austin_dern

It's a Sunday, so I'm just here to shareReviewing _Popeye and Son_, Episode 10: Split Decision and then a double dose of Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk pictures with you. Yes, I'm still not off the beach! Technically!

More of that ring arm reaching out to bite you.

And here's the carousel horses in-between rides. You can see the ring arm in the background on the left.

The clown mouth in-between rides. You can see a lot of the steel rings on the floor, where they completely missed both the clown's mouth and the capture area in front. And understand why the general public isn't allowed into that area.

The kids here had done their best to reach through the fence and grab rings near enough to get extra tries at the clown mouth.

Some of the horses. I forget if this is the one I'd ridden just before this photo, but that seems likely enough.

This horse must be important because of the head armor and all, right?

It was a couple minutes after 9 pm --- nominal closing time for the boardwalk, and this on a Friday in the summer --- but they were still letting people ride. Here's some of the hopefuls for the last ride of the night(?).

My last ring arm claw picture, I promise. Also the rare picture where I have a discernible depth of field.

Told you I was done with the ring arm! Back now to the boardwalk, closing up for the night.

Though the lights were on for Giant Dipper, it was already closed for the night. The swings were not quite done yet, though, that's nice.

Looks like the Sky Glider has done taking passengers back and forth. I like this angle where the ramp leading up to the station is higher in-frame than the station is.

A valuable warning for people approaching the station by sky chair!

Trivia: Omar Khayyám worked for eighteen years at an observatory in Isfahan (about 200 miles north of Tehran). During this time he measured the solar (tropical) year as 365.24219858156 days. Source: The Calendar: The 5000-Year Struggle to Align the Clock with the Heavens --- And What Happened to the Missing Ten Days, David Ewing Duncan. (The figure is correct but far more precise than the actual movement of the Earth allows.)

Currently Reading: Modesty Blaise: Live Bait, Peter O'Donnell, Enric Badia Romero.

And now ... Christmastime is here! It had really started earlier, with things like bunnyhugger going to her parents' to bake cookies, unfortunately days that I couldn't make it because of work or because I was sleeping off work. And then a couple days before Christmas bunnyhugger's brother and his girlfriend arrived, spending the holiday not at their new home in Kingston, New York, to our surprise. Where to host Christmas is an issue for a future year. For once bunnyhugger did not have to drive them from the airport. They finally rented a car of their own and so did not need to be driven or need to borrow bunnyhugger's parents' car.

But this also meant the natural thing to do, drive them to our house where their parents could come up, see everything we have set up, and then drive them to their home (where they stay), wouldn't happen. So Christmas Eve we had the next-best thing, with bunnyhugger's parents, her brother, and his girlfriend coming up to our place, here to admire our new floor and counter and as much of the house as was decorated.

Also to open a present. bunnyhugger's parents had gotten me things off my wish list, as you'd think. And for some reason they decided the physically largest thing was unsuitable for wrapping up and unwrapping at Christmas at their house. Fair, as Amazon sent it in way too big a box, but they didn't even want it waiting at their house for me to open there and then take the contents home. Instead, for fear we couldn't fit it on the drive back(?) they sent it to our home when bunnyhugger came back after making cookies with them a few days before, and bunnyhugger worried it was something that would eat up our not-really-enough space in the house.

What it was, inside the big box, was a reasonably-sized box. And inside that, a baby-proof gate wide enough for the door between the living room and dining room. This should be something to make it easy to let our rabbit run around the living room, with a stable wall that doesn't need to be anchored to the wall (it's pressure-based) or need the anchoring reinforced (as what we currently have needs).

And then, almost right away, we were off to a local neighborhood bar. bunnyhugger's father wanted to resume the tradition of going to this one local bar that has the best fries in town, and pretty good olive burgers too, and we agreed to this. I admit I was hoping it would be warm enough that we could talk them into eating on the patio outside, but it was about ten degrees too chilly for that. We finally start getting almost seasonal weather, right when it doesn't help us. (It was also way, way too warm for a white Christmas).

bunnyhugger's brother loved the bar, which he's been to before but not in years. It's resisted the stirrings of gentrification that have ruined some other neighborhood bars in town, though. It's retained nice features like a vintage Budweiser Clydesdale glass diorama, or ancient, battered lantern-lights marking the too-tiny bathrooms. If it's given in to upscale things like enormous flatscreen TVs showing the Lions game (they clinched the division while we ate) and laminated, folded menus, it's still doing the important stuff like serving only the food that can be made on the fryer. Plus salads that we assume are bagged pre-made ones.

