austin_dern

The National Baby Food Festival's cancelled for 2020. This is getting serious. While Pinball At The Zoo, in Kalamazoo, is the state's biggest event and the one that I always think I do well in without actually doing so, the Baby Food Festival is the second-biggest event and the one that actually does launch me into state finals.

The pinball tournament normally held at the Baby Food Festival might still happen. It's officially part of the Meijer State Games. Some of these events have been cancelled for the year, but as best I can tell there's no declaration about what the state of pinball is. Even if the event is held, though, a lot of what makes the Baby Food Festival's tournament so valuable, IFPA-wise, is that people attending the festival come in and play a few games, depositing their slight value as tournament players into a jackpot that us serious players take in. Even if the Games do happen, they might not be worth enough to help me get to a top-24 position and invite to the State Championship Series.

If there even is a State Championship Series for this year. It's now been longer without any sanctioned pinball than has been with, for 2020, and the International Flipper Pinball Association hasn't announced plans for that to change. Even if there is, I'm not convinced that it's safe. I think I wouldn't feel safe going to a tournament event before the state opens up arcades for socialization, at least, and maybe not even then if the daily infection rate remains too high. Sitting this year out might be the best thing for me.

Not sat out, technically: my humor blog. Here's what's run on it the past week.

• We’d like to know a little bit about you for our files which was last week's major piece and a big pile of nonsense.
• Statistics May: How the past month treated my humor blog and the usual roster of lists of things that somehow always gets me more 'likes' than anything else I write in a month.
• Statistics Saturday: The Boxes You Have a quick guide
• 60s Popeye: returning to the Aladdin’s Lamp with the Sea Hag! Who doesn't like the Sea Hag?
• Regarding the use of Neodymium in the production of bright purple glass in a little follow-up.
• What’s Going On In Mary Worth? Why does Saul Wynter have a teenage daughter? March – June 2020 which contains a reference to polycules, and then today I remembered my Dad specifically said he enjoys reading my Mary Worth plot recaps, so there's probably that for me to talk about him with next time we chat.
• Everything you need to know to understand me as a writer as I reflect on stuff I have written in the past.
• Everything there is to say about the creation and use of tools by rooks which is this week's big pile of nonsense.

Let's wrap up the Merry-Go-Round Museum and get back to Cedar Point, where I'll get wrapped up in something maybe better than the Town Hall Museum. You'll see.

Carousel hog making off with some corn.

Carousel fox sneaks into your house, eats all your pasta ...

This fangy creature, a secondary figure on one of the Merry-Go-Round Museum's horses, is a billiken. Billiken are not some minor spirit of long-ago ancient days; they were charm dolls created from the early 1900s. Around the time Kewpie dolls came out. So if you're wondering where Saint Louis University got its mascot from, it's this thing.

The front of the Merry-Go-Round Museum, which was a WPA-era post office and one of the surprisingly few round ones.

Back to Cedar Point! Here's the view out our Breakers hotel-room entrance.

And here, after a rest, we finally get in, near sunset and after there's been a spot of rain to get us in a reflective mood.

The area near the beach entrance, over where the Oceana stadium had been torn down. The dome in the center-left is the Coliseum. Most of the rides here are from a secondary Planet Snoopy kids' area.

Looking back from near the launch platform at Raptor's lift hill and one of its many spirals. There is a lot of queue area, you can see, although I don't think we've been there a time when half that queue was needed. Mostly it's a way to test how patiently someone will go back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, through gates before cutting under.

The stage at the Aldrich Theater, waiting for the Midnight Syndicate show. It had returned to Cedar Point, displacing the magic-and-dance show, with its blend of live music and fourth-wall-breaking horror. Always fun to see.

Back toward the Kiddie Kingdom. The building on the left is a lost-persons and message center (Cedar Point has no central public address system). It also clearly at some point was a train ride station. Interesting building reuse.

For dinner we went to Melt, one of the few sit-in restaurants, and over by the Kiddie Kingdom. Melt is in fact an Ohio-area chain, serving sandwiches the size of bricks; we each had a fried-grilled-cheese sandwich that would have adequately fed both of us. The thrill, though, was in the wall decor, which was all old Cedar Point stuff. Here's artwork from the old Iron Dragon ride-height sign, from before they replaced it with a dull generic chainwide height notice.

And this is the minimum-height sign for Calypso, a ride which they've since relocated and renamed the Tiki Twirl.

Circa 1990 advertising art for Magnum XL-200, rather fancifully suggesting the ride goes all the way into space, or at least above the Space Spiral (which was at the other end of the park). The Space Spiral was 330 feet tall, although riders only got up to 285 feet. Magnum XL-200 is 205 feet tall.

Old ride-height sign for a kiddie ride, Sir Bumpalot's Boats. Wikipedia lists no such ride, but the list of former Cedar Point attractions mentions the Bumper Boats, a kiddie ride near the Gemini children area, from 1993 to 2013.

Ride sign art that isn't complete enough to identify it. But bunnyhugger remembers this as the art for Power Tower, which opened in 1998, giving some idea of how recently, really, Cedar Point got rid of these more interesting custom signs.

Schwabinchen was at the park from 1970 to 2002. I assume this is the actual ride height sign and, boy, the marionette aspect is certainly an artistic choice, isn't it? I'm sorry they went to generic height signs because the artistic impulses that create something like this are wonderful and quirky and strange and I want more of that.

Trivia: The first successful chocolate mill in America, Walter Baker & Company of Massachusettes, opened in 1765. Source: Hershey: Milton S Hershey's Extraordinary Life of Wealth, Empire, and Utopian Dreams, Michael D'Antonio.

Currently Reading: Perfect Behavior, David Ogden Stewart. Not the guy who played Dr Jumba.

Baby Food Festival, 2019. Once I was knocked out of the Classics tournament I could return to putting my own scores up for Main. In not a single case did I improve any of the scores I'd done the Saturday or the Thursday before. But I could at least warm up and get a feel for how the games were playing that day.

My doing this came to a stop when the Women's Finals began. bunny_hugger had figured this division her best chance at bringing a medal home. It's a good calculation. Only four people would compete in the three-game finals, but she had spent almost the entire tournament as the top-ranked woman playing. She was squeaked out in the last hour by MKS, who put up a runaway game of Aerosmith, but still. bunny_hugger just had to not finish last.

The first game: Breakshot, one of the few games from Capcom Pinball. The game was a mid-90s attempt to make a game with an electromechanical-style layout --- no ramps or subways or anything --- with modern game elements, like multiball, an animated dot-matrix display, audio instructions to the players, and distractingly gratuitous sexism. Does the backglass need to feature ice dropping out of a woman's glass into her breasts? Does the screen need to sometimes show this scene, animated, complete with the woman shaking after this? It's a curious choice for the Women's Division, given nonsense like this, although the indefatigable KEC, who heads the Grand Rapids Belles and Chimes league, specifically asked for it. If you can ignore the breasts it's a decent game.

bunny_hugger has a lousy first ball and was in a foul mood. What could I do? I advised her: this game is, basically, an electromechnical. Play it as if it were. An electromechanical game has two important things: first, send the ball up to the top of the playfield. Second: let the ball do its business. You shouldn't be messing with it. bunny_hugger starts doing this. It works. She has a great game, taking first place with twice the score of MKS, three times the score of KEC, and four times the score of ZJH.

