austin_dern

And one more stray bit of business from March Hare Madness. One of bunny_hugger's friends from the bookstore, who'd had a job at the local cinema, donated to the cause of door prizes. This was a bunch of promotional movie posters. Most were in pretty good shape. Some looked appealing at first but then we realized they were for the Independence Day sequel. It added a nice bonus to what could be given away.

One of the posters was the advertising card for La La Land, and when he heard about this ADM declared he had to have it. This didn't strike us as the kind of movie he cared much about. That's what happens when you know a guy so much from one context you forget he has others. The movie is his girlfriend's favorite, and their first (or one of their first) dates was going to it.

The La La Land poster was among a couple of the largest, heaviest-stock prizes, so were going to be given out to the finalists, champion taking first pick, #2 second pick and so on. ADM figured he was a lock to be one of the finalists, surely, but to be safe asked the other likely-finalists to leave the poster for him. Easy enough to arrange. He wasn't one of the finalists, to everyone's surprise, his included. But he went on to deal-making anyway, offering to trade for it. He had a Game Of Thrones pinball backglass, for example, that he could offer. (He wouldn't accept assurances that we'd be happy to just give him the poster as a gesture of friendship.)

So, when we finally had the tournament done, CST came in first and didn't want or need another pinball backglass. So he picked some other poster. That left me picking, pro forma, the La La Land poster and discovering that it wasn't on the table downstairs where we'd left it. We panicked that the one door prize that someone specifically wanted had been stolen. A text to ADM confirmed he had taken it home, so, that was settled. The next time we saw ADM he had the backglass, rolled up in a poster tube, for us.

He had, we understand, framed the poster with the movie tickets from their date, and gave it to her on one of those new-relationship small anniversaries. Must say, that's well-done.

Trivia: An 1848 estimate counted some 233 boiler explosions in American river steamboats between 1816 and 1848, resulting in 2,563 deaths. 1838 alone witnessed 14 explosions causing 496 deaths. Source: The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century, Wolfgang Schivelbusch.

Currently Reading: Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-40, William R Trotter.

Starting off March Hare Madness with bunny_hugger the first person knocked out was awful. It's demoralizing for her, of course, and it's none too good for me. I couldn't even offer much comfort: I was still in the running, and had to play games. Some of the games would be easy enough, relatively, to beat the minimum score, but I play worse when distressed and I got scared I was headed for elimination too. I floated just past it, though, several games in a row.

Her being knocked out right away had some good side. The main benefit is Amazing Race tournaments really need traffic control, and now she had nothing to do but tell people where they should go, and what scores they had to beat. I could step in and help and log scores and the like, of course, as could CST and MWS. But she didn't have anything to pull her away from tournament management.

There'd be surprises. GRV, who's been one of the state's top players for just ever, and who's already all but sewn up an invite to state finals for next year, was the fourth person eliminated. WVL, organizer of the Lansing Pinball League, would be knocked out on Medieval Madness, a game he has trouble not breaking fifty million points on. I was worried about that game myself; nobody had put up a particularly low score on it. The game lends itself to arbitrarily huge scores, if you keep control: just shoot the castle, in the far middle section of the table. Just catch the ball as it's returned to you, aim, and shoot. Sounds simple? It is, if you don't get to thinking about how if you bobble things the ball might go anywhere and you're gonna lose it. I'm able to keep my cool, though, and get past the unexpectedly tight gateway there.

The biggest surprise: after Iron Man, the last game on the lower level, there are four players left. The last four players go on to head-to-head play, for the finals. (The International Flipper Pinball Association requires some head-to-head play for a contest to earn rating points.) It's a rare finals appearance for me. It's possible I'll take back home one of the trophies bunny_hugger made.

The finals are three rounds of four-player games, scored by the Professional and Amateur Pinball Association rules. (Each match, the top scorer earns four points; second earns two; third earns three; last earns nothing.) The quartet: me, CST, MWS, and a Lansing league regulars, DC. The randomly-drawn first game: Lord of the Rings, upstairs where nobody's touched it since game testing.

