austin_dern

We had reflected on the smallest comfort of this rotten last twelve months: neither of had gotten sick. Not even a cold, when bunnyhugger typically gets at least one a semester from her students. Me, I usually get about 28 colds a year, stacking them as much as three deep to get them all through. None of that, though, here.

Until Saturday, when bunnyhugger had something making her nauseous, and dizzy enough she needed to lie down most of the day. What was it? We can't figure that out. A virus after all? We couldn't figure where she'd have picked it up. Food poisoning? We eat the same things; why didn't I feel anything? It seems to have receded, but it remains another unwelcome injury.

In comic-strip reading I look at What's Going On In Gasoline Alley? What happened for Skeezix's centennial? and am surprised by the answer.

So now let's close out my last visit to the Silverball Museum, for now, from back in January 2020. Want to put bets on what's next on my photo roll? Here's a hint: if you've been reading my captions carefully you've seen it mentioned! Also, why are you reading these captions carefully? They're all, like, ``backglass to Sword of Girls, a 1973 Gordon Marche table with a fun theme but you can see a scoop that's just death in serious play''.

An anniversary pinball-like game, Williams Official Baseball. Your hits can make the runners advance around the bases in that black loop there.

The playfield for Official Baseball. A ball comes rolling out from the pitcher's mound and you hit it into one of the many holes there for bases or outs.

Bat-a-Ball's another baseball simulator, this one with a nice long ramp for you to judge your timing poorly. I think they had one of these at Rye Playland when we visited with bunnyhugger's brother.

Eight-Ball Deluxe, a circa 1980 pool-themed table that even gives you instructions on what to shoot for. Tip: in tournament play? Ignore the instructions. Just shoot up the left orbit again and again until you die of boredom. Eventually each shot gets to be good for ... I'm going to say 100,000 points and if I'm wrong it doesn't matter; it's something high like that. Easy shot to find, though, and very safe, so you can build up points while your opponents fall asleep.

Jumping Jack, a 1973 electromechanical with more of that Gordon Morrison art. It's stylized and focuses on the jack-in-the-box so you don't notice these women have waists smaller than their necks.

The card explains this 1964 Gottlieb World Fair is ``rated as the number two game of its generation''; I'm not clear on who's rating it that. It's from the era when games had this big rotating target in the center that's very hard for people who didn't grow up with the thing to understand.

There's that Superstar Slugger baseball simulator again.

The best hits on the Superstar Slugger can get you a home run or even, somehow a Super Home Run. According to its flyer, a Super Home Run is 30 runs plus one run for each man on base. I'll never live long enough to see that.

This sign behind the employee counter is very funny because Jared is the name of a guy who'd be very likely to win the Michigan State Championship except that his first name does not start with 'A' and we only let people with names that start 'A' be champion. ... Although his last name starts with an 'A'. Hm.

Gemini, Charlie's Angels, and New York, a rename of Pioneer done in honor of New York City lifting its ban on baseball.

And, sad to say, time to leave. But it was nice to consider that I could have gotten a pizza well done there.

Trivia: In April 1930 Milton Hershey gave his mansion over to the new-formed Hershey Country Club. He would reserve just two rooms to live in himself the rest of his life. Source: Hershey: Milton S Hershey's Extraordinary Life of Wealth, Empire, and Utopian Dreams, Michael D'Antonio.

Currently Reading: The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime, Judith Flanders. So this is proving a far more fascinating book than I expected, with a lot of consideration not just for particular imagination-capturing crimes but how they were perceived, and how their perceptions changed over time. So it's this synthesis of social and pop-cultural and legal histories and really great all together.

Yeah, still not much going on in my mathematics blog. I've been preoccupied. But here's a couple weeks' worth of writing from it:

• What do the less-than and greater-than symbols mean?
• How January 2021 Treated My Mathematics Blog
• In Our Time podcast has episode on Émile du Châtelet
• Some topological fun

With the weekend over I had ... well, a couple days of nothing big. Not much sense taking photos of the office, and only a little sense taking pictures of the extended-stay hotel room I was in for the next several days. So the next thing in my photo roll is from Thursday when I had to check out by 11:00 and didn't have to be at the airport until about 4:00 for what was supposed to be an early evening flight and turned into a 10pm flight.

