austin_dern | Entries tagged with pinball

January 2026

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Silver Balls '025 would be the 150th pinball tournament bunnyhugger has run through Matchplay, a web site that does great at organizing matches and keeping results straight and all that. It would also be the first one she's run without using her computer to do the computing work. She had a used iPad Mini, formerly her mother's and replaced as a Christmas gift, for the work and did it in a trial by fire, for the biggest and highest-profile open tournament she runs in the year.

Or almost. There were fewer people this year than usual --- 21, I think, with a couple leaving early --- including the absense of a couple people like MWS and BMK. It might have been the weather; they promised snow starting about 9 pm and that'd be lousy to drive home through. It might be the way the state pinball rankings shaped up this year; there weren't many people who could push themselves into contention, or improve their standing worth anything, by taking a high rank in this tournament, partly because a huge tournament in Bay City the weekend before took that spot. No telling. Still, people came, people bought in raffle tickets --- the raffling off of a couple boxes of charity prizes also being done by an app on the iPad Mini --- and there were some random draws for door prizes, t-shirts and the like, so that all went well enough and left bunnyhugger with a fattened wallet to bring and deposit later than she really wanted to.

The tournament itself started a little past the scheduled time, with bunnyhugger's voice fading under the stress just as her megeaphone was fading under battery fatigue. I had to repeat some stuff for her. But we were under way, groups of three or four players. In the fair-strikes format, the person winning a game gets zero strikes. The person coming in last takes two strikes. Everyone else takes one. The big difference between this and progressive strikes --- where you take one strike for everyone who finishes ahead of you --- is that near the end of the night, when there might be three or two people playing, someone's always taking two strikes in a round, cutting the finale rounds in half.

My first round was in a match against DMC, a very much stronger player, on Kiss, a game I'm good on, and some other people. DMC had a lousy first and second ball while I had my decent-but-not-exceptional play. And then DMC went and had a ball that not just kept on going on, but kept getting to higher levels of achievement, climaxing in something called Kiss Army Multiball that I have never, not in a decade of playing this game, seen or even heard of before. He said it was a surprise to him too, though I don't know if he meant he didn't expect to attain it or didn't know it even existed.

So, I took a single strike. And I got a single strike on the next game, Metallica, ordinarily a strong one for me but today being mean. That's all right, though; I figured if I averaged one strike a round I'd be in a good place overall. Then on the next game, Attack From Mars, I finished last, taking two strikes. I made that up the next round, The Addams Family, just squeaking out bunnyhugger to her delight. So the next round, Mandalorian, yeah, I took last place again and now I was in the do-or-die position where I'd have to win every game to continue. That sound be on Stranger Things, where my path once again crossed bunnyhugger's.

Stranger Things is another of those games that's usually in my back pocket, but I just wasn't having it balls one or two. Meanwhile FB, a new guy, was calmly running away with it. My last ball I would have to make up a hundred million points to beat him and, you know? For a while it looked like I might do it. I fell far short in points, about forty million or so, but that's because I had the bad luck to drain at the start of an Upside-Down Mode that, completed, would have brought me pretty near the top.

So I indirectly mentioned how I gave one strike to bunnyhugger. She had a frustrating tournament, taking one strike in every single round until that Stranger Things game where, thanks in part to my strong finish after a mediocre start, she got two strikes and was knocked out. I did try to help her to at least a third place, which would have let her continue, offering advice on how to get the (timed) skill shot, but the game didn't let her play long enough and, critically, never gave her --- and only her --- a chance at an Upside-Down Mode that's normally good for tens of millions of points. Had she got that even once she'd likely have gone on at least one further round and then, who can say where she'd have ended up? We tied, instead, just above the median for the whole group.

In the rounds after we were eliminated more people gained their seventh strike, three in the next round and then one more each round after that. Finally we were down to three people, DMC (no surprise), FAE (also no surprise), and DG, who was having a killer tournament. He started everyone by beating both these A-rank players in The Munsters, and was doing pretty well on Deadpool until a catastrophic moment. After DMC put up a monstrously high third ball, DG went up for his turn, forgetting until after he plunged that it was FAE's turn. This meant that he took a last place for the round, automatically, and that knocked him out. FAE finished out the game even though DMC observed --- and we didn't quite understand it at the moment --- that the outcome didn't actually matter. DMC would win unless FAE beat him two rounds straight, whether or not FAE took first place this game. (FAE did, it happens).

The next game, drawn up at random, was Rush, which you'd expect to be an automatic win for DMC. I mean, you know DMC and Rush. And yet, somehow, FAE won, getting halfway to overtaking the guy who'd been on top of the tournament all day. Next game, randomly drawn: The Simpsons Pinball Party, which DMC started out by putting up about ten million, a plausibly winning score, right away. FAE would need until the end of ball two to match this. DMC plunged the third ball, which pinged right into the outlane --- bad luck --- and we discovered that the game had no ball save.

Every couple years someone at Stern pinball gets the idea that factory settings should include zero ball save time, and everyone hates it because modern game design supposes you should have some minimum play time, and they go back to being normal for a couple years. But Simpsons was one of those no-ball-save games (The Munsters is another), and the game was probably reset to factory setting a couple weeks ago after MWS's Saturday tournament and nobody complained to RED about the problem since then.

And now this change just screwed DMC out of --- well, he'd still have had to make up FAE's score, plus enough on top for whatever their third ball would have been. But screwed him out of a chance to play, and it sucks to lose that way and it kind of hurts to win that way too.

But it was a win, FAE's third(?) in a row at Silver Balls, which would earn them permanent possession of the trophy if we had a travelling trophy.

And while it was past midnight, it was not so outrageously past midnight. We got home and to bed at a reasonable hour for New Year's Eve Day, ready to see what 2026 might start like.

But for now, you're going to see what Plopsaland was like in its 25th year and final month under that name!

Peeking around the track of SuperSplash; you can see some animals that I don't think were Heidi-linked particularly. As you get back to the station you see them, though.

People getting into a train car.

And here they're ready to dispatch.

Here's a close-up of some control button with the thing.

And here's a view out the window of the station, which is pretty nicely decorated, you can see.

We're ready for the next ride, and here's the exit side.

Trivia: In 1920, at the start of Prohibition, the United States Coast Guard fleet consisted of 26 inshore vessels, some converted tugboats, and 29 cruising cutters, one of them based in Evansville, Indiana. Congress would not approve any significant additional appropriations for five years. Source: Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, Daniel Okrent. Okrent mentions this was for just under five thousand miles of coastline, which I think means he's discounting Alaska entirely, which is fair because Alaska at the time had about twenty people so smuggle whatever you want in, it doesn't matter. But also you kinda can't actually measure coastline, thanks fractals, so I'm not sure what the five thousand miles represents.

Currently Reading: A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II, Maury Klein.

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[Stop-motion animated snowman voice] If I live to be a hundred I'll probably never forget that year that --- you won't believe this --- the world almost missed Silver Balls In The City. You don't know the story? Well, let me tell you ...

bunnyhugger's Silver Balls has always been one of the last pinball events of the Michigan calendar and this year planned to be no exception, with the event --- a ``fair strikes'' tournament, where you play until you lose enough times, last one standing the winner --- set for the Tuesday between Christmas and New Year's. Except that earlier this month bunnyhugger discovered that while she had created a Facebook Event for it and been publicizing it in the Lansing and the Michigan Pinball communities, she hadn't registered it with the International Flipper Pinball Association, the sanctioning body for competitive pinball. They require a thirty-day notice before an event takes place, the better to avoid shenanigans where people try to cheat their way in a close pinball standings race by opening something only the conspirators have a hope of playing.

What to do? Run it as an un-sanctioned event, kneecapping participation and --- the true point of it --- charitable donations to the Capital Area Humane Society? Run it thirty days from the date of discovery, which would put it not just into the New Year but past even Twelfth Night, the latest anyone could plausibly care about a Christmas-themed event? Ask the IFPA if they'll allow an exception because there was no attempt made to hide this event from anyone, just an absent-minded oversight?

After encouragement from me, bunnyhugger took the last course, and the IFPA, possibly just relieved any woman is still talking to them, approved the event with a bit of don't-do-it-again scolding. bunnyhugger went on to register every event --- league night, side tournament, women's tournament, and charity tournament --- for 2026, so that's covered. And we could trust that nothing would stop the tournament now.

When I got home from work --- inexplicably we had to come into the office the Tuesday between Christmas and New Year's --- bunnyhugger was distraught. Her plans for upcycling donated trophies had gone wrong, and went wrong very badly, consuming way more time and proving impossible without hardware that she wasn't sure any hardware store near us had. She spent many of the hours of the night in more aggravated improvisations of a workshop, and then --- sleeping so long she lost the time to make the cookies she had promised for the tournament --- running to hardware stores to get things that might help, and might yet help, but would not help this tournament.

She had got the trophies for the final three finishers assembled, but only just, and she was not able to find the laminate sheets and insulated jacket to run the placement finishes through the laminator and was about to give up on them. (Fortunately I knew where these were.) It would take hours for the trophy toppers to really set, and a day or more for them to be really secure. All we could do is trust that people wouldn't touch the Santa figures on top, and hope that they wouldn't fall off in loading them to my car or bringing them into the venue.

However, the important thing, is that Silver Balls '025 did happen.

And before I reveal how it happened, let me share Plopsaland De Panne pictures, like you've been enjoying since before Silver Balls:

A zone of fun in the park, where kids can pedal miniature cars around on a replica city street. If I were a kid this would have been my most favorite attration ever.

Isn't that great? Traffic lanes and curbs and confusing arrays of signs? Just fantastic stuff.

Kid giving some adults a high-five for managing a loop around the city square.

And here we are returned to the front of the park and the playful fountain. Note the shops in the distance have backdrops featuring a fake partly-cloudy sky that's a little weird to see against the actually partly-cloudy sky.

And now ... that tower ride seen earlier, SuperSplash. Wonder what that means!

And here's the station. You see one of the riders is all set to be super splashed.