After that, they all went back to bunnyhugger's parents' home. We packed up, ourselves, and got everything organized to go down to ... bunnyhugger's parents home too.

Photography wise, we're still at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. Enjoy the evening sun, please.

Here's a shot of the boardwalk in the evening sun plus some actual beach, courtesy of one of a couple of spots where the boardwalk jets out a little bit before coming back in. I think it may be adjacent to steps.

Beach view, and a pier beyond it that I think is where the woman we talked with at the pinball event told us we could get a whale-watching cruise. I may be wrong about that but it was somewhere nearby.

You may have thought, for a boardwalk the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk has had awfully few actual boards, right? It's all cement? Well, here we are, some of the original boardwalk boards, preserved from a restoration project back in 1984. This is one of those things we missed entirely on our first visit, part of why it's important to make a second trip to places. You discover things you didn't know you'd want to see, like ...

One of these! bunnyhugger here gets a snap for the Payphones That Still Exist photo community that she's either on or that I made up in its entirety. The SBC logo dates this to 2001-05.

One more photo, for your reference. I don't remember whether the phone worked at all yet.

And here's a snap looking up at the Undertow roller coaster as the sky dims even more.

Trivia: Robert Fulton's 1808 contract for the steamship Car of Neptune specified having ``all the joiners' work done in the best New York style, and of seasoned stuff''. Source: Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, Edwin G Burrows and Mike Wallace.

Currently Reading: Modesty Blaise: Live Bait, Peter O'Donnell, Enric Badia Romero.

Before we quite knew it, we were up to the holidays. Mostly Christmas, but you know us. The big change-up this year was getting the kitchen floor re-tiled and how that shuffled around a lot of small things. Mostly, it meant moving stuff out of the kitchen and breakfast nook, much of it --- including the pinball machine, moved by methods I cannot here reveal --- into the living room where then we couldn't decorate for longer than usual.

Our big pre-Christmas thing, then, turned out to be going to the zoo's Wonderland of Lights or whatever its specific name was. This year, as last, they didn't open after Christmas so we couldn't use that to take the edge off that post-holiday letdown. We ended up going the last day they were open at all, which as a holiday weekend during our warmer-than-usual December left the place crowded. We worried we hadn't left enough time for the zoo, and that's true, although mostly in that we never have enough time for it all. That said we did miss out on the crafts and whatever demonstrations they had going on in the educational center; by the time we got there at the end of the night, most everything was packed up except one demonstration activity with pictures of five animals and five bits of food, the challenge being to identify what each animal eats.

The zoo had a nice collection of lights, including new ones. What started us was noticing what was missing. There's naturally going to be turnover as pieces age. But many of the light displays we most notice, including the water-fountain swans, the wolves, and the peacock were gone. If we're not mistaken they didn't have any animal figures in lights anymore, which seems an oversight for a zoo. They also didn't have the ballerina wireframe figure that has moved around over the years.

Also apparently gone: the wolves! They've been replaced with tufted deer. I don't know where the wolves have gone. I can say there's now binturongs, though last month they were off in the winter quarters, wherever those are. Have to visit them sometimes in the summertime and see them.

Another surprise is that the snack stand has gotten way more developed since we saw it last. We're used to just hot chocolate or coffee from there and they still have that. But also espressos and lattes and other coffee products you can get a machine for. And hamburgers, hot dogs, chicken tenders, salads, and so on. It does seem like rather a lot.

They still have the bench donated by and inscribed with the name of Theio's Restaurant, gone nearly six years now.

Now let's look at Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk as it was six months ago now.

Beauty shot of the sun getting a ride on the Giant Dipper.

And here's the evening light playing with one of Giant Dipper's hills.

Looking out to see one of the endpoints of the sky chair ride. This is the spot where I saw those park cops talking with those women.

Looking westward along the boardwalk here.

And hey, there's a caveman up there!

Still a good-sized line for Giant Dipper, as is only fair.

Trivia: In September 1794 Spanish King Carlos IV officially made instruction in Spanish free and compulsory for all in the Philippines. It never had the resources needed to happen. Source: Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World, Nicholas Ostler.

