austin_dern

There was one more thing we did for the holiday season but I didn't have the time to write it up before and today my mood has been too fowl to do anything further. So that'll wait. Instead let's see some more backglasses and such at the VFW Ann Arbor Pinball Museum of Halls, from the Black Friday 2019 visit.

A real historic piece: Bally's 1934 Skyscraper. The goal is to shoot the holes that light up the whole skyscraper, so this isn't a pure mechanical. But note that there's no flippers or anything; you just have to plunge and nudge.

Looking closer at Skyscraper. The compass-like disc in the center is apparently a spinner for free points at the start of the game. The circle in the lower right corner is the tilt detector: if the ball's out of place, the game's void and your awards forfeit.

bunnyhugger playing the Cactus Canyon 2.0. The table was one of Bally Williams's last tables and the original rule set not completed; fans went and wrote their own completion and that's what you play here. (The Pinball Arcade app used to let you play the original.)

... Oh for crying out loud. Pinball stuck behind the drop target on Cactus Canyon.

Someone at Gottlieb in 1954: ``Li'l Abner license? Why would we pay for a Li'l Abner license?''

Lower playfield of Daisy May, with a truly wild arrangement of flippers. If I remember right the flipper button snaps both flippers on that side together, snapping them into a V. It really messes with your head.

The whole playfield for Daisy May. They were really into symmetric playfields back then.

End of the night; please enjoy a long row of pinball machines, some of them with backglasses that aren't about barely-clothed women.

Oh hey, yeah. Little detail in a Meteor table: we had not heard of the Pinball Association of America before, nor what relationship might exist between the International Pinball Association and the current sanctioning body, the International Flipper Pinball Association. Also we haven't had the nerve to call the Pinball Wizard Hotline to see who's got that number now, but isn't that a great number?

Trivia: During the winter of 1917-18 the United States rationed coal to two-thirds the usual supply, with many uses of electricity such as outdoor lighting and elevator runs to below the third floor being forbidden. Source: Coal: A Human History, Barbara Freese.

Currently Reading: Christmas: A Biography, Judith Flanders. So one delightful little recurring theme this book has been that it turns out a lot of Christmas traditions came about from someone who had a good prose style deciding that whatever their family did when they were eight was The Way to celebrate Christmas and their readers shrugging and guessing, welp, that must be right. Also that anything which existed when they were eight dated back to time immemorial, and so Christmas has just been Borging traditions up like this through the centuries.

I have a new device! A decade and a month or so after buying a first-generation iPad, I plunged boldly into ``tablet computers that have received any kind of update since 2013'' and got an iPad Pro. Not used, but one that a friend had, surplus to requirements, and was willing to sell, along with Apple Pencil and Smart Keyboard. Also all the original packaging, a thing that I can quite relate to The friend also hit some kind of USPS jet stream, sending it out on Saturday and the thing arriving this morning.

I'm, of course, nervous about this as I am with any big purchase. Also since my laptop kernel-panicked, which should just be a fluke but, after all, my previous computer went from one kernel panic to complete death in the course of about a week. While I've felt flush with cash, thanks to not paying for all these pinball nights, I'm not that flush and it's not like I can pick up extra money by tutoring.

Still! It's a handsome-looking thing, 10.5 inches, in that rose gold color that matches bunnyhugger's computer. It seems to be linked up to my accounts and I've downloaded some of the apps that I'd had on my old iPad. I haven't yet explained to my old iPad that it's facing retirement, but I'm sure it had to know something was up since it's been like 2017 since they last made any app that would even load on it.

Now some more pictures from the VFW Ann Arbor Pinball Museum Etc, as seen in May of 2019.

Backglass to Gottlieb's late-solid-state Arena, which is a promising theme at least.

Ah, but Robo-War, or possibly Warning..... Robo-War, definitely looks like the cover of a 1950s science fiction classic reissued in prestige-ish format in the 90s.

Bally's 1933 Air-Way, which the Internet Pinball Database credits as having the first (non-electric) score totalizer. As you hit targets a score flag at the bottom of the game flips over. You can see some of those flipped over at the bottom.

So if you get a ball to drop down the open hole (as at St Louis or Boston here), the ball's gobbled up, you get the corresponding number of points and the little door slaps shut so that, for example, a shot into New York will keep going and maybe hit the zeppelin or something else.

Back to the pure mechanicals. Here's Torpedo, made around 1934-36 by possibly Rube Gross of Seattle, or J H Keeney of Chicago. The Internet Pinball Database has pictures that definitely match the Rube Gross game. The baffling thing here is there's an arch of pins around the torpedo up top which seem to block off the whole center playfield. Nobody had any idea how to get to, like, the 5000-point shot in the center. Dropping something into the torpedo seems obvious, but that just led to an under-the-table path and ball drain.