The second game is Whirlwind. It's a very hard late-solid-state game. It should be easy, if it were possible to make either ramp shot, but it's not, so it isn't. bunny_hugger has overcome her hatred for this through experience, learning some of how to manage this touchy game. Also from realizing the playfield is very close to what you'd get if you flipped that of Funhouse, her favorite game, horizontally. It's not a runaway game here: the lowest score is ZJH's 1,156,010. The highest is 1,814,850. bunny_hugger has it.

At this point bunny_hugger is assured a medal. She's guaranteed to get at least second place, and that only if she comes in last while MKS also comes in first. The game is Aerosmith, on which MKS put up the best score in qualifying. This is a game that should be fun, but isn't, because so many of its shots are instant death. But bunny_hugger has had a good weekend with this too. I haven't told her what she has to do to win the gold medal, lest that add to the pressure on her. Nobody has a great game: ZJS, the first player, puts up 4,373,190. KEC, playing second, rallies to 28,004,560. bunny_hugger scores 11,705,730 and I am relieved because this means MKS's finish is irrelevant. MKS puts up 8,863,090; it doesn't matter.

bunny_hugger takes home the gold medal, in the Women's tournament, adding to her pile of hardware from the Baby Food Festival/Meijer State Games. KEC finishes just ahead of MKS; MKS had more second-place finishes, but a first-place finish is worth that much. ZJH finishes in fourth place, after coming in fourth all three games. It's rough, but she takes it well.

So back to qualifying, and the wait for Main Finals to start. And here they are! And ... oh, that's a power flicker. There's a heavy rainstorm coming through. The power never goes out, but we do make jokes about it. And think about the poor Baby Food Festival, since the torrential rain has to be destroying the big event. And this is not the first time rain has smashed the Baby Food Festival since we started attending its pinball events. The Special When Lit facility is too far from Main Street for us to see things, or to pop over and hang out at them. But we can see that it's impossible to see the cars in the parking lot through the rain, and we can deduce what's happening.

Well. Main Qualifying ends, and to my slight surprise I rate the Pro Division, the top sixteen players. To her greater surprise bunny_hugger does too. Either of us making the final four would secure our positions in the state championship this year. Making it past the quarterfinals would put us in good shape.

My quartet: AJH, running the tournament; JB, recently come from Lansing to play altogether too well; myself; and JH, a woman I don't know. It's easy to suppose a person you don't know is lousy at pinball, but that's never wise to do. After all, she made the top sixteen.

Our first game: Aerosmith. It's still a tough game, but I've been playing it pretty consistently well at the SWL facility this past month. I have my first inconsistently bad game, and come in last. All right. The next game: Spider-Man. I'm less reliable on this game, but I've worked out the essentials. There's two multiballs that it's easy enough to start, even with the game on its advertised Hard Settings and with the slightly-shorter-than-design-spec Lightning Flippers. (The flippers have this lightning-bolt pattern on their top side.) And if you hit the Sandman target, right in the tempting center of the playfield, you get a mode started and a mode plus a multiball is usually a good day. I ... have an okay day, putting up 35 million points. JB puts up 51 million. AJH, 52.8 million. AJH is already sure to move on to semifinals. JB is the safe bet. But I can move on if I win the last game while JB finishes either third or last. AJH takes first place, and JB second, which is almost the opposite of what I wanted. They'll move on. I'm out of the tournament, tied with JH for 13th place. AJH goes on to win the tournament; JB, to take third place.

Ah, but bunny_hugger? She's in a four-player group with BIL, MSS, and MKS again. The first game, Time Fantasy, one that everybody but me knows how to play. bunny_hugger has her first outright lousy game of that in a while, putting up a score I could beat, and comes in last. The next game is Congo, a high-scoring game on which bunny_hugger can confidently put up a billion points, a score which would have won this round. If she were playing confidently, which she is not. She puts up 247.5 million, just barely squeaking out MKS at 246.9 million. BIL wins, assuring his advance to the semifinals. bunny_hugger could still advance --- she's in literally the same position I was after two games. She would have to finish in first on the third game, Surf Champ, while MSS had to finish in third or fourth place.

bunny_hugger plays this old and irritating electromechanical first. She finishes with 56,150 points. MKS is player two, and finishes with 62,700, finishing bunny_hugger. BIL has a lousy game, 34,270. MSS finishes at 43,000, the third place that bunny_hugger needed him to take. Had bunny_hugger had a very slightly better ball, at any point in this game, she'd be moving on. And instead, we're both out of the Baby Food Festival/Meijer State Games main tournament.

MWS has a lousy first round also, three third-place finishes that leave him tied for 11th with bunny_hugger. KEC has a one-game playoff against SAL, missing the chance to advance and taking 9th place. BIL gets to the semifinals, but can't advance, finishing in 5th. MKS makes it to semifinals too, but gets a third and two last-place finishes, leaving her in 7th place.

Now things get nasty. bunny_hugger was in a foul mood after losing this chance to get back in the state championship race. Had we been on main street she could have gone to the fair and remembered that there's other things in the world. But we're out of walking range and, in any case, nothing would be open until the rain was passed (which it was getting to doing). Me, I went around playing games to enter the next Fremont Monthly Tournament, figuring the best I could do was improve my chances for a tournament that wouldn't be worth as much as this, but would still be something. But it's hard not noticing how much that's just consolation.

And we had an alternative plan. After all, Fremont is just like a 20-30 minute drive from Michigan's Adventure. We, with MWS, had talked about going to that park and riding roller coasters if we got knocked out early. We had done this two years ago. But we checked the park's operating hours and discovered it was closed, presumably after the rain blew through. And JB was counting on us for his ride back to Lansing, so there wasn't anything to do but hang around the site of our failures until he was done. He made the final four.

Trivia: In the French Occupation Zone of Germany during 1945 the total harvest of bread grain was less than half what it was in that area in 1938; of potatoes, about 56.6 percent the prewar harvest. Source: Germany 1945: From War to Peace, Richard Bessel.

Currently Reading: Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919, Mike Wallace.

PS: Oh, yeah, I'd promised to let you know What's Going On In The Amazing Spider-Man? Is Spider-Man ever coming out of reruns? May - August 2019 plot recap here for you.

PPS: Our Monday in Mexico City bunny_hugger was back at the conference. I went walking. Come with me, won't you?

Curious elevated cross structure that was beside the bank adjacent to our hotel (in the background). It was just attractive enough I wanted to remember it.

And peering from the road leading to the hotel, and bank, back in the hotel's direction.

Reverse angle. There was a lot of traffic, including a fair number of officially licensed taxis, and it felt fairly anxious to be walking around all these cars moving to a pattern I didn't understand. This doesn't come across at all in a still photo.

