austin_dern

Next thing in our adventures? Another night at Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum. I took fewer pictures than I really should have so, sorry. But here's what I have.

Pinball Row. Note that the Venom game is updating, one of those little surprise things pinball games can do now, even if it's minutes before a tournament where this game is going to be played. Fun!

The other half of Pinball Row, going back to the Revenge From Mars that still had my pre-Covid grand champion score (and would through January, when this location closed).

And of course I put up a killer game of Attack From Mars, but not in tournament play. Just for fun. What's the fun in doing something really well just for your own gratification?

Some of the Chuck E Cheese bird animatronics.

Oh yeah, also had a killer game of Toy Story 4, again where it didn't do me any good but be fun and get me on top of the daily high score board. Also more games should turn on the daily high score board.

In the back, near the women's bathrooms, was this array of pictures of Riverview Park (I believe Chicago) along with many ride and redemption tickets for it.

Other stuff in back, including a bunch of posters for mutoscope movies, not all of them about mutoscope salesmen stealing away businessmen's wives.

Another typical view of Marvin's. A slightly dated promise of souvenirs, some old (reproduction?) freak show posters, a Mister Peanut that looks off-brand, some neon, and a black-and-white picture of some kind of store.

Further along that area there's a lighthouse, flags of the world, and a coin-op mechanical (nonfunctional, I think) of a woman in an electric chair.

And here's our old friend the Cardiff Giant!

Behind the counter you can see part of an old magazine or newspaper print ballyhooing the giant. It's weird that it's obscured by the ticket redemption station.

And then a sign for Marvin's advertising itself.

Trivia: In stowing gear for reentry the Gemini 4 astronauts put the used film cassettes in the middle food box. The cameras, some refuse (including three defecation bags), the exerciser, and some other small bits of gear were put in the left-hand aft food box. McDivitt kept the EVA suit sleeves, blanket, and launch day urine bags underneath his legs against his seat. Source: Gemini 4: An Astronaut Steps Into The Void, David J Shayler.

Currently Reading: Michigan History, March/April 2025, Editor Sarah Hamilton. With an article on the time Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy recorded a show in Decatur, where it turns out he came from.

Saturday afternoon, after ERR's Celebration of Life, was also a women's pinball tournament, which was about three hours or so, and saw me put back in the commentator's booth to natter about pinball or whatever came into mind. But that wasn't especially burdensome apart from sometimes it'd be nice to just go play pinball for three hours uninterrupted. I have the chance to do this most every evening and never take it, though.

Sunday morning saw our other big social obligation for the weekend. PCL, the most enthusiastic member of the league --- and the one who's set up the streaming rig for pinball events --- wanted to hold an end-of-season pinball party. He suggested a couple dates which all made sense, except ... a weekend bunnyhugger and I would be out of town. Another weekend we'd be out of town. Memorial Day weekend when everyone might be out of town. Finally this past Sunday, after league finals but before the end-of-season zen (split-flipper) tournament, was the pick.

He had it at his and his wife's house, the one we visited a couple months ago. He particularly wanted to show off his pizza oven, some portable porch thing that heats up to like a billion degrees and will cook the pizza in a minute or less so don't stop turning it. Also to show off his new King Kong pinball machine, companion to the Godzilla game he got a few months ago, and got delivered just last Monday.

It was a pretty good party, with a healthy number of league people attending. Including, in a surprise, SCS, one of our old pinball friends from Grand Rapids. He'd had a birthday party the day before that we couldn't make, but he said that was fine, especially as something like fifty people did. And despite that he had several boxes of leftover cupcakes to give; we had some with coffee break today.

Part of the event was actually rolling out and making your own pizzas, although even with as many people who were there there was more pizza to eat than there was time or stomach available. bunnyhugger ended up making a simple margherita-style pizza we took home. FAE and MAG were among the people who leapt at the chance to roll out their own dough and make pies as well, and they looked like pretty good ones.

As to pinball. PCL tried holding a closest-to-the-pin tournament on Godzilla, seeing who could get nearest to a given score (their house number, times a thousand) without going over. As seems to always happen at these someone (PCL) got amazingly close, within a couple tens of thousands, on a game like this so close it seems impossible to do better. And then MWS went and did better.

The most astounding thing of the day was when MAG and FAE, playing King Kong split-flipper, didn't just have a great game, but had a game so good they set the Grand Champion score. Luckily, PCL has his game set to accept up to ten-character high score entries. Unluckily, FAE made a typo while entering their team name and now it stands there, MAG AN. Happens to us all.

When we arrived we weren't sure how long the event would run or how long we should stay even given that. We ended up spending about six hours there, and don't regret it, except that it was a lot of time this weekend doing stuff out and with other people, and it's weird to have the start of the workweek be the break.

But now we get to another century-plus-old-ride at Kennywood. Know what it is?

This is not the wishing well, despite the stones much like the well was made of and the water much like you find in a well. This is an artificial waterfall that's part of the facade of the Old Mill, the tunnel-of-love ride.

Despite it being a quite hot, sunny day the line for the ride was ... not ridiculously long, really, and we went for it.

The Old Mill's National Historic District sign now reflects past names including Panama Canal, Fairyland Floats, and Garfield's Nightmare incarnations.

Thinking it over I'm not sure there's any part of the ride where you see the water wheel in full or doing work or anything. It's just an obscured prop.

Boats ready for the loading. They've got good capacity so if people didn't mind sharing boats you could get a lot of people on the ride at once.

And here we are ready to take the ride. (Which I didn't attempt to photograph; it's dark and we're always moving not-quite-smoothly.) Sky Rocket is the coaster in back; more on that to come.