Note the tilt mechanism has changed to a flag that shows red if the game tilted. The plate definitely credits the Keeney company, but if there's any link between them and Rube Gross I don't know it.

The inaccessible, but so-valuable, center playfield of Torpedo. I even called over GRV, who's under a fairy spell compelling him to explain the rules of any game ever made, and he couldn't help.

Exhibit Supply Company (Chicago)'s 1934 Drop Kick, which the Internet Pinball Database claims is electromechanical although I can't think what would be electric on the thing.

Way up top there the sign encourages, ``Practice makes perfect - Try Again'. Notice on the right that there's a little turnstile, which lets you lock balls and get them released later.

My game. I felt good about scoring ... uh ... 2000 + 1800 + 200 + 400 + 200 + 200 so that's 4800 points. Anyway only two balls of the ten didn't score anything.

Playfield of Gold Ball, a 1983 Bally Midway game that wants to get you to think of Silverball Mania, and other stuff that's clearly about pinball life. Or, as implemented, to make you think of being caught head-to-toe in a thick gold-colored rubber suit. So, you know, something for everyone.

Bit of detail from Bad Cats, a game I really like. It's showing off a guitar-playing mouse, and of course that lightning-striped cat in boots.

Trivia: The earliest recorded pairing of a specific date and a day of the week seems to be a 2nd century AD manuscript by Vettius Valens, which described how to determine the day of the week for any particular day. He used as a basis the ``first year of Augustus'', assumed to start on a Sunday. This refers to the era of Augustus's reign in Egypt, the year after his victory of Mark Antony at the Battle of Actium, so the date was the first of Thoth in 30 BC, which was either the 30th or 31st of August. Source: Marking Time: The Epic Quest to Invent the Perfect Calendar, Duncan Steel. It's impossible to be sure: the leap year rule Julius Caesar had instituted was not being reliably followed in this era, and it is not clear when August moved from 30 to 31 days.

Currently Reading: Read You Loud And Clear: The Story of NASA's Spaceflight Tracking and Data Network, Sunny Tsiao.

My mathematics blog made its big transition this week! How'd that all look? Kind of normal, actually.

• Reading the Comics, June 7, 2020: Hiatus Edition
• My All 2020 Mathematics A to Z: Michael Atiyah
• I’m looking for D, E, and F topics for the All 2020 A-to-Z
• Using my A to Z Archives: Ansatz

The VFW Ann Arbor Pinball Hall of Fame etc had one of its rare open house nights Black Friday, 2018. We went of course.

At the VFW for Black Friday 2018 we played a game of FunHouse, of course. And, not to brag, but I was on fire, so this happend. Of course. Happily we were able to get it out without breaking my magic; I think we might have even shaken it loose because they don't actually have tilts on the games at the VFW, which is one of the reasons they'll never hold the State Championship there, as great a venue as that would otherwise be.

But ah, look at that! Both bunnyhugger and I had fantastic games. FunHouse scores are, at most, eight digits long so the 16-digit LED screen has a bit of a problem when players one and two, or players three and four, have good games. Also, you know who it was squeaked out the other in this high-scoring game?

That's right: bunnyhugger beat me, and beat my high score from back in September that was still on the board somehow.

Looking around to games of interest, though? Here's 1957 Bally Carnival, one of the surprisingly few amusement park-themed games. Also Bally's last pinball machine for a good half-decade; they made exclusively bingo machines, batting games, and other novelties until Moon Shot in 1963.

Thing about 50s pinball is that while they had flippers they didn't have the modern assumptions about how flippers should be placed or arranged, so you get absolutely wild combinations like this, which I'd like to see come back into play.

Gottlieb's Queen of Hearts, made 1952. Lights behind the number of millions, hundred thousands, and tens of thousands replace scoring reels. Also there's a separate 'points' system on the bottom that can give you an alternate way to earn extra balls or replays. Here, I'd scored 4,630,000 in the main game and collected 7 points.

Lower playfield of Queen of Hearts, showing off again the experimental flipper layouts of the early 50s. And neat things you could do to earn points, as opposed to scoring. I'd like this sort of separate scoring track to make a comeback. Note that I've drained one ball (of five) at this point in the game.

bunnyhugger plays the Williams 1953 woodrail game Nine Sisters, which among other things has a kickback mechanism, on the left outlane. It shoots the ball up a little spiral, which then shoots up back to the top of play again. There are almost no games of that era with such a three-dimensional element to play. Also, note that the game has gobble holes: you drop a ball in for (hopefully) a big points payout, but that ends the ball and you have to plunge a new one. Also there's just the one flipper, but to the right of that flipper is a kicker that honestly is pretty good at tossing the ball somewhere good anyway. The scoring reels were a short-lived innovation for Williams at the time; after a half-dozen tables they went back to bulb scoring for a couple years.