At the halfway point of the year bunny_hugger was frustrated, or infuriated, with her standings in the race to make the Michigan state championship series for pinball. The top 24 ranked players in the state are to to go finals. A few might decline the invitation, so let's say the top 30 have a chance of competing for the state championship. bunny_hugger finished the first half of the year in 40th place. I was in 24th, inspiring her to enviously complain that I always do better than her in pinball. I will admit to being slightly better. Most of our difference in positions amounts to having four good tournament finishes the first half of the year: three good finishes at Special When Lit monthly or league tournaments, plus a good finish in the Pre-State Championship pin-golf tournament, held at the Special When Lit facility. In explaining why I do not think it's given that she won't make state I would keep pointing out: there are more tournaments scheduled for the last six months of the year than there are the first half. One great finish in any of them would put her soundly in the top 30. Two decent finishes would put her in the top 25. And, after all, Michigan's second-biggest event was coming up in the middle of July.

This is the Baby Food Festival, in Fremont, at ... the Special When Lit facility. It's also the Meijer State Games, the tournament that I keep reminding bunny_hugger she took the 3rd place in the top division from just two years ago. The Baby Food Festival tournament this year would have a Main and a Classics division, both of which bunny_hugger could finish well in. Plus daily tournaments on Thursday and Friday which, thanks to the number of people we could expect in, might be almost as valuable and easier to win. Mid-July could change everything.

The Baby Food Festival tournament is run as Herb style. That is, there's an open qualifying period when everyone tries to put up high scores on a set of tables. You get points for your finish, the highest score on a table earning 100 points. Second-highest earns, here, 95 points, and third-highest 93, with fourth and so on dwindling down, one point per position. Herb-style tournaments don't have to go that way; you can set it to be 100/99/98/97/etc. This little bonus for finishing first or second --- and for knocking off someone else's first or second --- is how AJH and PH, running the tournament, like to do things. Your standing in the tournament is the sum of your scores on the tables. The top 24 players, in the Main tournament, go on to the Pro division. The next eight who aren't restricted on the grounds of being too good, go into the Novice Division. The top 12 players in Classics go into the playoffs for that. The daily tournaments take the top eight players.

For the first time the pinball events for the Baby Food Festival were to be held in the Special When Lit facility. This is the large space, the back of an investment broker's building, that all the regular monthly tournaments have been held in for a year. It's also where the State Championship Series was back in January. This is also to be the last tournament at the Special When Lit facility: AJH and PH believe they are close to securing a deal for a new, larger facility to which their events will move. I hope that my good finishes at this venue will carry over to the new.

But having the games at this venue, rather than at the (now closed) diner on main street or the Moose Lodge in town, did mean it was easy to just open the place for an extra round of competition. So the Saturday before the Baby Food Festival, the facility was open for ten hours of qualifying for anyone who wanted to put up scores. bunny_hugger and I, along with MWS and Lansing League newcomer JB, carpooled together to play. Even better, the day's entries were free. Games at the festival --- which is a charity event --- are normally a dollar a play, although this year they were trying out a new plan of $40 for unlimited play.

So this was ... wonderful, really. We just wandered around the place, playing and recording scores, enjoying the fun part of unlimited-entry Herb tournament qualifying. This is where you play, and you have something you're particularly trying to do ... but also, if you screw up? It's all right. All you've lost is a bit of time, nothing serious. No dollar an entry. You can just try again to do better than you have. An infinite expanse of time and future chances lay before you.

At the end of this pre-festival day? I had a bunch of mostly bleh scores. One really good game of The Walking Dead, in the main tournament. A pretty solid Barracora. Indifferent scores on everything else, including Classics. I was in the top 16, sure, but not with any scores that would stand up to two full days of serious qualifying attempts. bunny_hugger was in about the same spot. JB was, I think, in second place. MWS was in first, with the perfect-attainable 400 for the Main and the Classics tournaments. (There were more than four tables in the Main tournament, but only the top four scores counted.) Oh, and bunny_hugger was on top of the Women's tournament, which is nice to have but couldn't help her in the state ranking, as only open tournaments count for that. It would help her in the women's rankings, but Michigan has a weak women's pinball scene. It can't get her back to the Women's World Championship.

But of course we were going to come back. We figured to go back either Thursday or Friday, to shore up scores and try our luck at a daily tournament. We picked the Thursday, so that we would be able to rest Friday and not drive out to Fremont --- two hours away --- two days in a row.

Trivia: TAT-3, laid down in 1963, was the first direct transatlantic telephone cable connecting the United States to England; it could carry 138 communications circuits. Source: How The World Was One: Beyond the Global Village, Arthur C Clarke.

Currently Reading: Peanuts Dell Archive, Editors Whitney Leopard, Chris Rosa.

PS: Reading the Comics, August 3, 2019: Summer Trip Edition, finally taking care of last week's comic strips.

PS: What is finer than an amusement park by night? Not much. Back to La Feria.

Looking out at the midway by night. The tower with green lights around it on the right is the main gift shop.

Oh, the swinging ship ride, named La Nao China. We didn't get on it, but do admire the dragon across the sails there.

Cascabel 2.0 by night, along with some of the steps that lead down a terrace of the park.

Before our next trip, we had the time for one of our traditions. That's getting to the county fair. Not our county fair. As is also traditional, the Ingham County fair was sometime we couldn't go because most of it overlapped with, I think, Pinburgh. We went instead to the Calhoun County Fair. It's the county that bunny_hugger's parents live in. Her mother didn't go. Her back has been less a source of constant agony, but that doesn't mean it's actually good yet. Her father did go. He didn't last year, from concern for his wife. But this year was better.

We got delayed getting there, since the bridge over a small river the most direct route there was removed, pending replacement. So that's exciting. We weren't in danger of driving into the river. Did get a surprisingly good parking spot, considering our run of luck and especially the hour-long wait to get in that bunny_hugger and I had last year.

First order of business once inside: french fries. Next order of business: considering whether to get the fried Oreos or what. We decided against, but figured to get elephant ears on the way out. The three of us went through the barns and the livestock exhibits, since that's so much of what there is to marvel at at the fair. Also bunny_hugger's father quite likes taking the chance to pet cows and pigs. I just keep feeling like doing anything to get a pig's attention is probably a mistake. Anyway a lot of lovely-looking animals. Also in one of the goat enclosures a couple young people taking kids around on a practice(?) obstacle course, trying to get young goats to do stuff like walk up and then down a teeter-totter. The goats weren't having it.

Also I see from my pictures: what I have to guess was some kind of fancy part-translucent umbrella that looked like someone just abandoned a small flying saucer by the goat barn.