Sometimes, in this sort of thing, you have a good ball. Sometimes it's a great ball. Sometimes it's an oppressively good ball. I put up an astounding performance, starting up all four of the game's normal multiballs and even starting the ``Destroy The Ring'' wizard mode. I don't finish it, but who cares? I've got a first-place finish and that against two people who can routinely clean my clock.

I forget what the second game was. It was similarly good for me, though. I go into the third and final game in an ideal position, sure to get a trophy. And the random number generator is most kind: it picks Austin Powers. CST and I are the only people in Lansing league who ever play it voluntarily; we've learned its important shots. We're all but certain to finish first and second, and given the way things go. As it is, the only possible way I won't get second is if MWS finishes first and I finish last.

So MWS finishes first and I finish last. I could not get anything together, which is a problem, since there's one really good shot in the game (the left ramp, for Fat Bastard Multiball) and one mediocre shot (up the center, for the Time Machine Multiball), and MWS has them and I don't. I'm not knocked into third place, though. We're tied, and so go to a one-game playoff that, to my amazement, I win. I get second place.

CST, taking home first place, offers to trade trophies with me. Why? Because the first-place trophy is the only one that has a picture of our lost Stephen on it. But bunny_hugger's goal in putting the picture of Stephen on it was to share his appearance with other people. And I'd feel dishonest about the record in ways I don't like to swap trophies this way. (I do like minor fibs in the record --- it's why I'll sign the wrong date if I have the chance --- but not this.) No; this was a gift of the view of our rabbit for CST. He remarked that now he had multiple souvenirs of other people's dead pets. I forget what the other was.

Afterwards bunny_hugger, MWS, and I went to eat at the Fleetwood diner in Lansing. It's the place that she and I, with her parents and brother, went that awful last full day of Stephen's life, after we got home from the airport. It had been a lousy meal, occupied with thoughts of whether our rabbit would be alive in a day. This was a much better meal, and after the memorial tournament to him. It resonated, closing the misery of that day. At the least, the Fleetwood in Lansing was no longer ruined for us.

Trivia: A mistaken report of the German surrender set off wild jubilation in New York City the 27th of April, 1945. Source: 1945: The War That Never Ended, Gregor Dallas.

Currently Reading: Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-40, William R Trotter.

Two weeks after the Women's World Championship and the PinMasters tournament was ... another tournament. One of our own: bunny_hugger's second March Hare Madness. The stars aligned nicely for this one, as March had a fifth Wednesday --- meaning a week when neither Grand Rapids nor Lansing pinball leagues would be playing, giving us a slightly hungrier player pool --- and her school had off Thursday and Friday for no really clear reason. This used to be a two-day break at the end of term, and they moved it to the end of March, three weeks after Spring Break, for reasons that I suppose they have.

It would have new meaning this year. Our pet rabbit died the week before the last tournament, Silver Balls. This time we could be prepared. The poster would feature his gorgeous body, and the proceeds would go, rather than to the Capital Area Human Society, instead to the Rabbit and Small Animal Rescue of Westland. They're the agency from which bunny_hugger got Stephen.

Last year's March Hare Madness was done as an Amazing Race format and this raised planning questions, specifically: do it the same way, or try a different format? In favor of doing things the same way is that this is how you build traditions. In favor of a different format was some concern that people don't like the Amazing Race format. The basic Amazing Race format is, everyone plays a table. The person with the lowest score is knocked out. Everyone else goes on to the next table. What's good about it is that it's easy to pick up. It means everybody sticks around in groups near the current wave of tables, so they can hang out and socialize. It means once you've beaten the threshold score you can walk off the rest of the game, and walking-off a game is the best feeling in pinball.

What's bad about it is, first, if you have the lowest score so far you're stuck on a table watching for someone else to bomb worse than you did. It's a vulture-y sort of gameplay. Second, it really needs someone to traffic-manage because. Someone impatient will chance that their score will beat someone and then start playing ``provisional'' games on the next couple tables, games that count only if they turn out not to be knocked out. Someone else has to track that indeterminate state of the games. You can pay for a whole game --- a dollar on some of the new tables --- and play only part of your first ball. Emotionally fine if you have to beat a challenging enough score, but a waste if it turns out the threshold is something you can get by plunging without being unlucky. And, someone comes to the tournament, pays their money, and gets knocked out first round.