So you say this is Christian Marche artwork, huh? 1969 Bally game Op-Pop-Pop.

bunnyhugger having a game of Orbitor 1, the last production game made by Old Stern. This 1982 game has got an irregularly-shaped playfield, with color-changing lights (I don't know if that's original design or a mod that's been put on). It also has posts in the midst of the playfield that are actually spinning faster than the eye can see, so that when the ball touches them, it responds in weird and unpredictable ways. It's honestly a lot of fun, but I can also see why players would say this is ridiculous.

Detail of the upper playfield of the 1980s Stern game Iron Maiden, which features ... uh ... I'm sure that woman has a good reason for holding a long, complicated shower-head massage against her shoulder while in space? Right?

Backglass, on sale, for the 1958 Gottleib game Sunshine, which is just a bit too pricey to get because we happen to have a pet rabbit of the same name. They didn't have the actual table, so I don't know how the Rating bit comes into play.

Bally's 1969 game Joust, with some more Christian Marche artwork

Trivia: The Agena engine burn which brought Gemini 11 to an orbit with 850-mile apogee --- the altitude record for human, non-lunar-mission, spaceflight --- was 26 seconds. Source: Gemini: Steps to the Moon, David J Shayler. (The starting orbit was about 180 miles.)

Currently Reading: Winnie the Pooh, A A Milne. Since, y'know, it came with iBooks I thought maybe I'd finally read it after all.

Again, the subject line has nothing to do with anything. That anything it should have to do with, though? My humor blog, which the past week has enjoyed such satisfying content as:

• Selections from the October Catalogue, last week's long-form silliness.
• Notice From The Nostalgia Bureau, wordplay that nobody got or much cared about.
• Statistics Saturday: The Comedy Of Will Rogers, me taking on a completely irrelevant target who's nevertheless more important to the modern comic scene than I am.
• What’s Going On In Rex Morgan, M.D.? Why is the mob after Rene Belluso? July – October 2019, and the weakest medical scam in a long while.
• An Update On My Compulsions based on trying to find my chapstick in the dark.
• Popeye: so why is this cartoon called Mississippi Sissy anyway? as I run into a cartoon that's good and weird.
• I May Have Finished Exploring Trivial Quirks of Language with a joke turning out to be true. You know how it is.
• How To Clean The Window, Or Why, a bunch of housekeeping-themed silliness for the day.

And now let's close out the VFW Ann Arbor Pinball etc, at least for a couple months until I get to photographs of the next little visit.

Bally's 1969 Op-Pop-Pop, from that era they were just embracing the joys of op-art/pop-art and good grief but you could cut yourself on every joint of every person there.

Bally's 1964 Happy Tour. The backglass includes pictures of a dozen European countries that you 'visit' over the course of the game

Bally's 1966 Bazaar, a game with zipper flippers again. It's an exciting scene at least.

Bally's 1970 Big Valley, which is weird for several reasons, not just the art style. It was actually a multiball game, although unlike the other Bally multiball games it didn't have zipper flippers.

Middle of the Big Valley playfield, which has a very stylized mountain valley and one of the rare pinball foxes out there.

The night's over already! The backglass for Elektra, game turned off but showing the dazzling array of 70s crystal energy it has for us.

And the playfield of Elektra, showing off incidentally the inner playfield that's the real goal of the game.

And what the heck. Hot Doggin', a 1980 Bally early solid-state game featuring people who're enjoying winter sports while wearing rubber balloons.

Look at all that drop targety fun!

Trivia: In December 1864 the Alabama legislature required all trains to stop within 50 feet of junctions with other lines and specified ``the train of the eldest road to have the privilege of crossing first''. Source: The Railroads of the Confederacy, Robert C Black III.

Currently Reading: New York Sawed In Half: An Urban Historical, The True Story of What May or May Not Have Been the Greatest Hoax Ever Played on the Citizens of Gotham, Joel Rose. So, I get the historical mode the guy is going for, but he is using the More Polite N-word altogether far too often for someone writing a book published in 2000 for crying out loud that is not directly and immediately quoting something from the 19th century, united college funds, or baseball leagues.

PS: My 2019 Mathematics A To Z: Norm, not the comic strip. Something else that's all over vector spaces, which are all over everything anyway.

Oh, so, anyway, I did find the Wild Rides episode of Nickelodeon's Special Delivery. It's on YouTube, of course, but I didn't find it there directly. This Nickelodeon fan blog collected it for me. The upload dates back to when you could only do ten minutes at a time in a video, which is kind of all right since each of the segments was about nine minutes before a commercial break.

Part one.
Part two.
Part three. (The sound gets flaky during the last song, but you can make it out yet.)