Currently Reading: Pinball: A Graphic History of the Silver Ball, John Chad.

PS: What's Going On In Gasoline Alley? Why are Rufus and Joel in Charlotte, North Carolina? October 2023 - January 2024 in recap.

Despite bombing out in the first round of finals at MWS's tournament, you know, I've been playing pinball pretty well lately. Even that bombing out could plausibly have gone the other way; I was within a whisker of winning the last game, and if I hadn't got what everyone agreed were unfair drains in Indiana Jones and Ghostbusters I might have made it through to the next round.

But also, in a launch party tournament for the game Venom --- a four-strikes format, where you play until you lose four times --- I was on fire. I took a strike early on, but then kept on winning until I was one of the last three players. And I went in with only two strikes. I was able to beat IAS and DMC --- DMC the reigning league champion --- in head-to-head matches and come out the winner, and this on the sort of game that DMC specializes in.

So I was feeling good about going into our local pinball league's finals, a double-elimination contest where each pairing plays a best-of-three set. I was also going in with a higher seed for the first match, giving me first pick of a game. (Loser picks the second and, if needed, third games.) And there's a lot of games I feel quite cozy on, enough that I wouldn't need to pick anything I disliked until well into the match. (We can pick a game only once per tournament, a way to force people to play a diversity of games.)

I was wrong. While I got to pick a bunch of games I liked and normally do well on, I didn't do well on any of them. I didn't make it through the first round before being knocked into the Second Chance Bracket, as we politely call it. Well, that's all right; I always come up through the Second Chance Bracket and I've gotten as high as second place. And now I'd be playing people who were smarting from being knocked out on, presumably, games they had picked because they were strong on them or liked them. I could make this work.

I was wrong. I got knocked out the first round of the Second Chance Bracket. I'd bottomed out, not taking an 11th place in the 11-person bracket because my seed put me over the other person knocked out as fast. (IAS was also knocked out fast, but came in with a higher seed.) I was okay with this. Double Elimination contests demand someone do traffic routing, even when --- as we were this time --- you let a web site draw up the matches, and that's the sort of role I serve well in-between sulking on Mastodon. And, hey, at least I never had to play a round against bunnyhugger, the homewrecker bracket everyone except us loves to see.

And how did bunnyhugger do? Great, at least after the first round. She was knocked into the Second Chance Bracket the same time I was, but after that, she was on fire. She beat IAS two games to one, and then went 2-0 beating the guy who knocked me into the Second Chance Bracket and then the person who'd knocked her into Second Chance. I didn't dare tell her this, but she got up to facing DMC, one of the league's best players, and beat him one game. If she could win a second, she'd be one of the final three finishers and be guaranteed a trophy.

She didn't win a second. But, boy, it was plausible she might. Her fourth-place finish ties her best finish ever in Lansing Pinball League. The people above her --- BMK, JAB, and DMC --- are two people in State Championship and one person who would be if he played more venues. And she finished ahead of RED, another State Championship contender for the year. It's a shame we only make trophies for the top three finishers in a division; she earned some hardware this time.

Carrying on back to Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, after our trip Friday on the Cave Train Adventure here:

Crazy Surf here is a Miami or Moby Dick-style ride, the huge platform swinging side to side and up and down. It's a kind of ride I like a good bit and I'm sorry Cedar Point and Michigan's Adventure don't have them.

View of the Super Round-Up, always one of my favorite rides, with the Tornado and the Rock-O-Plane in the background. In the foreground, someone gets a picture of me taking that picture.

And here's what I love most in the Super Round-Up, that rounding and upping. Note there's a 77 inch height limit on the ride, though I'm not sure why. I don't think even long hair could get caught on any machinery.

Off the Super Round-Up you get a nice view along the boardwalk to the Giant Dipper's turnaround there, behind the log flume.

Quick picture of the exit of the Giant Dipper, and the booth where you can buy ride photos. We didn't get one, even when we had a front seat ride.

Going back out to our car to stow some souvenirs. This is how far back we had to park; when we were there two days ago we were almost right up against the front of the lot.

Trivia: Ford produced 3,546 Thunderbirds in 1954. Source: Car Wars: The Untold Story, Robert Sobel. (This is about 100 less than the number of Corvettes they made that year.)