And hey, look what I discovered, lost underneath the seat of my rental car! ... I believe that this was a book I'd gotten at the Book Garden, and didn't realize had slid into hiding, but discovering a lost book that's titled Lost Discoveries is just too silly not to memorialize.

And, for want of a better idea what to do, I went back to the Silverball Museum! They sell three-hour wristbands too and that was just about the time I had. Here's what the city-facing side looks like by day.

The convention center as seen by day; you can make out the hippocampuses and whatnot above the doors.

Getting back inside. Woodrail games and, in the distance, the 90s Williams row.

The 1951 game Hayburners, with a gimmick where various targets advance one of the horses. There's targets that switch which horse advances, too.

Lower playfield of Hayburners. 1951 is just a couple years after flippers came to pinball at all, which surely explains why they face the wrong way and there's no inlanes and all.

The playfield of Pinbot, always a nice spacey joy to play. It's a late-solid-state game, just barely.

The backglass to Jokerz!, a late-solid-state that always interested yet baffled me as an undergraduate. It became one of my pretty reliable games at Fremont over 2019, though.

The playfield for Jokerz!. It's among the last card-themed pinball games, and a highly symmetric table for the era too.

Event space in the center of the Silverball Museum, and one staff guy fixing an electromechanical.

Electromechanical version of Mata Hari; the game also came in a solid-state version. I had tried playing it Sunday, when it had a power failure after two(?) balls. Thursday, though, it was working fine. Just hard.

Trivia: The first American ship to trade at Manila, Philippines, reportedly never paid the customs duties. Source: Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America, Peter Andreas. (Andreas doesn't cite exactly what ship and date this was, or what duties were due, but it is in service of a point about how much early American trade was built on illegal transport of people and goods.)

Currently Reading: A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression, Jane Ziegelman, Andrew Coe.

So we reach the end of the Year of the Rat. Its start was the first time that Covid-19 really touched our lives, as it caused the mall to cancel the Chinese New Year parade and talent show. We weren't sure that was why they did it --- they just said it was ``postponed'' without explanation --- and it felt, to me, like this was overreaction, given there were maybe one or two cases known in the Detroit area.

I hope when this is all done they have their Year of the Rat parade, and then a Year of the Ox, to make good on the promise that these things were not destroyed but just put off to safer times.

So here from January 2020, before everything was bad everywhere, more of the Silverball Museum in Asbury Park.

I know I photograph this every time I visit the Silverball Museum but I just love seeing the Background Characters of Mary Worth singing on the backglass there. Also, for playing just the one game, I did pretty well; double that score would at least beat some of the high scores.

Lower playfield of Slick Chick, which combines women in rabbit costumes with rabbits I can't explain in any way.

Another game of the month, Bobby Orr Power Play, which is wonderful in that it starts up with a stirring bit of 8-bit fanfare. Also horrible in that either the scoop at top kicks the ball back into the scoop, so you have a great game, or it kicks it to a center drain, so you have an awful game, and there's nothing you can do about either state.

40th anniversary of Roller Disco! Which I last photographed at Pinburgh 2019. The backglass remains wonderfully colorful.

I played more than one game on Genie, but also, I got satisfyingly close to a high score on it. Since this was the weekend before State Championships, I was feeling pretty good about my chances. Note that I think none of the games at the Silverball Museum were in the State Championship, and if there was any overlap they were different instances of the tables, but still. Good play is a comforting thing.

So how do you fit the letters of ``Roller'' on when you only have five drop targets? ... Which seems to put the lie to the story that the designers of Barracora realized doubling the R's on one drop target was an innovation that fixed that design problem.

Jersey Jack Row. The Silverball Museum had all the games made by these guys, who're just down the highway some. Jersey Jack's released another game, Guns and Roses, since then and I assume they've added that too. Jersey Jack games usually treat me kindly.

The backglass of zodiac-themed game Gemini. I do love the games that just embrace a weird theme like this.