It's hard to pick a highlight from this but I'd have to give it to a roughly 14-year-old Matt Dillon. His line reads are those of a young man ripped out of bed at 5 am, and forced by his kidnappers to cold-read off cue cards being held by someone who doesn't know when to flip over to the next card either. Or possibly being asked to improvise a documentary about roller coasters, in which case he's doing a great job, but, wow. So. Every one of these is the take that they used.

One sincere delight of this is that there is a good amount of footage of a couple amusement parks, and particularly roller coasters, as they existed in the early 80s. Most of this, by screen time, is during music videos, themselves done in that Early 80s Music Video style of ``the director wanted to do this slightly dream-logic narrative and this is the New Wave song it's playing under''. My particular choice here would be the second video of the first segment, when (Somebody?) is playing whatever the song is has the refrain ``Nothing To Fear''; I can't work it out. The video is of a little kid bonding with a big, pale guy made to look like the monster of the swamp, on the Great American Scream Machine on Six Flags over Georgia. But, you know, choose your own preferred weird video. They're all fascinating stuff.

Another weird delight for me is in the second part when Matt Dillon says a serious roller coaster rider will not want to miss a certain amusement park ... one with ``not one but two coasters''. Yes, that legendary roller coaster Mecca of ... Barnum & Bailey Circus World in Haines City, Florida. Which ... uh ... well, a park doesn't need a lot of roller coasters to be worth the visit --- Seabreeze in Rochester has three, after all. But Circus World had two roller coasters, one a launched loop model like Lightnin' Loops (formerly of Great Adventure) or Sidewinder at New Elitch Gardens.

Circus World has been defunct since 1990. But these two roller coasters had a weird afterlife: Florida Hurricane, the wooden coaster, was eventually relocated to Magic Springs Theme and Water Park in Hot Springs, Arkansas, for some reason, and is still running according to the Roller Coaster Database. The other one, Zoomerang, the Lighnin' Loops-like coaster, eventually moved to Fun Spot Park in Angola, Indiana. After that park went defunct pieces of it were sold to Frontier City park, in Oklahoma City, to be used in their Diamond Back ... which is one of the two former Lightnin' Loops coasters.

Circus World isn't the only now-defunct park in the video. The last roller coaster in the video is Texas Cyclone, from Six Flags AstroWorld, defunct since 2005. Matt Dillon describes it as ``not the fastest, or the highest, but it is definitely the meanest I'm doing what you want please don't hurt my sister''. Texas Cyclone was a mirror image of the Coney Island Cyclone.

Dillon also mentions at the end ``the Zephyr, in New Orleans''. This ride, at Pontchartrain Beach, was a few years away from closing its long run. (The crest of its hill was moved to a city park, apparently.) And one ride I've actually been on got a mention: ``Thunderbolt in Pittsburgh''. Not Kennywood, but, there's not many parks in Pittsburgh you'd have to search to find that. This is an interesting mention though, as bunny_hugger pointed out that Thunderbolt went from, in its youth, being hailed as the greatest roller coaster ever to today where hardcore fans tend to regard it as overrated. This seems to have captured a moment when its reputation was so good that it would stand out ahead of the Coney Island (New York) Cyclone, or Kings Island's The Beast (then the longest wooden roller coaster and, depending when it was filmed, the fastest roller coaster and the longest roller coaster drop in the world). Cedar Point doesn't get a mention, but not unfairly. There wasn't much roller coaster action at Cedar Point at the time, with only Gemini a noteworthy coaster.

And, of course, the coaster they started with --- Colossus --- isn't really there anymore. It was the roller coaster from National Lampoon's Vacation. Also Kiss Meets The Phantom Of The Park. And a bunch of TV shows. But it was converted to a steel coaster named Twisted Colossus, so I suppose that counts as half-there still.

Anyway, if you have a half-hour and want to see some SDTV footage of roller coasters while Matt Dillon hears for the first time the things he's been saying, this is certainly worth the time.

Trivia: Manhattan's first kosher butcher shop was owned by Asser Levy, a Jewish Polish man who lived in New Amsterdam at the time of the capitulation to the English. Source: The Island at the Centre of the World: The Untold Story of the Founding of New York, Russell Shorto.

Currently Reading: 100 Maps: The Science, Art, and Politics of Cartography Throughout History, Editor John O E Clark.

PS: My 2019 Mathematics A To Z: Martingales, a thing that touches on financial mathematics, so that's always exciting stuff.

PPS: How about a little more VFW? Don't worry, this'll all be done around Thursday and we can move on to the next pinball event.

bunny_hugger catching a moment playing an early solid state game while outside the sun goes nova.

Mad science-themed late solid state game Strange Science, one of the first pinball games I ever really got into, complete with a fun little electric-discharge thingy atop the backbox. Also, Bally's Game Show, one of the surprisingly few game show themed pinball machines.