Currently Reading: Pinball: A Graphic History of the Silver Ball, John Chad.

PS: Reviewing _Popeye and Son_, Episode 9: Popeye's Surfin' Adventure, at last a surf cartoon.

What's next? What else? Pinball. MWS runs a lot of pinball events and each year he holds one late in the year at our local barcade. We could hardly skip that, much though we wonder why so many more people turn up for his events and why there's enough more that the bar is willing to do favors like open up a couple hours early on the day. The people we can understand: while bunnyhugger organizes charity tournaments he does a cash payout, with the entry fees flowing up to the top finishers. And, probably, MWS has an advantage in pressing people to come, as he still goes to enormously many other tournaments, including ones on the eastside where we don't go either because they're too far or because we've had dead-to-me grade fights with people. MWS may have fewer of these, or he may be more willing to smile and attend the tournaments of, like, Trump supporters than I could imagine being.

Anyway. The format was match play, putting people in groups of four (or if population demanded, three) and letting them gather points by their finish. The top twelve finishers go on to three rounds of finals, each round being three games each. (The top four get a first-round bye.) The main event was only five rounds, so you'll notice this implies that the final four play more games in finals than in qualifying for finals. This stuff happens.

Now me, I had a bizarrely good main tournament. The five tables I was called on included three I consider myself a specialist on --- Metallica, Cactus Canyon, and the Beatles --- with the fourth being Medieval Madness. Everyone in competitive pinball is a specialist on that; my edge was I had played it recently so knew how the ball was behaving. The fifth game was Venom, which is only a couple weeks old. I happened to have a killer game on it, though, taking a first place, so that's great. Overall I never finished below second place the whole day, and cruised into eighth place among a bunch of the names you'll be seeing at state finals.

bunnyhugger had a much worse time, primarily as her first game was on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which nobody is good at, and which she bottomed out on. Replace that fourth place with a first, though, and she'd have been in finals with me.

The catch is in the first round of finals I was in a group with MWS and two of the young superstar players, one of whom won state last year and the other of whom is going into this year's finals as top seed. I bottomed out on Indiana Jones, the result of two house balls that everyone agreed were unfair. Still, given the way the scoring divides in these three-game rounds, and that it wouldn't be absurd if the other three traded first place finishes (as it turned out they did) I wasn't doomed until I took a last on Ghostbusters. There, too, I was starting to put something together my last ball, but fell short, and that's it. After two last-place finishes I was knocked out.

Ah, but at least I could be a spoiler, or decider, for the last game. This was on Getaway, a game that might as well be a coinflip for as hard as the one at our barcade plays. I was starting to put together an okay game and got the option to trigger the ``Secret Mania''. This is a twenty-second mode where every shot is worth half a million points, and it's called ``Secret Drainia'' for what seems inevitably to happen really fast when you pick it. Also, in multiplayer games, Secret Drainia screws up other people's multiball progress. The pinball manufacturer made like five versions of the ROMs for this game and Secret Drainia screws things up in a different way every version. So I was messing up everybody else but also figured, what have I got to lose? I may as well make things hard.

Well, I drained, but not too much before the natural end of Secret Drainia. And I got a pretty solid score for this stuff, one I could plausibly win on. Well, the younger of the kids came and beat me out, by a whisker. But the other one --- the one who'd won state last year --- did not, and so he was knocked out with me. This gave him, incidentally, his lowest finish for the year in the handful of competitions he played. (He still qualified for state championship, though.) If I had taken first place, the two younger players would have had to have a play-off between them.

In the end, MWS would make it to finals but take fourth place. The kid who squeaked me out on Getaway would take third place, and one of the other wunderkinds in Michigan Pinball took first place. (Second place would go to DOM, a player from Bay City, who I haven't mentioned because I didn't interact with him at all, really. Sorry.)

So that was fun close at hand. More fun while I was winning, of course, and less fun when I wasn't. Still, nice spending time at a tournament that felt like something State Championship-level, and not having any of the stress of helping bunnyhugger run it or having to go anywhere. Probably I'll be up for that next year too.

Now back from pinball to my serious business, pictures from the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk:

Let me be arty for you and take a picture of the Looff Carousel's sign from the wrong side. You're welcome.