Top Score, the two-player version of 300, a game that wrecked a come-from-behind run at Pinburgh 2018 for me. Note the 'bowling ball return' machine in the backglass; certain shots push a ball up into the lane there, and each of those is good for a thousand points bonus. Which would have made all the difference if the game hadn't tilted on me.

Apart from Jersey Jack games the Silverball Museum doesn't get in modern pinball games often, but hey, look, they've got the Munsters, right next to the Addams Family! Nice.

Williams's 1967 Beat Time, with a fan-made backglass that makes it even more plain what they were going for.

The lower playfield of Beat Time with the original fake band names, all of which are funny enough to have been mentioned in a 1966 sitcom. I can't think who the Lurches and the Low Humbles are spoofs of, and I keep feeling like I know who the Neatbloods are a riff on, but I can't get it off my tongue.

Trivia: In a letter written in 387 CE, Augustine noted that the Alexandrian churches were observing Easter the 25th of April; Roman churches, the 18th of April. And the Arian churches in Gaul observed it the 21st of March. Source: The Calendar: The 5000-Year Struggle to Align the Clock with the Heavens --- And What Happened to the Missing Ten Days, David Ewing Duncan. Augustine noted this ``angrily'', says Duncan.

Currently Reading: A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression, Jane Ziegelman, Andrew Coe. Which by the way was a Christmas present from bunnyhugger, though she worried it'd be too downbeat a thing, and then she got home and saw me reading The Taste Of War, about food in World War II, so was assured this would be good.

So here's some more of the Silverball Museum, as seen in not-quite-mid-January 2020.

Looking down the Silverball Museum's row of 90s Williams Games, a murderer's row of all-time great games.

Their FunHouse, and a note celebrating Rudy's 30th anniversary as a pinball icon.

The FunHouse high scores. bunnyhugger has beaten those scores in simulation. I've beaten some of those scores in simulation, but not all. And ... those under-13 scores, on the FunHouse at Stella's in Grand Rapids.

A teacup which I have assumed is from an old amusement park ride. I assume from Asbury Park's Palace Amusements, but they don't have it signed that I remember.

A Superstar Slugger, one of the pinball-like baseball simulator games out there.

The 90s Williams row, along with two more of the signs for anniversary games.

One of the museum's oldest games, the 1962 Friendship 7.

And an even older game, the lovely woodrail Rocket. Like many games of the era you can get replays from scores or from collecting rockets, essentially, as achievements.

The playfield for Friendship 7, which fits the highly symmetric style of that era of game.

And here's their oldest game --- and an anniversary game --- the 1950 Knock Out. This is nothing like the Knock Out that's one of the pillars of my Fremont games.

The backglass for the 1950 Knock Out, which shows off all sorts of mayhem outside the ring. Notice the credits counter in the cigarette girl's box; it's almost but not quite aligned to fit.

Knock Out's playfield. Like many old-fashioned pinball games the goal is to get a complete set of targets 1 through 5, and repeat. Note that the flippers are crazy far apart, but there's a metal wedge that can pop up and make the ball impossible to lose except by your own bad play. I'm curious when that sort of drain blocker element will return to pinball.

Trivia: In 1940 the Soviet Union harvested 95.6 million tons of grain. In 1942 it harvested 26.7 million. Source: The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food, Lizzie Collingham.

Currently Reading: Cracking the Cube: Going Slow to Go Fast and Other Unexpected Turns in the World of Competitive Rubik's Cube Solving, Ian Scheffler. It's fascinated me how much the competitive-cube-solving community seems like a parallel-universe version of the competitive-pinball community. Rubik gets quoted a bit about the differences of various sports and how cubing is one that's well-balanced between physical requirements and mental requirements (picking what moves to do, executing them quickly and precisely). Pinball's like that too; so much of the game is mental, knowing what to do next and how to recover if something goes awry, but also that you need reflexes and at least some nudging game. That so much of cubing also involves not moving faster than you know what you're doing is also similar. So I wonder how much of these parallels draw from being very loosely similar demands on mind and body.