The most maddening shot in pinball apart from the others: so you're supposed to be able to shoot the pinball up this little blue vertical C scoop, all right. And then ... somehow ... shoot hard enough that it comes down the U turn and continues back up to some high-value targets? Really? Can that possibly be right? I've played this game every chance I can for thirty years and I still don't really know.

It's another full week on the mathematics blog. Reminding people of my archives really works as a publishing strategy. Who knew? If you didn't have it in your RSS feed, here's your chance to catch up:

• Reading the Comics, September 29, 2019: September 29, 2019 Edition
• How September 2019 Treated My Mathematics Blog
• My 2019 Mathematics A To Z: Koenigsberg Bridge Problem
• Reading the Comics, October 4, 2019: Glances Edition
• My 2019 Mathematics A To Z: Linear Programming
• Exploiting my A-To-Z Archives: Knot
• Exploiting my A-To-Z Archives: Local
• Reading the Comics, October 2019: Cube Edition

Meanwhile, how about the story comics? Don't you want to know What's Going On In Rex Morgan, M.D.? Why is the mob after Rene Belluso? July - October 2019 is a nice easy block to review.

And what was happening at the VFW Ann Arbor Pinball Hall of Fame open house weekend? A lot of wiggling! Enjoy!

Backglass to Bally's Wiggler, which has some interesting super-spy or super-thief thing going. And I know what you're thinking but, no, the artist was Jerry Kelley, not Christian Marche.

Playfield of The Wiggler, which includes a target called the Wiggle Jet, a lane called Wiggle Alley, and a general region known as Wigglesville.

Here, let's take us all down to Wigglesville!

Some henchmen(?) getting in the way of Wiggle Alley, which does guide the ball to do this nice long series of S-shuffles along its way. Various targets on the main playfield light rollovers in Wiggle Alley to make it more valuable.

And the Wiggle Jet Super-Bonus, featuring a henchman(?) in a space hovercraft(?). It's a bit hard to say exactly what's going on with this game but it's really interesting.

Backglass of Bally's 1964 Mad World, which has a bunch of silly nonsense in its art.

Lower playfield for Bally's Mad World, featuring the world having had enough of it all, thank you. Also two people racing cars to collide because they were throwing in a lot of wackiness for the art here.

Bally's 1971 Vampire, surely based on any given horror movie host of that era.

Bally Midway's Gold Ball, one of a handful of games based on portraying the pinball player as a solid metal possibly-robot figure, much like Silverball Mania does.

bunny_hugger partying on with the Party Animals.

What you get when they try drawing furries from outside the traditions of furry art.

The lower playfield for Party Animals, which you can tell is not done by furries because half the characters here are birds.

Trivia: Irving Berlin took on that name when a publisher misspelled his birth name Irving Beilin. Source: Know-It-All, A J Jacobs. (Or, ``Irving Baline'', according to Wikipedia.)

Currently Reading: 100 Maps: The Science, Art, and Politics of Cartography Throughout History, Editor John O E Clark.

bunny_hugger e-mailed me explosive news last week. Premier Parks, owners of the Six Flags chain, had put up a bid to buy Cedar Fair, owners of Cedar Point, Michigan's Adventure, Dorney Park, and other such parks. Terrifying news. Not that we like everything about Cedar Fair, but we like the way they run parks more than we like Six Flags's. Well, just look at how the carousels are maintained at, say, Great Adventure versus at Cedar Point. Decades ago Six Flags made a similar bid for Cedar Fair, and got shut down right away. This time? There wasn't such a fast no, and a meeting between Cedar Fair and some group of their own investors got postponed. Unsettling stuff.

Thing is, park operations preferences aside, there'd be good sense to it. If we take the axiom that a bigger company is better off, a Six Flags/Cedar Fair merger would make sense. The companies are in the same line of work, after all, and run parks that are of comparable size and complexity. And both operate mostly in areas that the other chain doesn't. The places where they have parks near one another are in the Philadelphia/New York City metro area, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. These are places that can support several regional parks.

The bubble burst a couple days later. Cedar Fair said Six Flags wasn't offering enough money, and that difference in corporation structures would mean Cedar Fair shareholders would get a lousy tax bill after the sale, and there wasn't any way they could envision Six Flags avoiding that. Which is fine, although bunny_hugger and I were hoping for a stronger statement to Six Flags, one including a phrase like ``... and the horse you rode in on''. Nobody thinks Six Flags could put up more money, though, not at this time.

(Still, if a merger is logical, it seems like Cedar Fair could go and buy Six Flags. It wouldn't be the weirdest turnaround play. Like I said, it's not as though a Cedar Flags chain would be obviously ridiculous.)