Trivia: The name of Cambridge's Magdalene College is pronounced ``Maudlin''; the college was named for Saint Mary Magdalene, but founder Lord Thomas Audley insisted on spelling it ``Maudelyn'', rhyming with his own name. Source: Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, Keith Houston. Re-founded, technically; it was a reestablishment of Buckingham College, which Audley had graduated.

Currently Reading: A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II, Maury Klein.

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Friday night we went out to a pinball tournament. Not one we were organizing or anything either; this one, on the east side of the state, was one of MWS's ``Speakeasy Specials'', held at the Sparks pinball museum in a mall. This was to feature a Super Secret Santa --- those choosing to participate brought a gift, and picked a gift, and if they got a gag gift that was that, with the packages opened at random --- so we of course went to find things that might fit. bunnyhugger found some of her higher-quality stickers that people might like (she was correct; the person opening them was delighted by each and particularly by the seagull proclaiming something Salty). I got out a Donkey Kong Jenga game I'd got meaning to give someone ages ago, and never got around to giving. All going well, this would finally leave our home.

And it did. There were surprisingly few gag gifts, I suppose for people feeling unsure that it was decent to zonk someone who might be a complete stranger to them. The Donkey Kong Jenga set went to someone who seemed interested at least. As mentioned, the guy who got bunnyhugger's stickers was happy with each of them. I got a couple of scratch-off lottery tickets, including one of the Christmas Vacation scratch-offs, so you know it's correct. bunnyhugger got some candy and a glow-in-the-dark comforter blanket that might just fill that niche of ``stuff to have in the car in case of emergency''.

As to the tournament play: this was eight rounds of max matchplay, that is, pairs being drawn up on randomly-chosen games whenever there were enough players waiting around for it, until every person had played eight opponents. Yes, of course I had to play bunnyhugger, third round, on the mid-70s game Fireball. That's a particularly difficult late electromechanical game, almost all of which comes down to whether you make the skill shot. I made it once; bunnyhugger didn't even know there was one until I showed her, and she wasn't able to find it in the one ball she had left.

And this would hurt her. The top eight players would go to finals, and my four wins put me below the threshold. Her five wins, though, put her in a tiebreaker to go to finals. Had she beaten me on Fireball, all else being identical, she would have been in finals and even had a first-game bye. Her misery at being in a playoff game, which she insists she never wins, was tempered by her putting up an overwhelmingly good score on Stars --- a solid state game that seems like it should be friendly, but isn't --- and crushing all before her. Also I'm pretty sure crushing my best-ever score on any Stars ever.

Sad to say, in the playoffs --- a ladder-style tournament, starting with the fifth-through-eighth place qualifiers; the bottom two are eliminated and the top two then play another game against the third-and-fourth-place qualifiers, and so on --- she flopped badly, on the early 60s game Riverboat. She ended up taking eighth place, so this won't be changing her state ranking, at least not in any useful way. But the tournament wouldn't anyway; it was too small, too low-rated a tournament to bump bunnyhugger's position even if she had won. There are a handful of tournaments left in the season --- and only one very small women's tournament --- and at least for bunnyhugger only illness or catastrophe is going to be changing any seedings. And she and MWS and I are so far out of open contention that we won't be seeing the state championship series except as spectators. Doesn't matter; it's fun getting out and playing some. And, y'know, there's something in Grand Rapids next Friday if we have the itch.

Now to close out pictures of walking around De Panne on Friday night. We'd try to get to bed early so we could enjoy the park the next day ...

I'm sure this sign outside the sciencey museum center type building makes sense if you participate in the educational activities within.

Oh hey did we mention that De Panne, despite being in the part of Belgium adjacent to France, is Dutch-speaking so you get names like Doktersweg for a street?

And here's the place to get a cold drink and all the Funky Winkerbean merchandise you can imagine.

I believe this is the street-just-beyond-the-boardwalk we went to because the map suggested there was an Automat here. It turned out to be a couple of vending machines, some with sliced cold cuts in, not all of which were even turned on.

And here's a look west at the actual beach. It's a shore town and moments like this felt strikingly Jersey-Shore to me.

Funland, alas, did not have a pinball machine that we could find. We only looked through the windows; I think there was an admission price we weren't willing to pay if there wouldn't be any payoff. (Possibly I'm remembering wrong and it was closed by that hour.)

Trivia: Cuba's Constitution of 1940 had 286 articles in 19 sections, and included (in article 61) a national minimum wage, (in article 62) equal pay for equal work, (in article 64) a ban on paying workers intokens or scrip, (in articles 65 - 67) workers' social insurance, an eight-hour day, and paid vacations; (in article 68) paid maternity leave, and (in articles 70 - 72) right to unionize and to strike. Source: Cuba: An American History, Ada Ferrer.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 79: A Viper Called Le Burgoo! Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

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Tuesday night, after some day-filling events I'll get around to, was time for the close of the Lansing Pinball League's season, with the split-flipper ``Super Ball'' zen tournament. In this nonsanctioned, for-fun event, teams play, one person working one flipper. bunnyhugger and I were a team, naturally, and while we got to the venue late for our own tournament we did pretty well considering.

The unexpected twist this time around was two guys we didn't really know who were hoping to play as a team. The tournament's meant as a little bit of fun for league members and not just anybody, but, they did say they were hoping to join the league and intend to be there next season. We've seen them around some before, too. bunnyhugger yielded on the point, allowing the two in and reassuring league folks that this was okay because they pledged to make good their pinball league connection.

The tournament structure was identical to that of finals, a double-elimination bracket with teams having to win two games out of three to move on. I'd like to brag that bunnyhugger and I finished the first round with two straight wings but turns out all four brackets that round ended 2-0. We went 2-1 in the next round, against PCL and DRG, with a game of Indiana Jones that turned out well thanks to bunnyhugger's skills at the jackpot-collecting right ramp, and with a game of Cactus Canyon, one of the games that I alone of the league understand or like.

Our next match was against the team-of-destiny of DMC and RED, two great players who blend magnificently. This one we lost, although we did get one win by picking to play Metallica against them. On our choice RED said yeah, that's exactly the game to pick against him. That's one of the other games that's usually surprisingly nice to me. We lost on Deadpool, but my recollection is it was closer than we had reason to expect.

That put us in the second-chance bracket, although by then three elimination rounds had gone on and we had to win only one to move into finals. And what do you know but those brand-new-guys were our competition there. We picked The Addams Family as our first game, mostly on the strength of my being good at the skill shot, and that skill didn't fail me. The brand-new-guys never got the skill shot dialed in and sent too many balls into the too-dangerous pop bumpers. Their pick then was Star Wars, the 2017 Stern game. That one seems like it should move too fast and be too complicated to play worth anything split-flipper, but, you know? At heart, the layout is a simple fanfold, shots reaching from the left side of the playfield to the right, and most of the shots can be backhanded. And since I'm confident in the complicated use of the Action Button to set a multiplier of shot value on chosen shots, well, we blew things up and they thanked us for a good night.

This brought us to finals, against the undefeated DMC and RED, and they chose Godzilla, a game where both of them are just on a much higher level of skill than we are. But, wow, we got some good shots in, got a Kaiju Battle completed and won, and somehow ended up ahead of them by the end. They picked King Kong, a game they similarly understand on a level we never will. We played the dumbest possible strategy, starting this easy-to-start-but-low-value two-ball multiball over and over and over, while they played with skills for a strategy that would have paid off if they didn't get a bad couple bounces. We beat them, two games to nothing.

So that put us into the second round of finals, winner taking all, and they picked Jaws. I'm not sure RED plays it enough to have the higher-order-of-magnitude understanding than we do, but DMC certainly does, and they beat us soundly. We had choice of game and the question, ``if we do get knocked out, what's a game we feel okay being knocked out on?'' I suggested Black Knight: Sword of Rage, since it's been so nice to me lately and mostly on this shot in the upper playfield that would be my responsibility. We started that and the game malfunctioned, giving us credit for a multiball we hadn't started. RED, in his role as repair guy for the machines, gave his opinion that the game was just going to keep doing that; he hadn't had the chance to fix that particular problem. So, with the approval of assistant tournament director MAG (making the ruling), we picked a different game.

This would be Attack From Mars, which everyone understands and can play on an expert level, but that's also really good for split-flipper play. And the heck is that through two balls, we were doing great and they were not getting it together. We had a fair shot at winning this, but I bricked a shot and ended the third ball at short of two billion points, which for that game is a respectable but not great score. And, sure enough, they got their control back, shooting the flying saucers (the attackers from Mars) for ever-increasing payouts until they finally beat us.

So, too bad. But it was still a great run, and it didn't even take too long into the night. Still a good way to close out the night.

And now, in photos, we're on Friday of our big European trip already and travelling from Rennes to De Panne.

Trains. The TGV inOui would bring us to Brussels Or Wherever and then we got another train to get to De Panne, on the Belgian coast. There's a red flag hanging out the edge of a panel containing the train number, which is why you can't quite see the inOui logo clearly.

And here we are! We got off the train to our first glimpse of what was then still Plopsaland De Panne. (A few weeks after our visit it was renamed Plopsaland Belgium, even though there's another park in the chain that's also named Plopsaland and in Belgium.)

Here's the train station in De Panne. I couldn't swear that we were ever inside the building, though. There's vending machines outside for ticket-buying that were all we really needed.

And a view of the observation tower and a coaster I would later know was The Ride To Happiness, before we set out to walk to our hotel because we thought it was a shorter distance than it was.

Here we go, a we-just-arrived photo of our hotel room in De Panne, and done artistically, which means through a reflected surface.

Then we went walking into town to find somewhere to eat. This fine building looks like it must be some kind of science museum center given the Fibonacci Spiral sculpture out front.

Trivia: In 1886 there were 3,500 elevators in New York City, 114 of them running a hundred feet or more. Some could carry thirty people at a time. Source: Otis: Giving Rise to the Modern City, Jason Goodwin.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 79: A Viper Called Le Burgoo! Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle. Bluto back in for his second story in like three tales, after being out of the comic for a half-century or so.