Plaque outside the Giant Dipper, tucked into the ground outside the ride. Oh, we're going to have to go back now it's a century old, right?

For Friday they introduced this new thing of a really long line to get in! Can't say I'm a fan but all right. There's the launch platform through the open windows there.

Tucked into the corner of the booth window --- where this time they were scanning our wristbands --- were these tickets for August 6, 2014. I don't know if that's from, like, the last season before switching to wristbands and swipe cards or what, but it seems plausible.

View from the top of the queue; the launch station's on the left here and the right has pictures of the ride once they run out of trivia to share.

Looking out of the coaster building and onto town, away from the boardwalk.

Trivia: In June 1926 the US Congress authorized the building of two giant rigid airships. It wasn't until March 1927 that money was authorized to build them, then, and only $200,000, not enough to build one. And mandated a design competition, despite the existence of only one serious competitor. Source: When Giants Ruled The Sky: The Brief Reign and Tragic Demise of the American Rigid Airship, John J Geoghegan.

Currently Reading: Pinball: A Graphic History of the Silver Ball, John Chad.

I took a break from Popeye and Son over on my wildly popular humor blog so that I could do more Year In Review nonsense. If you're just now catching up to my excellent content, please, take this chance and enjoy:

• MiSTed: Altered Destiny, Part 19
• The Year In Review: Top _Shrek_ Trivia Nights Of 2023
• The Year In Review: Top Winning Football Scores Of 2023
• The Year In Review: Top Losing Football Scores Of Of 2023
• The Year In Review: Top Search Engine Prompts of 2023
• What’s Going On In Prince Valiant? Is Aleta trying to shoo Valiant away? October – December 2023
• The Year In Review: Top Things Learned After It Was Too Late of 2023
• MiSTed: Altered Destiny, Part 20

Next up in my Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk pictures? Photographs from the one ride I went on that bunnyhugger did not. She used the time to take her daily walk. Me, I used the time for ...

The sky chair ride! Sky Glider, to use the proper name. Here's what the unloading/loading station looks like as you get ready to join the line.

Ride operator measuring a kid for a height check, here.

And here's celebrity guest rider Joe E Brown! ... Or one of the cavemen figures who've been riding as a promotional feature since the Cave Train opened in 1961.

The caveman has car number 30, and it turns out they've got all the cars on in numerical order, or at least did the day I was there. I imagine that order must be important to them if they've ever got it.

I don't have pictures from on the ride; they have signs prohibiting that and while I figured I could get away with it, I didn't want to push my luck. So, here's the chair I just got off, at the other side of the Sky Glider. You can see the Giant Dipper to the right.

Did I say I figured I could get away with taking out my phone? Because here, while I was in line for the return trip, a couple security guys came up to the platform ...

... and they walked two women off. Outside the station they talked at some length about something. I don't know what. However, since it had to be something happening on a sky lift ride ... I mean, taking out a phone and getting pictures where anyone, such as ride operators watching for potential trouble, can see you, is the first thing my mind thinks of.

Getting closer to the start of my return leg here. I took the picture now because of the Giant Dipper train on the lift hill, but I'm curious about the body language of the two people getting off the ride there.

I'm done with my ride and back where I started! And hey, who's that coming in on Sky Glider car number 10 there?

That's right, it's the cavewoman, twenty cars --- half the ride --- out of phase with Joe E Brown!

They don't do the safety checks on the cavemen.

And as you see, car number 10. Also you can see activity on the Undertow roller coaster.

Trivia: In the 1760s the British parliament prohibited the colonists in North America from making hats, at the behest of English hatters. Source: The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin, H W Brands. (Brands doesn't give a specific date for this; it's in a chapter dated 1768-69, but we are talking about stuff that was simmering for a long while.)

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Sundays Supplement Volume 9: 1947, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

Following Halloween we got to the traditional start of the extended Christmas season, and look, I got there before the end of the traditional ordinary Christmas season! That event is, of course, bunnyhugger's birthday and for the first time since 2019 we went to Bronner's Christmas Wonderland for the event. This would be a Sunday; while we'd rather go anywhere when it's less busy --- and the start of November is the start of their peak season --- the Sunday was both her birthday and a day I had off from work. There's much to commend my current employers, but not being able to just skip out without, like, asking is a drawback.

