austin_dern

If things were normal yesterday would probably have been the last Marvin's League meeting of the year. I bet they'd have had pizza, leaving the question of whether to fill up on that or get White Castle on the way home. Today, I bet, would have been Fremont's November tournaments. They're normally the last Saturday of the month, but the Thanksgiving holiday scrambles things. Grand Rapids Pinball League would have wrapped its season up on Wednesday, and I might have played in it. bunnyhugger would not, because her classes wouldn't allow.

I don't know how we'd have finished. I had resolved this year I wouldn't fret, or stress, about my position, and try to focus on just enjoying myself while playing. bunnyhugger had a similar resolve. But these kinds of resolutions crumble when you're very near the cutoff for invitation to the State Championship Series. I can imagine bunnyhugger and I squabbling about our relative positions; if I was even one slot higher than her, I'd have to point out it amounts to I had one good finish, in July, that made the difference. (Granting that our track record suggests it likely I'd be several slots higher.) Or that I got to a couple of Grand Rapids Pinball League events she didn't and one of them counted as among my top-twenty events of the year. There'd be a lot of comparing our individual finishes, event to event, and a lot of numbers since Fremont was adding the number of tournaments each month; we'd have had 34 data points from that venue alone. Plus she'd have probably finished in B at Pinburgh again, while I might make C at best.

The International Flipper Pinball Association declared the 2020 season closed, and that no state or national playoffs will happen. The points earned through the middle of March won't be applied to the 2021 season, if and whenever that starts, although the IFPA excise taken from the tournaments --- one dollar per player per event --- will. Same with the Women's World Championship. bunnyhugger was to organize the Michigan Women's Championship but that can wait for early 2022, we hope. Our IFPA ratings points continue to age and time out, growing less valuable at 12 and 24 months and disappearing entirely at 36 months. So far, this has made surprisingly little difference in our rankings. I've fluttered between 850 and 900th in the world; bunnyhugger between 1100th and 1150th and she sits now as the 1111th highest-ranked player in competitive pinball.

I forgot to play any dollar games of Centaur, at MJS's pole barn, after New Year's this year. I wonder when I ever will again.

Now let's close out Saturday at Halloweekends, October 2019. I know it seems like few pictures; I was thinking to photograph more meaningful stuff so I didn't have four thousand blurry shots of a skeleton(?) with no idea why I wanted to share that. And now see where we are.

The Midnight Syndicate show, a blend of music and horror scenarios. We've been to several of these over the years and they're good shows, although you learn some of the fourth-wall-breaking tricks they do.

Horror/music set up in the Jack Aldrich Theater, which used to be where we'd see the dance-and-magic show.

I forget the storyline at work; I think it was about an obsessed artist trying to make contact with his dead fiancee. (If it wasn't, the storyline was something about as good as that.)

Cedar Downs, the racing carousel that's always good for brilliant light-and-darkness pictures like this.

The station for Gemini, the racing roller coaster advertised at its 1978 opening as the tallest, fastest, and steepest roller coaster in the world. Wikipedia says each of these claims was false, but the other pages linked to make a hash of that. Like, the Gemini page says Busch Gardens Williamsburg's Loch Ness Monster was taller, but the Loch Ness Monster page says it was never the tallest roller coaster in the world, but doesn't say what it thinks was. It's a bit of a mess. (If I'm reconstructing this right, Montezooma's Revenge at Knotts Berry Farm was the tallest roller coaster in 1978.)

For not much reason we poked around one of the General Stores in Frontier Town and found this fox plush wearing a raccoon hat. (I think we put the [ fake ] raccoon cap on it.)

What interested us about the General Store is that this souvenir shop had antique packages all over the back shelves. None things that we recognized from the Town Hall Museum, and probably not all dating to any particular era, never mind whenever the Frontier Town is supposed to be set. But it's neat seeing this old stuff.

Pure spices, baking powder, budget macaroni, and a lot of carraway seeds and curry powder on offer. (Also, you forget that curry powder has been part of American cooking since the 18th century.)

More old-fashioned products: Brillo pads and shoe cleaner and pen tips and lots of soaps.

Cremo cigars: ``The band identifies it the world over''. They had a more basic idea of branding back then.