Trivia: The handbill, The Vertue of the Coffee Drink, promoting the opening of London's first coffee house in 1652 explained coffee's medical benefits, claiming it to be effective against sore eyes, headache, coughs, dropsy, gout, scurvy, and to prevent ``Mis-carryings in Child-bearing Women''. It also noted that it would ``prevent Drowsiness, and make one fit for business, if one have occasion to Watch'' and warned ``you are not to Drink of it after Supper, unless you intend to be watchful, for it will hinder sleep for 3 or 4 hours''. Source: A History of the World in Six Glasses, Tom Standage.

Currently Reading: The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore, Evan Friss. It's (so far) a chapter each on the history of particularly key bookstores so there's a lot of detail about neurospicy people.

Back to finals, B Division. After the mishap on The Beatles and her 2-1 win over DJN bunnyhugger's next opponent was BJ, the last other player not to have lost a best-of-three match. Whatever happened both would take home at least the third-place trophy. bunnyhugger had pick of the first game, and chose Attack From Mars, and won. BJ had pick of the second game, and chose Stranger Things, which has pretty near the same layout and a very similar basic ruleset, to the point FAE accurately dubbed it ``Vaporwave Attack From Mars''. bunnyhugger won that game too, and came back to the scoring table --- where I, having no other pinball to play, was now routing traffic --- and misunderstood the standings online to think she had won the B Division.

Not yet. She had to beat whoever won the Second Chance bracket, and it was still possible she'd lose that round. But she could not do worse than second place, now. This involved some waiting. Lansing Pinball League has always had the Second Chance Bracket be best-of-three play; most other leagues use a single game. The result is there's always a delay for finals. Second Chance can't have a winner until the Winners Bracket has completed semifinals, and then has to play a best-of-three match.

Beating everyone else in the Second Chance Bracket was DJN, who'd been beaten by bunnyhugger earlier. DJN picked Foo Fighters, a potentially long-playing game, and won that. BJ picked Star Wars, very prone to being a long-playing game, and won that. DJN now picked Pulp Fiction, the retro-80s-style game, and won that, giving BJ a third-place B Division finish, and earning the right to take on bunnyhugger for finals.

If bunnyhugger won, the tournament was done, as DJN would have lost his second best-of-three match. If DJN won, they'd go on to a second best-of-three match. So he had to beat bunnyhugger in four games of the next six. Formidable.

bunnyhugger had pick of the first game, and finally used her chance to play Dungeons and Dragons, winning with --- I think she told me --- one of her best Town Celebration Multiballs ever. Then it was DJN's pick and he chose Deadpool, ordinarily a game bunnyhugger plays only under protest. But this time, Deadpool liked her better, and she swept DJN in this, finals for the B Division. She would be taking home yet another first-place division trophy.

This all wrapped up, of course, well before the A Division finished. I think it even wrapped up before the side tournament happened. It was about midnight when DMC finally beat RED, two games to one, to get into finals, and when FAE beat RED two games to one to win the Second Chance Bracket. At bunnyhugger's urging I went home to sleep, as I had to be up at 7 to be in to the office at 8 am. Already the bar staff was turning off games, as it was looking like a slow night and they'd want to be ready to close as soon as possible. (RED assured bunnyhugger it was fine to turn on games as they were needed, and yes, the staff was fine with that).

So here I leave behind the events that I witnessed, and move into hearsay from bunnyhugger. The event she most feared as that these two titans would play so long that the bar would close under them, foiling the entire point of restricting the A Division to eight players. They could manage it easily; if they split the wins right they could need to play six games and two hours is not really enough time for that. As it happened the first round was a 2-0 sweep, the shortest it could be. The catch is, it's FAE who won both Foo Fighters (a long-tending game) and John Wick (not generally, but a good player will spin it out a long while). If DMC had won the night would be over. Now, with FAE and DMC both having lost one best-of-three round they had to play one more, winner takes first.

And here DMC picked out the game bunnyhugger most dreaded coming into play: James Bond 007. If I can make a match on that game take 50 minutes imagine what two plausible candidates for state champion can do. But it didn't come out quite so long as that. And DMC won. FAE made a bold pick for the next game, Medieval Madness. Any good player can play this forever, but the best players never touch the game anymore because they know it inside out. And here ... again, DMC won, with some flourishes such as starting the rare four-ball Multiball Madness.

This all finished around 1:30 am, so there's a chance they missed Last Call. When I got home from the office bunnyhugger quizzed me on what I imagined happened and I was right in the main, with my biggest miss being I supposed DMC had picked Rush, a game he can play for longer than a Rush album. (In fact, DMC had picked Rush much earlier in the night, securing a win against JAB.) The important things, though, are that we got a winner and it didn't require stopping the match and picking up again sometime later.

Still, Saturday I did quip to someone that league finals just ended ``25 minutes ago'', and was believed until bunnyhugger explained I was just doing that thing again. Well, it could have happened if the bar opened early enough on Saturday.

You know what was open a much earlier Saturday, back in July? The Noah's Ark ride at Kennywood. Want to see how that developed from yesterday's pictures? Look on ...

Huh. Wonder what a silhouette of animals leaving the Ark signifies in the Noah's Ark ride.

Oh. We're done and back outside again.

The new National Historic District sign for the Noah's Ark. The previous one didn't reflect Blackpool Pleasure Beach closing their Noah's Ark ride in favor of security theatrics.

The Lucky Stand, unexplained survivor of the 1930s, did not have its National Historic District sign replaced, which I choose to believe is a sly joke on the park's part.

What do you get to if you're going from the Noah's Ark past the Lucky Stand? Why, the Turtle, of course.