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Saturday I did something pinball-related for the first time, believe it or not. While I've supported bunnyhugger running tournaments for about a decade now, it has always been support. She's the person running things, telling people where to play and ruling when things go wrong or just ambiguous. But Saturday bunnyhugger had to be out of town all day, doing Marshall things for her university's graduation ceremonies, both undergraduate and graduate. And she had scheduled the last Lansing women's tournament of the year for the same day, noticing the overlap only too late to move. So, being not yet able to be in two places at once, she set me up with her Matchplay account and deputized me to gather everyone, tell them where to play and when, and gather results, and make rulings as needed.

I am glad to say that no rulings were needed. I've made rulings before, although I think only in games where bunnyhugger was one of the participants. While I wait until I can find a relevant paragraph in the printed-out rules that only I use before ruling, I have always trusted that she could guide me to what the applicable ruling is, which I then confirm and decree. This time, nothing bad came up requiring me to think about what was going on.

A half-dozen people showed up, meaning there were enough people to run a finals and so I got to learn not just how to run an event on Matchplay but also to spin off a finals event dependent on it. (The International Flipper Pinball Association requires tournaments to have at least three people, and that includes a finals round after a qualifying round; and finals can't involve more than half the people who play.) It also meant the play could be two groups of three people each playing, and the luck of the random number generator picking games had both groups playing adjacent or near-adjacent games for several rounds in a row. As one of the players said, it helped everyone feel like a nice chatty big group.

I did have to sacrifice some for this, though. While I come to these women's tournaments when bunnyhugger runs them, I feel at liberty to go off and play whatever games I feel like. This time it felt wrong to go off on my own, so I didn't play anything until after the tournament was decided and I had made my best guess at how to properly close a tournament and its finals. Still, the overall experience was just fine and I wouldn't mind doing it again, if there could be one where nothing really went wrong or needed any supervising.

And now, le finale of Le Grand Huit, Rennes. We would have had more time for it the next day, but the next day the place was closed for a private event.

Instruction card for the early-90s Data East game Lethal Weapon, which you might be able to work out if you can figure out what 'atteindre la rampe pour marquer le jackpot' could mean.

Instruction card for Riverboat Gambler, a game which comes from an era where games were an order of magnitude less complicated.

A couple of dining tables, made from salon carousel gondolas and arranged around the nonworking center of a carousel.

Heading back out again. That curious melange carousel's on the right and, in the sky, you can see some of the overhead lights floating off to become the constellation ``2-methyl heptane''. Do not drink!

The big Le Grand Huit sign in the twilight glow, with the melange carousel illuminated beside it. I love the gold letters in this light.

And I assume this was the old entrance to the place, guiding folks to the one they'd rather we used today.

Trivia: In March 1665, within days of the outbreak of England and the Dutch Republic going to war, the Royal Society was granted a patent for ``marine timekeepers'', under which terms half the revenues for the pendulum-based watches would go to the Royal Society and half to the inventors, Alexander Bruce and Christiaan Huygens, who had just become an enemy alien. Source: Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution, Lisa Jardine.

Currently Reading: In The Shadow Of The Moon: A Challenging Journey to Tranquility, 1965 - 1969, Francis French and Colin Burgess.

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Way too much going on today to report on anything so please enjoy pictures instead.

Le Bistromatik was an industrial robot rebuilt to be a robot bartender. Unfortunately, it wasn't running when we visited, and we wouldn't be around until Friday to see it.

Don't know what this had been; possibly a ticket booth, possibly a vending booth of some kind. Now, it held yellow cups that weren't particularly needed.

Here's a metal (iron?) train that looks like it might have been part of a kiddie ride at some point.

In another little alcove was this miniature carousel, that for some reason faces in the British direction.

And a bunch of model trains of some purpose I didn't grasp.

More of the models, though, including a kiddie toy set of a Grand Huit. (I'm assuming 'Grand Huit' is the term for a roller coaster, as many early roller coasters, and a good number of modern ones, have footprints that are roughly a figure 8 and the number was often used as a name. Also a common weird other name for roller coasters: Russian Mountain.)

Another jukebox, although I failed to get a picture of what was theoretically available on the Rock-Ola. (I think I was running out of battery and conserving shots.)

And another miniature carousel, this one with wild looking animals on it.

A sharp shooter game that seemed to be turned off, so we didn't have to regret not having the coins to test it out.

My best photo here of the floor as a whole. The elevated carousel is to the left of the picture; you can see the quartet of pinball machines on the right.

And a bit of stronger proof that Riverboat Gambler and The Party Zone were there.

The Party Zone's instruction card really shows how the game was not designed to be translated at all. Fun fact: this is one of the surprisingly few pinball games that will play The Who's ``Pinball Wizard'', given a chance.

Trivia: The first movie known to be shown in-flight on an airplane was Harold Lloyd's Speedy, shown in a Ford Trimotor flying over Los Angeles in May 1928. Source: Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World's Most Revolutionary Structure, Alastair Gordon.

Currently Reading: In The Shadow Of The Moon: A Challenging Journey to Tranquility, 1965 - 1969, Francis French and Colin Burgess.

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With FAE beating me, two games to one, they had won the Second Chance Bracket and had the chance to go against the not-yet-beaten DMC. It was around 11:30 or so, surprisingly early in the night considering, the pace of the night considerably helped by how many people finished their round in only two games. Of the fourteen rounds played only six went to a third game. There was a tolerable chance of the night ending before the bar closed at 2:00, or we got insufferably exhausted staying out past 1:00. But not necessarily: if FAE were to beat them in this round, they would have to play another --- two lost rounds needed for elimination --- so there could be as many as six games yet to play between two of the best players in the league.

As high seed DMC had first pick and chose King Kong: Myth of Terror Island. There are some games we shy away from playing in tournaments because they run long, and King Kong hasn't quite yet got the reputation that James Bond has, but the game was played during the regular season and hadn't malfunctioned so it was a legitimate pick. And a good one for DMC, who beat FAE in a match with way higher scores than I'd ever get.

FAE's pick next and they chose Game Of Thrones and, going first, put up 1.8 billion points on the first ball. A billion points is an excellent ball by any measure --- for anyone but these two it'd be an excellent game --- but twice that is crushing, especially when DMC had an unlucky first ball that ended at under a million. As FAE stepped up for ball two DMC did what we barely considered possible, and conceded. It's allowed, it just, like, never happens. DMC could plausibly have made up that gap, plus whatever FAE did on balls two or three, but apparently decided his chances were better starting a new game.

And that game was, of course, Godzilla, one of DMC's two pocket games. (He'd used Rush, the other, back in the first round when PCL needed vanquishing). DMC put up a mere mortal's game this time, finishing somewhere short of a billion points, but FAE still had to make up something like a half-billion points on their last ball. They gave it a great try, including several great saves, but fell short. Just as last time, DMC won the league and FAE took second. Only my presence in the not-quite-1-am trophy ceremony was different. I caught up on my sleep one of these days, I promise.

Now here's where this sets up future drama. Not that anyone doubts FAE deserves to be in finals in our local league or to win the league (they have, a year ago). But competitive pinball sanctioning body the International Flipper Pinball Association this year clarified (independently of that North Carolina drama a few weeks back) that women's tournaments are open to anyone who finds 'not male' an important part of their identity --- so, women, yes, and transgender persons (for taking up or leaving non-maleness behind), and nonbinary persons. With that policy made clear, bunnyhugger told FAE they were welcome at women's tournaments, and a month or two later they took her up on the offer. And immediately dominated the local women's tournaments, which are rare and low-value.

But half of the people invited to the Women's State Championship are taken for their excellent performance in the open rankings, that is, coed tournaments and leagues. And while FAE hasn't played in many outside Lansing, they have finished excellently high in all of them. With this second-place finish they earned a spot in the state championship and, coming from apparently nowhere, are certainly my favorite to win. (Well, bunnyhugger is my favorite in every way, but FAE is the safe bet.) This has not as of this writing been noticed in a way to cause drama from vagina-inspectors in the Michigan pinball community, or state-championship-watchers. But the prospect is there and I do not look forward to people saying awful things about nice people as a result.

More stuff at Le Grand Huit, now:

Ah, the spirit of French liberty or something, alongside another band organ. I don't seem to have a good picture of the mural behind and apologize for my mistake.

bunnyhugger getting a picture of the elevated carousel rolling above her; you just don't get pictures from directly underneath a horse that often.

Here's what a horse looks like from underneath. Also you see how the things are locked to not fall off the pole yet still be portable in case the carousel moves.

There's something a little magic to seeing the horses floating in midair like this.

And a reverse view getting a look at the chandeliers too. It could almost happen in Mary Poppins.

Looking up again at a horse's underside and also at the scenery panels above, which are all aircraft of an era I bet someone could identify all right.

Trivia: Among the published newspaper rumors surrounding the Wright Brothers' flight experiments at Kitty Hawk in 1905 were that they had flown ten miles out to sea and back (certainly false) and that they never left the flyer unguarded, sleeping beside it with rifle in hand (possible; they brought firearms to Kitty Hawk before, but for game). Source: To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight, James Tobin.

Currently Reading: In The Shadow Of The Moon: A Challenging Journey to Tranquility, 1965 - 1969, Francis French and Colin Burgess.

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And then there was my climb in the A Division of pinball league finals. My first round was to be against MAG, and was the only one I figured I could plausibly win; we're roughly evenly matched. But the winner of this round would face the winner of DMC versus PCL --- that is, DMC --- and after losing against DMC would face either FAE, RED, BMK, and MWS, any of whom are good enough to make state champion.

MAG had first pick, and chose Foo Fighters, which I was glad of because it's one of my stronger games. He had a very strong first ball and I had two balls of absolute nonsense. Last ball I went up needing to make up 110 million points on one ball and, good greif, but I actually did it, after a long chopping-wood grind. MAG, as the loser, had the right to pick the next game and chose Black Knight: Sword of Rage. Ordinarily this would be a good choice because Sword of Rage is a very erratic game, but the past month or so it's decided that it really wants me to play it, and I've had a succession of killer games on it. So I did this time, giving me my first win and ensuring that, whatever happened, I wouldn't finish below sixth place in league.

