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austin_dern

June 2025

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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 ...

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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.


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


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


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


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


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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.

Something else, a stray bit from Pinball At The Zoo. There were a handful of people wearing face masks. I'm going out on a limb here and guessing they're the people who'd be least at risk of Covid-19 if it weren't for everyone deciding they're certainly not going to be the ones to make a small effort for the good of every person, themselves included. One who kept catching my eye was someone who didn't just wear a mask but also carried with him ... I'm not sure what. It looked like an eight-inch square sun light accompanied by two tall computer speakers. He brought it with him around everywhere, setting it down just to play and, at that, setting it beneath the pinball machine while he played. Given the other pieces of evidence I'm wondering if it's some kind of portable air filter and maybe an ultraviolet light sterilizer? No knowing.

But, last day of things, I noticed him wearing a Commodore Computers T-shirt and mentioned it was a fun if troublesome computer. Got to deploy my line about the days when ``the computer had sixteen colors, and three of them were grey''. And he started talking about the great experience of Pinball At The Zoo, particularly getting to see older and rarer tables. And he threw me for a loop, asking: what was the first pinball machine to have a real ball save? Not the one where you get the ball back if you hit no switches --- many games have that --- but if you drain fast enough you get the ball back.

I don't know, but I had a candidate for possible earliest and it was even there. Checkpoint, a 1991 Data East game, and (one of(?)) the first tables to have a dot-matrix display. They had one at the show, as usual; it's a game I got to know well when I was first getting into pinball and this game was new. So, we got to talking about a couple of old games and my experiences getting into pinball in a golden age.

At some point he gave me his name, and I saw later he did get into playoffs, I think in A Division Main. I don't remember what it was. Never got to ask about the devices.

Anyway. After Pinball At The Zoo is, of course, the afterparty at MJS's pole barn. There's one on Friday night too, that's always the less-well-attended because of all the Serious Competitors who hope to get a couple hours qualifying in Saturday morning. I did happen, Friday evening, to join in a small group telling some woman who didn't know of the afterparty that yes, it was there and it was great and you can just show up, it's all right. She seemed skeptical. I don't know if she went.

But going --- and making [personal profile] bunnyhugger regret playing pinball instead of going to the Friday afterparty --- was WVL, for one. Also, uh, Gary Stern, and we don't know what his reaction was to seeing a row of a half-dozen Old Stern pinball games in magnificent, like-new condition, but we can imagine happy things we're sad to have missed.

We did go, instead, to the Saturday night afterparty, which neither Gary Stern nor WVL attended. But we did see CST --- who hadn't made Pinball At The Zoo at all to our knowledge --- and MJS (of course). Also attending, besides FAE who had little choice if they were to ride with us? ACE, and a couple of Lansing regulars like JAB. ACE would go on to organize a couple rounds of a Stall-Ball tournament. In Stall-Ball, best played on some venue where you have room to move and a free-play machine, players take turns playing just long enough to make the ball stop for something. Going into a scoop, for example, or getting caught by the lock.

Oh and also, there's an ante. Everyone playing puts in a dollar, putting their bill wherever they want on the glass covering the playfield. So the player on the flippers has to not just be ready with wherever the ball's coming from but has to make some guesses about where exactly their chosen targets (likely) are. And then after some fussing around to get a line organized, we got started! I was the second person in line, and immediately drained the ball, the one thing that gets you knocked out of the contest.

Second time around I got much farther; I think I was in the last half-dozen players and briefly thought I might win the jackpot. I did not.

So that's our Pinball At The Zoo experience, already receding into the background and turned into a bunch of International Flipper Pinball Association rating points. Thanks to it, I am, as of this writing, 91st-ranked in the state of Michigan. Probably not making state.


But we did make the Ionia Free Fair, back in July. Here's more pictures of it:

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Mirror guy! They had this performer/artist, a guy wearing a suit of mirrors, walking around. I barely had the chance to get my camera out and we weren't in place to catch and ask for a proper photo.


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But, wow, what a look, huh?


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I've mentioned the flooding. Over on the left you can see what looks like it would be the Grand River? Nope; that's the main parking lot, and part of why we were parked like three miles away from the fair.


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Now here's the Moon hanging out above the fairgrounds.


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Unbelievable! ... We missed the comedy magician's performance. Sorry. It was not that guy [personal profile] bunnyhugger keeps running into.


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And now we're getting into the midway as the sun gets around to setting, and you see how nice that looks.


Trivia: Samuel P Langley's experimental steam-powered pilotless machine flew three thousand feet at Quantico, Virginia, on 6 May 1896. Source: 1898: The Birth Of The American Century, David Traxel.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Volume 59: Popeye's Carnival, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle. Of all the most inexplicable presences of the Sea Hag as a figure on Popeye's side, this is one of them.

Happy Doctorversary, dear [personal profile] 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 [personal profile] 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 [personal profile] 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 [personal profile] 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 [personal profile] 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 [personal profile] 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.

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


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


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


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


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


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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.

Armed with a corrected idea of what to do for the jackpot on Creature From The Black Lagoon, [personal profile] bunnyhugger went in early Saturday to ... well, she played three games and on one of them had a reasonable breakthrough, almost doubling her score. I don't believe the jackpot ever came into play. She also tried playing Centaur, on which she already had a commanding score but that she, first, felt good about, and that she could still considerably improve her standings with a game only a little better than she had been playing. She never had that better game. But, after the Creature breakthrough landed her safely in 15th place she went to play Creature for the strategic value of keeping other people from doing anything that might beat her score on it. This may seem underhanded, but it's a generally accepted strategy in this sort of best-game-qualifies tournament. Time management is part of the tournament strategy.

It was not the qualifying she had wanted, coming in tied for the last position. But it's still being in, and that's the most important thing. That, and me going off to do other things so I wasn't watching to jinx her. As a result my reporting is going to be a little sketchy, based on what I happened to see walking past the screen showing Ypsi Pinball's livestreaming and [personal profile] bunnyhugger's after-action reports.

[personal profile] bunnyhugger's first round put her in a group with KEG, an old Lansing person who's moved out of state, and also with BRE --- top qualifier --- and LED, a player from the southeast Michigan scene. Being bottom-ranked meant [personal profile] bunnyhugger did not pick any of the games, but there were only six games in the tournament bank, and several of them she'd gotten to be rather good friends with.

For example: Centaur, on which she put up a respectable game, against KEG's killer game. BRE and LED I don't know what they did, but not as good as [personal profile] bunnyhugger. Which was great because in this sort of playoff format --- three games, points awarded each game, top two players move on --- coming in second reliably will get you to finals. There are cases where you'll have to play a tiebreaker, but, second is psychologically easier to shoot for and, here, just as good as a win.

Oh, did I mention that Ypsi Pinball was streaming this? They had four groups to pick from and I imagine they kept the cameras with the one top seed BRE was in. So [personal profile] bunnyhugger got to do all this in front of an audience at home, and people commenting in ways, she would tell me, she didn't think very insightful.

I mention this, though, because on the next game, Venom, [personal profile] bunnyhugger did not have a good game. She had a killer game, putting up two hundred million points --- which would have been a top-twenty game for the whole weekend --- on the first ball. The sort of ball that freezes out your opponents, leaving them stunned and, generally, demoralized. She would finish the game at about 300 million, or what would have been a top-five finish for the weekend; it's a score that two hours earlier would have bumped her up to 12th place in the standings. LED would put up the next-best game, something that would have probably won any other group or any other playing. But for that moment, and in front of the cameras, [personal profile] bunnyhugger was the power player.

At this point, two games in out of three, [personal profile] bunnyhugger was all but assured of moving on. To be guaranteed a spot in the semifinals she had to just not finish last on Creature From The Black Lagoon. And, better, she realized this, taking a good bit of pressure off her performance.

Nobody had a killer game of Creature, but, at the end of the last ball the first player, BRE, had something like 47 million points. [personal profile] bunnyhugger, player two, walked up with about 40 million points. LED and KEG had far fewer points but they had time to make it up and, as mentioned, [personal profile] bunnyhugger just had to not finish last. If she could get seven million points she was safe.