The new National Historic District sign also reflects the loss of the other operating Tumble Bug. It's a little weird there isn't a modern version of the ride being made, unless the Tilt-a-Whirl is meant to take its place for rotary motion on hills.

Trivia: In the fall of 1818, the United States Treasury ordered the Bank of the United States to deliver three million dollars in gold to the French government, as payment towards the principal on the Louisiana Purchase (as specified by the 1803 purchase agreements). At the time the Bank had total specie of about two million dollars, and had to turn to the London credit markets for the remainder. Source: Wedding of the Waters: The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation, Peter L Bernstein. The Bank would go on to demand hard money from its creditors, resulting in, among other things, the Panic of 1819, the United States's first home-grown depression.

Currently Reading: Miscellaneous comic books.

Three weeks ago the 22nd season of the Lansing Pinball League had its eighth and final regular-season meeting. Yesterday being the second Tuesday in May it was time for finals. This season the top, A, division was shrunk from its ``half of all eligible members'' to ``eight people'' in the hope of having finals that could wrap up by the time the bar closed at 2 am. One consequence: while I finished in A again, I was one of the two weak links. Not much hope of advancement, unless I got lucky and some of the real power players had bad nights. But that does happen, so, while I was up against FAE in the right round of the double-elimination tournament, it wasn't absurd to think I could win.

In fact, the first game --- The Addams Family --- bode well for the night. FAE put up a major lead on the second ball, managing to get the high-scoring modes of Hit Cousin Itt and The Mamushka going simultaneously, as well as getting some nice extra five-million-point shots on the Swamp and Thing and such. But my second ball I managed to get a good rhythm going of shoot the ramp, start a mode, and even collected a big points payout in Fester's Tunnel Hunt, a mode I never do anything with. In the end I caught up to FAE, on the bonus of my last ball, and took a surprise-to-me win. Good start for the night.

As loser of the first match FAE got to pick the next game, and chose The Beatles, which you'd think would be a gift to me. It's one of my favorite games and I'm one of the few who regularly plays it. I can almost anytime put up two to three million points, often enough to win a head-to-head match. Except. The Beatles was also the side tournament game that I played before finals started, in a group with FAE, and they'd seen something horrible: I didn't have it today. Sometimes you just don't have the timing right on a game, and I did not have The Beatles right, at least not soon enough, and played a lousy game in the side tournament. I would do the same here, putting up a better game but still not breaking two million, not enough to win.

So my pick of third, tiebreaking game. I'd been thinking of Cactus Canyon, but chose instead Metallica, a game that usually treats me well. Based on FAE's first two balls, I made a good choice as they were not doing very well getting a game together. Unfortunately, neither was I; it took me to the third ball to get the Sparky Multiball going, and that's usually something I can get ball one. When I finished there was still a slender hope that FAE might have a poor ball, but they didn't, and they won and knocked me into the Loser Second Chance Bracket.

After a while I got my first opponent in the Second Chance Bracket: BMK, who by the way is one of the 700 highest-ranked players worldwide, these days. BMK chose The Simpsons Pinball Party, which left me feeling pretty good; this is another game that I often do well on. I'd need luck on my side, but not outrageous fortune. BMK broke six million points on the first ball, while I didn't get more than a half-million, but that's not an insurmountable difference. No; insurmountable is the 35 million points he put up on the second ball, and topped on ball three with another twenty million. It would require the best ball I had ever had, better even than the killer game I had on The Simpsons at Pinburgh in 2017, to catch up. But I put up that killer game on The Simpsons on a Pinburgh-grade tournament and Lansing Pinball League has much more forgiving tables. Well, I managed to beat the replay score, at least, but didn't come near BMK's finish.

So my pick, and I needed something I could win on. Or at least would have fun playing on. I picked James Bond, maybe the only modern Stern Pinball game that I can seriously compete with the likes of BMK on; somehow, I just know it. Except this time around I seemed unable to even make the skill shot, putting up ten million points in two balls while BMK got to around 350 million.

And with one ball to save myself from elimination, and the need to do four things --- start a Villain mode, start Jetpack Multiball, start Bird One Multiball, and then start the James Bond 007 mini-wizard mode --- what else was there to do but not lose the ball? (The mini-wizard mode also requires starting a Henchman mode, but I had managed that, and fortunately it doesn't require finishing the mode.) And the funny thing is, I managed it. Got a Villain going, brought Jetpack Multiball into that. Got a Q Mission going, which isn't necessary but can give you a bunch of points. Got the Bird One Multiball going. Along the way sometimes I got playfield multipliers going and turned the points I was earning into double or triple what it would have been. I had a lousy James Bond 007 mini-wizard mode but, you know? That didn't matter. I put up over a half-billion points that ball, and got a 200 million point lead on BMK that he'd have to make up on one ball. Not bad.

Well, dear reader, he did it. The clutch performance that got me a half-billion points was a good one, and let me salvage some pride out of my night's performance. But I was knocked out of the tournament, first one in A Division, and would finish in the bottom of the bracket. Some seasons are like that.

Here's a different season --- last summer --- and some more Kennywood pictures, from the old owners.

As a Saturday in late July it was busy at Kennywood and here's how busy: the carousel queue ran past a full ride cycle. Those grand carousels have enormous ride capacity --- a typical one can fit something like 496 people at once --- so when you have more people than can fit on at once you've got a lot of people in the park.

Tracking shot of the tiger in motion. Despite this being a very bright noontime picture there's some effective blur.

And here we are getting ready to ride the carousel or, as you see while on the ride, views of lots of rear ends.

Or you can get side-eyed by the horse looking back at you and totally not judging you.

Nice look back at one of the horses. Note the face in the breastplate there.