Bronner's was busy enough; not quite packed to immobility, but still, bustling. I don't think they were playing the Lions game on the TV outside so dads could do something while the family shopped. Place still looked great, though, overwhelming in the good ways. And! --- bunnyhugger brought her camera. I mean her film camera, acquired recently at an estate sale from someone who kept every scrap of paper it came with. She's gotten into film photography and knew, just knew, that a place that is acres of Christmas ornaments would have plenty of things worth shooting a whole roll of film at. And I believe the film is even back from the developer's by now!

This was also our chance to get an ornament commemorating our new rabbit. The line for the quicker pen-customized ornament was long enough they had a staffer with a big lollipop sign marking where the end of the line started. The brush, that takes longer, though? That was a walk-on experience. We found the I Heart My Rabbit, and brought it up, and a couple hours later we came back to see they had inscribed ... 'Roger I Heart My Rabbit'. There's a large blank space underneath 'My Rabbit' where the name goes for all our past rabbits, including ones with longer names like 'Sunshine'. So we can't explain this impulse to make the ornament let Roger in on the secret. I did see the same curious placement was done for someone else's customized ornament so ... I don't understand it. But as someone with boundless patience for things going weird I'm unable to complain. It will be something we talk about every time we see the ornament.

And in one of those serendipitous events, bunnyhugger hoped to get a new tree skirt. She found one she liked almost right away, and we continued around the store to pick up other, more, ornaments than we can hang. I can't remember why we didn't take it then and there except, I guess, the confidence that it was going to be there when we came back around. That I mention this tells you what happened when we came back around. While looking for a second skirt with the pattern we'd failed to get, though, she found one with a pattern she liked better, and that's what we have under our downstairs tree. So this worked out well.

Also as hoped, bunnyhugger got to take both film and digital photographs of some nice sights. Among them, the big wall of yard decorations they have; this sort of light turns amazing in film in a way that digital doesn't quite get. Also the many pre-lit trees that Bronner's sells, although there the digital camera with its greater sensitivity also created problems. LEDs only look like they're continuously lit. They flicker with the alternating current, and if your camera exposure is under, say, 1/30 second? You'll get segments of the tree or even the whole of the tree blacked out. Score one for film, which makes them into starry dots inside halos at the sort of film speed you can get from a non-specialty shop.

Quite happy visit, as you might expect, and capped with a trip to Cheese Haus to find they didn't have samples (not sure if they'd put them away for the night or if they never resumed after the pandemic began), but did have a lot of spready cheeses that we brought home and haven't finished eating yet. We should go there more than once in four years, or more than once in a year.

Let's enjoy a bit more time at Santa Cruz, the Friday that was our last full day in California back in July:

The big drop for the Logger's Revenge log flume ride.

And oh hey, what's this part then?

Looking up close at the splash as the log goes past, and showing that actually, yeah, water does look like that weird artificial foam stuff you see in Rankin/Bass specials or the occasional model railroad set.

Giant Dipper retrain returning, not to the station, but to a loop back over top of the station. In front is, I want to say, a swinging claw ride.

One of the gift shops has this cute Giant Dipper-themed prop in the middle. It's a little inaccurate about the ride what with having outdated model cars and all.

See what I mean? Their train cars don't promise ``Millions of Memories''.

Trivia: The last British wooden warship to be built was the three-decker, 121-gun Howe, launched 1860. It had both a full complement of sails and a steam engine with screw. Source: Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories, Simon Winchester.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Sundays Supplement Volume 9: 1947, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

PS: What's Going On In Prince Valiant? Is Aleta trying to shoo Valiant away? October - December 2023, a quick and easy recap for a change. Magic ominous feline appearances!

Happy new year, dear bunnyhugger. Here's hoping for a good one.

And now, the finale of Lynn's pinball arcade, and the Thursday of our California trip.

Tournament already over, or near over, and just hanging around with the handful of people left over.

I know I was told there's something special about this Dirty Harry but forget what precisely it was. I think it might have been serial number #1, or something like that?

One of the tables they had was the new Scooby-Doo pinball game made by, of course, Spooky Pinball. I got a few games in. It seems fine, although I didn't play enough to get a handle on it.

Backglass and some of the topper of the Scooby-Doo pinball. They did pretty well at getting the feel of the show down and the topper has a bunch of the first-season villains/monsters.