When you launch the ball on Creature you have a choice of skill shots, a soft plunge to drop into a game-chosen lane above the pop bumpers, or a hard plunge that, if you time it right, will give you credit for finishing the K-I-S-S targets. She had finished that sequence once, for a multiball that didn't get much of anywhere. But the second finish --- ah, that'll be good for five million points. She hard plunged and got it exactly right, baffling the Ypsi Pinball commenters who apparently didn't know that's what she was trying to do or why she wanted to do that. With a little bit of shooting the targets on hand she got the extra million or two she needed, and then was in danger of losing the ball. She started nudging, pushing the game around, and ---

She tilted. End of ball, loss of bonus.

She threw her hands up making the Nixon-esque double-victory sign as she turned around and walked away, although from the camera angle streamers might think she gave double middle fingers. Why the victory? Because, first, she knew she had beaten someone and so would move on to the next round. Apparently the Ypsi Pinball commenters didn't realize all she needed was third place. (With a third place finish, she could tie with someone else for the privilege of moving on, but since tying still moves you on, she didn't care.) And, by tilting, [personal profile] bunnyhugger proved --- to herself at least --- that she was not a passive player. She was playing seriously, taking substantial chances.

And, it turned out, neither LED or KEG beat [personal profile] bunnyhugger's score, nor BRE's. [personal profile] bunnyhugger got first place for a second game of three, handily winning her group in quarterfinals. And KEG took second place, so top-seed BRE was knocked out.

She was on to Semifinals, and whatever else happened, she'd be a top-eight player.


And on that cliffhanger, let's get back to the Ionia Free Fair.

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And here's the Floral Building interior. You see how illustrations and photographs are threatening to overrun the fair.


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They had a special section for the Christmas theme and [personal profile] bunnyhugger got a ribbon of me looking sad near the State Tree.


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Don't know who got the blue ribbon for this shattered-glass mirror figure. I like how it has the vibe of a stained-glass window.


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Awwww! Animal life! There's a lot of pictures of baby raccoons in county fair submissions.


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[personal profile] bunnyhugger got a blue ribbon for a nice black-and-white photograph of a 90-year-old Lansing business here.


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And then another blue ribbon for this black-and-white photograph of a house in the neighborhood that looks wintery even in the middle of summer.


Trivia: The American Association's Philadelphia Athletics (unrelated to the team of modern baseball) in its last season was so destitute that on returning from a road trip --- during which team members threatened to strike for unpaid wages, and were fired --- to find the sheriff had sold the seats and stands of their Jefferson Street Grounds, raising $600 of claims for rent and a $1,435 bill for lumber. The team managed to complete its schedule, but lost every subsequent game, ending the season with a 22-game losing streak. Source: The Beer and Whiskey League: The Illustrated History of the American Association --- Baseball's Renegade Major League, David Nemec. They filled the team out with, essentially, day laborers, paid per game. The Jefferson Street Grounds had been the location of the first National League game, in 1876.

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

When last I reported Pinball At The Zoo action, it was about how [personal profile] 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, [personal profile] 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; [personal profile] 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 [personal profile] 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 [personal profile] 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 [personal profile] 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.

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


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Your classic Victorian cabinet of eggs, here.


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In pigeon culture, this is considered a McMansion.


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


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


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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.

I've mentioned how Pinball At The Zoo draws just, like, everyone. Not just from Michigan but from all of North America. Among the people we expected to see there was ACE, who'd swept into the league for a couple seasons when his job had him stationed for a long while in Lansing, and who left, sadly abruptly, in January 2023. He'd arranged to get time off to come out here, and even make a week of it, before realizing that it was Easter weekend. So, uh, won't be doing that again, at least not when Pinball At The Zoo is Easter weekend.

He would have a pretty good weekend, making it to 4th place in the B Division. He had a tiebreaker against RED, of Lansing Pinball League, as if he hadn't had enough play that weekend. ACE would have sad news for us that he wouldn't be able to drop in on the last night of Lansing Pinball League's season on Tuesday, though; work had found reason for him to visit a client or something down in Indiana on Tuesday and Wednesday. So we saw him several times over the weekend and at the afterparty, but figured that was going to be it.

Except! Hours before league night was to begin we got word that he was going to make it after all. And so he got to join us --- the league, that is; he didn't play in my and [personal profile] bunnyhugger's group --- as a guest player. Also to play in the side tournament, by a wild coincidence on Deadpool (his favorite game), which he managed somehow to win.

A completely unexpected friend to see, who was there Friday? WVL, founder of the Lansing Pinball League, and rare visiter back to his old stomping grounds. He's living I want to say in St Joseph, Michigan, these days, so fair enough he feels up to the hourlong hike to Kalamazoo once a year but not the two-hour drive to Lansing twice a month. He seems to be doing well, and was just there to see the show and see people. Annoyingly, I had to cut off talking with him because I was next on some table (I forget which) and then ended up stuck behind someone who took forever on their game, only for me to take no time at all. Anyway even a little bit of contact beats none. Also he was there with his (current? former?) roommate, someone else who plays on the MUD he does and we were able to talk a bit about the experience of text roleplay adventures like that.

A couple of big names of competitive pinball were there, like Steve Bowden, who's become a regular at Pinball At The Zoo, or Zach Sharpe (son of Roger Sharpe, The Man Who Saved Pinball[tm]). Even a guy from New Zealand. But the biggest name of all there?

That would be Gary Stern, another The Man Who Saved Pinball, who took the remnants of Sega pinball when it folded in the late 90s to make the new Stern Pinball, that's seen pinball make it another quarter-century. (Sega Pinball was the rebranded Data East pinball, which itself got started with company parts bought from the closing of the original Stern pinball company of the 70s and 80s and a much younger Gary Stern. Which, incidentally, got a lot of its start from what was left of the Chicago Coin company.)

He's retired from a direct hands-on role in Stern Pinball, but obviously you want to keep a guy who looks just like his caricature out and being a public face of things. (The new King Kong game even opens --- or at least it opened when I played the game Thursday --- with the presentation of King Kong on Broadway and the game's announcer saying to stand by with your decoder pins for a secret message from Uncle Gary.) So he walked around the expo, wearing the same satin jacket with 'Pinball' embroidered across the back that [personal profile] bunnyhugger got from the Stern Merchandise Store, patiently smiling and taking pictures with everybody.

Well, not everybody. A couple of times [personal profile] bunnyhugger saw him but also saw that he was talking on the phone, or sitting in the lounge area checking something on his phone. Times when it seemed like, you know, he's stuck being on the whole weekend, so she wasn't going to interrupt his having a moment of peace. If peace can be had on a phone.

And then I even bumped into him once. I was stepping back from a game for some reason or other, and didn't notice that he was walking behind me. We didn't collide hard --- while I apologized, he continued on, maybe not having even noticed --- and that was that. Still, it was enough of a story for me to tell the rest of the weekend, to [personal profile] bunnyhugger's ever-more-rolled eyes, and now that I've shared it here it can go away until next year.

Fun chance getting to see people, though, not just games.


Next big event on my photo roll? The Ionia Free Fair, which we got to for only a few but well-appreciated and water-surrounded hours in mid-July.

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The Ionia Free Fair doesn't charge admission, but it does charge for parking, but the parking does also come with coupons that you can see.


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Because of the crowds and the flooding that knocked out a lot of parking area we were way, way, way back, out where some abandoned tractors or other farm equipment promised farm power.


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Coming up to the fairgrounds brought us, first, to horse barns like this and a nice symmetry of light and dark.


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Goat rolling their eyes at me.


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Another goat getting a bit of a trim.


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And a bin full of newly-hatched chicks.


Trivia: After the October Revolution Lenin counted the days until he could claim in triumph that he had lasted longer than the Paris Commune of 1871. Source: The Age of Capital, 1848 - 1871, Eric Hobsbawm.

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

PS: What's Going On In Alley Oop? Is there a story in the Sunday Little Oops again? February - April 2025 in a pocket universe.