This did mean my next opponent was DMC, who had (it turns out) needed all three games to send PCL to the second-chance bracket. He had game choice, and chose John Wick. I chose to go first, reflecting my confidence that he was most likely going to beat me and we might as well move on to the next game when he'd passed my score. But John Wick, like Sword of Rage, is one of those games I'm having an unaccountably skilled phase in. When I finished my first ball DMC, coming back from the bar, looked at my score and did a comedic double-take, a pretty friendly move from a more remote player. While I did have a surprisingly good lead through two balls yeah, he beat me on the third. This gave me game choice and, considering what games I might at least put up a good show on? Or even win on? I went to Tales of the Arabian Nights and had, as on Foo Fighters, two lousy balls and a ten-million-point deficit for my third. Reader, I did not make it up, but I got pretty darned close especially considering I was on my last tilt warning most of the game.

On to the second-chance bracket, where if I won three rounds of best-of-three matches I could go back to finals. My first opponent was RED, and remarkably I had game choice, so went to The Addams Family. After two solid first balls we both flopped balls two and three, but I flopped a tiny bit less and claimed my win. RED then chose the newest game in the venue, Star Wars: Fall of the Empire, based on the parts of the Original Star Wars Original Trilogy that weren't used in the last two Star Wars pinballs from Stern. I barely know anything about this game and can't even reliably get a multiball started on, which is absurd when you realize any pinball game post about 1995 is going to give you a multiball like it or not. But he was also having a lousy game and ultimately he won the race to the bottom. RED was going home for the night, avoiding the worst of the storm. And meaning that, as he was the person with keys to the games, there'd be no more opening machines and freeing stuck balls. I don't believe this ended up mattering.

I couldn't believe I'd beaten RED, but I knew there was no way I'd beat BMK, next opponent. And then somehow, on BMK's choice of Deadpool, I did. He then picked Sword of Rage, my second visit to the game that night, and that was really peculiar to me since I believe he was in the group with me when we played it a couple weeks ago in league and I tore the game up. We both had really good games on this one, but I had a slightly better game and so, somehow, beat him two games to nothing.

This brought me to the last round of the Second Chance Bracket, incredibly, playing FAE to see who would go on to finals. Also at this point I was assured a trophy, and was now playing to see whether third, second, or even first. I figured there was no way I could beat FAE, but then, there was no way I could beat BMK and beating RED was pretty unlikely too. FAE had first pick and chose Star Trek and, what do you know, but after two mediocre balls I pulled everything together for the last and not just won but won handily, with a score maybe three times what I needed. I couldn't believe it either. FAE then picked Star Wars: Fall of the Empire, and did not repeat RED's mistakes. I don't think it's true that their first ball beat every score I've ever had on it combined, but this was closer than I'd like. So I was --- finally --- playing the third game of a round, and had my pick.

When I thought I was going to get knocked out on Star Trek I'd done a little intelligence-gathering on the tables, mostly looking for ones with high score tables with few FAE's on them as my best shot. Monster Bash, one of the 90s Williams tables based on collecting the Universal Movie Monsters into a band, felt like a good pick, something I enjoy, am strong on, and not prone to letting anyone have preposterous runaway games. And then, on a table where I can always collect Creature From The Black Lagoon, Wolf Man, Mummy, and Dracula before starting Frankenstein multiball, I couldn't get any of them. I had to struggle on the last ball just to get Frankenstein multiball by itself, never mind any companion monsters. Which would have been all right as FAE was having a similarly weirdly bad time of it. But their last ball they got The Mummy and Frankenstein going together, and blew past my score in what probably wasn't so excruciatingly long a time to wait. I just had to wait for the multiball animations to pass long enough that I could confirm that I had lost.

And there it was: after a night I was ready to kneel on, I ended up beating several people I didn't believe I could, and took home a third place trophy. I never figured that I'd rank that again.

That's not all I have to share about pinball league finals, but I also have more to share about Le Grand Huit. Let me share another half-dozen photos with you, to start:

Near the bar they had a carousel which rotated continuously ... and which was raised to the top of the ceiling, so that you could not ride it, but you could see it working from an angle you never really look at carousels from.

Another view of that elevated carousel. For scale remember that even at the lowest none of these poles were in danger of hitting any person's head.

And then more pinball! As if the four games already listed weren't a curious enough set they also had Gilligan's Island and Surf N' Safari. Both kind of fun games, but we were out of change and you can see the coin slot here was taped over.

The instructions card for Gilligan's Island, which yeah, explains it all pretty well, really.

The French version of the anti-drug warning.

So, the Gilligan's Island pinball, like many Gilligan's Island projects, couldn't get Tina Louise's image rights, which is why you'll notice she's facing away from the viewer in the backglass there, and why when the dot matrix display does a little roll call of the cast, well, in English rather than show her it just shows marquee lights and ``A Movie Star''. Or, in French ... there you go.

Trivia: Scotland began using January 1st as New Year's Day from 1600. Source: Marking Time: The Epic Quest to Invent the Perfect Calendar, Duncan Steel.

Currently Reading: In The Shadow Of The Moon: A Challenging Journey to Tranquility, 1965 - 1969, Francis French and Colin Burgess.

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So to cut to the end: as it turned out I didn't need to worry about bunnyhugger's finish. She would win the B Division, and handily, not just never losing a best-of-three round but only once, in finals, even needing the third game of a round. It would overstate things to say she dominated the division --- a couple of times she won in what we call ``losing the race to the bottom'' --- but a win by some nonsense counts the same as a win by playing like a pro.

Speaking of nonsense. There was one time that I, as backup tournament director, was called in to make a ruling and that was of course for a game bunnyhugger was playing. She and her competitor were on Godzilla, her competitor had finished ball three, and she was taking her last ball facing the uphill climb of beating the 130-or-so-million of player one. And the game just went and reset, like someone had powered it off and on again.

This sort of game interruption is provided for in the rules of pinball tournaments, of course. Normally the procedure is if you can recover the scores as they stood, give a compensation ball and add that to the interrupted game's score. This is unfair if the interrupted player had been about to start, like, the Super Multiball, but what else can you do? But, in this case, the game had reset weirdly enough that it didn't preserve any of the scores, as though it forgot it had been in the middle of a game when it took a quick nap.

My inclination was that since everyone agreed the opponent had about 130 million points, give or take, let bunnyhugger play a whole game --- since nobody knew just what her score was, the game's screen somehow not being big enough for an always-on score display --- but I don't like making that the official ruling until I can back it up with the in-print rules. And I found that the actual printed rules we had were more specific; in the event of a catastrophic malfunction (the term of art here) all players are to replay. (If the game catastrophically malfunctions again it's kicked out of the tournament and a new game gets drawn.) So --- bunnyhugger's opponent a bit disappointed to lose a decent score against a tough competitor --- they replayed.

This turned out as well as we could have hoped. bunnyhugger's opponent had a better game than she'd had the first time around, so could not feel cheated of a decent score she'd already completed. But bunnyhugger had an even better score yet, taking a win and going on to the semifinals as cleanly as possible.

Fortunately that was the only ruling I had to make all night, as bunnyhugger, not being directly involved in any other games, could handle the rest. And most of those amounted to ``direct where the stuck ball's to be placed'' and ``take out Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles because it is, once again, broken''. TMNT may be an enjoyable game --- granting that nobody's figured out how to enjoy it yet --- but it keeps having issues of throwing random numbers of balls into play in the middle of tournaments.

Anyway, bunnyhugger won, and the second- and third-place finishers were also delighted, and we just had to worry about whether the A Division would finish by any reasonable hour.

But now, in pictures of Le Grand Huit, I have to share ... pinball! It wasn't a surprise that pinball was there, to us, as I'd gone looking on a pinball map to see if anything might be in reachable range, but the games that were there ... well, when I saw them on the pinball map I thought, that can't be. And yet, here they were:

Williams's Riverboat Gambler and ... Class of 1812! This was a wild enough choice that we had to photograph it, and also bunnyhugger had to tell people on Facebonk that it was there.

Besides Riverboat Gambler and Class of 1812 they also had in this area Party Zone, which I think I've once ever seen on location, and Lethal Weapon 3 which is, eh, that's a game all right.

Class of 1812 is a wild game, though, with a definite vibe of ``we have The Addams Family license at home'' and that gruesome-humor vibe that's always fun.

bunnyhugger had, like, three really good games in a row of it. Here she pauses to wait for her score to come back.

Pinball router calling cards: the universal language? Apart from the grouping of telephone digits you could slip this under the glass of a game in the United States and not really stand out.

A nice thing about Gottlieb games of the early 90s is they had this map of what was on the playfield and what you got for it. I didn't know they made it in multiple languages, though.

Trivia: The second Howard Johnson's opened in 1935, ten years after the original; by the end of the year there were 39 of them. By the end of 1939 there were 107. Source: The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways, Earl Swift.

Currently Reading: In The Shadow Of The Moon: A Challenging Journey to Tranquility, 1965 - 1969, Francis French and Colin Burgess.

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I felt a slight disappointment when I got to our hipster bar Tuesday for pinball league finals and saw MWS there sitting at the bar. Not because it's ever unpleasant to see him, but because he was one of the eight people in the higher, A, Division for playoffs, and bunnyhugger was in ninth place. Anyone not showing up would get her into a place where she could only improve her standings. Coming in seeded at the top of B, she had to win the bracket to finish right where she started. MWS seemed my candidate for someone to stay home; it was not quite snowing, yet, but it was going to snow and heavily enough that all sorts of weather alarms were being announced, and MWS had even expressed to bunnyhugger his fears that the weather wouldn't let him drive back to Flint. As he was coming from farthest way, I thought he was the most likely to bow out for weather.

In the hour or so before the finals would start --- and bunnyhugger would arrive back from a work meeting that could not be postponed nor switched online --- I walked around, getting as much attendance as I could logged early. Also testing the machines I thought I might have to pick, or get picked against me, in finals, the only time during the season that Lansing League players choose what they play. And saw more of the other six players in A arriving. Around fifteen minutes before the official moment of finals beginning someone mentioned that MAG had not yet appeared and, oh, yes. He had missed last meeting too, and his postal job sometimes means he just can't get to league. And it is the busy season for mailing things, so he moved up to my second choice for plausibly likely to miss. He walked in a few moments later and the whole of A was accounted for.