There were ducks in the pond again, and turkeys, so that's a couple years in a row now there's no particular bird diseases going around. The turkeys were pretty cool and none of them attacked my camera this time, although they didn't look happy about me being around. I don't take it personally. The small mammals barn had not a single guinea pig or hamster or gerbil in it. It did have a bunch of rabbits, including Californians that reminded us how hurt it was to have lost Penelope so soon. No really large rabbits. And then one of the women supervising the barn came over to ask me not to take flash photographs because it can startle the rabbits. Which ... all right, but I wasn't taking flash photographs. My camera's flash pops out on a little extension, like cameras did in the old days, and I showed her that as proof of my good behavior. She told me that she saw light coming from my camera. So I put my camera away rather than continue an unproductive debate.

In the 4-H hall the enormous array of photographs submitted, and winning ribbons for things, reinforced bunny_hugger's belief that she should submit some of her own photos for a county fair. She should, absolutely. She has a lot of great pictures, and there are like eight hundred thousand categories so there's surely some that she can totally dominate.

Outside we saw a guy doing license plate art. That is, spraying paint onto a plate that's the right size to put on your front plate holder (Michigan has only rear plates). And, what's really striking, drying or producing some kinds of paint effects by spraying the thing with fire. He was doing these cosmic, loosely prog-rock-album plates, to the applause of a modest but interested crowd.

They had the same rides at the fair again. The really fast carousel that we see in Fremont each year. The Ferris wheel and drop tower that, this year, we skipped. We didn't want to spend too much time riding things, considering bunny_hugger's father was just sitting waiting for us to be done, and her mother sitting at home waiting for us to be done. We just picked a couple of them --- a Wipeout, the trabant, the carousel --- and bought tickets for them. Did admire more of the art, though. The tiny haunted house, for example, had some fun art and a couple of animated figures outside that were worth photographing. Maybe we could've spent more time at the fair. But, you know? We had a good time and we got back early enough to try this Mice and Mystics chapter that had been licking us. It licked us again. That's doing pretty well still.

Trivia: Four of the six ``First Day's Vases'' cast by Josiah Wedgewood on the 13th June 1769 opening of his new works at Etruria still survive. Source: The Lunar Men: The Friends who Made the Future, Jenny Uglow.

Currently Reading: Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About The World, Tim Marshall.

PS: Little more of last year's Baby Food Festival.

Table display of miscellaneous trophies for the Baby Food Festival 2017's various divisions.

I think every emotion of tournament pinball is on display somewhere in this picture.

Scratch-off lottery tickets I noticed in the main room of the restaurant. I didn't see any examples of the Pinball Wizard card in their machine, though, and haven't seen it since.

So the finals, as I saw them. I was in a group with JIM, who I knew but underrated, KAH from Edmonton whom I didn't know, and PCM from Indiana I think and again didn't know. We start on Dirty Harry, and find I do still have the rhythm for that Magna Force-to-Side Ramp-to-Headquarters-to-Magna Force shot. I score 431 million and feel pretty good about my chances; KAH sneaks out a 504 million point game, and I get second. Next: Iron Maiden. I'd said I was starting to get the hang of this game, and yeah: I put up 171 million. Not my best score on any instance of the game to that point. But close enough. I have a first-place finish and, with that, I'm already assured of advancing to semifinals. So is KAH. The only point of the third game is for JIM and PCH to learn their finishing positions (16th and 11th, respectively). But I don't know that, and pick 4 Square, wrecking bunny_hugger's plans. This is an electromechanical with wonderful simple rules. We have to take it one player at a time; it only has the one scoring reel. JIM puts up 1,393. PCH a really solid 3,231. I come in and toss off 5,128 in a game that feels like it's never going to end; this is more than halfway to rolling it. KAH closes us out with 2,609. I have the morale boost of going in with two first-place and a second-place win in the quarterfinals.

For the second round I'm in a more familiar group. One where I know all the players, pretty well. The drawback: it's AJH, PH, and MWS. They're all better than me. I can beat any of them one-on-one, yes. But in a three-game format? My real hope is that they split the first-place finishes and I can sneak through the round in second. It's a strategy that often works --- the PAPA-style scoring system, where a first place finish earns four points, second place two, third place one, and last place zero, helps this through --- but it depends on them cooperating.

First game. AJH's pick. Iron Maiden. No surprise; like RLM, he's got the combination of accurate shooting and deep rules knowledge that make this suitable. But I have a pretty solid game myself, putting up 117 million. MWS, going first, has some bad luck and never quite gets control; he spins out at 46 million points. Could easily have been me. AJH loses his game momentum when the ball rockets down the drain; it catches everyone by surprise. Also a surprise: he throws his ball cap at the floor hard enough it makes a snapping noise and slides across the room. Everyone's shocked by it, AJH included. He says he'd meant to just slap his hat on his leg, and lost his grip. It's good for me, though: he finishes at 102 million. PH, at 122 million, takes first place. But I've got the second-place I needed and, really, wanted.

Second game, PH's pick. Congo. Much like Dirty Harry, if you can get a good rhythm going you can keep going all day and score a billion points. Literally; the game is a high-scoring one, and a decent game is at least 250 million points. For example, PH does exactly this. I very nearly have this rhythm and get 612 million. MWS pulls in 260 million. AJH puts together 831 million, much of it on the last ball, dashing my hopes that I might secure myself with another second-place finish. PH, with two first-place wins, is through to the next round whatever happens. MWS is doomed unless he can get a first-place finish. AJH and I, both with a second- and a third-place finish, are tied. Whichever of us places higher will go to finals, unless MWS gets a first-place and PH a second-place on the last game.

MWS picks 4 Square. Given the rough time he's had this round, it's the way to go. Electromechanicals flatten out how much advantage a more skilled player has over the less-skilled. On this game our group is nearly enough a coin toss. AJH goes first, scoring 2,666. Nice, solid game. Could easily be a winner. I go second. I have the game of my life. The goal of 4 Square is to hit quartets of standing targets numbered 1 through 4. Each of these lights other targets, like bumpers and lanes, for ten times their normal point value. And I just keep the ball alive, and keep sending it up to already-lit bumpers and lanes. The game grows ever-more illuminated under me, and my game still doesn't end. I finish at 7,683, the second-highest score anyone's put up on the machine all weekend. I have crushed MWS under an anvil, then run over him with a steam roller, and then dropped a cruise ship on the steam roller.

He tries to rally, but nothing doing; he only gets 715 points and I think he might even have tilted, ending his game early. (Many electromechanicals end the game after a tilt.) He goes to lick his wounds while PH plays a ball that can't affect anything at all: he and I are through to the finals. He puts up 2,899.

Finals. Oh yeah wait, I'm in finals in the main tournament. I feel like I'm playing way above my skill level. I've managed top-four in the Baby Food Festival Classics tournament before. But the Main tournament --- this is by far my best finish. Anything I do will be a bonus.

I keep telling myself that after the first game, Knockout. Apart from one game the day before, and one terrible game in Classics finals, I haven't touched the game, other than for my stupid mistake resetting the game on MSS. I'm not just last place; I'm so far back in last place that if my score were doubled ... well, all right, I'd be in third place. But not by much. CST takes first place, and KAH is barely behind him.