Thursday all I managed was to get one game in on everything in Main and Classics. [personal profile] 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 [personal profile] 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.

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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.


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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.


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


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


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


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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.

My plan for competing in the Main and Classics tournaments was to play one game each on all the tables and then see what happened. I started out with Classics, a tournament I haven't played in in years. (Classics finals have become a Friday night thing, to save time on the otherwise very packed Saturday, and if you don't know that you can get to the tournament Friday in time it doesn't make sense to enter unless you figure you're never going to qualify anyway.) This started out fantastic, with me playing Abra ca Dabra, a really old one-player game, just forever. I put up 90,150 and for a short while, admittedly only two hours into the tournament, had the highest score of all on the table.

Next I went over to Jungle Queen, famed of my Pinburgh D Division First-Place Tiebreaker; while I lost that time, back in 2017, I've always felt good about the table since. I went to put up something like four house balls and the lowest score on record. On Skateball, a circa 1980 table themed to skateboarding or whatever I put up a great half-million, and then on Golden Arrow a score below what I could probably have gotten flipping at random. I was feeling, all right, if I'm going to play great every other game that's fine, I only have to be good on four games out of six to qualify. Then I went up to Firepower, a table that not only have I played in real life but play all the time in simulation, and stank. Then on to 300, a bowling-themed game that treated me kindly at Pinburgh, and treats me well at RLM Amusements, on which I did not as well as at RLM amusements.

Well, no worries. The important thing was getting any kind of placement in Classics; I could go for a good placement later, if it looked like I could accomplish that.

So from there on to the main tournament, with fifteen games to play. And if it strikes you that six Classics plus fifteen Main games is more than the 20 entries I might well have mentioned buying, yeah, so it was.

Also, now, the weird thing: the tournament was packed. There was a queue three or four players deep on every table. Thursday was traditionally the slow day at Pinball At The Zoo, the one where you could get a bunch of entries in and hope they held up okay over Friday and Saturday morning qualifying. If it was packed Thursday, how busy was it going to be Saturday morning? Would it be possible to play at all then?

I did get to play all the Main tournament games on Thursday, yes. I don't say that I played them all well. In fact, some of them I played rotten. My games of Bobby Orr's Power Play, Tommy, and The Shadow would be 99th or worse out of about 110 entrants. I would never manage to improve a Shadow game that was for a while one of the three worst entrants; the game kept going down, at one point being pulled from the competition area entirely so PH and AJH could work more on it.

But you don't have to play everything well. You just have to play something well. And here I did. I had a Space Shuttle game that was top-ten for when I put it in. A game on John Wick that was similarly well-placed. A game of Mystic where, despite trying to shoot the spinners instead of the treacherous drop targets, hit enough drop targets on the first ball that I would get a 72,000 point base to my bonus; for a while that was, I think, a top five score. And then the game Legends of Valhalla, which I'd never seen or played before, where I had a first ball that did not want me to finish. I would get a multiball, shuffle that around a while, and then a new mode would start for some reason, and while I did my best to figure what that was about another multiball started. I ended up with a score above 100 million, which was the highest anyone put up, at the time, and I think was even still the top score at the end of Thursday. By the end of qualifying it had dropped but only to fourth place.

For a while, on Thursday, I wasn't just qualified for playoffs, but I was qualified for the A Division.


The day of that Marvin's visit was also, it happens, Roger's birthday and we had a present for a beautiful big white bunny.

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[personal profile] bunnyhugger sitting down, readying her camera to photograph Roger's response to a gift he was too busy sleeping to expect.


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And there's the bunny, hanging out beside the freezer bottle that he understood could keep him less terribly hot through summer.


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Mmmm? He's interested to know what's all this, then. It's a 'pie' of dried fruits and vegetables in a shell that sure looked and felt like ice cream cone material.


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Though he came out he didn't race right for it, possibly because he didn't quite see it, possibly because being out was more fun than being out for a purpose.


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A little pointing out from the blurry [personal profile] bunnyhugger and he got the point, though.


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Oh, isn't that a bunny who looks surprised and happy!


Trivia: The Centaur upper-stage rocket was given that name officially in November 1958, after years being the ``high-energy upper stage''. The name was proposed to the Advanced Research Projects Agency by Krafft Ehricke of General Dynamics, who had directed development of the booster; he had gotten the suggested name from Eugene C Keefer of Convair. The name was after the horse-human blend, with the Atlas booster it rode being the brawn, the horse, and the Centaur, containing payload and guidance, the brain, the human. Source: Origins of NASA Names, Helen T Wells, Susan H Whiteley, Carrie E Karegeannes. NASA SP-4402

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. [personal profile] 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 [personal profile] 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:

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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.


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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.


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


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``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.


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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.


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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.

This year for the first time I took two days off work to go to Pinball At The Zoo. Before the pandemic began, when I was working for the company in New Jersey, I wouldn't work for the two days of the tournament, no, but my hours and my responsibilities were so vague that I didn't feel the need to say anything to anybody there. But since then? Well, 2023 I didn't feel I had enough of a savings cushion to take the time off. 2024 I believe [personal profile] bunnyhugger had some commitment or other keeping her busy that Friday so there was no sense my going to Kalamazoo without her. We did go after I finished work for the day, though.

But this year was different. [personal profile] bunnyhugger had no commitments, and I feel flush with enough capital to spend time off instead. [personal profile] bunnyhugger was surprised I did this; she'd supposed that I would take maybe one day off if that, for qualifying, and I was late in making clear to her my plans.

(There was one late hiccough, when I realized I had a dentist appointment for Thursday. This was easy to reschedule, though.)

Pinball At The Zoo is a show, at the Kalamazoo (County) Expo Center, although the thing that gets us going several days in a row is the pinball tournament there. Tournaments plural: a Main tournament, this year on 15 games; a Classics tournament, on six older games; a Women's tournament, also on six games; and Daily tournaments, on four games. You buy entries for a charitable donation. Your best scores in a bank go into your ranking, with sufficiently high rankings going on to playoffs. In the main tournament, the top 32 players would go on to the A Division, and the next 16 --- more than ever before --- into the B Division. In Classics and in Women's sixteen players, twice what had in previous years, would play off.

In the Daily tournament you get one try on each of the games, which I think is a new restriction. I'm pretty sure in the past you could try as many times as you liked, time permitting. With people discovering the daily tournaments could be as good for generating International Flipper Pinball Association rating points as the Main and Classics tournaments for people who don't make the playoffs, focusing on that became a strategy and I think they might have wanted to head that off.

So those were the basic stakes. Also appearing at the show, besides everyone who's anyone in Michigan Pinball? (Not actually true; there were a bunch of absences, some expected --- GRV has just had a lot of issues with, well, everybody who runs tournaments --- and some that surprised us even though, like, CST hasn't actually competed in this since before the pandemic began.) A lot of the big names in competitive pinball, since Pinball At The Zoo has solidified its place in the pinball Pro Circuit, a set of a dozen or so really major events.

And Stern Pinball sent people there, because they used the show and the tournament to debut their newest game, King Kong. Like the movie, but also not like the movie, because to save on licensing expenses they're officially basing it on the novel, which you recall was officially ruled in 1976 to have been acquired by the public domain so that Universal could do its remake without paying anyone for anything. When we walked into the hall the center was dominated by a giant inflated vinyl gorilla, just like you'd make if you were doing a bit about a King Kong promotion at a pinball tournament. It was wonderful; I'm sorry I can't share enough pictures of it all.

Anyway, as said, since this was what we would do instead of AnthrOhio, we just had to make it worth missing a big exciting furry con. As said the other day, no pressure.


Also no pressure? Hanging out at Marvin's back in July, as seen in photographs.

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``Anyone know where to get an electric jolt around here? No, no, without power.''


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Sign up top promising a steam carousel, which Marvin's does not have, although theirs is a small three-figure model like this. It goes the other direction, though.


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There's the Marvin's sign: 'Marvin Yagoda - Amusement Machines - Specializing in Rare and Interesting Diggers', with a candy-crane-type device in front of it.