I missed the last couple of people checking in by going around the whole bar looking for people who might belong in league finals. But I had everyone rounded up and ready to receive instructions just as 7:00 rolled around and bunnyhugger rolled in, fresh from work and from picking up the trophies, having driven through the early parts of the storm that MWS was afraid he'd have to drive back through --- I hadn't been able to the day before because my car was getting its service --- and looking ready for action.

She took the roll --- giving one late player just the margin needed to not miss his part in finals --- and gave the instructions as quick as possible, as if that could help the event not run until dawn. And she was still there at the top of B, having to defend her position against everyone.

I told her I wasn't playing. Placing highly in the league, or even the state, just isn't that important anymore, and she would be happier bottoming out in A than I would be taking first (if all the really good players somehow knocked each other out). And one of our big problems with these events has always been traffic management, as players just do not understand who they're supposed to play in a double-elimination seeded bracket. They always try to enter their own finishes and make up their own ideas about how to play things out after their first loss, and it never goes right. Having someone at the post continuously, entering results right away and sending people where they should go, would help avoid confusion and keep things moving swiftly.

bunnyhugger wasn't having it. I tried to lay out the good reasons for this, and to stand on it, and she refused every one of them. Even the prospect of, you know, if she flopped in B Division she might see all her play this season --- which was generally quite good and just foiled by a couple other people, me included, having killer last nights --- gone to an 19th place (or whatever) finish. After she swore she would be fine with it even if she had a catastrophic night, I relented, and agreed to play. And she told other people, fairly, how she could not believe what I was trying to do there.

Finals were ready to start.

And now in photos, we're back at Le Grand Huit and drawing closer to what we went there for ...

Crane game that for all I know could even be played, although mostly I liked the chrome styling of all the important parts.

And here's a different crane game that still looks nice and metal and substantial.

The hand-cranked record player on top of the crane game was up way too high to actually touch but still, interesting to look at.

And a Wurlitzer jukebox! We didn't have the spare coins to see if that worked either but aren't the buttons stylish?

Took a picture of some of the records on offer here. Yes, they have Kool and the Gang. And Stars On 45. (I'm not actually sure about the attributions here because The StarSisters were a spinoff group that --- look, it's all weirdly complicated.)

``Why not come sit comfortably on the Long Pig Couch?''

Trivia: The United States produced 400,000 brass clocks in the year 1855. Source: The Age of Capital, 1848 - 1875, Eric Hobsbawm.

Currently Reading: In The Shadow Of The Moon: A Challenging Journey to Tranquility, 1965 - 1969, Francis French and Colin Burgess.

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Not really a harbinger of Christmas, but something that usually comes up around Thanksgiving, is MWS's Saturday tournament. This usually happens the Saturday after Thanksgiving but for whatever reason he was better able to time it for the Saturday before. Given the fine but persistent snow the Saturday after Thanksgiving, this turned out well. MWS has inexplicably greater pull with the owners of our local hipster bar than bunnyhugger ever has, and was able to call on special favors such as opening three hours early, and --- for those early hours --- getting the metal-detector screening waived. So it felt a little closer to the way the old days at the place went.

The format was group match play, setting people up in groups of three or four players and assigning ranking points based on the order they finish in the game. The plan was to have as many matches as could be started in the three-and-a-half hour or whatever it was from the start of the first round. This turned out to be five complete rounds. We were not close to a sixth. The top eight finishers after these rounds would go to the A Division finals, and the next eight into the B Division finals.

There were also prizes given away, several at the end of each round. This was done by a couple rounds of luck: first, a random draw to see who won a prize, then, they'd draw a playing card to see which of a dozen prizes they had. Then, if they wanted, they could trade that prize in for one of five Mystery Box prizes --- one with a big grand prize inside, others with pretty good prizes, and a couple with zonk prizes.

Well, dear reader, I had a surprisingly great qualifying. Despite facing SPM, one of the way-too-young-yet-way-too-good kids playing competitively, and FAE in the first round I got second place. In the second round, I managed to put together a third ball rally that let me win Monster Bash. In the third round I came back from nowhere to take second place by a whisker. The fourth round --- the new Star Wars: Fall of the Empire game --- I just flopped on, finishing third place. And then in the last round, Attack From Mars, I started out with a killer ball that made everyone else sit and wait and grow cold and demoralized, finishing off with another first place. This great finish left me in a three-way tie for the last two positions in A, and I got a solid second place on the tiebreaker game so I was in the main playoffs.

Finals, though, there I got to flopping. The games --- picked by SPM, as top seed --- were almost perfect for me; Pulp Fiction, John Wick, and Tron. Pulp Fiction I'd been putting a lot of practice time into, and for some reason I play John Wick well despite having no idea what's going on or why. SPM had a terrible game of Pulp Fiction --- coming very close to rage tilting, must be said --- and I thought I was in good until FAE and DMC both showed me who's boss. John Wick went similarly, except here I leapt way ahead on the first ball and then SPM and then FAE played killer second and third balls. DMC managed to squeeze me out on bonus on the last ball, too, so with a third-place and a last-place finish I was all but finished. Moving on would require a very particular lineup of finishers and a successful tiebreaker, and that didn't happen. I went down to a last-place finish on my old buddy Tron too, with DMC and FAE taking first places.

So it goes; I ended up tied for seventh place with one of the guys in the other group. SPM, despite his first-place finish in qualifying, was also knocked out by this; FAE and DMC would go on to finals. In the end DMC would take second and FAE fourth; a guy from Ohio would grab first place overall, and DOM --- one of the 100-top-ranked players in the world --- would get third.

bunnyhugger had a rotten tournament and was inconsolable. MWS had an okay day, finishing either in third place or first place in four-player groups. He got into the B Division finals, although that because several people ahead of him were --- as top players worldwide --- restricted into playing in A Finals Or Not At All, and didn't make A Finals because I had a freakishly good Attack From Mars. He had a better first round than I did, but was still knocked out. So it goes.

Continuing in pictures, our adventure in seeking out Nigloland, the amusement park:

Ah, there it is! See, they can't completely hide an amusement park in a tiny village of vineyards and hotels!

This sign did so much to reassure us when we were walking through a trail that we weren't perfectly sure wasn't trespassing. At least if it is trespassing, they're chill about it.

And here's the park! This intersection is one we viewed a whole bunch on google street view and apple maps and all as part of judging whether we could get to the park on foot, particularly, for the question of is there a sidewalk leading there?

As you can see, the answer is: uh, there's space where I guess they figure you're going to be walking on foot? Also there's not a lot of traffic at least.

And here's some gates! We hypothesized that these would be open during normal hours while the parking lot gates were farther down.

And there's a parking lot and, I notice now, public toilets. Good.

Trivia: One of the Sanskrit words for 'Thursday' was 'Guruvara', meaning 'Teacher'. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 77: The Lost Prince of Effluvia!, Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle. Getting Swee'Pea back into the comic strip after a couple years and also giving him another ridiculous little nation for Swee'Pea to be the lost royal family member of.

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Pausing a moment from things directly about my life, there's a scandal going on in the competitive pinball world. It says a lot about when I got into the competitive pinball scene that my first reaction to learning of it was ``thank goodness it's not Michigan this time''; the state used to have an outsized reputation for causing Drama. But this drama is more about an unfolding sad mess rather than things you can look and snicker about from the safety of being uninvolved.

In short: at a North Carolina pinball contest, one of the venue staff decided --- against the explicit direction of the tournament organizers and the venue owner --- that she was going to be the Vagina Inspector. This chased off a nonzero number of transgender people from the event, and disrupted things for everyone else.

The International Flipper Pinball Association, the body that sanctions competitive-pinball tournaments, ruled that the venue would not have any sanctioned events for twelve months and would be subject to annual reviews until they were confident it was an open, welcoming place for all players. Okay enough there. But they also ruled that the tournament, broken as it was, would be allowed to stand as a sanctioned event. They did not ask, particularly, the IFPA Women's Advisory Board, set up to provide guidance on how to make pinball events less misogynist, their opinion before this quick ruling.

And the IFPA has responded to criticism of this like a cishet guy being told for the first time that ``gyp'' is a racial slur. Insisting they have made their decision, it's not going to be altered, and if you bring it up in the IFPA Discord you're banned.

The sympathetic reading to this is that they want to avoid the precedent that if someone hollers loud enough they'll de-sanction anything. It's easy to see how the malicious will abuse that, and there's few things with as much malice as a transphobe who's noticed a project to combat sexism. So far as I know, and I am getting all my juicy gossip secondhand as I'm not in the IFPA Discord, nobody has actually said this, though. And it is hard to distinguish the actions taken from what someone who didn't actually care but wanted the fuss to go away would do. The resignation of the entire Women's Advisory Board suggests what they, people in closer touch with the IFPA management than most, believe.

So it's an enormous mess with a lot of people threatening to quit the IFPA, or at least asking what it's good for. Mostly, from the player point of view, it's a way of getting sanctioned events which draw players to them, in the hopes of winning renown for their play.

At one point bunnyhugger said there was talk of a schism, breaking off a new sanctioning body. There's no reason in principle there couldn't be one. But the IFPA does have a considerable lead in having a lot of people already registered, and a rating system in place and tried by experience. Also a lot of personal ties with Stern, the one big maker of pinball games, as well as with the second-tier makers like Jersey Jack (and don't let's get started on that) or Spooky Pinball or American Pinball. (The lack of separation between the makers of pinball games, the organizers of tournaments, the judges of tournaments, and competitors has been a minefield competitive pinball has so far not set off.) The practical objections might be insurmountable, unless the organization really does fracture along some natural fault line.

Mercifully this hasn't required bunnyhugger to take a big stand yet. It does suggest that we need to do a little prodding around to see if there've been problems people haven't been willing to bring up, though, and that won't be happy to learn.

Now, venturing into the Musée des Arts Forains, during our little layover in Paris.