And a more usual side view of the animals.

Trivia: A letter from Pope Leo X to the English court, in 1514, appealing for astronomers or theologians to advise on calendare reform, included the lamentation that ``Jews and heretics'' were laughing at the flawed Christian calendar. No reply from the English monarchy is recorded, and Leo sent three more letters on the topic which are archived. Source: The Calendar: The 5000-Year Struggle to Align the Clock with the Heavens --- And What Happened to the Missing Ten Days, David Ewing Duncan.

Currently Reading: The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts, Silvia Ferrara.

Something from the Pinball At The Zoo afterparty I forgot to mention, in explicably. The lineup of games at MJS's pole barn has changed from last year, as you'd expect. New to the place is an old game, almost as old as pinball can get. It's Golden Harvest, a Bally game from 1935, or a dozen years before ``flippers'' came into being. It's a game much like those cheap plastic toys you get that call themselves 'pinball' games but are just about plunging a ball bearing into a hole or a small scoop. It's not those cheap plastic toys' fault that the game of pinball has moved on from that pure-mechanical style. But Golden Harvest is not just a flipperless game. It's more sinister.

Now and then you hear about a city repealing the laws against pinball machines that everyone is stunned to learn were ever on the books; Ann Arbor lightened up its rules just this past month, for example. Or you hear about Roger Sharpe and his ``called shot'' that ``saved'' pinball. And it always sounds like a funny moral panic. In loosening the pinball rules one of the Ann Arbor city councilmembers said something like, ``Heavens to Betsy, a pinball parlor!''

Thing is, when pinball was busy getting banned, it's because it was if not a gambling machine, at least awfully close to it. You put your nickel in and if you're lucky, you get a payout. Golden Harvest is one such game. There is no free play here; MJS set a cup full of nickels beside the machine so people could get their ten balls. And if you do it right, getting balls into the right combinations of holes, you get a payout of ten cents, fifteen, a quarter ... all the way up to $1.50, a rather nice 30x return.

As with all pinball, you get your points by completing sets of things. In this case, getting a ball in the 'Harvest Moon' hole up top and then combinations of, say, both cabbages or all three potatoes. Or all four ears of corn. For the higher payouts you need to not just get several targets, but targets that themselves can only be gotten by rebounding a ball from near the bottom of the playfield back up. I managed one of those shots, once, although not to get any of the other ears of corn that would get the $1.50 payout.

I did play several rounds, getting the basics down right. As with even modern pinball you want to launch the ball softly, just enough to get it into play. A fast ball rolls right over the holes it's supposed to drop into. And you have to nudge, patting the game to slow the ball and to guide it where you want. I never got it to a payout, but boy, it was hard not to think just one more game ...

Other people did get payouts, although I didn't get to see how the payout mechanism worked. Turns out there's a small tray underneath the coin slot that you slide out when you get your win. Here's a picture, not of MJS's setup, showing it slid out.

I've played other 1930s pinball machines, pre-flipper and pre-scoring-display and all that. But this is the first time I've played one that was an actual payout machine, ready to give you coins if you manage this game of skill luckily enough.

And now in the Ionia Free Fair we're on the verge of a major discovery. Does it come in this set of pictures? No, but there is a surprise anyway ...

Slightly better framing of the Welcome to Arnold Amusements Midways, in terms of centering the Ferris wheel behind it, but I think I'd have better picture if I had levelled on the sign rather than the horizon you can hardly see anyway. But look at that nice cloud too.

Don't have enough tickets for the carousel? For a quarter, or possibly more, you can get the coin-op ride of Star.

But here's the merry-go-round, far off from the band organ but pretty centrally placed anyway.

Huh. I would have sworn Phantom's Revenge was a kiddie coaster at Kennywood but, you know, seeing is believing.

And here's the Alien Abduction Gravitron, which bunnyhugger would not ride and which I wouldn't ask her to. But I like the planet stuff there.

Here's the Fun Slides, reenacting the dramatic Moon Gun launch of George Méliès's A Voyage To The Moon.

Trivia: V-E Day, the 8th of May, 1945, was Harry Truman's birthday. It was also the day an army truck finally moved the Trumans' household effects from Blair House to the White House. Source: 1945: The War That Never Ended, Gregor Dallas. Eleanor Roosevelt had needed twenty trucks to move her and Franklin Roosevelt's effects out.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Volume 60: Wimpy's Walking Handbags, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

Happy Doctorversary, dear bunnyhugger. ... I am sorry that this Pinball At The Zoo report happened to fall on it. If I'd realized I would have postponed writing the house-curse post a day.

Pinball At The Zoo women's semifinals. If bunnyhugger can play another round like the one she just had she'll be in finals and basically assured of a top position in women's finals next January. Also after a killer performance on Venom, and a great demonstration of skill on Creature, she's ... maybe not going to have top-seed-in-the-group GCH pick those games against her. Hard to say. Depends whether she was paying attention and how much she thinks those were fluke events.

Also the Ypsi Pinball camera stays with bunnyhugger's group. I don't know why. The highest seed still in the tournament was in the other group. Maybe it was just a 50-50 chance.

Anyway, I see this starting and I get out of the way lest my watching, even on stream, jinx bunnyhugger. I must have seen too much: she has a lousy game of Uncanny X-Men, good for only third place. There's no way she's moving on unless she gets a first on one of the next to games, and maybe not even then. The next game is Centaur, which has treated her pretty well all weekend ... and not this time. She gets a last and at this point ... actually, given the point distribution it's possible for her to move into the next round, but she'll have to win the final game --- Deadpool --- and then if the other players finish in the right order, she'll have eto win a playoff after that. It doesn't matter. She loses Deadpool, coming in last and worrying that everyone on-stream thinks she looks like a fool. My recollection is at least Chat thought, aw, she got some bad luck there.