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Former Chuck E Cheese animatronics on perpetual display.


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More of the Chuck E Cheese animatronics plus some more Charlie McCarthy musicians, behind the fan.


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[personal profile] bunnyhugger with a dollar coin to make the identification medal for Roger. But the machine was out of order (see the tape over the coin slot, upper right), so we had to try and remember to keep the coin for next time.


Trivia: Actual footage of the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906 did poorly in movie theaters compared to recreations produced in New York City by the Biograph Company. Source: The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and the Making of Modern America, Kevin Rozario.

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

When AnthrOhio wrapped up last year with the declaration they were moving to a new hotel, I'm not sure it came with the news it was moving to a new weekend. We did learn about the move to a late-April weekend months ago, though, and were mildly irked that it would be coming so soon after Motor City Fur[ry] Con. Also that it would be coming in the late-middle part of the term. With [personal profile] bunnyhugger having Monday classes we'd have to drive home after closing ceremonies, not even sticking around for the Dead Dog Dance, to have a chance of getting her in bed in time. Or cancel classes, something she's most reluctant to do for mere fun.

And then came Pinball At The Zoo. This, the biggest tournament in Michigan, is always sometime in mid-to-late April and what do you know but it was set for this past weekend. As in, the same weekend as AnthrOhio. So we were stuck with the question of what would we miss, the furry convention that, despite outgrowing the cozy, intimate convention we loved, is still our favorite; or the pinball tournament that's so exciting and fun and social and competitive and that's become one of the Pro Circuit events where some of the best pinball players of the whole continent converge.

And then, eventually, we realized that it was also Easter weekend, a day --- often a weekend --- that we always spend with [personal profile] bunnyhugger's parents. There's no inherent conflict in going to Pinball At The Zoo, which ends Saturday, and to her parents for Sunday. But there's a compelling conflict going to central Ohio and mid-Michigan for the same day.

We did a lot of thinking out what was the less bad thing to miss. We finally chose to miss AnthrOhio, for me for the first time since 2012. We'd be glad for Easter with her parents. And we'd be glad for attending the least replaceable pinball tournament of the year. As long as we did well enough.

No pressure.


Now let's have a bit more 4th of July fireworks from the City of Lansing and from outlying territories.

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On the left, I think, the city's fireworks. On the right, the fireworks of whatever town is north and west of Lansing. I'm going to say ``Delhi''? That sounds like a town that exists.


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Here's a meteor seen just at the limits of sensor range while in warp.


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Dutch angle! Fireworks local (on the left) and distant (on the right).


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And here's the city or possibly the ballpark fireworks getting to the grand finale!


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More finale, but this time so you can see colors and the shape of the cloud.


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And this is no fireworks. This is traffic, cars driving back from downtown. We stuck around a good bit after the show because we figured why rush home.


Trivia: A conventional break-bulk cargo ship of the mid-1950s would typically require 150 or more longshoremen working for at least four days to unload and load a vessel's cargo; using $2.80 as a basic longshoreman's hourly wage, this implied over $15,000 in stevedore charges for a typical port call. Source: Box Boats: How Container Ships Changed The World, Brian J Cudahy. For perspective, that's more than a contestant might win on a whole episode of The Price Is Right --- when they would play for the full half-hour show --- of the time.

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

PS: What’s Going On In Olive and Popeye? What’s this wrestling story going on? January – April 2025 finally, finally gets its turn.

It's Tuesday, we've beem at a pinball tournament all night, I looked at What's Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? How did The Phantom beat the Elon Musk Robot? August - November 2024 and its lesson for us all, let's see the last of the Pinball At The Zoo pictures:

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Coming on the end of the day, now, and people disassembling machines and wrapping them up.


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One of the remaining games, alongside the many, many power cables that make the weekend possible.


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Oh, looks like something might be happening in the main tournament!


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Meanwhile, even more of the show packs itself up to leave.


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[personal profile] bunnyhugger won't leave before she gets this game of Elton John done, though!


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[personal profile] bunnyhugger continues her Crocodile Rock filibuster, singlehandedly keeping the show open. Not really, but I think she may legitimately have been the last non-tournament-person playing a game, and she was having a pretty good one.


Trivia: On the second EVA of Apollo 12, Commander Pete Conrad rolled a grapefruit-sized rock down the wall of Head Crater, about three to four hundred feet from the passive seismometer. It was not detected on the seismometer's four axes. Source: Apollo By The Numbers, Richard W Orloff. NASA SP-4029.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 48: No Stone Unturned, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

After exhausting Bronner's, but not ourselves, we had other stuff to do in Frankenmuth, the Bavarian-themed city. First was getting over to the Cheese Haus to see what kinds of cheese they might have. The first disappointing part was: no free samples. Those haven't been brought back since the pandemic began, since we can only bring back demonstrably bad things, like in-office work and Republicans.

Still, they had an abundance of cheeses, and cheese spreads, which are our favorite lunch when we don't feel like doing more than opening a tub. And there's ones we just don't get easily anymore, like Wensleydale-with-fruit and stuff. I can't swear that we spent more in cheeses and cheese spreads than we did on Christmas ornaments but if we didn't, it was a close thing.

And after that, dinner. Frankenmuth has a host of Bavarian restaurants that have responded to the request for vegetarian options with stunned silence and then, occasionally, some clever reworkings of things. A lot with squash and such. [personal profile] bunnyhugger had found one --- the lodge where we occasionally played at pinball tournaments (the arcade seems to be closed to renovations right now) --- that she hoped to get to. We haven't been to a sit-down restaurant indoors much since the pandemic began; I think we're at a count of maybe four, including this. The place was nearly deserted, although we could hear in the connected bar someone playing the guitar, all the sorts of fondly remembered 70s-ish songs that do well in that format. It took a good five minutes or so before anyone saw we were waiting and I felt the need to ask if they were still seating people; we don't want to be total jerks at going to a restaurant.

When we got back home there were gifts to open. [personal profile] bunnyhugger had figured to have something to look forward to for when the day was done. (Also to save time during the day when Bronner's was open.) The largest by volume was a ``Christmas gift but you should open it for your birthday'' from my parents. This turned out to be a large resin turkey. [personal profile] bunnyhugger has been looking for a good terra-cotta turkey figure since the old one broke in storage years ago; I don't know how my parents remembered that fact, or found this, since turkey statues are weirdly rare on the ground.

I had a couple of smaller gifts. A Cedar Point postcard from [personal profile] bunnyhugger's birth year; it doesn't show a ride she cares about (or is likely to have ridden), but the match in age seemed important. The card was used, but the message nothing terribly juicy, just the reassurance that you could ride things all day and not run out of park. I also gave an old parking coupon, something dating to around 2000, and bringing back a rush of memories of how they did parking back in the days before thermal printer receipts and credit card transactions only.

Last thing was a T-shirt, a bootleg for Gillian's Wonderland Pier. We had been there years ago and enjoyed it deeply but they had no t-shirts or other merchandise to speak of that we found. This year, the park closed for good, the land sold off, part of the town's process of turning into hotels everything that attracts tourists to that town specifically. But it's a well-done bootleg, the sort of thing we should have been able to get from the park, and it can be the impersonation of a souvenir from a happy day.


Let's look some more at stuff from Pinball At The Zoo, in Kalamazoo's County Expo Center, which is not literally a zoo:

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Amusement license on Chubbie, showing it was legitimate around ... well, Richard Reading was mayor of Detroit from 1938 to 1940, so, then. (Reading was booted from office when it was discovered he was selling protection to numbers racketeers, so I guess that's why he was putting his name on all the pinball in town.)


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Bally's 1987 Party Animal, showing off a bit of furry-art-not-done-by-furries, which is why you see such inauthentic pieces as many birds. The Party Animals would be seen again in Party Zone, a sequel to this game and to Doctor Dude.


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Back to the electromechanicals; Fashion Show tantalizes with the question, ``what if women wore clothes?''


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The rather symmetric playfield of Fashion Show. Note the very 60s touch of the center target with value determined by a spinning wheel.