Despite suggestion/warnings that maybe a different format would be more popular, bunny_hugger chose the Amazing Race and I think it was wise to. I like having varied tournament formats and this is one of the few that isn't head-to-head play.

Also up for debate: the side tournament and how to run it. This would be a triple closest-to-the-pin contest: get as close as possible to a target score on several games, without going over. By making it three tables we could have up to three winners, and hopefully treble the side-contest entry fees. This meant we had to get prizes for all three tables. We had thought we had, in previous events, won or gotten three day passes to the Klassic Arcade in Gobles, in western Michigan. It's a fine spot with a good number of tables and the closest provider of Moxie Cola I know of; we just haven't had the chance to get there and use them. And it's cheap, so the prizes would be attractive but not too much for the side tournament's junior status. But we could only find two of them, so made up the difference with a gift card for Schuler's. Schuler's is a small local bookstore chain, with outlets in Lansing, Grand Rapids, and Ann Arbor, at least one of which would be near whoever won it. It was won by the guy from Flint, which is an hour away from the nearest of those. Well, you act on your estimate of what's most likely to happen.

And there'd be more. Several friends planned on bringing door prizes. bunny_hugger refitted several of GRV's donated old trophies to fit the theme, including hare figures got from Michael's and, for the first place, a head shot of Stephen. It looked just fine.

Trivia: At least one cameraman waiting for the arrival of the Hindenburg that 6th of May, 1937, grew tired of waiting for the ship and left early. Source: The American Newsreel 1911-1967, Raymond Fielding. (I concede this sounds like an urban legend cameramen would share about missing the big one.)

Currently Reading: The Container Principle: How A Box Changes The Way We Think, Alexander Klose. Translator Charles Marcrum II.

The finals were scored as is apparently standard for Professional and Amateur Pinball Association contests. The four players would all play four games. First place on each table would get four points; second place, two points; third place, one; fourth place, would be thanked for participating this time. Whoever gets the most points wins the competition and so on.

I forget which the first two games were and it doesn't much matter. The last game was Fish Tales, which after all hadn't actually broken down or anything earlier. We just failed to read one of the scores reliably before it was too late. That wouldn't affect us again. Between four players and the designated scorekeepers we'd at least keep track of who won and who didn't, the important thing. So it was back in, and after the usual sorts of turns of fate we got to the last ball. The third player was, if I remember right, WVL, and he was coming back tolerably when he suddenly dropped the ball from the right flipper. This was bizarre, and heartbreaking, but it is the sort of mental error every player makes. It just seems to happen more when the stakes are higher.

Only he hadn't make a mistake. The flipper had broken, as the next player confirmed. It had broken in a familiar way: pressing the flipper button made it snap up, but the flipper didn't hold. On the last player of the last ball of the last game, and about fifteen minutes before midnight, we finally had to scratch, and restart a game.

This has got us wondering; it sure seems like games break down a lot during league or tournament play. Is it just that they're played more, and more continuously, and this encourages transient glitches? Or is it just that glitches happen every so often and the greater time spent being played means we're just there to see it? Unanswerable without serious research, of course.

Nothing to do but go to the backup table. This would be Indiana Jones, which skilled players can take forever on. CST, for example, can start playing that game and finish up sometime the following Thursday. This also dashed our hopes of finishing before midnight. It'd take about forty minutes for everyone to finish playing. Meanwhile bunny_hugger and I held our breath, because this Indiana Jones also has a known yet transient problem. It can get a single ball stuck in the idol lock, and somehow try every possible way to get a ball free except dropping the plastic gate that holds it trapped. It'll drop the trap when the ball isn't there, mind. Just not when it is. It's infuriating and we just dreaded the prospect of it happening again.

It didn't. We got out of the game safe and sound.