It's a disappointing finish, especially coming immediately after a killer round. And especially because just making the final four would have all but guaranteed her placement in women's finals. But it's not as bad as might be. Five of the seven people finishing above her are from out of state, and while it's possible that, say, KEG might come out from Chicago or GCH from Greater Toronto Megalopolis for finals, more likely they'd play closer to home. With her finish bunnyhugger launched herself into 7th place on the women's side of tournaments, or fifth place among those likely to attend, and she can focus on maintaining rather than securing her position now.

FAE, who'd ridden with us Saturday as well, didn't make finals in anything; they were 25th-ranked in the race for 16 spots for Main Tournament B Division. If I could've swapped my Legends of Valhalla score with them they'd have been in, but you're not allowed to trade like that for some reason. Too bad.

We hung around a while, of course, me watching the end of women's main where KEG and two other women managed to tie for second place, and so had to have a three-way playoff to see who got which trophy. And to see the end of B Division finals, where ACE and RED ... got into a tie for third place, and had to have a two-way playoff to see who got which trophy.

And there was other stuff going on at the expo, even in these last hours for it. One of the vendors had a very musty manilla envelope full of spare parts for Tri-Zone, and I got that; it's nothing that we need right now --- plastics for the playfield and such --- but if we ever do need them, they're nice to have on hand.

Also the biggest disappointment of the weekend? The people with the exotic sodas did not have any Moxie, for two years in a row now.

Most interesting side item was a pinball museum in (somewhere) presenting a couple of Python Anghelo games. Not just games he'd designed, including the quite rare soccer-themed Flipper Football, but --- they claimed --- actual specific games from his personal collection. Including, like, the original playfield of Taxi when they used 'Marilyn' as one of the taxi passengers, before someone from Marilyn Monroe's estate made it clear that they had to play money for that and Williams Pinball changed it to Lola.

And the thing that was still holding a line when the rest of the show was packing up? A guy with his homebrewed pinball game, Sonic Spinball. A table based more or less on various Sonic the Hedgehog games that I don't understand, selectable at the start, along with a basic but respectable Pat Lawlor-esque table design. The guy had created it, originally, as his calling card to get into professional pinball design and it worked, getting him a job at the boutique maker American Pinball ... until they laid him and many other people off recently. But hey, he got to talk with Gary Stern and a bunch of Stern Pinball people, not to mention just about everyone who didn't spend every waking moment at the tournament. In a neat trick the game can be operated like normal from flippers and the plunger, or --- and he showed this off --- by a Sega handheld game controller. He said he'd thought about putting a shaker motor in the pinball machine so you could hit a button and 'nudge', or at least rattle, the physical game while playing on the controller. He also showed how silly this all could be by standing at the back of the table and playing by controller.

Anyway, after the long line I got the chance to play, poorly. FAE had a fairly respectable game, while bunnyhugger had one of those balls going on so long it got to be a little embarrassing, and she worried other people wouldn't get the chance to play at all. But all games, even runaway killer ones, end, and she got to have a really good bit of play on a homebrew table.

Back now to the Ionia Free Fair and some of the exhibitions.

Bunches of lawn and farm equipment on display in another part of the Floral Building. Also some vintage signs.

And you see they also had your dad's garage here.

As well as the owners guide for every car your dad owned.

Some vintage Ionia Free Fair stuff, plus miscellaneous Christmas things like Ray Coniff albums.

And then out the back, looking towards the Grand River ... say, what's that there?

Yes, looking out the doorway gave me this picture, now an Art!

Trivia: Algae use molybdenum as part of the digesting of sulphur, converting sulphur it to dimethyl sulfoxide and then by a molybdenum-based enzyme, to the volatile dimethyl sulfide. From there it rises into the atmosphere, oxidizing it into methanesulfonic acid, which triggers cloud formation. Source: Molecules at an Exhibition: The Science of Everyday Life, John Emsley.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Volume 59: Popeye's Carnival, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle. Popeye accidentally buys a circus? Huh, I wonder if it's in financial --- oh, they don't have a tent.

When last I reported Pinball At The Zoo action, it was about how bunnyhugger was at the end of Thursday still qualified as one of the top sixteen competitors for Women's, but she feared that Friday's qualifying time, and new round of players, would knock her out. She'd have to spend Friday shoring up her position. This would eat up time and entries, among other things limiting what she could do to qualify for Classics or Main. Also taking her away from things like talking with WVL or walking around to see the games on the floor. I had the time that I could tease her with the promise that someone she wanted to see was in the far left corner of the expo hall. She did manage to find time for that, but was confused why I'd point her to a vendor who seemed faintly familiar but ... so what? And then she realized what must be going on, and saw the FunHouse game there. (For sale for $6,000, which seems a bit much, even for Rudy.)

Incidentally the vendor did have a worn but recognizable FunHouse playfield for sale, and if we didn't already have the Popeye Saves The Earth playfield it might have made a good surprise anniversary present. For the record, it will not, at least not from me and not this year, and I am not setting up some kind of fake out by doing this.

For Friday, bunnyhugger figured the strategy was to try playing the games she'd done weakest in --- in terms of the ranking she got, rather than how well she did compared to what she'd expect --- in the hopes of breaking through to a higher position. Or even getting a lucky game that really blows up.