Side art of Scooby-Doo, showing how much of the original season styling they put into the decor.

Final standings for the tournament. It was a mere three-strike tournament, so finished too soon. bunnyhugger is angry that I finished higher than her but we were right next to one another.

More of the tables at Lynn's. The Pabst Can Crusher is the third(?) of this table I've ever seen, a reskin of Whoa Nelly to be not breast-themed and therefore much more enjoyable a play. The game is styled to play as a very old-fashioned table --- the prototype was literally a 1957 game with the elements reconfigured --- and it's fun when the theme isn't getting in the way.

We were doing our best to close the barcade out for the night.

Couple more old-fashioned tables. Surf Champ was the one where I managed my first and much-needed win, as I knew the table from playing it in Fremont and my opponent was badly outclassed. Even Knievel, now, I forget if I was knocked out of the tournament on that or if I just took a loss on that, but it was one of those games I should've done better on and didn't. Also, the game should've been made a few years later so it could have had ramps, but if they'd waited to make it, Evel's moment would have passed.

Wall art near the bathroom, including a Garbage Pail Kid that I don't know if was real or not, and a couple of pinball playfields. The one on the right is from Rollergames; the one on the left, one of an estimated billion pool-themed tables from the early 60s.

I forget why I zoomed in on this sign. Maybe to show the bits of Indiana Jones and Attack From Mars stuff in front of it? Maybe for the 'OK' sign above? I'll take guesses if people have them.

And a last look from the far back corner of the bar. Fun place and I'm glad we could see it at least the once.

Trivia: Of all the numbers smaller than 100, only 60, 72, 84, 90, and 96 can be subdivided in as many as ten different ways. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Sundays Supplement Volume 9: 1947, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

Let's see if I can't finish my Halloweekends report before the new amusement park season starts.

So the rest of Saturday was, as we expected, warm (though cooler than the previous two days) and packed. Just stuffed full of people. We considered eating at the restaurant that replaced the Antique Autos ride near the Town Hall Museum (still renovating after four years into a new experience, if you believe the sign for some reason) but the line was far, far out the door, and we braved crossing it to get a look at the menu and found there was maybe one thing vegetarian we might have eaten. Back to cheese on a stick with fries for us.

Also a line out the door: the women's bathroom just about everywhere. bunnyhugger declined my suggestion to just go in the men's room, busy but not quite that busy. Some other woman, though, also telling her family how waiting for this would take forever, accepted my suggestion. This went without incident although if I'm not mistaken, she didn't wash her hands.

Another oddity? Around about 7:30 pm or so we wanted to take the train from the back of the park to the front. They announced this was going to be the last train of the night, too, something like four hours before the park would close. Nobody explained why that was, especially since the park was packed and the train is an easy way to put a hundred or more people on something --- and give them something to look at (the back-to-front leg of the trip takes you past Skeleton Town, a series of comic scenes populated by skeleton animatronics). Possibly some conflict with the stuff scheduled to happen at the main performance stage, which is close to the front end of the train ride. But it's not like it's that close. Possibly staffing issues, since no park has had enough people since the pandemic began, and Cedar Point's enormous size gives it an enormous appetite for staff.

Later in the evening we did something new for me, and that bunnyhugger hadn't done in almost twenty years. We sat for a story. Ages ago when Halloweekends was a small young event they'd do dramatic readings of horror stories and that came back this year. And with the same story they used to use, too: Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart. This was lightly dramatized, and presented as the ranting confession of a well-we-thought-he-was-securely-straitjacketed man on Death Row. Since the story is first-person and a speech from the murderer to the audience, basically reading the story is what you need to do. His running out into the audience, and night, to disappear is all the dramatic license you need to take.

As the night wore on, and it was pretty well-worn by the time the murderer escaped, the park crowds had dispersed and everything was getting a nice foggy glow. Amusement parks turn into seas of diffuse light when it's hazy like that. We spotted that Gemini wasn't just open, but running trains on both the red and the blue tracks, and had a wait of five minutes or less. Earlier in the day it'd had waits of an hour and even earlier than that, I think, it wasn't running, so this was an excellent deal. We got lucky, too, riding the blue track just before that went down for some reason; if we'd started on the other side first, we couldn't have gotten both sides of the racing coaster in.