CST won, breaking his streak of getting third-place trophies made by bunny_hugger. But he could take that. J M came in second, and RLM in third. WVL, sadly, had faded at the end of the night and took fourth place.

He would have his consolations, by which I mean, first, finishing great. Second he'd get 2.42 points in the International Flipper Pinball Association's rankings. With that, now, the majority of his points come from the three pinball tournaments bunny_hugger has run. That mostly shows how few things he goes to; besides the league, still undervalued, he doesn't make it to very many things. Shame; he's a better player than his ranking suggests. Anyway, we're doing our bit to fix that.

Trivia: Michigan did not require schoolteachers to have at least one year of training until 1925. As late as 1928, a teacher with three years' experience could obtain a lifetime teaching certificate. Source: Michigan: A History of the Great Lakes State, Bruce A Rubenstein, Lawrence E Ziewacz.

Currently Reading: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson's lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival, Peter Stark.

PS: How Interesting Is A Football Score? and if you say ``it isn't'' then go turn in your junior mathematicians badge.

So putting aside the great AJG upset, how did things go at March Hare Madness? Past that earth-shaking event, largely the way we anticipated. We knew to start with which games were dodgy, and one of them, World Cup Soccer, did indeed have to be taken out of the rotation. I forget just why, but it wasn't for the reason we expected it to break down. Theatre of Magic shocked everyone with a sudden, unexpected reset. When that happened a second time we took it off the roster, which is a shame. It's a fun game. And it allows for some pretty high scores pretty fast, which would make it a good Amazing Race game. The Simpsons Pinball Party was also out because it was eating quarters. Which is fine, since the table at our hipster bar is the roughest anyone knows, keeping it from being all that fun. We started out just putting arrows on the threshold score index cards. When the last table got knocked out I added a ``Kennywood'' to the arrow, making a joke of this that would amuse bunny_hugger if she noticed it at the time, or maybe amuses her now.

We would have a few little glitches. On Fish Tales, one of the competitors put up a score of just over three million points. This is a surprisingly low score. We could hardly see how he got that low considering he didn't tilt repeatedly. It takes some skill to get that when you aren't deliberately tanking the game. But that's what was on record. He came back to bunny_hugger asking if she was sure he'd recorded the score right. He had thought he'd gotten eight million. Which is still a low score, mind, but not an improbably low one. But by then she only had what her notes said. She did vaguely think the leading '3' looked strange, but she wasn't positive.

The thing about our Fish Tales is that it's got a couple faulty columns of dots in its dot-matrix display. And it doesn't show the leftmost column at all, which would be exactly the column that would turn a '3' into an '8' or vice-versa. It would make much more sense if he had eight million. But then other players had gone past based on the three-million threshold. After consultation bunny_hugger decided to void that particular instance of the game and send everyone on to the next table, just as if they passed.

bunny_hugger would be knocked out about halfway through, in a freak event. This would be on The Addams Family, a beloved but often cruel table. It's easy to get a low score on this. Somehow, nobody did. The threshold score started about fifty million points, which takes a respectable bit of play. It floated down to about thirty million, which is still above the median for our typical Lansing League night. And somehow nobody had the typical blast of rotten luck; everybody put up respectably good games. bunny_hugger's was just the worst of an otherwise respectable set. Of all the Amazing Race games, this was the one that had everybody put up good, tough-to-beat scores.

I would be knocked out less gloriously, and just shy of the final-four quartet. It would be on The Walking Dead. WVL, the Lansing League's president, put up a score below ten million points, which is about what you expect to score for showing up and not being actually deceased while playing. He was expecting to be knocked out on this. He had bad luck, the ball coming after the plunge and bouncing into the outlane several times. But I played right after him and ... got the first ball kicked into the outlane before I could react. Tried the second and never got control of the ball. Tried the third, going for the simplest, easiest, surest set of scores in the game and saw the ball drifting out of control. I nudged. Too hard. The game tilted. The score came up and it was short of WVL's. Possibly had I not tiled my bonus would have put me over his. WVL thinks so. I'm not sure of it. In any case, I had a sub-terrible score and was out also.