This worked out exactly right a couple times. On Centaur, a 1980 game with a shockingly large number of multiballs (you can get five balls going at once, somehow!) she got a string of great play together and came up just under two million points, one of the ten best scores put on the game all weekend. On Venom she had a similar breakthrough, putting up nearly a quarter-billion points and again getting a top-ten position. (Aide whispers in my ear.) Sorry, a top-eleven position. Still, play like that on four games and you're in a great spot.

She did not play like that on four games, unfortunately. She played a lot of Wheel Of Fortune --- an early-2000s Stern that almost everyone has forgotten --- without improving her standing. A lot of Creature From The Black Lagoon with again only marginal improvement. When qualifying ended at 10 pm --- there would be like two hours more in the morning, but everyone would be there and playing as much as possible so she couldn't count on getting any games in --- she was in 17th place.

This made for a miserable drive to Taco Bell for dinner, as you'd think. Things got marginally better by the time we were there, though; bunnyhugger had bounced up to 16th place. This is the sort of weirdness that will happen with this sort of best-game qualifying, as person A's good game can cause person B's best-four-games standing to drop below person C who was not involved. Particularly since the top two finishers get a little points bonus, so if you had the best score on a game and someone else beats you, you drop three points while someone way down in the standings drops at most one.

Still, it meant our drive home was a lot of me promising bunnyhugger that she was a good player and that I believed she would be in the playoffs when Women's qualifying ended at 10:50 or whatever it was the next day. I was able to provide some very useful intelligence about Creature From The Black Lagoon: first, how to get the jackpot in multiball. Creature is a dot-matrix-display game, but it's early enough it still has the late-solid-state ethos of the jackpot being a huge payoff but at least as huge a pain to get.

So the theme of Creature is that you're at the drive-in, and multiball is starting the movie, where you're searching for the Creature and the Girl he's abducted. Once you do that --- by shooting two of three scoops on the playfield --- you're urged to shoot the snack bar, and if you do that the game urges you to shoot the jackpot. The game also urges you to shoot the left ramp, and that fooled bunnyhugger into thinking that was the jackpot. No: the left ramp is a shot that builds up to double scoring on the playfield. The jackpot is shooting the snack bar yet again. And then you can shoot into the pop bumpers to build a super jackpot that I have made, like, once ever and maybe three times in simulation.

Also, since she was having trouble shooting up the center for the ``Move Your Car'' points grab, I pointed out what you get if you shoot the left scoop to complete the K-I-S-S sequence. In a normal game, the second time you do this it lights an extra ball. In tournament mode, that second time around gives you five million points. That's maybe a tenth of what the jackpot is, but, especially in tournament conditions, a safe five-million-point shot is not to be sneered at.

I also learned that for all that I play Centaur pretty well at MJS's pole barn and also in simulator, I don't know as much about just what starts multiball as I thought. Back home I had to look up and learned how you can build the ORBS multiball up to three- or four-ball multiball. I felt scales falling from my eyes, at least.

But would any of this help bunnyhugger?

And now let's venture back to the Ionia Free Fair and admire the ... we're not up to the rides yet. Don't worry. We'll get there.

Here's the corn 'sandbox' used to lure children unsuspectingly into goat transformation. Why did you think they call them ``kids''?

Your classic Victorian cabinet of eggs, here.

In pigeon culture, this is considered a McMansion.

I guess we're a little early to see the peacocks.

Ah, and here's one of those goats I was telling you about earlier. Kid seems unsure about trampolines.

Among the things I can't explain about this statue: why is it leaking?

Trivia: One of the Sanskrit words for 'Thursday' was 'Saumayavara', honoring Jupiter and meaning 'great master'. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.

Currently Reading: Force: What It Means to Push and Pull, Slip and Grip, Start and Stop, Henry Petroski. Discussing the P-38 can opener Petroski writes, ``Veterans of World War II remember another kind of can opener'', this in a book published 2022 and therefore written as late as 2020, or the 25th anniversary of the 50th anniversary of the end of the war.

Thursday all I managed was to get one game in on everything in Main and Classics. bunnyhugger had a similar strategy, but she was further divided by the need to enter Women's, and I believe she ended up not entering games on all six Classics tables to clear time for Women's. Nor did she end up focusing on Main very much. In this she seems to have been like most of the women playing at Pinball At The Zoo. You can get into the women's championship with a strong finish in women's-only events, or in open-to-all events, and there's big open-to-all events you can get five or more ratings points in every week. Women's only events with this kind of rating are Pinball At The Zoo and that's that.

For a while she was up top of the rankings, but as the day wore on and more people showed up she dropped lower. By the end of the first day qualifying she was tied for 14th, with the top 16 players going on to playoffs, and despaired that she would make it when everyone playing Friday entered their games. I countered that given how busy Thursday was, it was likely that most everyone who was going to play at all had put scores up. My prediction was that the roster of finally qualifying women would look a lot like the people who currently were there. The positions would be scrambled, surely, but probably 90 percent of the people currently above the cut would be there in the late morning Saturday when women's finals began. The discomforting thing to answer that is that wouldn't the people most likely to drop below the cut be the people in 14th and 15th and 16th place?

Well, I thought to save a screenshot of the standings after the first day and can tell you: I was wrong that 90 percent of the top 16 would be there at the end of qualifying. Only twelve of the top sixteen made it. The interesting thing is that three of the women who didn't make it were in the top eight after one day. The other was the woman who was tied with bunnyhugger after the first day.

My strategy for Friday --- when FAE couldn't come with us, owing to work --- was going around playing the games I thought I could most likely improve my standings on. For example, my Thursday game of The Shadow had been a disaster, three rapid drains. Surely I could do better, by ... no, that was another three rapid drains. All right. And then The Shadow went down so solidly that I gave up on the idea of ever getting back to it.