I'm not actually sure what our last rides of the night were. Plausibly Rougarou, since I have photos of that to look at, and maybe Blue Streak. I know we got to one gift shop with all the Halloweekends merch, including some pretty cute Audrey II-inspired plush we didn't get, and also Peanuts dolls with dubious choices like ``Charlie Brown, vampire'' and ``Woodstock in a witch's hat'' and ``Snoopy, but his fur is all yellow with dozens of tiny black bats all over''. Can't tell you what that's all about. But that closes out our Saturday from Halloweekends, and we could get back to the hotel room to sleep with a will.

Next on photos from our California trip? That's right, it's pinball! We found a place with the one tournament we could get to without a ridiculous drive or cutting short any other amusement park visit.

The venue. Lynn's is inside a fairly complicated set of strip malls huddling against each other and there was strikingly little parking, to the point that I let bunnyhugger out to get us signed in for the tournament while I found parking. I got back in time anyway but we couldn't be sure of that.

In the time before the tournament I put up one game of Gorgar and it was a darned good one. I liked my chances for the night and even picked Gorgar as one of my games and did not do nearly this darned well.

Something we loved here was the older games, including the late-70s Dolly Parton game, the early-80s Dragonfist, and ... uh ... the early-80s Paragon, which has a killer theme but is too difficult a game for anyone to play.

bunnyhugger at the bar and giving some sense of scale to what all's in the place. There were fewer players than usual that night, a shame but a boost to our chances to survive.

Junkyard's a fun game, and one (then-) recently lost from our local venue. But the special thing is one you have to look closely at the table for ...

See that microbus, and the stuff at the end of the track there? Early concepts for the game had it possible to lock a ball inside the microbus and set it up for a multiball. That feature was dropped from production, but a prototype game like this particular unit still had the openable microbus door they planned on.

Trivia: In June 1790 President George Washington took his Cabinet fishing on the Hudson River. (The government was still based in New York City at the time). Source: The Money Men: Capitalism, Democracy, and the Hundred Years' War over the American Dollar, H W Brands.

Currently Reading: Miscellaneous comic books.

My excuse for not having more text today: a friend visited and stayed, talking, much longer than we imagined. We're glad to have him and to be talking with him, it's just it took up a lot of time that I'd mentally reserved as ``plenty of time for blog-writing''. So instead, please enjoy --- guess what --- pictures of Gilroy Gardens from almost half a year ago.

Last look back at the park's main body. The bridge here is one the train goes over. There was no benefit to our applying for a season pass, but Gilroy Gardens is still sending bunnyhugger invitations to their holiday lights show, which must be amazing.

Hey, looks like Spider-Man got to enjoy a day at the park! That's nice.

Peeking over the end of that bridge to see a nice patio and a waterfront view.

Down there's the kiddie carousel, all nestled up in its sleeping tent.

And then here --- near the exit --- I realized where the Circus Trees we hadn't registered before were! I believe that's Sideways Rope Rectangle in the background and Picture Frame up front.

Zoomed-in view of Sideways Rope Rectangle.

Extreme close-up on Picture Frame showing you can too see right through it.

This one is Squat Curvy Scallops; you can see it on the sign there, asking if you love its curly curvy shape.

This one is Spring Vine, which doesn't seem like a wild tree the way some of the others do, but that's because it had had 'vines' spiralling around the trunks to look like a grape vine. And that's why the sign is that slightly cryptic message about what it doesn't have.

Double Hearts, sometimes known as Reverse Hearts, is another Circus Tree; it's apparently not clear what kind of tree it is. According to Gilroy Gardens's site there had been another Double Hearts started in 1953, grown from a weeping willow, which had side-by-side hearts. I assume that's one of the Circus Trees that didn't survive to the Gilroy Gardens era.

Here's a fresh look at Sideways Rope Rectangle, not zoomed in this time, just photographed from up close.

And here's a look up Sideways Rope Rectangle to show what it does past the point that the showy part was cultivated.

Trivia: During reentry Apollo 8's Command Module ``bounced'', as planned, from an altitude of 180,000 feet back up to 210,000 feet, before resuming its descent. Source: Apollo By The Numbers: A Statistical Reference, Richard W Orloff. NASA SP-4029.

Currently Reading: Michigan History, January/February 2024. Editor Sarah Hamilton.