If there's a theme to this week's humor blog items, it's my slightly messing up the scheduling of stuff that would logically be scheduled. Well, part of that is I messed up my mathematics blog posting, but that's all right. Nobody seems to have complained. I don't feel neurotic about that at all. But also run there the past week and see what the other mis-scheduled thing was? Here.

• On This Or That Date: November 10, last week's big piece, and see if you can pick the four items that I felt inspired by and thought would be enough to fill 700 words before I realized the rest was going to require work.
• Meanwhile In Local Fast-Food News some baffling McChicken-based behaviors.
• Statistics Saturday: The Local News For Some Reason in which I read the local free advertisement-delivery system, sort of.
• What’s Going On In Gasoline Alley? August – November 2017 (it's a lot of wandering around and circus jokes)
• In Which I Ponder The Thinking Of Criminals In Inspector Danger’s Crime World because yeah, the mystery is a fair one, it's just weird is all.
• The Sixth Talkartoon: Wise Flies and whoops, I forgot to do the fifth. Sorry.
• Friday Is Coming, We Hope as Silver Bells In The City approaches.
• On This Date: November 17, If You Like so I guess this is my theme for the month.

So let me share with you some last shots from the Silverball Museum, as it stood last December. You like these, right? Close enough.

Main playfield of Xenon, a 1980 game set in the poster for some visually awesome but honestly kinda dull Logans Run-style movie. Key to the game: ugh, who knows? Probably shoot the scoop way at the top and do drop targets in order. They're all like that.

Main playfield for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the pinball game, evoking the movie's iconic images of that tower and blobby amoeba shooting out lightning bolts.

Playfield for Gottlieb's Dragon, not the game that inspires giddy cries of ``bao'' from everyone who's played it, but still, one of those surprisingly few games that has a cheery, friendly dragon I think everyone would like to hug on it.

Some of the Silverball Museum's oldest working, playable tables: 1950s woodrails Hawaiian Beauty and Rocket. Five-ball tables and you're responsible for putting balls into the shooter lane, so, if you want to play a two- or three- or even five-ball game go right ahead! It's your choice.

Lower playfield of Hayburners, an electromechanical with a horse-racing theme in which, among other things, you pick which of six horses in back to advance with your progress. The green horse, number 1, is named ``Uncle Miltie'', which is maybe a bit of whimsy and is maybe a slipped-in-past-the-censors joke? Also note the lower flippers point backwards from the way normal flippers do, because flippers were still new things on games at that point and anything could happen.

Backglass of Hayburners, showing the six horses on their track, as well as highlighting the currently-lit horse and showing their names. See what I mean where Uncle Miltie stands out as a name?

Full playfield of Doodle Bug, the quirky beloved star of the 2016 Pinburgh finals. Among the features: that little ball inset in the field, which various targets will start kicking back and forth for 10, 100, 1000, or even in theory 10,000 points a hit. Also: absolutely nothing surrounding the flippers, so there's no holding the ball or even live-catching it the way normal games allow. There is a center post that can be popped up, so you can trap the ball at the tip of the flipper, but given that every pinball player is used to trapping the ball at the base of the flipper, and here that's instant death, you can imagine how fun this is.

Quit Playing With The Clock! Detail from my high-score-table worthy night-ending game of FunHouse, showing that it's both 11:30 and ten to midnight. (This was Chicago's first draft, before they'd worked out the meter.)

Trivia: The first tryout for the musical Mata Hari was a benefit performance for the Women's National Democratic Club at the National Theater. At this performance which, with Lynda Byrd Johnson in attendance, the show ran past midnight, scenery collapsed, and leading actress Marisa Mell was accidentally caught in a spotlight during a costume change while she was almost nude. The show closed without reaching its intended Broadway opening. Source: Not Since Carrie: 40 Years Of Broadway Musical Flops, Ken Mandelbaum.

Currently Reading: Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History, David Aaronovitch.