Some of the many exhibits there, including a (Bayol, I assume) rabbit leaping above them all.

And hey, pinball! At least, one of the ancestors of pinball, where you roll the ball into holes for points. These are about the length of a dinner table.

And here's a rabbit posed over a heck of a garden vase.

Ooh, hey, what's this? When did we get to a Middle Eastern castle?

Ah, there we go, it's an elaborate model displaying some street scene. Oh, but wait ... computer, zoom out.

There we go! It's an elaborate miniature street scene riding the back of an elephant!

Trivia: In 1645 Blaise Pascal introduced his Pascaline mechanical-addition machine in a pamphlet entitled Advis Nécessaire à ceux qui auront curiosité de voir la machine arithmétique, et de s'en server (Advice necessary for those who will be curious to see the arithmetic machine, and to use it). The last paragraph directed orders to Sieur de Roberval, a resident of Paris, who could provide demonstrations. Source: Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, Keith Houston.

Currently Reading: The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City, Kevin Baker.

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This week in my humor blog: more Jimmy Rabbit, some public domain comic book nonsense, my ongoing obsessive interest in Compu-Toon For Some Reason, and a list of creative projects for the month that actually took a bit of work, although in short bursts of thinking rather than an extended period of joke-writing. Here's that, plus pictures to follow!

And now ... recovered from a camera thought lost forever in an Ypsilanti bathroom ... pictures from Motor City Furry Con 2025! Yes, these are the pictures that the forces of fate and my forgetting to pick the camera up again almost stole from you! Ready for the excitement?

Well just wait a little moment more as here's an establishing shot of arriving in the far reaches of the parking lot! We were fortunate to find somewhere to park most days of the con and I hope we aren't forced to do that when the next Motor City comes up in (shiver) February.

Peering down from the second-floor balcony to see the crowds, in a picture that could almost be my album cover.

Folks gather around to interact casually with the fursuiters. Meanwhile we make a beeline for ...

Pinball! At the hospitality suite! We enjoyed playing this through to Saturday night when the game went down and never came up again.

Craft paper and quality crayons in Hospitality; I drew a quick sketch of myself looking vaguely near-ish bunnyhugger. Sometime in the last year I figured a way to draw fingers that's not any more right but looks a little better.

bunnyhugger drew a little cockatrice, an underrepresented creature.

And other folks had their fun.

So I went to the macros meet-and-greet and they set up 'skyscrapers' of cardboard boxes to loom over and occasionally topple.

The aftermath of one of these topplings. The organizer had only had time to cover one, most of the way, with skyscraper 'plate glass' printouts.

Now here's a tower in the midst of toppling!

And someone sneaking into the nearly glass-lined skyscraper. The debris on the floor is tiny human and animal figures for that stomping experience.

And what's better after a good stomping than sitting back with your feet by the fire and a coffee in your paw?

Trivia: On the 7th of November, 1775, Virginia's Royal Governor John Murray, the Earl of Dunmore, offered immediate freedom to all enslaved people who ran away from their enslavers and joined the British forces. Despite the propaganda of an appalled Continental Congress hundreds did flee and join British forces at Norfolk, along the way picking up thousands of other enslaved people who wanted British protection. Source: The First American Army: The Untold Story of George Washington and the Men Behind America's First Fight for Freedom, Bruce Chadwick

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Sundays Supplement Volume 18: 1956, Tom Sims, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

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With Top Thrill 2, my roller coaster count climbed to 313, and bunnyhugger's to something like 337. This requires some trickery to record, though. coaster-count.com, the easiest way to keep a record of this, draws on the Roller Coaster Database (rcdb.com) for its basic data set, and RCDB has for some reason decided that Top Thrill 2 is essentially a renaming of Top Thrill Dragster, which we already have credited. To my way of thinking Top Thrill 2 is such a different ride that it has to be considered a new ride. But RCDB also considers Kennywood's Thunderbolt to be the same coasters Pippin, even though Pippin got a major expansion and redesign to make it Thunderbolt. And it counts Seabreeze's Bobsleds as the same ride as Junior Coaster, despite that getting expanded and being changed from normal metal strips to tubular steel track. And yet it does not count Cedar Point's Steel Vengeance as the same ride as Mean Streak, despite similar-in-magnitude changes in the structure and layout and tracking.

What this comes to, though, is that deep down ``identity'', what makes a thing a thing, is a frightfully elusive concept that breaks down on most any serious investigation. We think Top Thrill 2 is a different ride; our roller coaster counting system does not, and what's there to do besides include a manual correction to their count?

Well, one thing you could do is make a substitution. Coaster-Count offers a bunch of coasters that aren't there anymore, or aren't ridable, for people who might have, say, ridden Jumbo Jet back in the day. It also lists some things that are not in the Roller Coaster Database, since, for example, RCDB doesn't list roller coasters in travelling shows. It also lists some things that one might not list as a roller coaster, like the White Water Landing log flume, or the Demon Drop freefall ride, or Pipe Scream, a Disk'O ride that Cedar Point occasionally tries to list as a roller coaster, and Coaster-Count plays along with them. Of course, Coaster-Count has stern warnings about what might happen if you falsely record yourself as having ridden a ride, or even if you just give a false date to your ride. I too would love to know what historical problem brought them to that sternness.

Anyway, a problem for future us. On the day, our big thing next was to go riding stuff and discovering how many rides were not open. First day of Halloweekends there's some roller coasters they don't bother opening, at least unless there's higher-priority coasters that are closed for some reason, which is why Gemini and Corkscrew and Rougarou and our dear Blue Streak weren't running. We did check in on Steel Vengeance to discover its line was already too long for us --- we'd come back later in the weekend and get lucky, joining a line only about twenty minutes long when we happened to get there just after the ride had been closed --- and found that Maverick's video-screen queue promised a wait of 0 minutes or, for Fast Lane riders, 0 minutes. This turned out to be an under-estimate and the actual wait was closer to fifteen minutes or so, which is still a good short wait for the ride.

It would be a good night for riding, maybe the best of the weekend despite some of our favorite rides being closed. Not too busy anywhere and everything running quickly. We'd also get dinner at the park although I forget which side of the park. I know we had dinner once at the place with pasta dishes that replaced the Antique Autos ride, and once at the Grand Pavilion on the Boardwalk area where we got potatoes not as good as they used to serve there, and once at the place in Frontier Town that makes burrito bowls and turns out not to charge you for guacamole if you get the vegetarian bowl. Also once we got lunch at one of the food trucks that they still have around, this nice Puerto Rican rice-and-plantains dish. It makes no difference the order when we had these and barely matters that we had them at all, but I did want my readers to be confident we hadn't starved ourselves. (Somehow over the weekend I lost five pounds, though I've since found them again.)

And to close out the night we took a chance on Siren's Curse, which had something like a 25 minute wait for Fast Lane and N/A for regular non-line-cutters. This might reflect that there wasn't reliable data on hand, or it might reflect that the wait for normal people not giving the park money to cut the line had a wait of just about the same length. And Siren's Curse at night? With the lights of the track and the lights of the train at work? That turns out to be really great. The train has lighting with colors that change as you move through the ride, which includes music and audio from the Siren, Cursing you for whatever it is you were doing exactly, so that what is already a quite good ride --- not just for the initial gimmick of the track hinging from horizontal to vertical --- gets this an extra level or two up. Really good night.

Next up on my photo roll, pictures from a bit of pinball and something else ...

bunnyhugger putting in some entries for the Dungeons and Dragons launch party. You can see the plaque beside bunnyhugger in her dragon livery, and also, you can see how perfect that outfit is for a game like this.

Right around this point PCL began setting up livestreaming gear and he even set up a podcasting 'booth' on the big table we use to organize pinball events. Here you see bunnyhugger offering a few words about the game that we didn't really know the rules for, underneath.

This was the first event since league member ERR died and I noticed one of his high scores was still around, so, preserved it. Number four is the last of the high scores that Stern tables keep around; whoever next made a high score would bump him off.

More livestreaming. Also you can see the Lansing Pinball neon-style sign PCL had made up not realizing there was no possible place to hang it at the barcade.

A separate event but still pinball related: the trophies for March Hare Madness, which was maybe two weeks after the above pictures. The trophy bases are recycled bowling trophies but the statues are Michaels toys given gold, silver, and bronze paint.

And finally, a jigsaw puzzle that had been a gift from my parents, and that bunnyhugger and I did together: the history of (crewed) space flight done in jigsaw form, with depictions of all the spacesuits (upper left), space stations (center left), spacecraft (center right), and booster vehicles (bottom) used to date. I did more work on this than she did as I'm the guy who will spot the differences between the excessively many Soyuz variations.

Trivia: Around 1200 Quaker volunteers went to Germany, Austria, Yugoslavia, Greece, and Sicily in 1945 to aid victims of war. Source: Ruin and Renewal: Civilizing Europe after World War II, Paul Betts. Not the largest volunteer relief force on the ground, Betts notes, but a particularly experienced and efficient one as the Quakers had been providing help to all, friend or foe, since the Crimean War.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Sundays Supplement Volume 18: 1956, Tom Sims, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

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Halloweekends began for us Thursday, at least measured by when bunnyhugger and I were in the car together going somewhere. I'd taken our pet rabbit and mice down to her parents' the night before and introduced them to the mice. This I'd done with the mice in the pet carrier because I supposed that one put back into their bin they'd disappear under the litter and in toilet-paper tubes rather than deal with all this bother.

We left a bit before noon because we had to run a small errand at the bookstore where bunnyhugger sometimes works, and start off a bit slower than we'd have liked because of the dense construction zone around our house blocking off immediate access to highways. And for all that, we still arrived at Cedar Point almost exactly at 4:00, just as we'd have hoped. It would be too much to credit that for my big innovation this trip --- I had got exact change for the Ohio Turnpike fares and put them in a plastic bag on my divider console --- but that innovation was also very good. We also got really lucky in the parking spot, maybe the third or fourth spot closest to the front door of the hotel, the kind of spot we usually grab on Sunday after everyone's checked out and I move the car closer so it's easier to load up. We would lose that spot Saturday to go to the Merry-go-Round Museum in downtown Sandusky, but the replacement we got was almost as good.

