn might be, you know, supplying a The Drugs or something. And Horn expressed his disbelief and wondering what he was teling his kid. Which is a natural lead-in to the song the Buggles would of course have to play, ``Lenny''.

Yes, yes, I'm kidding. This version of ``Video Killed The Radio Star'' did make the change from putting the blame from VTR to VCR, a common move bunnyhugger disapproves of. It also extended itself a little, picking up a more modern instrumentation and third set of lyrics that I couldn't compare to the version on Bruce Woolley's version. Couldn't get enough of that, but they ran out of Video to provide.

Trevor Horn thanked everyone and promised to see us again later in the show. The people sitting next to bunnyhugger got up and left, never to be seen again. I hope they just jumped to better seats; don't know.

Seal, the main show, I admit not really knowing much about. I have a little familiarity with a couple of his songs, and that of course were played. But my first association is the joke that the emcee of the costume contest at Furfright 2012 made to bunnyhugger, about her Trevor Horn costume. (``I loved your work with Seal''.) Like, I couldn't think why they showed posterized clips from the movie Batman Forever while Seal sang ``Kiss from a Rose'', a quirky choice that bunnyhugger explained to me after. Still; he's a gorgeous man with a fantastic voice and that charismatic presence you get in your first-rate performers. While we wouldn't have bought tickets just to see him, we certainly weren't going to leave early.

The same backup band played as did for Trevor Horn, although they changed out of the ``Best Buggles Ever'' shirts. Trevor Horn played bass guitar for him, too, changed out of the ``Solitary Buggle'' shirt and shiny jacket to something that wouldn't pull focus except for us. Or, really, not even that; Seal's a compelling performer and naturally I kept paying attention to him, now and then remembering oh yeah, that older guy on stage is half of the Buggles and that's neat.

We were seated in the balcony, a quite good spot for almost all the show. While there was no risk that anyone would get up and dance, it did mean that bunnyhugger could see the whole performance. At least, she could until the last couple of songs, when Seal moved out into the audience to perform where he was obscured from our view. He also did some nice crowd talk, asking a couple people what they were feeling and what they were doing here, and he offered the reassurance that ``this thing called love, it always wins in the end''. It's a nice thought and also one giving me an unintentional laugh as I know someone on Mastodon with a running joke of non sequitur declarations that ``love wins''. Happy stuff, though, and good memories for the days ahead.

And now we have seen both the key Buggles in concert, although not together. And, I find, at the Yes show they didn't play ``Into The Lens'', so we don't have the whole ``I Am A Camera'' from two perspectives put together. But it's as close as one could reasonably hope to get. Now, we just have to catch Bruce Woolley in concert somewhere.

Back now to Pinball At The Zoo, and photographs of, here, stuff that was up for auction and that we did not buy.

From the auction row here's a quasi-pinball machine, Dinosaur Eggs. The gimmick here is your controls don't affect the bal directly; instead, you tilt the whole playfield, trying to guide it to higher-value switches. Seems like a great gimmick but it was in nothing like playable shape.

View of dinosaur figures, and art, from the top of the Dinosaur Eggs playfield.

Oh yes, and the game was one of the handful of machines made by Alvin G and Company, the short-lived successor to the venerable Gottlieb Pinball.

Serial number and basic service information card for Dinosaur Eggs.

Also on auction: a Roller Disco table in need of quite a few repairs, including a new backglass. Might be the best view I'll have of the playfield, though.

Peering down on Roller Disco from the top of the playfield, with none of that pesky reflection from the glass cover. Just natural reflection in the paint.

Trivia: France's first railway, inaugurated in 1828, ran along the valley of the Gier between Lyon and Saint-Étienne. It opened to passengers in 1832. Source: The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography, Graham Robb. Not the whole of the way, but along a valley from Saint-Étienne to Andrézieux. In case you were worried. (Wikipedia says it was also the first railway open to public passengers in continental Europe.)

Currently Reading: The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human, Siddhartha Mukherjee.

bunnyhugger tested negative today, as we'd expected. We're both more than five days from the onset of symptoms and took our Paxlovid as prescribed. The only lingering symptom we have yet is coughing. I expect this is going to last a while; when I get a cold, I have a cough from it that lingers for about five years, so this should be fun.