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A cocktail pinball, smaller and designed to play while sitting. This one is named Eros One, and it's got a Juno-versus-Athena theme. Note the left flipper has a kicker labelled ``Change Athena's Desire'' and the right ``Change Juno's Wish''.


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And there's Athena's Desire and Juno's Wish. Each kicker hit changes the number lit and when both are on 4, you have the chance to collect a special. It's a clever mechanism.


Trivia: On his initial selection as astronaut, future Apollo 12 commander Pete Conrad was assigned to (Gemini) cockpit layout and systems integrations. Source: Gemini: Steps to the Moon, David J Shayler.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 48: No Stone Unturned, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

[personal profile] bunnyhugger's birthday was our next big event; it was also, you may recall, Election Day. I had voted early at the community center nearby and got one of those wolverine-tearing-his-shirt stickers. She voted the day of, with a lunchtime wait that wasn't anything to speak of, somewhat surprising me; we both expected a higher turnout. Well, that wouldn't hint at anything bad, right?

I had the day off, because Election Day is now a state holiday (in even-numbered years). More, my state-support job actually forbade me to work; every byte of traffic on the state government's computers and VPN was to be devoted to critical services and to election support.

So we went to Bronner's Christmas Wonderland, for what's become a tradition on her birthday, started in 2016 and ... you know, maybe this isn't the best election-year tradition we could have. (Obviously we didn't go in 2020.) The last couple years has been on the weekend and that's just when Bronner's starts getting its Christmas crowds in. For a Tuesday, though? Very few people there and very laid-back, all quite comfortable.

We had one important goal here, getting an I-love-my-rabbit ornament customized to our new rabbit Athena. This was easy to do, and beautifully done; the customizer wrote out Athena's name in maybe an even more beautiful semi-script than any of our other rabbits have gotten. We also got a couple other customized ornaments. One for [personal profile] bunnyhugger's brother and his fiancée, celebrating their first full year in their very own home. Another for my parents, who've moved to a new apartment again. This one's a congratulations on your new apartment ornament --- a door --- that I had their names, but certainly not the date or the address, put on. They'll be moving again in a couple years.

(Seriously; my mother has declared that when she turns 80 they're going to have a serious talk about whether they can continue living on their own, and on their own so far from any other family.)

Beyond that, though, the day was one of wandering around more Christmas ornaments than you would imagine there are, and yet somehow they don't have one for letterboxing. (Though it happens we didn't see the geocaching one this year.) We also peeked into the theater where they sometimes show movies about the history of Bronner's and discovered ... oh, they have a collection, an enormous number of Precious Moments figures. Not just Christmas-themed ones but every kind of moment that could be precious in porcelain. Also a display of the steps in making such a figure. Also some other collectible-doll figurines. Also nativity scenes from around the world which you'd expect more from the place. While we were looking around another couple came in and mentioned how they were glad someone else was appreciating all this, the museum that we didn't know was there. Besides the figurines were also a bunch of things from the early days of Bronner's, like their first cash register and the early catalogues from when they were more about sign painting with a side line in Christmas decorations.

We were there until Bronner's closed, but that was not the end of our day.


Now back to happy days of April and Pinball At The Zoo, not quite finished yet in my photo reel:

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Lower playfield of Caveman, an early-80s attempt at reviving pinball's fortunes by --- well, you'll see what they came up with here.


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Yes, it's one of the attempts to combine pinball and video games; good pinball play gets you more video game time.


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But I mostly like the 80s-breakfast-cereal-box art style of the playfield figures.


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Here's a dinosaur in the center right part of the playfield. Looks friendly.


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Here's another 1930s game, Stoner Manufacturing Company's Chubbie, from 1938. I couldn't resist.


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Here's the playfield. How many times can you hit all fifteen targets? Which, note, are not pop bumpers; the ball just bounces against each light as driven by gravity. In several games I managed to complete the set zero times.


Trivia: In 1820 Rochester, New York was not quite ten years old and had a population of three thousand. By 1827 it had about eight thousand people. Source: Wedding of the Water: The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation, Peter L Bernstein.

Currently Reading: Some more comics.

Longtime readers know [personal profile] bunnyhugger and I went to Closing Day of Cedar Point's season. This was not a decision made without sacrifice. [personal profile] bunnyhugger had to skip a women's pinball tournament in Grand Rapids, one that --- if it were big enough --- might have affected her position in women's rankings for the year. I would give up ... well, getting to see the FlopHouse TV streaming show live as it aired. It turned out neither was a great sacrifice. The pinball tournament drew only five people; even if [personal profile] bunnyhugger had been there it couldn't have affected anything. And the streaming show we could watch anytime between now and the end of February, so, okay.

Prompting us was partly the thrill of going to Cedar Point in November. The park usually closes at Halloween, but would stay open if Halloween were any of the weekend operating days. This year, Halloween was a Thursday, which they've expanded Halloweekends to fill, but for some reason they were not open the day. They also skipped being open the Sunday after Halloween, which is why we had to decide how to spend our Saturday. So, we got out there for Saturday. This would be the first time since I got my current job that we went out for a day trip to Cedar Point that closed at midnight, leaving us driving home and flopping into bed wearily at something like 4 am.

Our goal for the day, and it was successful, was to ride the Kiddy Kingdom Carousel a lot. We hadn't found any confirmation --- or refutation --- of the sale rumor and so [personal profile] bunnyhugger wanted to be sure she rode all four rabbits. And indeed, as he was doing the safety check for our first or second ride the operator who'd given us the strange rumor the week before started a chat with us about how it was a great ride and his understanding was they had already sold it to the Ohio State Fairgrounds. We could not figure out whether he recognized us from the week before and was updating his rumor or if this was a rumor he was passing on to anyone who looked like carousel appreciators.

We would not just ride all four rabbits on the Kiddy Kingdom Carousel and photograph it, but we also took documentary-style photographs of the rest of Kiddy Kingdom. We've always wondered when the area --- which hasn't had any major changes in decades --- would be renovated and removing the carousel, if that is happening, would be a compelling time for it. So we've fortified our memories of things.

Despite being the last day of the season it was still a Saturday, and somehow a warm, beautifully clear one as well, so the park was busy. It's hard not to miss the days before 2015, when the old climate was still hanging on, and the first weekend in November would be cold and threatening snow and there'd be more park workers than attendees. (And yet the day before, with no less bad weather, our pinball friend JTK was at the park and it was so deserted that he got in all the riding he wanted and wouldn't bother coming to the park Saturday, a thing [personal profile] bunnyhugger took as if bragging.)

We would not get one of those fantastic-riding days where we get on all the (adult) roller coasters. But we got rides on all the carousels --- the Midway Carousel was still going backwards and I hope this marks a start for Cedar Flags being okay with rides going the ``wrong'' direction --- and towards the end of the night the crowds thinned out and we could get on coasters again. Including, happy to say Iron Dragon, which was operating again. When we had seen it the weekend before, and the chain for the lift hill was off the ride, we assumed it was closed for the season and no, they got it back for two last days of operation.

The Kiddy Kingdom Carousel closed for the night, along with the rest of the Kiddy Kingdom, at 10 pm, so by 9:30 we were heading back there and got on the last couple rides. Here a different operator was doing Kiddy Kingdom Carousel trivia, which [personal profile] bunnyhugger nailed every question for besides the hard-to-answer one about the ride's age. (It's around a century old, but nobody seems to have a definite word about exactly when it was made, and it's plausible that it was carved and sat around the warehouse a couple years before it was first installed; the mid-to-late 20s were when the carousel carvers had such a glut of product that the market would collapse, just in time for the Depression to close a lot of parks.) We did our best to make sure we rejoined the line just after the safety inspection started, so we would always be the first people to pick seats, and so would get two rides in a row on [personal profile] bunnyhugger's favorite rabbits. If it should be that the carousel is gone in Spring, she will at least be the last member of the general public to ride her favorite rabbit.

The operator also told us names for the various rabbits and a couple other animals that we're not sure we believe, but at least her given name for the lion matched what [personal profile] bunnyhugger remembered hearing from before.