So we at least have that security in our beloved amusement parks. We need it, too. The past month has been bad for news of old places. Clementon Park, in South Jersey, abruptly closed in the middle of September, just before a Customer Appreciation Day (customers showed up to locked gates). They cancelled their Fall Festival. They haven't been selling season passes for next year. Their Facebook page was deleted and their Twitter gone private. There's rumors about the park being up for sale.

Clementon is owned by Premier Parks LLC, which annoyingly is not the Premier Parks that owns Six Flags. It's the one that owns New Elitch Gardens outside Denver, and that up until 2018 operated Darien Lake.

And that's not the only park that we've visited to be going away. Coney Island Cincinati is removing all of its amusement park rides, to focus on its water park side. This is not the first time it did this. After Taft Broadcasting used the name and rides of the original Coney Island to open Kings Island, what remained --- mostly the swimming pool --- stayed open while the company thought what to do with the land. But in time new rides came in, and the swimming pool regenerated an amusement park around it. The park, which can trace activity back to 1870, is staying open I suppose, and that's good, and obviously anything might happen in future.

Lakemont Park barely exists anymore but says they'll open Leap-the-Dips next year. Bowcraft is closed. FunTown Pier's owners might still be talking about rebuilding but I don't see how anyone can believe that.

But it's hard to avoid the feeling that the amusement park ecosystem we're used to is contracting. It's hard not to feel there's doom here.

Trivia: An order of two thousand IBM cards cost US$3.60 in the early 1920s. By the early 1930s they were $4.20. Source: Before The Computer: IBM, NCR, Burroughs, and Remington Rand and the Industry they Created, 1865 - 1956, James W Cortada.

Currently Reading: 100 Maps: The Science, Art, and Politics of Cartography Throughout History, Editor John O E Clark.

PS: Exploiting my A-To-Z Archives: Knot, which would really seem like something that doesn't need explaining, wouldn't it? Well, live and learn.

PPS: More hanging around the VFW.

bunny_hugger playing the Apollo-Soyuz-themed Williams game Space Mission. The pile of papers next to her are stuff she had to grade because there were not enough days in the weekend to both spend a day at the VFW and get classwork done separately. I can't tell you how afraid I was that she'd lose something, but, she did never did.

Spanish company Recel's 1975 game Check Mate, with a backglass that makes you wonder ... wait, why is the guy so miserable over a chess game? It is just a chess game, right?

Emergency repairs on one of the older games. The VFW as a private club presses like all its members into service for repair work on open house events like this.

So, Sunshine has been acting a bit weird lately. She hasn't been reluctant to eat, which is the important thing. But otherwise?

She's been digging a lot, lately. She's always liked scrunching up the throw rug underneath the sofa, part of her digging her way underneath the sofa. But she's been digging up the fleece that's within her pen. It's like she's trying to nest, which would make sense if she still had the organs necessary for that. Maybe she just still feels the seasons that strongly. I think she was doing a lot of nesting behavior last year too.

The digging would be fine except that she's also getting territorial. We need to go into her pen for various stuff, some of it rabbit care, some of it not. Like, just winding the mantle clock. But we only have a limited while before she'll hop over and nip our feet. This helps us remember to keep our socks on, but still. It's hard to even know how to discourage this, since we, being sensible, get out of her way and that is what she wants from this. I'm hoping that it's a side effect of whatever's got her nesting so intently, and that it'll pass when she isn't preparing for the baby bunnies that can't be there.

She has not only been annoying, though. She has always been a happy, energetic bunny, one fun to watch. She's still prone to flopping out on her side and exposing her belly. She has always run joyful little energetic laps of her cage. The one thing that she doesn't, though? She doesn't bink, an expression of bunny joy in which a rabbit leaps up and flips around in mid-air.

Except, that she did. I had gotten up first, as I often do, and was downstairs while bunny_hugger was still in bed. I looked over Sunshine, who had run around a little. And then she did a perfect bink, leaping straight up as if by magic and then twisting 180 degrees around to land again. I was delighted. And taken by surprise; if I had been the slightest bit ready I'd have given her some treats to encourage that.

She's been her usual bundle of energy and

Trivia: The postwar Strategic Bombing Survey's research indicated that at the very end of the war about 29 percent of the German population still wanted to continue fighting, 24 percent claiming never to have wavered in their resolve and about five percent having wavered and then regained confidence in the conflict. Source: Why The Allies Won, Richard Overy.

Currently Reading: Disasters and Accidents in Manned Spaceflight, David J Shayler.

PS: Reading the Comics, October 4, 2019: Glances Edition, comic strips which exist and that's all I have to say about that. Of course one of them gets into calendars so I get verbose. It happens.

PPS: Some more pinball art and stuff.

Alvin G and Company was a short-lived company made by the refugees of Gottleib Pinball's final bankruptcy in the 90s. So you can see why in those trying times they would ... try to make a two-player pinball, the occasionally-attempted solution to a problem nobody actually has. Anyway, bunny_hugger examines the whole affair.