Not part of the General Store props. These are posters put around Maverick's station, now, to build up the Frontier Town Cinematic Universe. Notice the Watkins Emu Eggs thing; part of the setting is that Watkins figured there was no reason the Old West couldn't support emu farming. It's a zany element but I do find believable that someone would try farming emu in Old West Town.

And finally turning in for the night! Here's one of the carousel horses in the Breakers lobby, which for Halloweekends is a skeleton riding a decayed horse.

We have never seen in person the lobby without the Halloween haunted horses. We were figuring this would be the summer we'd just go in and look around.

Trivia: At the 6 December 1989 closing of the Leaning Tower of Pisa its tilt was growing at approximately one millimeter per year. Source: Tilt: A Skewed History of the Tower of Pisa, Nicholas Shrady.

Currently Reading: Fade In: From Idea to Final Draft: The Writing of Star Trek: Insurrection, Michael Piller. An ultimately self-published book which may explain why the title has fourteen colons in it.

Again in better circumstances, this would have been the last day of ReplayFX. We'd be postgaming Pinburgh and thinking of what had gone well and what had gone wrong and what might have gone differently. bunnyhugger would have played in the Women's Invitational Pinball Tournament, in the morning, and gotten upset that she wasn't put on a bank with FunHouse or that she was and didn't do well enough with it. She'd probably have sent me off to play games in the free areas and avoid stressing her by watching. Probably I'd have done a fair bit of replaying games where I lost badly, with a side of playing weird stuff. GamePlan games, for example, or maybe for once remembering to find Lectronimo while it was turned on. Doesn't matter. It would not be long enough, and we would try to squeeze even the last minutes out of the experience.

And then, when it was over, I bet we'd have gone to Kennywood for the evening ride. Steel Curtain, their new roller coaster, probably has been working reliably enough now that they've had a year to debug it. If we didn't go to Kennywood it would be because we planed to spend a full day there, which could be. It would depend on many things, including MWS's desire to see the place and ride Steel Curtain especially if he had gotten his 100th coaster credit at Kings Island. And whether we had decided to go to Altoona and ride Leap-the-Dips on Monday instead. Not that driving to Altoona would need the full day; it would only be maybe two hours, and Lakemont could not possibly be a full-day park. It would more depend on whether we needed to vacate our Pinburgh hotels and where to decamp to.

My mathematics blog continues apace, with one major new piece a week and then some supporting materials. If you don't already have it on your RSS feed, here's your chance now:

• Using my A to Z Archives: Commutative
• How June 2020 Taught Me How Many People Just Read Me For The Comics
• My All 2020 Mathematics A to Z: Delta
• Using my A to Z Archives: Differential Equations
• I'm looking for G, H, and I topics for the All 2020 A-to-Z

And now I can finish off Pinball At The Zoo, most recently held the last weekend of April 2019.

Upcoming events at the Expo Center. Who's not intrigued by Touch-a-Truck Day?

One of the boutique pinball games on exhibit there was Oktoberfest: Pinball On Tap. This is the only time we've played it. It's themed to just what you think and this makes it one of the surprisingly few pinball games with a roller coaster element. It's a fun game, in our very limited experience.

Gottlieb's Big House, a late-80s game with a theme of The Jailbreak and that for some reason is partly Caricatures of Gangster Picture characters and partly Funny Animals. It's a strange blend, really. PUF, who'd also encouraged us to take the chance and play Oktoberfest, pointed this one out to us and it's a kindness that he did.

Rat cops in a drop target bank and prowling around islands on Big House, for some reason.

And here's a small playfield feature, maybe an inch or so tall, of a ... rabbit? long-eared bear? hound dog? ... breaking out of the jail.

Another late-80s Gottleib game, Deadly Weapon, from their era where they figured they can just take photos of staged scenes for their backglasses, and also that other companies can pay for licenses but they have a better idea.

Snappy-dressed mice at the bottom of Party Animals.

Playfield elements from Party Animals, showing that if you don't hire furries to do your artwork, you'll get things like hippos and ... well ... vixens.

Here's a Namco bowling simulator that we didn't see in use, but that has got some great styling.

A Division playoffs in the main tournament. Four people are left; one of them would finish top-four at Pinburgh. Three of them would finish top-65 at Pinburgh. So that's what being a circuit event does to the competition level here.

It was the 27th of April. In fact, since it was after midnight it was the 28th day of April, 2019. What the flipping heck?