Second game. PH's pick. Iron Maiden once more. One bit of hot gossip all weekend has been that the game has not just a skill shot, but a super skill shot, made by plunging the ball just enough that you land it on the left flipper, and then shoot up the center ramp. OK. But also that there's a super secret skill shot, made by plunging just hard enough your ball goes out the left drain, for twenty million points (and returning your ball to play). I had managed this once during the weekend, wild luck in, I think the quarter-finals round. CST had mentioned wondering if the version of the game code with the super secret skill shot had been installed on this particular game, and I told him it was. He got the super secret skill shot, playing this round.

He doesn't have a runaway game. He has a game that, up to that weekend, would have me intimidated, scoring 149 million. But I have a pretty good game myself and am frustrated that I top out at 137 million. PH has a solid run too, but his last ball ends at 129 million and I feel like I just might have a chance at taking a top-three position. KAH has some bad luck and gets only fifty million points. My recollection is he has a particularly infuriating bit of bad pinball luck, when he has the two balls in his multiball crash into each other, neutralizing their momentum, just as they're above the gap between the flippers.

With two first-place finishes, CST has won the tournament. PH, with two third-place finishes, and KAH, with a second- and a last-place finish, and me, with a last- and a second-place finish, are tied. Our order of finish on the last game will be the second through fourth place in the tournament.

The game choice: Dirty Harry. I haven't had an outright bad game on it all day. I feel great. I feel confident. I feel --- wait, where did my first ball go? None of us has a really good first ball. CST has the least-bad one, but it's still a shaky start. All right. Second ball, CST gets his game together and gets to several hundred million. No matter; the rest of us are playing each other. My second ball. I remind myself to relax. I focus on the flippers. I know when to flip to get the Magnum Force shot. To get the side ramp. To get the Headquarters shot. I just have to --- argh. And drain almost right away. The astounding thing is that KAH and PH are racing me to the bottom.

Last ball. CST continues his cool mastery of the tournament and finishes with 537 million. I step up and remind myself, I've done that. To get about 400 million in one ball is hard, but it's doable. I've done it before on this very table. I would do it again on this table four weeks later. All I have to do is not lose my head. The ball starts (as they all do) with my getting to pick a Skill Shot award. I can get a sure bonus multiplier of 2x. Or I can light the Mangum Force shot on the side ramp. Or I can try to load the gun, a shot that's worth a lot of points but that I never make. I've been going for the side ramp shot all day, because I always make it. But I think, would the bonus multiplier be the better shot? I need every point I can get; why turn down, in this case, at minimum an extra ten million points if I don't tilt?

But I disregard my complete failure to make the side ramp this game, and go with the Magnum Force shot, aiming for the side ramp. I miss it. And I brick it, my ball draining and my game ending at a weak and very vulnerable 120 million. I have no hope of PH not catching up; he's not just great, but he knows this table well. KAH, well, I might beat him yet. He's been having as bad a game as I have, and he's not from around here.

He picks the bonus multiplier for his skill award, and he doesn't drain right away. But near enough. When the bonus counts up, he has 129 million.

Yes, I know. I kick myself for not picking the bonus multiplier myself. If I just literally had ten million more points --- ah, but, I did. I thought this was so, and verify it later. Making the Magnum Force shot awards you 10 million points. You get that award, too, if you pick the Magnum Force award on your skill shot. So had I picked the 2x bonus award, yes, I'd have gotten about ten million more in my bonus, but I wouldn't have gotten ten million just for shooting the ball at all. Still it's hard not to convince myself I made a terrible mistake, and I don't actually get to verify that I did not until I get some time to test out Dirty Harry, next Fremont event.

Anyway, I'm resigned to a fourth-place finish. PH is in fourth place, yes. But he's too good a player, and too good at composing himself, to not beat 129 million. He's got a good shot at beating AJH's 537 million. He ... lowers his head into his hands, as the ball just suddenly isn't there anymore and his game ends at 98 million.

CST wins the tournament. KAH has second place. And me ... I've got third place. With a medal and everything.

It's my most valuable, points-wise, finish in any event this year. Probably the most valuable one I could have through to the end of 2018. It's 15.97 points towards the state and worldwide rankings, leaping me six or so places up in the state standings. Maybe a hundred in the world standings. It's a fantastic finish to have going in to Pinburgh, the biggest tournament of the year.

And for all that, I still torture myself with thoughts about how if I'd made one side ramp shot, I'd have second place and another four points in the rankings. (Which, based on how the state rankings look right now, might at best and if just the right things happen, move me up one further spot. Maybe.)

The pinball tournament starts breaking up, and cleaning up, and all that. I find MWS and we go next door to the Moose Lodge, to the Blind Squirrel Tavern. We put in games for the next round of the Blind Squirrel League play; this would be the finals that I missed two weekends ago to be at my aunt's wake. And we find bunny_hugger, who keeps apologizing for missing the finals when she was out getting fair foods.

It's been a long day, and it's two hours driving back for us, and an hour after that for MWS. We decide to go home, a plan foiled when it turns out my car's battery is dead. bunny_hugger and MWS push the car (and I steer) to a free spot where my hood will be available, so that we can get a jump from AAA or somebody. MWS realizes, oh yeah, he could just ask any of the very many people wandering around if they could jump our car and it happens the first person he asks was parked next to where we've rolled our car. And yes, I have jumper cables; after a similar accidental battery drain a few months back we got cables for both our cars. I have three false starts finding where I put them. They're in back of the driver's seat in my car, in a heap of stuff that seems like I should be able to clean out, but every piece of which seems essential. (Jumper cables, first-aid kit, reflectorized orange vest, jacket, bottle of water, roll of paper towels ... it seems like clutter, but can you point to any that shouldn't be in your car? And really, shouldn't I also have some cold-resistant, indestructible snack in there, and maybe a blanket?)

But I get through the false starts, and we get on our way, and have no trouble getting home. Apart from my incessant giggling at how ridiculous it was that I should have finished in third place. How could something like that even happen?

The next week we figure to be truly busy.

Trivia: In 1858 the governments of France, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Piedmont, Russia, Sweden, Tuscany, and Turkey paid Samuel Morse a cumulative 400,000 French francs (about US$80,000) for rights to use the telegraph; each country put up a share based on the number of Morse telegraphs in use. Source: The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the 19th Century's Online Pioneers, Tom Standage.

Currently Reading: The Bicentennial History of Ingham County, Michigan, Ford Stevens Ceasar.

More of Traverse City, the city.

Historical site Novotny's Saloon, built in 1886 and for decades a cornerstone of the social life of Traverse City, as a bar and as a social club and as a grocery and as a dance hall, until 1978 when the building was destroyed by fire. This, says the sign, is a ``near replica'' built within a couple weeks.

Lay Park, commemorating Albert Tracy Lay, the other founder of Perry Hannah. (That's what you were waiting for.) His park seems much larger than Hannah's, just a couple blocks away. But he hasn't got a statue, just a plaque on a rock. Lay's plaque mentions Hannah, although Hannah's says nothing about Lay.