There was some pretty good riding to be had those last couple hours, including enough time for me to divert to the Power Tower for a ride on the ascending side, shooting me up several hundred feet and lowering slowly. There was some kind of fuss getting people loaded on one of the drop towers, with several rounds of unlocking and re-checking the constraints. And on top of that, at some point someone jumped the fence and cut across the lawn to get on the ride. The operator repeatedly got on the speaker to warn that the lawn was a restricted area and get off of it, and if you got in line you would be asked to leave the line and re-enter by the queue, appropriately, instead. That she had to repeat this indicates that whoever it was either was paying no attention at all to the announcements (very likely) or figured the operator was bluffing (possible, but I wouldn't want to bet that way). Cutting across the lawn is weird behavior, all the more baffling because there was no line to speak of. Like, there were people waiting but it was for one or two ride cycles and yeah, the drop tower was taking a long time to get its cycle going but it's not like the rider was saving any time cutting across the lawn instead.

We went to the back of the park for the last rides of the night, conscious that we were going to have to walk to the front of the park once the last ride closed. We went to Mine Ride, getting on to find we had the train to ourselves (and the train ahead was empty), and decided we were going to stick to this the rest of the night. Which was only one or two more rides, but we were thrilled by the idea we might have the last Mine Ride of the season to ourselves. We did not: there was one last train, that they were letting everybody get on, after our final ride, the last of the season. But we had a couple trains all to ourselves, including that last one. And since we were on that train when midnight struck --- well, we were on a roller coaster on the 3rd of November, the latest in the year we've ever been on one and the closest we've ever been to [personal profile] bunnyhugger's birthday on a roller coaster.

This also meant we had been to Cedar Point this year both the earliest (Eclipse Day) and the latest days (November 2/3) it was open, a first for us. Felt pretty good, that. And as we were leaving the park for the day, the Midway Carousel's band organ played ``Mysterious Mose'', just as we'd hope to close out the season.

Also we once again got caught up to the present on the Greatest Generation podcast, although since we haven't gone anywhere together since then we're now like two episodes in the hole. We'll catch up.


Speaking of closing, is this the closing of Pinball At The Zoo? No, no it is not. But look on, dear reader, and enjoy, I hope:

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And here is the tilt bob for Circus! If the pendulum rod touches the ring outside, it completes a circuit and registers the tilt, ending the game (I expect, given the era). The weight around the bob is just to control how fast the pendulum oscillates and how long it takes to settle down.


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There was something wrong with --- I forget what, maybe the credits reel --- and so gradually more and more middle-aged white guys came to examine the mechanism and try and fix it.


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You see where the problem is, there's not enough photos of cats in the machinery.


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They spent a while trying to fix it by the light of people's phones. Not all of that time was spent in pointing at things.


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Oh yeah, pinball tournaments. Here's the plaques and the prizes to be given the top four women finishers. [personal profile] bunnyhugger would not be among them.


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Not sure if this is the last moment of play in Women's Finals, but it's got the energy of the last moment of play.


Trivia: 503 wealthy Parisians are recorded as being taxed in 1423. 43 of them are money changers. Of the twenty paying the highest sums of taxes, ten were money changers. Source: Gold and Spices: The Rise of Commerce in the Middle Ages, Jean Favier.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 47: Square Egg Island. Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle. Sims and Zaboly way overestimating how much this reader wants to see things come back to ``how can the college football team win every game this season again?''. There's also a really weird sequence of looking at pictures from their last several adventures, making me wonder what, did they need to vamp for two weeks before the next story came in? (Author Tom Sims wasn't replaced on the daily strips for three years after this story was published so it's not like he was filling out void space in a contract.)

Sunday morning we got up and checked out of the Breakers. We assume. We were at the end of our reservation, sure (the hotel would be open Sunday night, but we would be home Monday morning). But there wasn't a bill slipped under the door, nor an e-mail to [personal profile] bunnyhugger with the particulars. When she dialed the phone to auto-checkout she got that tone that telephone systems give you when they're stumped. The checkout button on her phone wasn't working, possibly because her phone is smaller than they designed around, possibly because web sites aren't tested before deployment. And by the time we had got everything cleaned up and moved to the car, and some last-minute lost item found (I think it was just the hotel key card), and all, it was far enough past the checkout time that it would have been embarrassing to go to the desk and hand in the keys. We left our key cards on the dresser, as we would have done had we got the paper bill or the phone checkout worked, and left, figuring they would work it out. Cedar Point hasn't come to put us in debtors prison yet so we're probably okay?

Part of the delay, besides our desiring more sleep, was figuring how to go into the park. We wanted to go in costume again, but we also wanted to be able to not drive home in kigurumi. Once again I went in as Angel and [personal profile] bunnyhugger as Stitch, and I wore my regular pants and t-shirt and even another shirt underneath, so I wouldn't be too cold during the day even without wearing my hoodie. [personal profile] bunnyhugger wore long underwear and figured we would have somewhere to change before setting out for home. We would: since the Hotel Breakers was open Sunday night into Monday, we could use its bathrooms, and did.

Our Angel-and-Stitch pairing was better-received Sunday than Saturday. We got a healthy number of compliments, and we even ran across several other people doing the same sort of couples costume. One we even got to do some clowning around with, exaggeratedly pointing and ooohing at our twins, to the mild confusion of anyone overseeing it. I felt good anyway.

(There was a family with someone asking how I, the male, was not Stitch. I answered truthfully but with a little irritation: I look great as Angel.)

The weather, you may have inferred, was a little colder than Saturday but still so good that the park was busy. We took the chance to get on some of the flat rides and other smaller rides, which we often neglect, while waiting for crowds to subside on the roller coasters. This led me to realize, toward the end of the day, that if we played our cards right we could get onto all the adult-carrying flat rides in the park. We'd miss some of the thrill rides, like MaxAir and the Wave Swinger, but all the things that you could, basically, bring to a carnival and set up? We got 'em. It wasn't until maybe 7 pm, an hour before the park's closure, that we got the last one in, but we did it.

While looking for one of these --- the tilt-a-whirl that's placed in Camp Snoopy and themed to Linus's well-known Beetle Bugs hobby for some reason --- we also discovered an outright easter egg. We don't want to spoil it because of the joy in finding this thing we never heard anyone talk about, but, there is an unexpected reference to A Charlie Brown Christmas in the back half of the park somewhere.

This season I made good on my resolve to ride WindSeeker, three times over. I also wanted to get to another ride [personal profile] bunnyhugger would refuse, and that's the Sky Ride. It's your basic cars-on-a-cable ride, running between the Main Midway and Slightly Farther Down The Main Midway. The length is a relic from when the park spread out over less territory, and used to feed to the Frontier Lift that was the only way to get to the back half of the park. (The Frontier Lift cars are the ones on the Sky Ride now.) I'm not sure it's faster than walking the same distance, especially not if there's a line, but I'd never been on it and this time I was going to take it, both directions.

When I was getting into the car --- they let me ride alone, unlike the Ferris Wheel ride I took on Eclipse Day --- the operator approved my sitting down and then said ``don't forget your seat belt''. I couldn't find it. ``It's on the ceiling,'' she said. I couldn't imagine how that worked but looked. ``Made ya look,'' she said, and yeah, I like that energy brought to the park.

I really enjoyed the ride. It's not as tall as WindSeeker or Power Tower or the taller roller coasters, but it's the closest Cedar Point has to an observation platform (somehow!). And the park looks gorgeous from above, with all these familiar buildings and walkways and crowd movements a miniature sprawl. I'm happy to have ridden and might take it at night sometime too.

(Coincidentally, at the end of this season Great Adventure, the regional amusement park of my youth, tore out their equivalent ride, the Skyway, a ride originally built for the 1964 World's Fair and that was always one of my childhood favorites.)