But it's an ill wind: because I am still coughing my boss said to work from home this week as well as last. I'm happy to work from home as long as I possibly can and have not told my boss about how I reasonably expect to be coughing from this through to 2028. Still, this is very convenient since it means bunnyhugger won't have to drive me in to work tomorrow just to have a car free for her dental appointment. (Her car is still in the shop.)

In other health news: I have a scheduled colonoscopy appointment, and the time off for it. The preparatory material warns that I shouldn't go back to work afterwards, and while that's probably meant for people who do physical labor I imagine I might not be in a productive state of affairs anyway. I plan to stay on the couch and be a potato. Also, since the appointment needs me in their office at 9:30, this means I have to take off by 9 am at the latest. I asked, then, to take off from 9 am through 4:30 pm and my boss was a bit unclear why I wanted to bother with one hour at work. Well, it's a work-from-home day, so I might as well spend it with my laptop open as not. Also, yes, I'm trying to underscore that I do like this job and want to keep doing it. We'll see if that sticks.

And meanwhile: I also got approval for time off, the first week of July, for our big roller coaster trip of the year! So I've got a bunch of undersized paychecks coming up ahead but that's all right, I feel okay about my savings. Other than that I have to buy a new laptop as mine is getting way too kernel-panicky. But even with that, I'm feeling better about things overall.

Now let's get back to pictures of Pinball At The Zoo, admittedly not our cheeriest moment as we were long done competing while other people were not:

Prizes and merchandise of uncertain purpose left on one of the tables by the tournament area. I assume at least some of this was stuff people were giving away --- there's flyers for The Godfather pinball machine, for example, and the Stern hat and stuff inside looks like prizes --- but I can't explain the Led Zeppelin playfield there.

Rush showing that bunnyhugger could play a very good game on it now and then, possibly because of an understanding with the bunny in the backglass. (Lower right corner, peeking out of the top hat. I assume it's a Rush album cover thing.)

Trophies headed for the people playing at the highest levels that day.

The game banks! To balance things out players couldn't just pick any old game in finals; they had to pick one of these sets of three, ensuring that whoever won had to play across a variety of games and also that not every group was lined up to play the same tables.

Explanation of where the funds raised go, as well as a house rule about what happens if you are AJG and have a supernatural ability to discover bonkers combinations of shots that you alone know how to make and that give you MAXINT points. AJG did not play.

Folks sitting off out of the play area, watching the streamers themselves watching play.

Trivia: Daniel Defoe is known to have published under at least 198 pseudonyms, among them Count Kidney Face, Obadiah Blue Hat, and the Man In The Moon. Source: Marking Time: The Epic Quest to Invent the Perfect Calendar, Duncan Steel. (Also, for that matter, 'Daniel Defoe'; his birth name was 'Daniel Foe'.)

Currently Reading: Cool Comfort: America's Romance with Air-Conditioning, Marsha E Ackermann.

Here we go with Pinball At the Zoo and also bunnies:

Stern's game 007: 60th Anniversary, here is a James Bond game created by Stern but it is also completely unrelated to the James Bond games next to it. The game is retro in styling; you see the screen there where it looks like there's a four-digit scoring reel? It actually is, with a real actual totalizer just like in the old days, and light-up inserts around in case you beat 9,999 points.

The layout is unrelated to the James Bond games, or any other table Stern has made. It's got a lot of retro styling to it, though, including three targets to complete labelled 'A', 'B', and 'C', the way games would label back in the old days before they had better ideas for how to label sets of targets. The game has no ramps or secondary levels, but has got a multiball you can build into a three-ball multiball by locking balls, just like a game of the early 80s. When you start a game you get to pick, too, whether you'd like the game to have a contemporary soundtrack, or to have bells and chimes like an early 60s game, or the chimes of a 70s game, or of an 80s game, or the more modern music and sound design of a 90s game. But, like, just imagine acknowledging there's differences between the chimes of a 60s and those of a 70s table!

And here's an actual old-fashioned game, Hi-Score Pool, one that challenges the definition of a pinball machine because ...

As you can see, nearly all the table's targets are hidden underneath that overlay. The arrows point ideal shots to aim at to knock out strings of balls, but good luck hitting that exactly! Part of the fun and challenge of a table I genuinely like.

Wait, is this a picture from the furry con that got mixed in here? ... No, OK, it's just back at the bunnies show. Want proof?

There we go, lots and lots of rabbits and the smell of chips.