Trivia: In early 1861 Jefferson Davis selected William Yancey, Pierre Bast, and Ambrose Dudley Mann to plead the Confederate case to European powers. They were not granted the authority to negotiate or conclude treaties with any powers, however. Source: Look Away! A History of the Confederate States of America, William C Davis.

Currently Reading: American X-Vehicles: An Inventory, Dennis R Jenkins, Tony Landis, Jay Miller. NASA SP-2003-4531.

In better times, this would have been the second day of Pinburgh. Someone on Tiltforums posted a 'game banks' list for the tournament and people are using random number generators to simulate their days. What the heck; I can join the fun. Here's how I make out my simulated days. Game order is modern game, electromechanical, late-solid-state, early-solid-state, for the most part.

Day One.

First round: bank 74. Cactus Canyon, Odds and Evens, Title Fight, and Seawitch. I like this. Odds and Evens looks like a mess but all the other games I know tolerably well. Seawitch is a particular favorite so I'm sure to faceplant on that.

Second round: bank 68. Roller Coaster Tycoon, Magic City, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Fathom. All games I know, all games I like. Roller Coaster Tycoon is the one I'd have the best chance of winning on, though.

Third round: bank 50. Airborne, Mini Zag, Road Show, and Power Play. Apart from Road Show these are all games that have crushed me in earlier Pinburghs. Airborne is a weird quirky Capcom game from the mid-90s so literally anything could happen on that, including one or more of my competitors turning into a werewolf.

Fourth round: bank 38. Walking Dead, Hi-Lo Ace, Class of 1812, and Incredible Hulk. Hi-Lo Ace is a mystery to me but I like the layout. I love Class of 1812, as everyone does, so I would go in expecting disaster and emerge ... ooh. Who knows?

Fifth round: bank 32. Tron Legacy, Gay 90s, Dr Dude, and Seawitch. A different Seawitch from before. Another bank where I like everything on it. I've been playing virtual Dr Dude and getting to know the rules and also some nice easy repeatable normally safe shots, so that should send me up in flames very nicely.

Could I reach 30-30 on this set? ... I certainly know the rules well enough on enough of these games to. If I could find the plunge on Title Fight that would probably be a solid bet. Two Seawitches is a gift to me and I'd hope I could carry it out. I expect I end in D Division, though I might earn it rather than be restricted into it.

Day Two.

Sixth round: bank 54. Terminator 3, Star Pool, Terminator 2, and Nitro Groundshaker. Now that I know Terminator 3's RPG shot is a sure five million points, rather than ``disabled'', I feel good about my chances there.

Seventh round: bank 72. Batman The Dark Knight, 300, Gladiators, and Dracula. What would keep me from a perfect failure round here is that everybody else would be in the same desperate straits I am. 300 is a fun bowling game, though, and if it's set up like last year, it's a tilt monster, so I like my chances there.

Eighth round: bank 25. Terminator 3, Hot Tip, Dr Dude, and Cyclopes. Different instances of Terminator 3 and Dr Dude, but still. This is a bank designed as a gift to me; Hot Tip I've played at PAT's and at RLM's facility so don't feel lost there. Cyclopes I play at MJS's pole barn all the time and the ugly art might scare off everyone else. This will be the bank I hate myself for not doing better on.

Ninth round: bank 37. Shrek, Time Zone, Big Guns, Frontier. This will be an average bank for performance, but I'll have a great time playing it.

Tenth round: bank 51. Independence Day, Derby Day, Jokerz, and Pinball Lizard. Well, the last two I've played before. Independence Day is a mid-90s Sega game so that'll be a disaster, albeit with an automatic multiball last ball that won't help.

Do I make playoffs? I wouldn't bet on it, but then I wouldn't have bet on it going into 2017, nor that I would have been so close in 2018 and 2019. Be a great set of games for me, though. Do I at least reach 60-60? I like my chances for that, yes.

For my photo dump today? ... Uh ... how about pinball tournament stuff? Pictures from the first day of Pinball At The Zoo 2019. Pinball At The Zoo 2020 is still officially on the schedule, for the first weekend in October, but ... I notice the Cleveland Pinball Show, set September 10-13, just cancelled and that's feeling like a harbinger. It feels to me that if PatZ 2020 can't be held, then the whole state championship series for the year is off, too. That's just my feelings, though, not those of anyone with actual knowledge of anything.