Among the things we did Sunday was take in a show. It was the first one we'd done all Halloweekends. It was packed, too; [personal profile] bunnyhugger told me it was popular but I didn't imagine. We got in about ten minutes before the start of the show and still could only get a couple obstructed seats in the balcony. The show was some music, like you expect, but structured around a murder mystery: which of these four people murdered the central figure. The twist here is that the murderer was determined by audience vote, after everyone made their case for why someone might suspect them of murder. And they went with the audience vote to resolve the show, making me very curious to know what happens when a different cast-member gets picked as the guilty one. If we'd had time we might have gone in for another show which might be why it's so popular.

We stopped in one of the gift shops we usually overlook, for reasons I forget. Probably to see if they had a pin-trading board, and they did indeed. More, though, they had park maps! Not the free ones like they used to give away, but a big one, for sale for a couple bucks, the sort of souvenir map we always say they ought to sell. Having talked about that for so long we had to put our money where my mouth was, and I bought it. I don't know where we'll hang it, but it's big and clear and just the sort of souvenir we really want. (And, unless I missed something, it was not in the Main Gift Shop where we would have expected, so we're going to remember that come next year.)

We took the map and a couple other things back to my car, re-entering the park for the final hour of the day. I was a little worried they might have closed the re-entrance gates for so late in the weekend. No, although the security guards did wave [personal profile] bunnyhugger with her bigger camera through the metal detector because, they said, they recognized us. It's nice to be known and regarded favorably by security but this does offend our sense that the rules should serve a useful purpose and be impartially administered.

Anyway our last rides of the day were on the Kiddy Kingdom Carousel --- where the operator dropped that shocking rumor that the park might be selling the 100-or-so-year-old ride (a rumor still unconfirmed, but also not explicitly denied, by the way). And after that, and telling ourselves it couldn't be true, we went to the Midway Carousel to close out the night. We stuck around long enough to hear the band organ play ``Mysterious Mose'', a tune [personal profile] bunnyhugger couldn't have named a month ago and that, thanks to a really good animation by Screen Novelties, she now couldn't get enough of. Made for a great close for our big four-day Halloweekends vacation.


Here's some more Pinball At The Zoo stuff you might like to see. I did.

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Oh hey, someone's playing Weird Al's game and has got the Wesel Stomping Day mode going on the screen there.


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The Four Horsemen, an electromechanical game, which of course is themed to college football. (It made sense at the time.)


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Rare appearance of TimmyBigHands's father as the referee, too!


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Another non-pinball game that got sold: Monte Carlo, a game of tilting the playfield so the ball doesn't roll into the inappropriate holes. Looks fun.


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More fine woodrail games, this one with a circus theme, this one by the Exhibit Supply Company, from 1948. They were around from the early 30s to about 1950, in making pinballs; after that they made a couple gun or bat games or the like.


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As you can see, 1948 is from before they really wanted to have flippers on playfields, which is why the flippers are backwards and way too far away to be of any use.


Trivia: By 1939, NBC Orchestral performances from 30 Rockefeller Plaza's Studio 8-H ameliorated the resonance-free acoustics --- particularly harsh on trombones and other brass instruments --- by feeding the pickup through an echo chamber in the control room. Source: The Mighty Music Box: The Golden Age of Musical Radio, Thomas A DeLong. A half-decade later the studio would be renovated to have a better sound. (Studio 8-H is where Saturday Night Live has broadcast almost every episode.)

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 47: Square Egg Island. Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

My humor blog has been mostly low-energy stuff, me posting about songs that give me a smile at least, and here's your chance to catch up on those if you missed them:


Enough of that; here's Pinball At The Zoo pictures from April.

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So how would you like a coin-operated roulette table machine? For amusement only, of course. Are you amused?


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It's got that great late-50s styling with curvy stars and all and yeah okay so it costs $30,000 but ... no? You're not feeling it?


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Well, once last chance to try it. Was working when I saw it.


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And here's a homemade pinball game that I believe was called something like Trashland or something in previous years. It's got a new name, House of Flesh and Blood, and I guess the theme is changing to match, although at this moment the game wasn't working.


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The little side ramp where the ball goes out the playfield and comes back is a cute gimmick but I bet one of the problems with the game flow as the ball probably doesn't behave well there. The legs are very stylish, though. I don't know if they fold up or just come off for transport.


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An old Gottlieb electromechanical, Roller Coaster, unfortunately dating to the days before pinballs could have ramps. The old scoring reels weren't fast enough to handle ball speeds that allow ramps.


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Well, there is a bit of a ramp, on the inlanes, but it's not a very fun one and you can see, it's not putting any stress on the scoring reels like this.


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The other main gimmick was this extra flipper, rotating steadily and sending the ball off as an agent of chaos. Landing the ball in either scoop (above the puny ramps) got you whatever the flipper was pointing to.


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And now let's look at the Zootopia pinball game, Police Force, which you've probably seen me photograph before. But how about details? Like ...


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The crocodile with the machine gun! The game's choices for villains have two good animal metaphors --- the Drug Rat and the Loan Shark --- but the Diamond Weasel and, here, Machine Gun Croc, are reaches.


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Two of the cops in the Police Force car.


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And here in the middle of the pop bumpers, a tortoise and hare and for some reason the bumpers are shooting at the hare. Thank you, Python Anghelo, for never compromising on whatever your vision was exactly.


Trivia: Whirlpool Corporation was contracted to make an eight-ounce bag, approximately five by three inches, fastened to the neck ring of Apollo lunar suits, so astronauts could get water when needed. It would expand throughout the program, finally ending up able to hold about 32 ounces of water. Source: Lunar Outfitters: Making the Apollo Space Suit, Bill Ayrey.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 47: Square Egg Island. Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

After leaving the Merry-Go-Round Museum we stopped at the CVS because ... I forget why. Maybe just to use the bathroom. Thursday we'd stopped there to get some motion sickness pills and, along the way, a magazine about The Kinks, who seem to be getting more attention this past month for some reason. Saturday I don't think we meant to get anything particular, but I did see and buy that book about the electric railways that the area used to have.

Why stop at a convenience store bathroom instead of just use the one back in our hotel room? Well, it was a beautiful sunny Saturday during Halloweekends; there was no reason to assume we'd make the couple-mile drive back to the hotel in less than six hours. In fact, it was almost traffic-free, and we were back to the hotel dressing to enter the park in way less time than we had allocated.

But that meant we had more time to enjoy the park atmosphere. Also to go to the park in kigurumi again, this time with [personal profile] bunnyhugger in her Stitch outfit and me in Angel. We ... well, we expected many people to observe us as adorable like this, because we are. Did not get as much comment on this Saturday as we expected, although a few people mentioned, including if I recall correctly one of the people working the entry gate. The Angel kigurumi has advantages over the red panda in that there's much less tail, just a little puffball that compresses easily against a roller coaster seat. The disadvantage is the legs are shorter or a tighter fit. I was terrified I'd tear it while getting on any of the carousel horses. And on the Kiddy Kingdom Carousel --- which doesn't have a stirrup for your left foot --- I had to keep my leg lifted the whole ride, which challenges my butter-like muscles.

While the traffic into the park was weirdly absent, there was still plenty of foot traffic within the park. (Also a couple times an ambulance; I don't know what the normal accident rate is, though. We might have just beeen lucky in seeing the unlucky.) So as we had expected we did a lot of walking around enjoying scenery and seeing fewer other people in Stitch-and-Angel pairs than we expected. (The number would increase Sunday.) And sitting on the outskirts of the stage blasting either that ``The Monsters Are Coming, Charlie Brown'' show we saw last year too or else this year's adult-themed music show about ... I'm not sure what the story was. The stories are always just hooks to hang music numbers on but this one was more inscrutable than expected.

Toward the end of the night, though, the crowds thinned out and the riding got good again. I believe this is when we got the last rides on the roller coasters we hadn't been to yet, besides the closed Iron Dragon. By the last half-hour [personal profile] bunnyhugger and I were looking to session Wild Mouse. Yes, again.