Trivia: Buildings in Japan were limited to a height of 328 feet, the height a fire fighter's hose could spray water, until 1964. Source: Otis: Giving Rise to the Modern City, Jason Goodwin.

Currently Reading: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson's lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival, Peter Stark.

PS: More Things To Read, mathematics and physics-related stuff I've come across recently.

The Amazing Race format seems to be a new one to competitive pinball. We first encountered it as the side tournament in the state championship back in February. The idea is that all the players compete on a string of pinball machines, with the lowest-scoring player or players on each table being dropped. The last one to lose a game wins the championship. Or would, except that Pinball Master Command insists that there be some direct head-to-head play. So instead the last four people to lose a game go into the finals, and play three head-to-head rounds. This blesses the whole tournament with International Flipper Pinball Association sanction and points good for state championships and the like.

The side tournament in February took roughly six weeks to play out. Maybe not quite that long, but it was long. bunny_hugger had to have a shorter tournament. March Hare Madness couldn't be a weekend night; the hipster bar books paying acts then. It had to be a workday night, and it couldn't start before people might get out of work and over to an Eastside hipster bar. bunny_hugger and I spent some time trying to figure out elimination rules, how many people should be knocked out per round if there are still 10 people in the tournament, or still 20 people, or still (shudder) 30 people, or more.

bunny_hugger also put some thought into making things run faster. The obvious way was to put index cards reporting the threshold score --- the lowest score to pass on to the next game --- on each machine, and to keep that updated. This might sound chaotic. But there'd be only three or four tables being actively played by anyone at a time. And it doesn't matter how good a score anyone has once they've beaten the lowest one needed to move on. So players, or people watching the players, could see when they had done all the pinball they needed on one game and could move to the next table safely. That's a small innovation and it comes from having seen in February people running back and forth to the official scorekeepers wondering what the minimum scores were.

Subtler and nearer genius was her breakthrough in traffic management. She gave all the players a seeding. The lowest-seeded player was to go first. This meant, first, if there were an empty table, someone --- in practice, CST, with minor help from other scorekeepers --- could find someone who needed to get on the table and play. This eliminated those long awkward pauses of nobody knowing who should be where doing what.

The other bit of brilliance was in how seeding was assigned. The seeds were based on International Flipper Pinball Association ranking. The lower-ranked the person, the closer to first they go. This is not a guarantee that the worst players would go first in any round. After all, a mediocre player can get a high ranking by going to lots of tournaments; a great player can have a lousy ranking by not going to many things. But it's a good proxy for ``how good a player is''. And a lousy player can have a great game, and a great player can have a lousy game. But twelve lousy players aren't going to have great games in a row. So this would weight the system to probably get a fairly low threshold score for moving on, pretty fast, and one that the better players would mostly zoom right on past.

This also ameliorated one of the vicious things about the Amazing Race format, the sitting around waiting and hoping for someone else to do worse than your own rotten score. Mostly people would end up beating the threshold score easily and moving on. There's little that feels better in competitive pinball than being able to walk away because you've already won and don't need to play any longer. And this seeding scheme seems to encourage lots of people to have walk-off games.

The index cards are surely going to be copied by other Amazing Race tournaments; it's too obvious not to be. The seeding scheme, at least in the sense of having some assigned order for people, likely will be. It's too handy to be able to point to someone and say, ``You! Go put up at least 25 million points on The Walking Dead now!'' and have them obey. The genius of seeding being based on estimated skill level? That's the part that needs to be copied and I'm not sure it was obvious that was going on. But it surely helped the impression bunny_hugger gave of running a well-managed, steadily moving tournament.

Trivia: In May 1981 seven space shuttle launches were cut from the 1982-1985 manifest, partly due to the inability to build enough External Tanks. Source: A History of the Kennedy Space Center, Kenneth Lipartito, Orville R Butler.

Currently Reading: Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, Mary Roach.

PS: A Leap Day 2016 Mathematics A To Z: Transcendental Number, or as I argue it is, ``Number''.