Pinball players being welcomed to the Kalamazoo County Expo Center.

Trophies! For the whole tournament, for B Division, and daily and other side tournaments. Guess which one I took home! That's right, it's bunny_hugger's, because I drove.

Photograph of the standings from that brief time when I was the top-ranked player at Pinball At The Zoo. This time would be 3:19 pm, the first day, eighty minutes after the competition opened, and when only three other people had played the six-game minimum to complete a full scorecard. Still, I was there!

Surf Champ and Time Fantasy, games from Fremont that always whomped me and that were the daily tournament games for Thursday. I would, later in the year, get to be okay in them, but not that day.

Gathering instructions for the Thursday daily tournament. Since Pinball At The Zoo was a circuit event it drew a lot of high-power players from outside the state that we Michiganders couldn't really compete with. But --- everyone realized --- the daily tournaments were, because of how they were set up, worth almost as much as a good finish in the main tournament would be, and required a less big streak of good play so ... everybody crushed onto those games instead.

I like the ghost alien robot theme of this Williams Contact. I remember nothing of what the game was like. Not a tournament game, just one on display.

In the heritage of ``Krystal can't enjoy her sandwich'', here's ``bunnyhugger can't enjoy her pinball tournament'', because she had student exams that needed grading that weekend and the only thing to do was work on them in free time and hope nothing got lost, including her laptop.

Alien Star and Genie being taken in for their 10,000,000-point routine servicing and oil changes.

Scoring sheet recording the first round of the daily tournament, in which eight players all competed on four games. The top two in each group went on to the final round, another set of four games, four players. This format, combined with the high rating of the participants, is why the daily tournament was worth so much to play. The scoring is PAPA-style: first place finisher gets four points, second place two points, third place one point, fourth place zero points. So if one person is claiming all the first-place finishes like Jason M did in the top group, you can get through with a pretty average performance. And as Travis H did in the second group, you can get through just by not ever coming in last. It's a great scoring system if you can't reliably play great.

Playfield for Aquarius, a Gottleib electromechanical that was in the main tournament and that I enjoyed, and that moved to Fremont where a scoring reel got intermittently sticky, so it's always ruled out of tournaments. Shame; it's a fun theme and a pleasant playfield.

Tucking in the convention for Thursday night.

Little picture of the gorilla at the main entrance, a PatZ in-joke I'm not fully in on. I would have sworn they've worn a nametag in past years but I can't find a photograph showing it, or what their name is. There's a gorilla reliably on the PatZ logos, though those usually include other animals too. s

Friday! When we revisited the place for a couple hours to try brushing up our scores. (bunnyhugger had classes so we only had a short window of the day when we could have gone. Arguably this was a bad use of our time, but, as it happened, bunnyhugger did get into the B Division of the main tournament, partly from her play that short day.) Anyway, here some repairs get done on Big Indian, one of the daily-tournament electromechanicals.

``What we found out is that each one of us is a skinny white guy, a bearded white guy, a bearded white guy in glasses, an older bearded white guy in glasses, and another bearded white guy in glasses. Sincerely yours, the Pinball Breakfast Club.''

And here's PatZ being tucked away for the night again.

Trivia: Saturn's moon Titan had a diameter estimated at 4,160 kilometers before the Voyager missions. Afterward it was estimated at 5,150. Source: Mission to Saturn: Cassini and the Huygens Probe, David M Harland. (It's today estimated at 5149.46 kilometers.)

Currently Reading: Well, gosh, it's the end of that batch of comic books. Honestly was not sure I'd ever see it.

In better circumstances this would have been our travel day, getting into Pittsburgh. If we had come from Kings Island in Cincinnati we likely would have driven through Columbus. Conceivably we might have stopped at the Columbus Zoo, to ride the antique carousel and the Sea Dragon roller coaster, and maybe some other rides. It would depend how MWS felt about this. He'd presumably have ridden Orion as his 100th roller coaster, so there wouldn't be the pressure to save that. But it is zoo admission prices for, for him, one ride of particular interest and then, mm, oh, a Himalaya. Probably we'd have just driven through, taking the advantage to sleep late in the morning and then have some free hours in the evening to gather with Michigan Pinball and probably have the first of about three trips to the taco place.