Every time we visit Traverse City we remember this hobby shop too late to actually go inside. Anyway, here's the vestibule, including where the ``new'' floor has been worn down to reveal much but not quite enough of an earlier floor.

We got back to Fremont soon after the qualifying hours opened. This required we get up about six hours earlier in the day than we liked, but, sacrifies must be made. I started out with FunHouse, a game included in the bank not just because bunny_hugger loves it so. It's a tough game for tournaments. Anyone who loves pinball knows this game inside-out; it's maybe the most accessible late-solid-state game and one of the all-time best games. But if you're skilled, and the game is playing comfortably, you can play it basically forever. To have a tournament not go on forever, the table has to be set hard. So play it in a tournament and the game's likely to be crushing, and it had crushed me the day before. My first game of Saturday, though, I had it, cruising along to multiple jackpots and about 13 million points. This put me in the top ten players on that table. And I'd stay there: shortly after I played the game malfunctioned, and after a fair bit of trying PH and AJH determined the game couldn't be fixed in time to put back in play. Nobody could swipe my 91 points. Testament to that superstition that your first game of the day is often your best.

But other games go well too. Dirty Harry I start to get the hang of. There's three important shots on the table. One is the Headquarters scoop on the left. One is the Magna Force shot on the right. One is the side ramp shot in the center, using the upper flipper. I finally start to find where these shots are, that is, where on the flipper to shoot to hit them. Better, the shots feed into one another. From the left flipper shoot the Magna Force, from that shoot the side ramp; that takes you to the right flipper where you can shoot Headquarters, which puts you back to the left flipper. I start feeling really good about the game. It ends up being one of my four best games.

I don't better my other scores for the Main tournament. But I give the Classics a try and improve all three games. Mystic it's relatively easy to double your score on; just have a good first ball. 4 Square is more about bringing the ball to a stop often, and then aiming; the game is a bunch of targets all labelled 1 through 4 and you want, like it suggests, to hit four 1's, four 2's, four 3's, and four 4's. The more sets of 1-2-3-4 you hit, the more everything on the field is worth. And on Eight Ball, the pool-themed Fonzie-ripoff game, I find the little shot up the right that builds up the bonus value; the bonus is based on how many targets corresponding to pool balls you've hit, and so --- well, that's got me into the Classics Tournament.

The Classics Tournament is an exciting prospect. My first really big finish in an important tournament was the Baby Food Festival Classics, several years ago. Its points had just lapsed from my International Flipper Pinball Association rating. (Points decline in value as they age; the first months of my and bunny_hugger's competitive pinball lives now count for nothing, except that they are how we got here. The scheme does motivate people to keep playing, and to give skilled newcomers a chance against skilled oldcomers who've been playing since before games had flippers.) The downside: playing in it could endanger my appearance in the Main Tournament. I'm qualified now, but anyone not playing in the Classics Tournament will have that uninterrupted time to put up Main Tournament qualifying scores. They could edge me out.

I get into Classics in 11th place, out of 12 taken in. I'm comfortable with that. bunny_hugger is at 16th place, not in unless an impossible number of people don't show up or decline to play. They don't. She doesn't actually kick my shin, but we do argue about whether I'm a significantly better player than she is. I'm not. I would accept ``slightly'' better, with the main differences being that I recover quicker from an unfair event and that I have an easier time strategizing on a modern Rules-a-palooza game with impossibly complicated gameplay. All my grand strategy experience.

First round of Classics Finals. Three games, in a four-player group with Grand Rapids League regulars RLM and MSS, plus this guy UNC, in from Indiana. He's one of a couple of out-of-staters (and in one case, an out-of-country-er) who're there and messing up the usual forecasting of who'll do what. Knock-Out is the first game; it's an electromechanical. It wasn't in the Classics Qualifying banks, as it was reserved for the daily tournaments. But there's no daily tournament Saturday, so it's free for our use here. We play it one-player, since the game can sometimes tilt through, losing someone their ball because the previous player tilted. MSS goes first and puts up 81,540, nearly rolling it. I'm second; I like going second when I can, for no good reason other than why not. I put up 40,320. UNC is next and gets to 38,780 and I breathe so much easier. I get at least one point the round. RLM has a terrible game, getting only 21,630. If I can keep this pace, I'll get through this round and into semifinals.

The next game is 4 Square, which I think of as a friend by now. RLM goes first, and puts up a solid 3,725. I'm second; I put up 2,055. Not good, but with a bit of luck I might get third or even second place. UNC gives me hope again, but on the last ball (of five) he blows through my score and finishes at 2,596. MSS takes to the fourth ball to beat my score. I'm now tied for third in the group of four; only the top two go on. If I win the last game I move on surely; if I come in second, I might make it.

The game is Mystic. Well, literally anything might happen. What does happen is that MSS has a really good game, getting 394,320 points. I manage a much more average 82,230. RLM squeaks me out on the bonus, coming in at 84,650. My only hope is that UNC tilts away his bonus, and he doesn't; he squeaks out the both of us and finishes at 93,280. MSS and RLM will go on to the semifinals. I'm out of the tournament in 11th place. UNC gets 10th. MSS will go on to 8th, and RLM to 4th.

On the one hand I'm free to better, or at least defend, my position in the Main Tournament. On the other, aw, man. Classics was my best chance to get a nice big heap of points. What am I going to do in Main?

MWS, who carpooled with us again, tied in the first round of classics with CST. CST won; MWS finished the tournament in 9th.

Last year when we all bombed out of the Main Tournament after the first round we went to Michigan's Adventure. We had agreed to doing this again, if the Main Tournament turns out not to need us.

Trivia: Beethoven's Fidelio opened five nights after Napoleon's armies occupied Vienna, in November 1805. The sparse audience was mostly French officers who had little knowledge of German and less of Beethoven. Source: Beethoven: The Universal Composer, Edmund Morris.

Currently Reading: Fuelling the Empire: South Africa's Gold and the Road to War, John J Stephens.

PS: I'm Looking For Topics For My Fall 2018 Mathematics A-To-Z so please drop a few in!

PPS: A little more Columbo and then some of the town, last year.

And a split-second later, the leaf is much less than it was, and Columbo was a bit heavier than he had been.

Fallen tree along the walkway down to Omena proper from the house. It's not all that far, but every spot of it looks like every letterboxing clue ever.

Looking back up the road leading from Omena to the rented house. There really is a split in the road in the far center and the house was off to the left from it.

Our next big expedition after Traverse Bay was Pinburgh, the major pinball event. That we would leave for a week and a day after getting home. So yeah, we fit something else in between that. And at the risk of sounding out of character, of course it was a pinball event.