With the regular day begun and figuring we couldn't get another round on Mystic Timbers we looked at the park just to take in the whole experience. It was already a hot, sunny day and bunny_hugger and I thought to do something out of character. We'd try the log flume. It's Peanuts-themed, since Cedar Fair parks own that license. But this is the rare Peanuts-themed ride that makes a lick of sense, since it's titled ``Race For Your Life, Charlie Brown''. Going along a river ride is sensible. While we enjoyed that --- after the big splashdown there's even a statue of Snoopy and Woodstock in a tub, shooting water at the riders --- MWS went off to get his all-day drinks wristband. We had the all-day drinks thing on our season passes (and had even used them, none too much, at Michigan's Adventure and at Cedar Point). MWS wasn't so much for log flume rides, an attitude he would come to regret (watch this space!) although not at Kings Island.

So from there off to The Beast. This is Kings Island's other, older, biggest, world-class wooden roller coaster. It's the ride of the park. It should have been a fiasco: a coaster designed by someone who'd never designed a roller coaster, paid for by people who weren't asking questions, that kept sprawling out in the construction. And yet it turned out great. Turned out fantastic. It goes far off into the woods. It's a better ride at night, as you go racing through the dark and quiet, but it's still a great ride by day. Also by day we could notice stuff set up around the park that was clearly Halloween decor, such as the warehouse behind the ride station that's labelled the Slaughterhouse.

One more bit of unfinished business. When bunny_hugger and I went to Kings Island a couple years ago we were foiled in riding Flight of Fear. It's a linear induction-launched coaster, an indoor one, with a heavy flying saucer theme. (And was originally titled Outer Limits: Flight of Fear, back when the park was owned by Paramount and it was the 90s and the Outer Limits remake was a thing anyone remembered.) When we'd previously visited the ride was plagued with shutdowns; apparently, the early induction-motor launchers are just tetchy. And we'd gotten to the ride late, leaving not a lot of time to wait out glitches. This time we went early, discovered there wasn't much of a line --- we were able to join the queue right about where we'd had to give up last time around --- and joy of joys, we got to ride. I like induction-launchd coaster; it's a nice, slightly supernatural feeling. And the flying-saucer/aliens setting works nicely for it.

Some more rides, such as Diamondback, the big steel coaster built out over the pond. It has a nice final hill that touches the water, creating this enormous satisfying spray behind it that nobody on the train can see because they're in front of it. The ride's got a nice dramatic plexiglass box of broken cell phones warning what happens to those who take these things out while on the ride. It's also the spot where I realized I'd left my camera on simulated ISO 3200, so that all my photos were a touch overexposed. From this point everything gets a little better color-balanced. You'll see.

I don't remember what we had for lunch. What I remember standing out about it is we saw that we got these modest, maybe 12-ounce, cups for our season-pass free-drinks plan. MWS got this larger, maybe 16-ounce, cup for his day free-drinks plan. We understood instinctively why free-drinks people would get smaller cups than people buying the regular or the large sodas. But why would season-pass free-drinkers get an even smaller cup than the day free-drinkers? And it wasn't a quirk of that drinks stand, or even that day, or that park: it would be consistently smaller when we visited Michigan's Adventure and Cedar Point later in the season, at least until late enough in the season that cup discipline was clearly breaking down or they ran out of the small cups. It's a small, mysterious thing.

Also there and less generally mysterious: a petting farm. It was set up in a converted amphitheater. The stage was still there, as well as the ghost of the brackets where seats were mounted. This one was billed as Snoopy's Barnyard Friends, giving us the third label for a Cedar Fair petting zoo in as many parks. Also another slightly baffling Peanuts tie-in because, hey, remember all those great Peanuts strips where they went to a farm? ... Yeah. Well, there were some, which at least makes a petting farm more on-point than amusement parks. (As best I can tell there's exactly one week of story in which any Peanuts character went to a fair, never mind an amusement park. As best I can tell a Tilt-a-Whirl is the only amusement or carnival ride to ever be featured in Peanuts.) Despite the peculiar theme and slightly awkward space they had some nice setups with all the animals you might hope for. Ducks and geese. A llama that doesn't seem to know why she's there. Pygmy goats. A whole mass of bunnies, some of them who'd even not quite had enough kids thrusting hands at them and so were sitting in petting range and not under cover. A great little moment of animal contact in the midst of our amusement park visit.