We got once again a room on one of the wings off the rotunda, which are ones with single beds and therefore less likely to rent to families with bunches of noisy, squealing kids. So we have no explanation for why one night there seemed to be a family down the hall with kids doing footraces outside the door. They were quiet by the time we went to bed, anyway, and if they made noise early the next morning I didn't hear it. I'm sure that means everything was good.

I was a little confused at check-in about whether we needed early-admission tickets. Starting next year season passes aren't going to get you early admission to parks, a bonus we have used at Halloweekends and pretty much nothing else. But staying at the Hotel Breakers gets you that, and I had learned from bunnyhugger about this change and failed to process that we didn't have to worry about getting early-admission tickets until next year. If the policy lasts, anyway. The Six Flags/Cedar Fair merger has hit some rough spots, with --- particularly --- some of the parks having to give up on the new policy of charging admission to the haunted houses. (Not Cedar Point, though, at least this time.) Many things might be changed to win back goodwill or because someone tells them it's a way of stave off bankruptcy.

But we got everything settled in our room, dressed up as warmly as we could, and got into the park. Cedar Point had a roller coaster that officially opened in 2024 that we had never yet ridden; would we get to it this weekend?

And now, a quick dash through the end of the Michigan State Women's Pinball Championship, because I'm sparing you pictures of backglasses and of people you don't know facing away from you.

Gladiators is a surprisingly fun game for a 90s Gottlieb and I play it often in simulation form. This was a rare chance to play the actual table, where I ... don't know what the replay value was.

bunnyhugger with her megaphone, giving instructions to the competitors. After this there's so many pictures of people standing at pinball machines and ignoring the camera, you have no idea. You can see the pinball flyers lining the dor in the background.

Over by the food counter there's a couple board games you can play, including, oh yeah, the Pac-Man board game. I had that as a kid.

Tile art on the wall shows beloved video game character (look up video game characters before publishing) posed so you'd think they were playing Lost World, a game that sad to say wasn't in the tournament.

And now we're zipping ahead to the end of the night; Ypsi Pinball Podcast is gathering up their gear and bunnyhugger bows out.

Last picture of the venue; the podcasting 'booth' is in teh background. The food is way off past even that.

Trivia: The Champagne Fairs, held once or twice a year through the 12th and 13th centuries, gathered merchants in each of the four towns of Troyes, Lagny, Provins, and Bar-sur-Aube, and gained prominence from the protection the Count of Champagne offered to merchants travelling to and from the event. Source: Gold and Spices: The Rise of Commerce in the Middle Ages, Jean Favier. And yes, I'm irked that I did not realize this before we were in Bar-sur-Aube (briefly and for other purposes) earlier this year.

Currently Reading: Comic books still.

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So stop me if you've heard this but we were at Cedar Point all day and I didn't have time to write anything. Instead, enjoy a dozen or so pictures from the Michigan State Women's Pinball Tournament.

Artwork set up at the Crazy Quarters Arcade showing all stuff from the classic arcade games they have, plus Kangaroo.

I don't think there was anywhere you could sit and eat immediately near this Lunch Box decoration but at least it has a lot of modern-looking faintly-ironic lunchboxes on the wall.

And here's some of the games they have that aren't pinball.

Here's the plaque for the winner (who wouldn't be bunnyhugger this year) and the first-through-fourth-place trophies. The International Flipper Pinball Association provided the plaque; the trophies were on bunnyhugger's dime.

Crazy Quarters has some of these posters that I, too, would have thought were at Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum.

And here's a corner with a vintage-looking poster advertising Dracula from when he was the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

In another corner where I couldn't quite get at it they had a playfield for an old-style mechanical pinball game, where you get points for dropping balls in scoops.

bunnyhugger getting ready to give competitors their instructions and set things up for the matches to get started.

Since I didn't have much of anything to do I looked around the area that we could play. Venue has a Scooby-Doo game like we'd seen when we were in California back in 2023, but I'm no good at it.

Hung up around the venue are flyers for a lot of games, including here the 90s Guns N Roses and Dungeons N Dragons games.

More vintage pinball flyers, including one based on the Broadway musical version of Tommy and the cartoon-mayhem-themed Mousin' Around.

And some propaganda-style posters for Donkey Kong, Tron, and Dig Dug. I don't think freedom was at stake in the Dig Dug backstory. I thought it was just Dig Dug Guy getting creatures out of his garden beds.

Trivia: The first cesium-based atomic clock was built in 1955 by British physicists Louis Essen and Jack Parry. Source: Time's Pendulum: The Quest to Capture Time --- from Sundials to Atomic Clocks, Jo Ellen Barnett.

Currently Reading: Comic books! At last. I picked up a couple at the comic book shop downtown and discovered that it has reached the level of expansion where it supports a fridge of out-of-market soda pop, which is how I was able to surprise bunnyhugger yesterday with a couple glass bottles of Moxie.

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Ahead of our Halloweekends visit this year I did my lone preparing-for-a-trip responsibility and filled out the online form to hold our mail. Since the last time we had our mail held this somehow went wrong --- letters were delivered one day during the pause anyway, and we never got the big bundle of everything shipped at the end of our stay --- I checked the box to have them keep the mail at the main post office so I would pick it up myself. I also signed up for Informed Delivery, where they e-mail you a picture of the mail you're supposed to be getting that day, whether there's a hold or not. Over the weekend I got daily pictures but didn't know if that meant they were adding this to the hoard of mail at the main post office or if they had gotten the hold wrong and were delivering that every day.

Skipping ahead: when we got home Sunday night our mailbox was full. Over-full, in fact, with stuff dangling out of the mailbox because ours isn't actually that large and some of the stuff didn't bend. It looked like about the total mail we'd expect for the whole trip but I had no way of knowing if they skipped any days or anything. Mercifully if anything got rained on it wasn't damaged enough to show.

Monday afternoon, armed with the questions of why our mail wasn't held and if there was anything that was successfully held after all, I went to the post office with the printout of my hold-mail-confirmation. Guy went back and disappeared for long enough I was getting worried; I think everyone else in the five-person line was handled by the other clerk before mine got back.

There was no mail back there, of course. He said he checked all the spots held mail might be, and checked with a supervisor and with a carrier, though not the one working our neighborhood to confirm he wasn't overlooking anything. As best he can reconstruct the problem, it's ... well, you know what you need to get data from like ``whose mail is being held'' from the post office's central database system? That would be ``a person with authorization to access the central database system'' and right now there's nobody in the Lansing main post office with that access. He recommended that I fill out an in-person hold-mail request because that way then someone at Lansing is sure to see it.

While I was glad, I suppose, that we weren't missing any mail, I did not relish coming home to tell bunnyhugger all this because she is not as amused by folly as I am, and I lost most of my taste for post office folly when they lost a vintage postcard bunnyhugger had bought online and lost the remainder when they lost our held mail earlier this summer. But, you know, maybe it'll give you a giggle in these trying times.

Anyway. Next thing on my photo reel is mid-January 2025, and the Michigan State Women's Pinball Championship, held this year in Bay City, of Roller fame, and featuring bunnyhugger as the tournament director as well as publicity director. Hope you like.

The venue: the Crazy Quarters Arcade, which occupies a lot of the Bay City City Market downtown.

And the press would be there! bunnyhugger has learned that women's pinball tournaments offer local news exactly what they want most: human interest stories you can take a lot of good-looking B-roll footage.

Here of couse is Bay City's famous Portal to the otherworld.

And here's the venue, particularly, the pinball games. Lots of pinball games. Competitors are taking practice time and figuring out what games they'll plan on playing, and when.

Local news interviewing bunnyhugger, who's gotten several short but intense bouts of learning how to talk to cameras.

Other media! The Ypsi Pinball Podcast had a booth and after she was knocked out of tournament play bunnyhugger would pop in and give commentary with reasonable ease there. The figure in the center of Ypsi Pinball's logo there is the famed Ypsilanti Water Tower, which is not nearly as phallic as the Internet wants to point and laugh about.

Trivia: Scientists of many nationalities protested the 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded to Fritz Haber for his work on ammonia synthesis and its use in ammonium sulphate fertilizer, as Haber also worked in Germany's chemical-weapons program and oversaw the first successful large-scale use of chlorine gas in April 1915. Source: An Edible History of Mankind, Tom Standage.

Currently Reading: Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space, Adam Higginbotham.

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Pin-golf got started before I got home from work. The format lets you start anytime and the plan was that people could start playing a course anytime between 4:30 and 7:00. By the time I got home and walked to the barcade to join bunnyhugger a few people were already playing, and she was waiting for the chance to start herself. Past experience said it was a bad idea for the two of us to play at the same time, since it leaves the main desk with nobody watching it, but it's also just ... not done ... to play on your own if you can help it. So when the next couple people came in, bunnyhugger started playing with them while I watched the desk and gave people instructions and all that.

Fear and Trembling is usually a small tournament --- people shy away from the pin-golf format, it seems --- and since you can start anytime there's never a particular reason to start at this time, so folks drift in slowly. I didn't get to start playing myself until just before 7pm, when, among other things, FAE and DMC decided to ditch the cards they had been playing and start new ones (one could restart a try for a small additional donation to the charity). DMC's choice to restart came after he had accidentally been playing toward one objective but had written down, on the scoresheet, that he was attempting the other. It was clear to everyone what he had meant to do, but we have to go by what's on the page and with that failure to meet the goal, a 4, he decided to restart. This is how he and FAE ended up in a group with me.

Since I had tested out most of the objectives in the preceding half-week and had suggested or concurred with all of them you'd expect I would be good at the course, if you had no idea how pin-golf works. Even expert players have trouble with some of them --- DMC, an expert on the game Rush, failed on his first go-round to make that objective in a single ball! --- and I'm not an expert player. I think my only hole-in-one was the Rush objective, one that we had agreed was an easy one, but also that you need some easy objectives because it is too demoralizing when everything is impossible. Despite that even expert players DMC and FAE had a couple of 4's, representing objectives never made. And even some of the more novice players, in other groups, got a couple of objectives in three or even two balls, giving them a heck of a feeling of triumph.