Fremont, Michigan, is out in the middle of nowhere, not even a major highway running through it. Getting there involves at least a half-hour driving minor streets, and the quickest way from our home involves an hour on surface roads like that. That might be good for the town, oddly still the headquarters for Gerber. It supports a healthy number of pretty major festivals, including the Baby Food Festival. AJH, one of the state's top pinball players, has teamed up with the Baby Food Festival for a charity tournament that brilliantly uses the festival to draw in casual players and generate International Flipper Pinball Association ranking points for experienced players. And usually brings in a great selection of games you don't see everywhere to play out.

bunny_hugger, MWS, and I went out for the Saturday, last day of qualifying and the one day of finals. We took advantage of early reports that the tournament was kind of slow, with not many of the serious players competing. Maybe it was the timing: days before the much bigger, much higher-stress Pinburgh event, but out of AJH's hands because the Baby Food Festival is the schedule-setter. Maybe it's a chronic thing: there's enough tournaments and leagues now, and enough points mines on both the east and west side of the state, that the jackpot of doing well at the Baby Food Festival isn't the make-or-break to qualify for the state championship that it used to be. (Fremont, host of the Blind Squirrel League, is one of those points mines, but given how far it is for us in Lansing, I can understand folks in the Detroit area figuring that you know, it isn't actually worth it even for potentially 25 points.

The format was much as previous years: put your best scores up on the seven or so tables in the main tournament; the best five give you your tournament ranking. Put your best scores up on the three tables in the Classics side tournament; how you do compared to other people gives you your ranking there. There was also a side, women's, tournament, and bunny_hugger was feeling good about that until she saw SMB, one of the best players in the country, walk in. Right this minute SMB is a top-16 player in four states. She's the 25th-highest-ranked player in Michigan, and she lives in North Carolina. (I think.) She was visiting family, apparently, and figured to just pop in and see what might happen. Only the top four women competing would go to finals there and bunny_hugger saw her chance evaporating.

Trivia: A 1710 map of Cheshire, England, marks ``John Stubbs salt pit''. The current Stubbs --- after centuries in the salt business --- are not certain exactly who John was. Source: Salt: A World History, Mark Kurlansky.

Currently Reading: The History of the Calculus and its Conceptual Development, Carl B Boyer.

PS: So this dovetails nicely for once. Day after Thanksgiving last year we went to a charity event at the VFW Ann Arbor Pinball Hall of Fame. Here's some of the spectacle.

``So you wanna mouse around?'' Lower playfield of Bally's 1989 Mousin' Around, a cartoony cat-and-mouse chase-themed game that would actually be less Poochied Up if it had actual Poochie in it.

bunny_hugger can not believe these Jokerz. Williams 1988. One of an estimated infinitely many card-collecting-themed games.

``So what did we watch for the FlopHouse 1989 Super-Spectacular, Dan?'' ``Well, Elliott, we watched Midway's Transporter: The Rescue, all about women being caught by a rubber mask with cocktail weiners growing out of his forehead.'' ``All right, I'm not quite sold on it, but has he got lobster claws and does he wear a crown of candy corn?'' ``Yes.'' Also the game that made Pinburgh 2016 for bunny_hugger so, that's pretty good.

PPS: How October 2017 Treated My Mathematics Blog, a brief report.

My mathematics blog had a gift possibility open up this week. You don't need to get it for me. But if you're interested in what you missed, here, enjoy.

• Reading the Comics, February 15, 2017: SMBC Cuts In Line Edition --- or do they?
• One Way To Get Your Own Theorem and it's a gift service I don't endorse, just acknowledge the existence of.
• Reading the Comics, February 15, 2017: SMBC Does Not Cut In Line Edition and sorry to leave you in suspense like that.
• Reading the Comics, February 23, 2017: The Week At Once Edition so there'll have to be something ... different? ... on Thursday.

Ah, now for a break from pinball reporting with ... pinball event pictures. These are from July and the Baby Food Festival/Meijer State Games, in Fremont, a tiny town we'd come to know one small part of well in the close of the year.

Trophy table at the Summer 2016 Baby Food Festival/Meijer State Games pinball tournament. bunny_hugger and I would take two of the medals home. Note the baby food festival trophies there. The Coke wasn't anybody's particular award.

Competitors putting in games for the Baby Food Festival tournament. The screen on the right lists the standings. The people above the red line are qualified for finals. Qualification is based on total points, with more points given for beating more people's scores on a single machine. One good game might not be as valuable as fair scores on everything.

Low-angle view of every pinball tournament, or at least what qualifying for the tournaments always looks like.

bunny_hugger grabbing the awards presentation to the kids division winners. The kid on the right would go on to state finals.

bunny_hugger examining her own medal, for second place in the women's division.

Finals. ADM tries to put up enough billions on The Walking Dead to squeeze out victory. Watching him with the notepad is AJH, who'd be the top seed in the state thanks in part to his knowing how to get ALL THE RANKING POINTS EVER for arranging pinball events like this.

Trivia: In May 1932 an experimental television broadcast for station W6XAO, Los Angeles, originated from a tri-motored airplane in flight. Source: Please Stand By: A Prehistory Of Television, Michael Ritchie.

Currently Reading: Vichy: Two Years Of Deception, Léon Marchal, Translated by Jean Davidson, Don Schwind.

The Classics Tournament started its finals first. They were scored, as is standard at PH/AJH tournaments and is threatening to be the only thing anyone does anywhere, PAPA-style. PAPA here means ``Professional and Amateur Pinball Association''. In this groups of four people play. Whoever gets the highest score wins four points for the match. Second-highest gets two points. Third-highest gets one point. Last place gets nothing. There would be three rounds. PAPA-style scoring is taking over from two-player match play, winner goes on, because of International Flipper Pinball Association rankings. IFPA wants to encourage head-to-head play. Their system for rating players treats the four-player group going head-to-head as the quintessence of competitive pinball. The greatest number of ranking points are earned for group-of-four play. So despite potential anomalies --- after two rounds out of three a player can be assured of a win, or a last-place finish, and so has little reason not to play as spoiler for others --- PAPA scoring is taking over.

My group of four players would include AJH, who's a naturally ferocious competitor and by the way playing on his own machines. Also ADM, whose main weaknesses as a player are that he adjusts slowly to poorly-maintained machines (which these were not) and that he is probably mortal and so might someday die in the middle of a game. We started on Flash Gordon, and my recollection is I started weak but managed finally to keep the last ball in the upper playfield area, where the highest scores are. I got second place, behind AJH, none too shabby.

The second game was Tri-Zone. It's the same game, different table, from the one we have. Pinball folklore has it that any table you own you can't play worth anything anywhere else. I had put in a few practice games, trying to figure where the key shots --- the drop targets, the rollover lanes --- are, but hadn't really got the hang of it. I put up pitiful first and second balls. Third wasn't much better. But I could at least avoid coming in last place, by just catching the ball, bringing it to a rest, and shooting at the drop targets carefully. These would be worth one thousand points (ten thousand if lit, which I could get if I waited for the light to come around). All I needed was to not have the ball bobble down the center and oh, there it goes. Last place, falling behind KEC by 1500 points. She said she had no idea how I didn't pass her. I'm not sure either.