Lower half of my playfield on the Alvin G and Company Soccer-Ball. The other side has the same layout; a ball shot too hard down the center goes into the opponent's play.

And here the lower side of the Joust two-player pinball game, which similarly has a very short and mirrored playfield for the competitors. It does use the same sound effects as the video game.

So our first big event after Pinball At The Zoo was ... well, another pinball event. The VFW Ann Arbor Pinball Hall Of Fame annual show. Once again we got tickets for Friday evening, the 4-to-10-pm show. We might not be able to do that again: rumor is the guy who owns the place wants next year's to be Saturday and Sunday alone. Why cut back on the few days the place is (or even can be) open to the public, when it's always extremely popular, to the point that tickets reliably sell out? ... Nobody's really sure, although it's hard not to get the vibe that the guy who owns the collection doesn't really like having all these strangers in messing up his games. There was a tournament before the show started, but we didn't join that. For one, bunny_hugger still had classes in the early afternoon. For another, it was some ridiculously large entry fee that, as I understand it, was neither for charity nor paid out to winners. It's how you hold a tournament while not really wanting anyone there.

Still, the show draws a lot of attendees, including pinball vendors showing off their latest. There were three Black Knight: Sword of Rage tables, one of them the plain vanilla kind played at Pinball At The Zoo, and two the more deluxe models with an upper playfield. This was our chance to try the game again, before it comes to every pinball venue around us, and maybe even hear more than the bass of the music.

Also present: one of Jersey Jack's newest tables, Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. I'm not sure if the game rules are finalized (as far as game rules are ever final, anymore; it's now easy to patch the software in a pinball game, so it's easy to ship a partially complete game and trust you'll fix it after the fact). But it's bright and colorful just as you'd imagine the theme would be, and there's several lovely and weird shots to make, and already neat clips from the movie for various modes. Nobody got the Wonkavator multiball started but that looks like it should be great fun. We never did see anyone tilt a ball, but we've all got an idea what clip from the movie they've got to use when that event occurs.

We met up with MWS, of course, as well as some Lansing League regulars like RED and GCB and all. We led RED and GCB to Class Of 1812, to hear the multiball music, which goes into the 1812 Overture Done As Chicken Clucking, part of the game's weird-era Gottleib weirdness. RED opened the game's coinbox door --- something anyone can do, but which is against the rules and can get you kicked out --- to turn the volume up to ``earth-shattering'' so we, and everyone in the room, could hear it. Which was great, mind you, and which everyone liked. For a while. RED opened the box again to turn the sound down when one of the event staff came over. RED told them, ``I was turning the sound down'' without mentioning his part in turning the sound up, and was thanked for this good deed. Then he held up a pack of Mentos and smiled at the camera.

bunny_hugger and I would go looking largely for the older, weirder games. There were some wonderful new selections available. Particularly, there were a bunch of pure-mechanical games, pre-war pinball machines, from the era before there were flippers. There was just a shooter lane, a ball, and the fact you could tap on a machine to nudge it a little. Where the ball ended up guided your score. Some of them were great and I felt almost an instant expert, such as Bally's 1933 Airway, where there's ten airplanes labelled different cities, and a scoop for a ball to land in each one. In my best game I got balls in seven of the ten city-planes.

Others had me stumped, though. They had a 1934 Rube Gross and Company Torpedo, a naval-war-themed game. But the pins --- actual nails in the wood --- seem to close off all but two of the scoring holes. Even GRV, who knows every rule to every game ever, couldn't see how any of the rest even came into play. There are some dirigibles that hide the openings to tunnels, but he got a ball into one of them and it just returned to the shooter lane. So how does this game work? I don't know. Rube Gross and Company was active from September 1934 to sometime in 1935 and made three games, according to the Internet Pinball Database.

One little frustrating bit. I was having my best-ever game of Quicksilver, an early solid state game with a melty-character theme. My last ball, though, didn't kick into the plunger lane. This is a really simple fix --- open the coin box door and push the solenoid that kicks the ball out --- but, of course, non-staff opening the coin box door are subject to expulsion. I asked the first staffer who was nearby, an older man who was going around polishing table. He didn't seem to know what to do, or to follow what exactly the problem was, and in trying to fix it he lifted up the playfield, and reset the game, and eventually turned off the game. Well, two outstanding balls is still something.

The VFW has a Seawitch, too. This is an early-80s game with playfield adapted to be the new Beatles game. Beatles rapidly became one of my favorite pinball games, something I just have a complete understanding of the flow for and all the major shots and what to do. This was the first time I'd seen Seawitch since the Beatles came out, and I wanted to see how they compared. It turns out if you play Seawitch as though it were the Beatles table, you have a pretty good Seawitch game. In particular, the way the drop targets build your bonus multiplier, how the bonus multiplier carries over, and how you earn an extra ball are the same on Seawitch as on Beatles. So that's fun to know, in case it ever turns up.