Trivia: The West Side & Yonkers Patent Railway property --- the first elevated railroad in New York City --- was sold at bankruptcy auction on 15 November 1870 for $960.00. Source: 722 Miles: The Building of the Subways and How They Transformed New York, Clifton Hood.

Currently Reading: Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History, David Aaronovitch.

PS: some more Silverball Museum pinball beauty shots.

Midway's 1963 Midway Champ, one of those games that challenges your conceptual theory of pinball. The targets advance one of two cars on a little track, embedded in the backglass, and the challenge is to get the red or the blue car farther in the allotted time. See some of the targets are good for one car length while others are good for a half or a whole lap.

Glass-top view of the playfield for Midway Champ peering up at the backglass, although not quite high enough to see the good backglass toys. You can see the grandstand painted into the backglass scene, though.

So here's the backglass toys. The red and blue cars move, I assume, magnetically; at least I don't see obvious sign of tracks. It's a nice little scene embedded in the backglass.

(Sorry, honestly thought I had set this to post.)

Relatively quiet week at my mathematics blog, with the usual comics posts and one stray bit of reading post. Don't worry; it's inspired me to write something as a follow-up. To see what I'm going to have a follow-up to, why not try some of these:

Also, are you informed about What's Going On In Gasoline Alley? You can be! It takes maybe a thousand words to catch up on three months' worth of searching for the heartbroken Rufus. Had enough beauty shots of pinball machines? Me neither. I used the Sunday of my work trip last year to get to the Silverball Museum in Asbury Park. Here's how the place looked.

In the dark grey skies of an overcase December afternoon the Silverball Museum's lights don't make it look the least like the evil corporate overlords of a dystopian yet very 80s future.

Looking north along the boardwalk from outside the Silverball Museum. It looks cold, to me, but that might just be my memories of the way the place felt and how I worried that I ought to be back home with our pet rabbit instead.

Looking east along the boardwalk into the grey Atlantic shore. I don't know how much the fence does to stave off winter storms stealing away the beach, but the beach was there when we visited in summer, at least.

View of the Asbury Park Convention Center; you an see the tree set up inside. Fun fact: if you wander the length and breadth of the convention center you have a 20 percent chance of seeing Bruce Springsteen, even if it's only his spectral presence manifested by the expectations of Jersey Shore residents and he's off performing in London or something.

So here, finally, a look inside the actual Silverball Museum and its first row of games. It leads off, naturally, with FunHouse, this model featuring an over-caffeinated Rudy staring directly into your soul. Howdy, Biff.

South wall along the Silverball Museum, and the games that are off past FunHouse and The Shadow and Road Show above. It isn't quite a review of the games I learned to love pinball on --- I never saw a Scared Stiff or a Cirqus Voltaire until this decade, for example --- but most of this row is stuff I played in the 90s when I was learning to love the game.

Backglass for Silverball Mania, an early solid state game themed to the idea of ``why not have everybody be shiny liquid metal''? And like a dozen years before Terminator 2 invented liquid metal, all right? If you prowl around the game you discover there's a lot of people and different body types, including some wizened old men with beards and stuff. Don't worry. All the liquid metal women are young-looking, if I'm not mistaken.

One of the rows of solid-state games at the Silverball Museum. Evel Knievel, sadly, came out like two years too early to have ramps, which has to be one of the great shames of pinball timing.

Trivia: One scheme of counting the dates, popular in Italy in the Middle Ages, was the ``Bologna custom''. It counted dates from the first to the middle of the month, and then began counting backwards toward the last day of the moth. Source: The Calendar: The 5000-Year Struggle to Align the Clock and the Heavens --- and What Happened to the Missing Ten Days, David Ewing Duncan.

Currently Reading: Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History, David Aaronovitch.

For dinner we figured to drive across the state. New Jersey's only about forty miles wide at that point. But on the other side of I-195 is Belmar, with Kaya's Kitchen, a vegetarian-and-vegan restaurant that's become part of our tradition. We got into town just as the pirate parade was busy going the other way, because apparently Belmar just has parades of people dressed as pirates these days. We also had to go several blocks away from the restaurant to park, which would add a bit of extra exhausting fun at the end of dinner when we realized we'd lost a marker pen we needed, and we had to retrace our steps.