In Classics I got back to Jungle Queen, putting up a more okay-ish game that still wasn't in the top 60 of players. I tried Golden Arrow, especially after listening to some better players about how they got their scoring strategy together, and somehow did worse than I had done before. At this point, I gave up on Classics and focused on Main, so far as I played at all.

Particularly, like, their Iron Man pinball. Their table was prepared for tournament play by a simple strategy to make it harder, removing this pop-up post that stops the ball in the middle of an orbit shot. The better players weren't thrown too badly by this. I was completely beaten by it. There was in the free-play area an Iron Man that I was able to use and practice things like ``how can I make the skill shot without that pop-up post?'' and ``what exactly do I do to start the Iron Monger Multiball again?'' and armed with this knowledge, was able to nearly quadruple my score to 97th best among the entrants.

The one where I kept figuring there'd be a breakthrough was Metallica. It's a table I know quite well, and that usually treats me well, and it wouldn't be hard to break through on it. The median score was about 30 million points and that's not at all hard to hit; just get two multiballs on a game that has seventy multiballs. A hundred million, which would be unlikely on a tournament game but hardly unthinkable, would be a top-15 score. So I spent most of my Friday --- and Saturday --- entries crashing up against that, somehow failing to start the simplest multiball, the Sparky electric chair, over and over and over until my final game started in the last minutes of open qualifying on Saturday. That one, finally, I managed a partial breakthrough, getting one multiball started and getting to about 16 million. About half what I thought I could reasonably get, but still, far better than I'd been doing, and beating even skilled players like MWS or MAG.

Reader, I failed to make playoffs again. Even with B Playoffs taking a largest-ever sixteen players (and that after A Playoffs took a largest-ever 24 players), I finished in ... 41st place. Just behind MWS, PH, and BIL, which I have to say is at least really good territory. PH I'm sure was was so far out of contention only because his responsibilities running the tournament --- and fixing games, especially the often-broken Shadow and Bobby Orr's Power Play --- ate up his time.

And now a last half-dozen pictures of Roger and his birthday present.

Roger leaping back into his pen. It happens he caught his foot doing this, so when we first worried about his mobility issues I thought it was that he'd wrenched his foot a moment before this picture.

He had grabbed the 'pie' shell and carried it off to eat. Note that his hindleg is a little damp from the condensation on his freeze bottle.

That's not going to slow down his eating, though.

And now here he is having a bite of pie shell.

Just a nice picture of his eye. He looks wary or concerned or unhappy but that's just bunny face, you know?

Slightly different framing of his profile and he doesn't look quite so disapproving of all these goings-on. For now.

Trivia: The + shaped direction pad for the Nintendo Famicom controller was derived from the controller its lead engineer, Gumpei Yokoi, developed in the late 70s for the Game & Watch LCD games. Source: The Ultimate History of Video games, Steven L Kent. If I'm not being misled from what I can find about these games, it looks like no Game & Watch game used a + controller before 1982. But it would need development sooner than that to be consumer-product-ready, of course.

Currently Reading: Force: What It Means to Push and Pull, Slip and Grip, Start and Stop, Henry Petroski.

We drove down to Kalamazoo on Thursday, and would on Saturday, with FAE, a pinball friend nearby who doesn't (can't?) drive to out-of-town places on their own. No trouble there; we like them and like spending time with them, and also had fairly high hopes for their placement in the tournament. FAE's an absolute champion competitor at league and local events, playing in that way where you know if they travelled more and got to more high-value tournaments such as Pinball At The Zoo, they'd be in the running for state championship.

When we got in, maybe fifteen minutes after the show opened, there was a long line for buying entries to the games. Also, to a lesser extent, for registering. bunnyhugger had registered before the expo began, but I never figured out how. I'd assumed the Pinball At The Zoo web page would say, but the official page is less informative than the Facebook page, which didn't have what I needed in the space viewable to people who don't have Facebook accounts. In hindsight, I should have thought to go to neverdrains.com, the site used to manage the queuing for events and tracking of everyone's positions, but it didn't occur to me. Or just asked bunnyhugger when she mentioned she had made an account.

Anyway, while in line to buy entries, they let me and anyone else not registered duck over to the other person with a computer and officially sign up. I failed to actually hear what my user ID was --- they give a three-digit ID, plus a four-digit PIN, all the user account this sort of event needs --- and so had to ask when I bought my entries.

I figured to put an entry in on all the Main and Classics games to have some initial standing and then figure what to do when time allowed. But first, how to warm up? There was the Thursday daily tournament.

So, cocktail pins. Of all the odd attempts at making variations of pinball, this was one of them. Made in the 70s/80s these are short, small tables well-made for people to sit at and I guess you can rest your cocktail on the glass. I think cocktail arcade games make a little more sense but maybe that's just familiarity talking. Not sure; it seems to me you can have a two-player video game going with your date in a way that you can't do with a pinball machine. But someone brings some cocktail pins every year and I always play them and enjoy them. This year, the Thursday Daily tournament was putting up your score on three cocktail pins. This would be great, a nice little warm-up.

Reader, it was not great. I had so many house balls, balls launched into the outlane, or balls that ricocheted off something and raced to the center drain. And with only one attempt on the games, I would never be able to improve. I had the 83rd-highest score of 86 players on Caribbean Cruise, 88th of 89 players on Night Moves, and on Eros, a Zeus-and-Athena-themed game ... well, OK, there I had the 13th highest score of 94 players. Still, not a good showing; I ended up in 76th place of 95 competitors. Given that finals were the top twelve, well, it was not my contest to win.