Knoebels has put in a mandatory-mask policy, kicking out people who aren't wearing some face protection. From reports, this has cratered their attendance, with barely anyone in attendance and barely anyone on rides. And sociopaths on Facebook saying they deserve it for ... wanting to reduce the chance someone dies for it. This, if it held up, would make Knoebels ironically another good park to visit: outstanding rides, an outdoor venue even for an amusement park, and nobody around? ... Cedar Point and Kings Island apparently are having similar well-if-you-want-to-risk-it small crowds.

Michigan's Adventure is not going to open its amusement park rides. It is opening the water park, though, with conditions. Now, I know that the water in these rides is chlorinated (or treated with something as good as chlorine) but ... jeez, I guess if it keeps them from losing too much money to operate at all? Still.

And here's the last hours of Motor City Furry Con 2019. What do you guess is next: amusement park, pinball, or furry con?

Some of the new signs Motor City Furry Con had to direct things, since the hotel had a lot more linear space as well as some rooms in some conference space semi-detached from this.

And we're dancing! There's always a bit of that to close out the convention.

Someone's brought a balloon to make us worry that one of the fursuiters is going to step on a balloon.

bunnyhugger being all cool with the explosion going on behind her.

Fursuiters hanging around outside or possibly after the Dead Dog Dance.

Folks gathered in the hallway in one of those little moments you see when nobody really wants to leave but there's nothing particular to stay for either.

A complaint about a slow-moving line, although since this was found on a Sunday I'm not sure what the line would have been from. Maybe the ice cream social?

bunnyhugger using the shoe-shine stand as her throne. Bow to the bunny paw, everyone!

Ah, here we go. There's a bit more dance yet and I got a moment when the lighting was in my favor.

Spotlight on bunnyhugger as the Dead Dog Dance continues!

bunnyhugger gets a last doodle in on the Hospitality tables.

Now the dance is done, and the Main Events ballroom is getting cleaned up and turned back to its generically usable condition already.

Trivia: The 1939 World's Fair time capsule did not include a radio set, and certainly not a television. Source: Please Stand By: A Prehistory of Television, Michael Ritchie.

Currently Reading: Miscellaneous, mostly Harvey, comics again. You know, it's a little bit weird that a comic book aimed at fairly young kids just comes right out and calls him The Sad Sack when you remember what phrase that truncates.

PS: How June 2020 Taught Me How Many People Just Read Me For The Comics, a sobering moment as I shift to A-to-Z writing.

ReplayFX cancelled today, finally. We expected it. They're rolling our Pinburgh tickets over to next year, which is great for us since we won the time lottery and got tickets in the three-second window of availability.

This is unfair to everybody who didn't happen to refresh their web browser on the correct page the moment tickets were available, and it's not fair to the people who decide between February 2020 and spring of next year that they'd like to try Pinburgh. I would expect, without thinking too deeply, that maybe one or two hundred of the thousand people who had tickets for the 2020 tournament will want to cancel or not do 2021 at all, but even 200 cancellations won't fill the already-existing wait list of about 500 people, never mind take care of more people.

(Pinburgh has resisted raising prices to reduce demand to the 1,000-person capacity of the tournament. This I believe is for ideological reasons, to keep the tournament from being even less accessible to poorer people. And that's fine. But it needs to go to a lottery for tickets. Giving tickets to the people who happen to hit the right moment after 12:00 on Sale Day is unfair to people with slower Internet, or who have poor typing skills, or who need, say, a text-to-speech tool on their web browser.)

ReplayFX/Pinburgh 2021 is scheduled for the 12th through 15th of August, 2021. Which is a relief to know, really. There's an academic conference in summer 2021 that we might conceivably go to, and that might have interfered with Pinburgh. But that's set for the last week in July. The academic conference is in Australia, and ... well, nearly two weeks is a bit tight to refresh and re-set from a flight around the world, but it's doable. Here's hoping the world is in shape for us to do it.

Enough of 2020 and 2021. What about 2018, and the Keweenaw Peninsula? What was going on on that bluff anyway?

So what we had here was a pack of ham radio operators. There was a contacts-race event going on, trying to make contact with as many people as possible. For that sort of event, the higher you can get your antenna the better, and so the top of a mountain, or at least a 700-foot-tall hill, is pretty good.