Given the mass of pirates we worried the restaurant might be full, or closed, or something, but there weren't any problems. They could seat us right away. Surprisingly to me they didn't have anyone performing; we've seen small groups playing in a corner in the past. Maybe Saturday nights are too busy to give up the floor space. Kaya's has been getting a bit more successful and moving ever-so-slightly upscale with each visit; they'd dropped a while ago the simulated drumsticks that even included edible ``bones'', and they don't seem to have their vegetarian equivalent to pork roll anymore either. It's good they're doing well, and we'd love to have a place like this near home, but they did change a little bit away from what was probably our favorite. Or the chef got bored and might come back to pork roll when her spirits pick up again.

Belmar is on the Jersey Shore, just a little bit south of Asbury Park, which was of course our next spot, because on the boardwalk there is the Silverball Museum and its splendidly successful set of pay-one-price pinball machines. Between getting up late, spending time at Dorney, lounging about the hotel and not rushing dinner (why would we rush dinner?) we were getting there late, something like 10 pm, possibly the latest I've ever been at the Silverball Museum. But, heck, the place was open till 2 am, so how would we not have plenty of time?

This is also the first time bunny_hugger had been to the Silverball Museum since getting seriously into pinball. She'd been there at New Year's, yes, after a couple months playing in our league, but that was before she felt like the master of her pinball skills. It was also well before she got into Wii's Pinball Hall of Fame and fell in love with FunHouse, which of course they had and which she's wanted so much to play in person. (They have it at the Arcade, location of our other pinball league, and at Marvin's, but still, that's not enough access.) The game is harder to play in person than electronically --- the Pinball Arcade engine is fantastic, but it doesn't capture the grittiness and imperfection and variation of actual tables --- but it's still great reconnecting her to a game she quite loves playing. I could also point out some of the other games, like Road Show, that did their best to duplicate the FunHouse magic, not so successfully.

I managed to have a pretty respectable game of Doctor Who, which is gratifying since it's always been a table I admired more than mastered. Speaking of which, someone had taped to the backglass --- with its spreading array of the Classic Seven Doctors (the only ones to exist back when the game was made) --- a picture of Peter Capaldi doing his cape-billowing, finger-pointing pose.

The Silverball Museum has a Challenger table. This is one of those well-meant attempts to produce a two-player version of pinball, this one with a double-length table that tilts toward one player or the other. As with our attempt on the Joust two-player table, back in May, bunny_hugger handily beat me, managing something like triple my score.

Sometime after midnight the museum got really empty, opening up table to play and to hear, clearly. Around 1 am, one woman there did come up and start chatting with us. She explained she was the Gina B whose name appeared often on the boards listing people's high scores. She got into pinball through her boyfriend, who lives a few blocks away from the museum, and what with hanging out there she's gotten to be pretty competitively good with every game. I have to admit the conversation kind of went on past the point I could think of anything to say, and I suspect it went on past the point she knew what to say either, so we had that terrible bit of smiling and acknowledging that things in general exist to conclude our chat.

She also mentioned that the museum really closed at 1 am, although they weren't going to push people out too harshly. Still, they were turning off the radio and TVs and turning down the lights and turning off unattended machines and we were rather shocked to lose the hour of pinball we thought we might have. So, ah, oops. But that did give us the chance to make our apologies and get in a last game before heading out. They did turn off the last machines and most of the lights as we left, and that's the first time we've closed out this particular arcade.

We must've got back to our hotel somewhere around 2:30 am, and to bed right away.

Trivia: The term ``ball'' for a baseball pitched outside the strike zone (and not swung at) is an abbreviation for ``ball to the bat'', a warning umpires were to give to pitchers (to throw fair, hittable pitches) and for the batter (to swing at fair, hittable pitches) after concluding either the pitcher or batter was deliberately stalling. Source: A Game Of Inches: The Story Behind The Innovations That Shaped Baseball, Peter Morris.

Currently Reading: The Future Is Japanese, Editors Nick Mamatas, Masumi Washington, Haikasoru.