The last game of the first round was Blackout, my savior at Pinball At The Zoo. None of us put up very good games on it, but once again I found something on that last ball and just edged out KEC. I think she got an unfair tilt on the last ball. With a second, a last, and a first-place finish I had 6 PAPA point and advanced to the second round, alongside AJH.

bunny_hugger had a much worse time of it, with a last-place finish on Boomerang, a second-place on Mystic, and a last-place finish on Tri-Zone by barely more than a thousand points too. She'd be knocked out of the Classics tournament and ended up in 15th place. MWS advanced to the second round.

In the second round I was grouped with AJH, and MWS, and also SMS, one of the state's best women players. And once again Flash Gordon was dominated by AJH. But I came up with a not-bad second place. The second game was Tri-Zone again and once again AJH dominated it, with a score of 391,830. That's a solid score in any case for Tri-Zone, but especially so as they had all the settings put on their hardest possible values. And I had my mediocre practice games and outright lousy first-round game to consider. Which is why I'm still shocked to see I put up 344,970, a second-place finish.

After those two rounds AJH was now guaranteed to move on to the finals. I would be guaranteed to move on as long as I didn't finish last. PAPA scoring produces those locked-in results sometimes. And the game was Boomerang. AJH put up 97,910 in five balls, just coming short of rolling the score. I was the second player, putting up 100,190, and earning jokes about how I had somehow only scored 190 points. Either SMS or MWS could force a playoff for the finals, if they won first place. MWS put up 53,760. SMS put up 47,090. I was in the finals.

I've said, I'm not a tournament player. I do better in leagues. Being in the finals is a novelty. The finals would be me, AJH, CST --- who'd come back from a huge gap on Tri-Zone after asking whether we thought it practical to make a quarter-million points in one ball, and he did ---, and BIL.

First game, once again, Flash Gordon. I hadn't put up a score below 200,000 on it all day. I'd put up scores above a half million half the times I'd played. I could almost feel entitled to a second-place finish on it. I got last. The next game was Blackout, another friend that decided this time to hang out with the cool kids of AJH and CST. I got third place. At this point BIL and I were tied with one PAPA point each. BIL and I couldn't possibly win first or second; whichever of us outscored the other would take third place. AJH and CST, similarly, were really only playing each other; whoever had the higher score on Mystic would take first place.

CST would put up 135,250 on Mystic, a score that's honestly anemic but what can you do? AJH, playing right after him, would just barely squeeze him out, 141,220. BIL would put a lousy 58,850 points on himself. And me? I managed to so slightly less lousy and put in 63,420. I got third place.

And hey, third place! I'd gotten that position last year at the Baby Food Festival too. But that year it wasn't also the Meijer State Games. Meijer provided medals for the top three finishers, Classics and Main. I would go home with a literal bronze medal for competitive pinball play. Wow..

bunny_hugger would also take a bronze medal, in the Women's Division, Pro Players set. She's too good to play as Novice anymore.

Trivia: In Spring 1959, NASA's first computer program, ODP-1, for determining satellite position was done. Running on the Univac 1103A, it could predict a satellite's orbit for 24 hours, with only 24 hours of calculation. Source: Something New Under the Sun, Helen Gavaghan.

Currently Reading: Twenty-Five Mystery Science Theater 3000 Films That Changed My Life In No Way Whatsoever, Frank Conniff.

PS: Why Stuff Can Orbit, Part 5: Why Physics Doesn't Work And What To Do About It, or, Lagrangian mechanics in 1200 words without equations.

The Baby Food Festival is a pretty good-sized carnival held in July in the small, remote town of Fremont, Michigan. Its theme is just what you might think given its name and that it's where Gerber Products Company is headquartered. PH and son AJH run the National Baby Food Festival Open, an open pinball tournament, there. This year it was also the Meijer State Games pinball tournament. PH has a collection of dozens of machines, many of them all-time classics, many of them exotic and pleasantly weird, so putting out a subset of them makes for a fun tournament. AJH has a superhuman ability to organize playoff formats that maximize International Flipper Pinball Association reward.

Some of their genius is holding the tournament during the town's festival, with a big sign out front pointing out that it is a charity tournament (it raises money for MS research), and that there's daily contests and many categories of contests so that the chance of winning something feels high. And having a lot of people enter a pinball contest boosts the IFPA reward, which encourages every serious competitive-pinball player in the state to go there, which drives its value up more. Of course we'd go. It would be the biggest in-state pinball event of July. It would be the second-biggest pinball event of the month.

We carpooled with MWS. Fremont is about two hours from our house and three hours from his. He can't get there without passing within two miles of our house, so not carpooling would be a touch daft. But it was two hours (three for him), which is why we set out only on the last day. There were daily tournaments Thursday and Friday which we passed up. Saturday we could attempt to qualify for the Main tournament, with mostly modern games, and for the Classics tournament, with electromechanical and solid-state games from no later than the early 80s. We still had to get up way too early in the day for that.

They would have four games we knew or kind-of knew in the Main Tournament: Embryon, a 1980 solid-state game with a weird theme and a lot of strange, confusing shots that I inexplicably like. The Walking Dead, based on the TV show, which every place has and which has had so many code revisions nobody knows what to do with it anymore. Whirlwind, a late 80s game made just before FunHouse and similar in many ways to it, but still requiring agonizingly precise hits and lots of them for the high-value payouts. And Shrek, which is the same game as Family Guy but with different art and animations and audio recordings. Somehow, Shrek is a lot more fun than Family Guy, and it must just be that it's a less annoying theme. Literally the only thing changed between the games is the pictures on the playfield and what they name stuff.

Games we didn't know well: Corvette, one of roughly a jillion games licensed to cars that drive fast. It had this crowded, complicated playfield and we'd never touched one that we remember. And Elvis, an early-2000s Stern license we'd played at Pinball Pete's in Ann Arbor. We knew a few tricks from it, like where the super-skill-shot was and how to start the Heartbreak Hotel multiball. Not much, but even a little bit helps.

The Classics tournament had only three games. Boomerang, by now an old familiar, with a dangerous tendency to center-drain after you make the scoop shot that's the one valuable shot in the game. We knew to watch for that and what to do (hit the cabinet at the right spot at the right time, nudging the ball out of its doom). Blackout, the game that brought me glory in the Pinball At The Zoo Classics back in April. Flash Gordon, themed to just like you think, 1981 model with an upper and a lower playfield and the promise of lots of instant drains if you didn't keep the ball's speed very slow for as long as possible.

There were two daily-tournament games, not ones we'd have to play to qualify, but which might be picked by people in the finals. One was Mystic, another 1980s table with no comprehensible rule set and a tendency to award enormous last-ball bouses for no reason anyone could work out. And Tri-Zone, another model of the pinball machine we have at home and know so well. Pinball folklore has it that if you own a game you can never play another of that table worth anything. This would be the first time we'd get to find out whether we suffered under that curse.

Trivia: The final launch countdown for the Space Shuttle required about two and a half hours, and consoles watched by three launch control personnel. The equivalent process for Apollo required about 28 hour and ten times the launch controllers. Source: A History of the Kennedy Space Center, Kenneth Lipartito, Orville R Butler.

Currently Reading: Dirty Old London: The Victorian Fight Against Filth, Lee Jackson.