While we walked around we could hear the strangely-modulated timber of voices, altered by their bounces off the ionosphere, and saying things about QRO (``should I increase transmitting power'') and the like.

Handful of ham radio operators and one of the radio dishes that's set up there.

Temporary antenna set out and pointing a bit over the horizon. If I'm making out maps right, this is pointing roughly west .

Not some ham radio gear! This is a small solar-powered weather station that's a permanent fixture.

And now? We see how close I can get to the edge of the bluff without alarming my precious bride.

Looking out over the forest. Notice there's a little spot where the trees have all died off. This maybe reflects some recent change in the water table? Hard for an amateur like me to know.

The bluff comes to some pretty dramatic edges, and only your good sense keeps you away from them.

Still, I couldn't get enough of looking down on the forest like this. When we got back to our temporary home, my toes got all cold and wobbly.

bunnyhugger has had about enough of me getting near the edge. I have too.

A closer look at that patch of dead forest.

You knew I would try making a panoramic photograph, though.

bunnyhugger looks to the edge of the world and disapproves of my having got that near it. Also you see how far you have to go down the slope before you're actually at a dangerous spot.

Wildlife! We found whatever the heck this bug is; it was at least an inch long and fairly noisy.

Here's a nice look at the side of the bluff.

And peering down the side of the bluff to, at the bottom of the photograph, the protective wall at the end of that part of the overlook.

Trivia: During the Renaissance a fine Venetian-glass mirror cost more than an old-master portrait painting. Source: The Essence of Style: How the French invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafés, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour, Joan DeJean.

Currently Reading: The Men Who Loved Trains: The Story of Men Who Battled Greed to Save an Ailing Industry, Rush Loving Jr. It is so weird to hear the coal industry held up as the cash cow that will keep any railroad which serves it healthy. Seriously. Also it's amazing how many times railroad executives will say something in a cabin that turns out to be broadcast over the entire vehicle's intercom and that screws up something. OK, maybe this only happened three times, over a quarter-century, among a half-dozen significant railroads but still, it's a heck of a leitmotif.

PS: In Our Time podcast repeats episode on Carl Friedrich Gauss, a heads up to something I had nothing to do with creating, but that I did listen to.

The semester's called off. Turned to a virtual class, anyway, which we knew was going to be its fate. bunny_hugger has been overloading herself on the struggles to put online what should have been real courses. This has involved a lot of yelling at PowerPoint, since you know there's this thing where you record audio over a slide presentation? Turns out PowerPoint for the BunnyMac will occasionally decide it's had enough of this slide, wipe out everything recorded for that slide, declare that it's been recording for over six hours, and when you stop recording for the slide show presentation tell you that it's recorded over fifty hours of audio. This even if you've been talking for two minutes. This problem, ripped from the depths of computer Hell and the movie version of Carl Sagan's Contact, is all but unknown to the web and if there's any fix for it, it is not generally known to humanity.

The Women's International Pinball Tournament has postponed its ticket sale. They were supposed to go on sale at noon tomorrow and sell out at 12:00:02 pm. This is all reasonable and right, yes. But the tournament is scheduled for the last day of ReplayFX, and it's hard not to see this as a warning that ReplayFX is readying to delay or cancel. Which will carry Pinburgh along with it. So we're trying to get ready for that bad news to come.

Pinball At The Zoo has rescheduled from late April to the first weekend in October. Here's hoping that's more than long enough.

Trivia: Intelsat IVA, launched 1975, was able to carry 6,500 voice circuits and simultaneously two color TV channels. Source: How The World Was One: Beyond the Global Village, Arthur C Clarke.

Currently Reading: Perpetual Motion: The Illustrated History of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, Joe Mysak and Judith Schiffer.

And the 4th of July, 2018, we went to the Lugnuts game, to watch them lose (they did) and the ballpark and then the city fireworks after. Let's rewatch.

Baseball! I didn't take as many pictures of the game as usual but, y'know, this gives you an idea what it looked like and what our seats were and that the Lugnuts had pitchers and first basemen and all.

It was rather a hot day, in the middle of a heat waves. Some people brought adequate shelter from the sun. bunny_hugger wore this nice canvas hat herself.

Between-inning shenanigans, this one involving people wearing giant inflatable vinyl balls. I forget whether they were running around the outfield, ``Sumo'' wrestling, or just trying to not pass out from the heat.