Except. I noticed how little line WindSeeker had. And, yes, this year I'd ridden WindSeeker, and ridden its twin at Kings Island and was only stopped on that for not too terribly long really. But I hadn't ridden either of them at night to see what the park looked like from 301 feet up and twinkling in the lights. I detached myself from my bride and got a ride on that. In seat 13, by the way, which is what you'd hope for Halloweekends. This ride went well, everything behaving itself, and the park is indeed gorgeous as a tiny, distant model of itself covered in darkness. [personal profile] bunnyhugger will take my word for it.

And for all that, I had time to join [personal profile] bunnyhugger and get one last ride in on Wild Mouse for the night, bringing her to something like six rides for the weekend and me to five, the most we'd ridden any specific ride. Great close to the night, except that we did stop in the Breakers' gift shop and look over their trading-pin board. I don't think [personal profile] bunnyhugger traded anything, but now that she was open to the possibility, the possibilities seemed everywhere.


And in photos: here's more Pinball At The Zoo. By the way I didn't come anywhere near qualifying in Main, the only tournament I put any entries in for.

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Miscellaneous stuff for sale, including a lot of arcade and pinball game manuals, flyers, and miscellaneous parts. Do you see the big ramp for Whitewater? Or the backglasses beyond that?


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And here Jersey Jack shows off their latest game, one that hasn't reached any venues around us, which is a shame as it's a fun one.


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Yes, there's a Crocodile Rock jackpot and look at that animated guy.


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There's also crocodiles rocking in the form of plastic miniatures on the playfield.


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Now if you're looking to build an old-school pinball machine here's some playfields from some pure mechanical games. Star-Light on the left is unknown by that name to the Internet Pinball Database; there's games with similar names (usually Star Lite) that clearly don't match. Trik-E-Shot appears to be a 1936 game from Gotham Pressed Steel Corporation, though the Internet Pinball Database has different playfield art.


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Some more pure mechanical pinball-adjacent gadgets, along with the cup of pennies to play them.


Trivia: The Latin word ``mas'' for ``male'' did not enter any of the Romance daughter languages either directly or as a loan word for learned speakers, except possibly as a dialect term for ``ram'' in Picardy. (Derivative words such as ``masculus'' and ``masculinus'', which have the diminutive suffix ``cul'' attached, survived in abundance.) Source: Webster's Dictionary of Word Origins, Editor Frederick C Mish.

Currently Reading: Comic books.

No time to write much today; pinball league ran late and stuff kept me busy last night. In the meanwhile please consider reading What's Going On In Alley Oop? Is Alley Oop still a flashback? August - November 2024 and catching up on that. Now for a couple of Pinball At The Zoo picture:

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Oh hey, looks like something's happening over in Classics.


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Yup, they've got the four trophy finishers, getting their photos taken by people with phones and someone with a real camera who's only processing the picture today.


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Here's Joe the Gorilla, the unexplained mascot. Finally a not-awful picture, thanks to this ``flash'' thing some cameras have. Ever hear of it?


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I'm not sure about the flash thing, really. Seems kind of gimmicky when you could just fix it in post instead. Also I don't know where I get the idea his name is Joe from. As you can see, there's no nametag here.


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Oh now, here's a coin-op game of the whack-a-mole variety. And who's the star of it?


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Mister Wolf! I guess this is a prequel to The Bad Guys, that makes sense.


Trivia: The Babylonians regarded the seventh, fourteenth, nineteenth, 21st, and 28th days of a lunar month to be unlucky. The 19th day of a lunar month is the 49th day of the previous month. Source: Marking Time: The Epic Quest to Invent the Perfect Calendar, Duncan Steel.

Currently Reading: Comic books.

Thank you, dear [personal profile] bunnyhugger.


We finally got to the Merry-Go-Round Museum maybe a quarter after two, giving us not quite two hours to hang out and see the sights. Fortunately we've seen many of them before, but there's always ones we can look at again and feel are new, like this E Joy Morris sea monster that's not quite the one you see reproduced on Chance fiberglass carousels, but is a kin to it. Or looking at the animals they've carved for their own carousel, like the rabbit that's adorable but so tiny that no one over 60 pounds is allowed to ride it. Or just studying again the big Toy Town map for an amusement park (that seems kind of low on specific rides) never built, somewhere in Iowa, that's just imagination-capturing. I also realized that weekend was the 50th anniversary of a National Carousel Roundtable conference held in Flint, one of the key moments in the development of merry-go-round appreciation. I thought it was wonderful we were here on the 50th anniversary of the organizational beginnings and then remembered that the program they have on display shows the October 1974 meeting was their second annual meeting. (I believe it's the one where the Norris family presented what they were able to determine about George W Long's carousel history, though.)

And then there's new things, as there are every year. The one standing out here was a sign from Cedar Point. The rides there used to have custom-made art showing off the ride, usually with a character saying how tall you need to be to ride this ride. The Merry-Go-Round Museum had somehow acquired the sign for Blue Streak, showing a lightning-wielding superhero hovering somewhere above the Space Spiral, which was not actually near Blue Streak, but it's nice and dramatic. They had some miscellaneous other old stuff too --- a Welcome to Cedar Point sign that has to date to around 2000, a kiddie height guide using Peanuts characters (so, from sometime after 2008 or so), a papier mache figure formerly on the Midway Carousel.

Something going on we didn't quite understand: some family had lost a something. We didn't pay detailed attention to the family that was one of the big group having a tour --- and a carousel ride --- as we got in. But after we had thought they'd left, they were back, casting blame at one another in the search for something. I was feeling the need to go over and lend my thing-finding experience but also felt like I needed to not get involved in other people's tense moments. Eventually the father declared that he had found it, everyone was now to assemble at the car as they were leaving. Someone asked him where he found it and he answered, ``Does it matter?'' I am torn between whether this means it was in his pocket or he was lying about having found it and would reveal the lie when they were too far away to drive back.

A surprise we maybe should not have been surprised by was the raffling off of a carousel horse. They'd announced for 2021 that they were doing one last raffle of one last horse, at the end of 2022. Last year, they announced the final raffle had been postponed to the end of 2023. You will be stunned, then, that [personal profile] bunnyhugger bought another six raffle tickets for the horse to be raffled off New Year's Eve, 2024-25. Along the way we got the story of the horse that had been won by some party that didn't pick it up for ... I want to say ten years. (They were from way out of the area --- I want to say California --- and had trouble arranging a time when they could be back in Ohio with means to drive back to California. Even when they did, story goes, they didn't have space for it and so loaned it to a neighbor who did.) We'll see.

Also we saw how the museum had a couple of carousel calendars for past years. I mean really past years, like 2008 or so. They don't have one for 2025, unfortunately. [personal profile] bunnyhugger plans to make her own out of the pictures she's taken this year. Including ones at the Merry-Go-Round Museum, although the skeletons they've set on some of the animals as Halloween theming constrain what she can use. But outthinking constraints is part of what makes art, isn't it?


And now back to Pinball At The Zoo pictures. Will there be any pinball this set of pictures? Or will I focus in on ...

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Pixy Prize is one of the redemption or prize games that were on sale --- this one was already sold --- so unfortunately I didn't see it in demonstration. But I got some idea of what might be going on from looking at the pixies on bottom.


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So you see those figures with the big heads and open mouths and enormous barber-pole antennas, right? Well, are you ready for ...


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Yeah! They have faces on back of their heads too. In fact, they have duplicate bodies on the back, so they can rotate around and always come to a rest looking at the customer.


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Just a little long-distance shot from near Pixy Prize at some of the games and people playing them.


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One of Stern's rare misfires in recent years was the Led Zeppelin table. Here's a playfield being offered for sale individually and I don't think it moved. Could be wrong, though.


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Oh yeah, so, we were no where near threatening to compete in the Pinball At The Zoo main tournament but here's pictures of two of the trophy plaques, things someones not us (specifically, ADB, currently the 45th-highest ranked player in the world and DOM, the 122nd) could hang in their living rooms.


Trivia: The Convention of Mortefontaine, signed the 3rd of October, 1800, at a chateau north of Paris, ended the Quasi-War with France. News of it first arrived in Baltimore the 7th of November, too late to affect the Presidential election. Source: John Adams, David McCullough.

Currently Reading: Comics.