I did just well enough to make the four-person playoffs, which took me by such surprise that when bunnyhugger told me I said ``no I did not''. The playoffs were further pin-golf, playing a bank of three holes at the choice of top-seeded DMC, and the objectives chosen by second-seed FAE. (RED and I just got to pick our order of play.) I did not do well in the first two of the playoff objectives, even though they were the same ones as the main course. The only one I managed was on the final game, King Kong, playing the goal of climbing to 200 feet of the Empire State Building, which you do by making a specific set of game-chosen shots, one of them a right bastard, because there isn't a reliable angle to set up the shot. I ended up giving up on aiming for that and starting a multiball instead on the correct supposition that in the chaos of three balls running around something would go my way, and it did.

Still, that left me in fourth-place, still taking home a trophy. RED took home third place, the trophy he liked best too --- one he happened to mention earlier in the night as being awesome, assuaging bunnyhugger's fears that she had made disappointing trophies this time around --- and DMC took second. This meant FAE won the Fear and Trembling tournament for the fourth time in a row and it's kind of a shame we can't give them permanent possession of a trophy. They just have to take home this year's first-place trophy again.

Still can't believe I made the cut but there's the trophy to prove it.

Now I'm going to close out Christmas lights pictures; I promised you I was going to be more sparing in these, didn't I? Go ahead and guess what amusement park photographs come up next.

Pterodactyl light that's stationary and not animated, but the streaks in my windshield give it a little vibe of having just landed anyway.

And I'm always going to be fond of showing a sea serpent. As I recall the serpent actually has only one tail, with the end alternating, and my picture got both lit at once.

This Santa alligator looks like they've taken all the cold medicine.

From the Noah's Ark display here's two raccoons, two squirrels, and two frogs hanging out. The rest of the Ark is on the other side of the street.

Oh, bunch of people pointing at a lad in a basket, wonder what comes next.

The reindeer are so glad that I'm leaving. You can see a bit of the raceway stadium stairs behind, in the picture, that you couldn't possibly see in person.

Trivia: One of the Sanskrit words for 'Wednesday' was 'Budhuvasara', meaning 'Awakening'. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.

Currently Reading: Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space, Adam Higginbotham.

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holidays,
pinball

All the way ago last Tuesday bunnyhugger hosted this year's Fear and Trembling pinball tournament. This is her pin-golf event, where the goal is not to score points but to complete objectives in as few balls as possible. This is a fun and frustrating format, for everyone. Us, for the challenge of figuring out what tables to use and what objectives to set on them. Everyone else, for finding that they can't manage to do something on purpose that they always do incidentally while playing. Sometimes your best approach is to ignore the goal and just play a good game, but people only resort to that in desperation.

Speaking of desperation: one extra challenge we put on ourselves is that the tournament offers a player's choice of objectives, so we need to find tables that have two clear objectives that aren't just ``get a bunch of points''. Ideally they should be objectives you can make progress on that's saved, ball-to-ball, and should make it really clear when you've made the goal so you don't have to guess what happened. The point of this is to make choosing, and knowing you might have succeeded if you'd picked the other objective, part of the game.

Ironically, we passed on the challenge of picking which tables, turning the choice over to a random number generator. Well, we feel like we always pick the same games and after long enough you run out of different goals. The random number generator picked an interesting enough course, though, including a couple games I really like, at least one that I don't but am somehow good at, and didn't repeat too many from the last couple years' of games.

Picking objectives was annoying, in part because many modern pinball games have gotten complicated to the point there are jillions of things to do and the video screens, for all the space they have, don't always persistently show you what happened. Ultimately we only had to bump one game from the main bank to backup for want of being sure we had a clean objective. And there was testing, because with stuff going on we didn't have enough time at our local barcade to try them all out. I went two days in a row in the leadup to the tournament to try out objectives I wasn't sure about, but still left a couple games --- like Medieval Madness, which I've played so many times in person and in virtual form that I doubt there's anything I don't know --- with objectives that were technically untested.

Still, what's the worst that could happen?

That teased, let's wrap up photos of our trip to Crossroads Village from the last week of last year. I'm almost up to within the past ten months!

Another intersection with a nice lighted fence and some really good reflections here.

Here's the village's central tree and the reflections in the slush around it.

Not Santa! Just one of his many statues waving around the place. Note the over-decorated tree in the background, one of the village's centerpiece items.

The opera house and the coffee shop here, near the end of the night. The gift shop has already closed and is dark.

The tree wrapped up tight in lights. I think this is the time we overheard someone asking and told them that yeah, we'd been here in the summer and the tree was still wrapped, just unlit.

And a parting view of the train station and a lot of wet planks of wood.

Trivia: When developing the first periodic table of the elements Dimitri Mendeleyev supposed that the atomic weights of either tellurium (128) or iodine (127) must be wrong because tellurium clearly preceded iodine in order. Mendeleyev was correct about the ordering, but did not know of isotopes, or that there is enough abundant tellurium-130 that an unrefined sample's average weight will be closer to 128, while iodine-127 is the only common isotope of that element. Source: Nature's Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements, John Emsley.

Currently Reading: Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space, Adam Higginbotham.

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Saturday we hoped to do a couple fun things. mystee was going to be in the area and we'd hoped to meet up sometime, but finding a date and time we'd be free was hard. But there was already a furry meetup planned for that day, first at an orchard/cider mill we'd never heard of before, and then going over to The Arcade in Brighton. This seemed like a good destination to mystee and to us as well and we figured to get together then.

So it won't surprise you that we got off late to this get-together we wanted to attend with a friend we haven't seen in ages. I should have asked when to set an alarm for before going to bed the night before but I didn't, and we got started later than we should, and slower than we should because somehow we forgot the whole world is construction anymore. Also we had to park farther from the cider mill than we expected.

Happily, finding furries was no real problem, and mystee and her posse were almost as easy. There were a lot of regular people delighted to see strange mascots wandering around the midst of an already busy, cheerful day at a packed cider mill. It was in the 70s and rain was forecast for sometime much later in the day, so everyone in eastern Michigan was there.

So we settled in and had some cider and some mill^W doughnuts, and talked a fair bit, especially about all the interesting things there were to see and do around here. We did none of them, because almost on the dot as we finished our cider and doughnuts the storm clouds we had all agreed looked like rain in a couple hours turned out to be lots of rain right now, right on us, and we fled for our cars. This proved to be a mistake as the rain was only pouring for a couple minutes and by the time we were in the car, spongee-ing off my coati tail and bunnyhugger's jackalope costume it had settled to a gentler mist. We'd have done better to stay under cover, if there were nearly enough for crowds like were there.

But this broke up the cider mill gathering, right about at the 3:00 that we were supposed to go over to The Arcade anyway. We cursed ourselves, me lighter than bunnyhugger, for getting there so late, especially after we learned that mystee wasn't going to go to the Arcade after all.

So at The Arcade while we knew Vix who was there we didn't know hardly anybody, which didn't stop people from coming up to admire bunnyhugger's costume, including one guy at the supermarket next door where we parked and who didn't know there were furries in the area, cool. (A smaller number of people admired my tail, which was of course a gift from bunnyhugger.) This wasn't bad, particularly, although it was very loud and crowded. We were able to work out the rules for a couple objectives for an upcoming pin-golf tournament bunnyhugger is running --- watch this space --- and to play the Pinball Brothers' new game Abba, which was fun but prone to draining, like, a lot.

The day ended up short of what we'd hoped it would be, but at least driving home we got to see lightning tearing the sky open, which was very exciting to drive though.

Now, some more pictures of Marvin's from our farewell visit.

CST collecting his second trophy of the night, for Jaws. Ah, but who would win the third and final, The Uncanny X-Men?

Wait a second ... me? I won it? ... Oh yeah! (The 2nd there is the playing order; I pick second when I have the chance. My score is the highest.)

Old furnace clock that I noticed for the first time on the floor between the Venom and Deadpool tables.

And a Popeye the Sailor clock I've seen many times before. I don't know why his shirt is white except maybe to give the center something to look at.

Peering slightly upward at the coin-op merry-go-round and some of the many planes in the area. Also another copy of that Mickey Mouse candy factory where turtles are covered in chocolate and sent out as food.

Warning sign for the merry-go-round that seems like it could use one more - mark. Also some of the coin ops, like the teddy bears at the center bottom, or the 'Love Shack' cherub nearby it.

Trivia: The inaugural broadcast of WLW's 500,000 Watt transmitter on 2 May 1934 was officially turned on at 9:03 pm by President Franklin Roosevelt in the White House, tapping the same golden telegraph key that Wilson had used to signal the opening of the Panama Canal. Source: Crosley: Two Brothers and a Business Empire that Transformed the Nation, Rusty McClure with David Stern and Michael A Banks. It took a long while for the tubes to warm up to that much power and they were still warming up when Roosevelt hit his key.

Currently Reading: Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space, Adam Higginbotham.

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Page Summary

There'll Be No Year Without a Santa Claus, and All the Joy That Santa Brings
It Was a Year Without a Santa Claus, the Worst We've Ever Had
Ooh, It's a Funny Game, Don't Believe That It's All the Same
We Can Make It if We Try
You Got the Power
You Gotta Fight for Your Right to Party
How Nature Points Up the Folly of Man
When My Eyes Beheld an Eerie Sight
I Should Have Known She Would Win in the End
She Was a Girl in a Million My Friend
Whether Times Are Good or Bad, Happy or Sad
You Know Where to Put the Cork
As He Wades Through the Buildings Toward the Center of Town
I Staggered Back to the Underground
Spooky, Scary Skeletons Send Shivers Down Your Spine
Right Behind You I See the Millions
When You Find Me in Your Mailbox Cut the String and Let Me Out
I Will Choose a Path That's Clear
I Can Dig It, He Can Dig It, She Can Dig It, We Can Dig It
Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree With Anyone Else but Me

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Style Credit

Style: Elegant Notebook for Gold Leaf by rosecarmine
Resources: Yusuke Kamiyamane and Atle Mo