austin_dern

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 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:

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.

But, wow, what a look, huh?

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.

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

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

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.

Armed with a corrected idea of what to do for the jackpot on Creature From The Black Lagoon, 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 bunnyhugger's after-action reports.

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 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 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 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, 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, bunnyhugger was the power player.

At this point, two games in out of three, 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. 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, 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, 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 bunnyhugger's score, nor BRE's. 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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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 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 bunnyhugger got from the Stern Merchandise Store, patiently smiling and taking pictures with everybody.

Well, not everybody. A couple of times 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 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.

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.

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.

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

Goat rolling their eyes at me.

Another goat getting a bit of a trim.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

A little pointing out from the blurry bunnyhugger and he got the point, though.

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.

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 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. bunnyhugger had no commitments, and I feel flush with enough capital to spend time off instead. 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.

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

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.

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.

Former Chuck E Cheese animatronics on perpetual display.

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

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.

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:

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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 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:

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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 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 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. 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 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; 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 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 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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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. bunnyhugger will take my word for it.

And for all that, I had time to join 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 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.

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Thank you, dear 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 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. 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 ...

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.