Trivia: In 1836 the British duty on newspapers was lowered from 4d a paper to 1d. The tax would be abolished entirely in 1855. Source: The Age of Paradox: A Biography of England 1841 - 1851, John W Dodds.

Currently Reading: Infinity Beckoned: Adventuring Through the Inner Solar System, 1969 - 1989, Jay Gallentine. OK, the first chapter starts with an epigram by Ashleigh Brilliant, of the Pot-Shots comic strip, which I'm maybe the only currently existing reader of, and in the preface Gallentine responds to a hypothetical complaint about why do we need to send another probe to Mars, don't we already know the temperature on Mars by asking if we actually need to measure the temperature of Singapore given that it's 90 degrees Fahrenheit and humid and at this point I want to know: why is this guy me?

Boy, feels like forever since I recapped my humor blog around here, doesn't it? If you're not reading the RSS feed for it, you can catch up on things from here, including the end of one MiSTing and the start of a vintage old one.

• MiSTed: The Tale of Grumpy Weasel, Conclusion
• From Sea to Shining, See
• Statistics Saturday: Ranking of I-795’s
• You Know What Else the 80s Made? Jingles
• I Always Always Always Find a Typo When I Reread Stuff
• What’s Going On In Rex Morgan, M.D.? What’s this beef Terry Beatty has with you? March – May 2023
• My Favorite _Raising Duncan_ Strip Just Reran
• MiSTed: The Rangers of NIMH II, Part 1

Back to photographs. Here's some more from Pinball At The Zoo on the Saturday of the event, featuring real actual photographs of pinball happening.

bunnyhugger getting some last licks in on Rush, trying to work out how to play the game and also keep anyone from upstaging her score on it. There's two reasons to play another game in a Herb-style tournament and blocking other players in the last minutes of qualifying is one of them.

Gathering around getting the instructions for the Women's Finals. bunnyhugger was annoyed she still had second seed, but at least that meant she was picking the games for her group.

bunnyhugger showing off her jacket while playing 4 Square, traditionally one of her pocket games and a table on which she's unbeatable. She was beaten.

The streamers were set up just to the side of the women's tournament bank here.

And there's the trophies for the top four finishers in the Women's Tournament; bunnyhugger took home first place last year and I was expecting her to repeat.

The winners' poster, signed by everyone who placed in all the tournaments. Among the sad things about bunnyhugger's first-round knockout was not getting to sign this.

Trivia: Detroit's population grew from 466,000 in 1910 to 1,720,000 in 1930. Source: Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World, Joshua B Freeman.

Currently Reading: When Giants Ruled The Sky: The Brief Reign and Tragic Demise of the American Rigid Airship, John J Geoghegan.

Today, a day I'd have devoted to reviewing my mathematics blog if I hadn't walked away from it without explanation, I bring you the close of pictures from Pinball At The Zoo, Friday Night. We were there only a couple hours and I was trying to limit how many photos I took that looked exactly like the photos I take every year, which is why I don't have a full week's worth of pictures of a guy leaning into a machine while I assert something interesting is going on there.

The long line of stuff at the table separating the tournament area (left) from the free-play area. The bare table at the lower left of the screen is a Led Zeppelin table.

New thing this year was a little seating area, mostly used by competitors taking a break from qualifying. There's a screen set up there showing whatever game was streaming at the moment; also, there was streaming with commentary about some game most of the time.

End of the night! People get their last games in and final scores recorded before leaving.

The streaming setup, as the first round of the Classics tournament finishes off (in the background there, with the rig set up over the game Barracora). I don't know how you get to be a live pinball streamer but I feel like I'd be intermittently okay at it.

The gorilla that's always standing by the entrance to Pinball At The Zoo. I would have sworn he had a name badge but I never see it anymore and don't know if he has a proper name. The closed table behind is also the stand that sells bottled pop. Their Moxie distributor was running late --- trucking issue --- so there'd be none of that this year.

And here's Pinball At The Zoo all closed up and ready for bed. In the morning the final day would get started.

Trivia: Skylab's workshop finally settled to an average temperature of about 75 degrees Fahrenheit once the parasol sun shade was installed, although the temperatures did increase toward the end of the first, 28-day, mission because of the increase in the amount of time the station spent in the sun that time of year. Source: Skylab: A Chronology, Roland W Newkirk, Ivan D Ertel, Courtney G Brooks. NASA SP-4011.