Friday, with four games, I would somehow manage to do even worse. This time there was only one cocktail pin --- Night Moves --- with the other three being more normal pinball machines, from the electromechanical or early solid state era. On Time Fantasy --- a game I really do like, and that at the end of Thursday night I had put up the four-million-plus-point high score, I managed three fast-draining balls and a mere 54,020 points, the 105th best showing out of 111. On Night Moves, despite nearly doubling my Thursday entry, I finished in 90th place of 116 entrants. Snow Derby, a surprisingly pleasant skiing-themed game, saw me in 66th place of 101 entrants. Ah, but the last game ... Egg Head, a 1961 Gottlieb with a robots-playing-tic-tac-toe theme, that went well. I had been able to play it a little on Thursday and figure out a little bit of how to play it, and came within a whisker of breaking a thousand points. This had me at fourth-best of 115 entrants. So overall I finished in 83rd place of 115 people who played at all, not a risk for making the 12-player finals. Too bad.

But the daily tournaments are just side shows. There were still the big tournaments to get to.

Now to close off visiting Marvin's from July:

Here's what they tell us is the P T Barnum fake Cardiff Giant, still curiously hidden in a spot obstructed by the redemption counter and stuff like that.

And they were refilling one of the change machines! So here's what it looks like from the top. ... Kind of what you would guess, I suppose.

Restocking the coins. It looks hilariously like pouring water into the goldfish tanks in the basement.

``Excuse me, does anyone know where to find any Pop around here?'' This hangs (hung) in the back of the building, near the Cardiff Giant.

More redemption prizes including world-flag soccer balls and big green plushes. Also a regular feature of the last year of Marvin's, the status update poster. The Cardiff Giant is on the right.

Far back corner where they have a 'Dance of the Fairies' display that as far as I know doesn't do anything, and a collection of flags. The thing in faux neon reading 'MARVIN'S' at the lower center is a coin-op bumper-car miniature.

Trivia: W C Fields's first professional appearance in vaudeville --- as a juggler --- was in spring 1896 at an Atlantic City beer hall. (He had been entranced at the age of fourteen by a circus clown's juggling and followed that path.) Source: The Encyclopedia of Vaudeville, Anthony Slide.

Currently Reading: Slime: A Natural History, Susanne Wedlich. Translator Ayça Türkoğlu. I know I'm taking forever to read this but I've had less time available than I would hope and also it's really really good, just full of interesting observations about slime, not just scientifically but also culturally, looking at how people have thought about slime and fascinating little corners of cultural history like Victorian scientists freaking out over carnivorous plants because those just flout All the Rules.

So, big thing happening in pinball this month was Pinball At The Zoo, in Kalamazoo, but before that was the Lightning Flippers women's tournament that bunnyhugger organized and ran and competed in. This was made as an unofficial launch party for Pulp Fiction, the newest yet retro-styled pinball machine at our local barcade. Eight people attended, meaning there could be two groups of four playing for a nice satisfying pinball experience, although one group being put on Pulp Fiction every round (the other got put on a randomly chosen game) meant that, by luck of the draw, bunnyhugger played it four rounds in a row.

And then in playoffs came that dreaded moment: I had to make a ruling. This because bunnyhugger had a problem with the game she was playing (Pulp Fiction) and she can't very well rule on herself fairly. Arguably it's only a little more fair to have me ruling on her, although in this case the ruling was pretty near pro forma.

The trouble was that one of the flippers got out of alignment, so that it was coming down to more nearly horizontal than to sloping downward when the flipper button wasn't pressed. We lacked any way to fix that so I had to rule: the game had failed catastrophically and it would need to be replaced by a randomly drawn other game. This would end up being James Bond 007, and in the next round, Star Wars. Luckily, RED --- who maintains the games there --- was around, or came back (he'd been at the bar earlier and I thought he had left, but maybe was wrong) and fixed it up for the last round.

The change of games hurt, though. bunnyhugger had come in first place three of the four times she'd played Pulp Fiction that day, and while she was in third place on her last ball she was in good shape to take second place. On James Bond, though, she finished last.

And then a day or two later she realized I had made an understandable mistake in my ruling. She had called me over for the malfunction on ball three, after players one and two had already finished. Player one (KEC) had a lower score than anyone else and so had a fourth-place finish. Part of the standard International Flipper Pinball Association rules set (which we use as the basic template) has it that if a game is pulled for a catastrophic malfunction, then only the players whose position is not yet determined should play the new game. So the replacement James Bond should have been only three players.

It's a natural mistake; the circumstance where that rule comes into play are rare. And if we suppose that the three people who should have played James Bond finished in the same order, and that the other two games finished in the same order, then it wouldn't have made a difference in the finals. bunnyhugger would have taken third place by a slightly higher margin and KEC would have had a slightly lower last place, but the standings would have been the same. Still, annoying to get it wrong.

Despite the Taco Tuesday incident bunnyhugger's father did not burn down his house or my car, so the 4th of July we were back in Lansing and walked out to see the fireworks. Or maybe something else ...

In the park were a couple people filling up Chinese lanterns, which let us see just how you do launch them and also that they're way bigger than we thought.

Seriously, I'd have put the lanterns at like a foot tall and it's four feet at least. Note the firework of a distant land just past the tree line.

Here's one ready to be released.

And up we go! Some of them needed a couple tries to get going, but they're easy to re-catch and re-release if needed.

There goes one into the sky that was actually darker than this.

Better idea of how dark it was at the time, with one lantern released and three more getting ready to go.

Trivia: Andrew Carnegie donated the funds for 7,689 church organs. Source: The Uncyclopedia: Everything You Never Knew You Wanted to Know, Gideon Haigh.

Currently Reading: Slime: A Natural History, Susanne Wedlich. Translator Ayça Türkoğlu.