We didn't really have enough time, but we never do at the VFW. Maybe next year, when --- if rumor pans out --- we'll probably get the Saturday ticket, 10-to-10. Saturdays are reportedly always packed, but there are a lot of games there, and twice as many hours wouldn't hurt.

Trivia: In 1755 --- before the declaration of what would be the Seven Years' War --- British sailors captured three hundred French merchantmen, taking something like $6 million in prizes. Source: The First Salute: A View of the American Revolution, Barbara W Tuchman.

Currently Reading: Holland on the Hudson: An Economic and Social History of Dutch New York, Oliver A Rink.

PS: A little more Potter Park Zoo Wonderland of Lights, 2017 edition.

Light-lined sidewalk that's got the day's fresh snow on it. December 2017 was a snowy time in Lansing, which is great for night pictures and a little less great for walking around in.

Nice long arc on the sidewalk with a bunch of Christmas trees. I like how the trees are lit from beneath and you can see the darkness of the sky.

These were not animated reindeer lights, but I liked the way the picture came out anyway.

If we expected anything about Meridian-Baseline State Park it's that it would be empty. It's a tiny park near nothing but the intersection of county lines and 200-year-old surveying paths, and was opened to the public only four years. It was not empty. It wasn't packed, mind, but there were several groups of people. People resting in hammocks in the woods. People walking dogs. People curious what we were looking for, which we explained as ``frogs'', an excuse tolerable since there were 180 billion spring peepers there making a great noise which silenced when we talked, and which came back gradually as we stood silently still. People walking with their kids, who'd run a while and then fall down and cry. This would be a danger: it's bad form to leave a mysterious small package in a remote area while strangers are watching. Urban letterboxers have similar challenges.

Another thing we expected: that there would be a place to put a letterbox. We kind of knew going in that the north intersection point would be no good. Also there's a north and a south intersection point. Michigan's baseline latitude is broken, with the part east of the meridian --- the older line --- 935.88 feet north of the part west of the meridian. Nobody is sure why. But once you've laid out a baseline like this, there's no choice but to stick with it.

The land is marshy. This is because the lower peninsula is, geographically, a swamp that someone went and chopped all the trees down from. That someone is Americans, a project which started in 1837 and was complete by 1915. When the park was built in the 70s, both the north and south intersection points were marked with neat copper(?) discs inset in a small circular pyramid. Over the decades since the building and the opening, the land around the north point washed away, so it now sits like a flying saucer several feet above the swamp level. Part of opening the park was building a boardwalk from kind-of dry-ish ground to the concrete cylinders. There was no hope of placing anything there, although ``underneath the monument'' would be such a cool hiding spot, if a thing could be kept there. Also at some point somebody stole the north intersection's disc and it had to be replaced when the park opened. Yes, everybody wants to know who fenced a Meridian-Baseline Intersection Point monument.

Also why they didn't also nab the south intersection's marker. The ground for this one has not yet washed away. Nor has that disc been stolen. This would be the obvious candidate for a place to plant the letterbox. If there were a single good hiding place. In a forested area like this there's normally a bouquet of hiding places. Hollowed-out logs. Piles of rocks with a good little cavern among them. Fallen branches that form a concealed crater. And here? There was ... nothing.

There were a lot of constraints here, of course. We wanted someplace that didn't seem likely to flood. Someplace not on the main trail between the north and south points. Someplace that could conceal a sandwich-sized Tupperware-style container. Someplace that wasn't so far off the trail that people visiting it might form a social trail. Someplace that wasn't defended by too many thorny bushes. And we just kept on not finding viable places. We would go back to the car --- where I had rashly left the letterbox, when I thought the park was much smaller and nearer to the parking lot than it actually was --- and reinspect the north monument, out of the forlorn hope that maybe we had missed a spot and something in the marshlands would be not so terribly bad after all. Or that we might find a spot which maybe failed one of our criteria but was so good for the others that it was all okay.

But we did come out of this understanding why Meridian-Baseline State Park has a mere ``virtual'' geocache, in which you go to the spot and demonstrate you've been there (I think it was by counting the concrete pillars between the north and south baselines?) rather than by going to a specific location and getting a particular thing.

Oh yes, also. Michigan has a permit system to allow you to leave geocaches in state parks. This system was designed without awareness that letterboxes are a thing. And the system wants information, including precise GPS-datum coordinates, that we simply couldn't provide. This is why I am going to conceal the answer of whether we did find somewhere acceptable. I may not want it to be too easy for a state agent to find and dispose of our box, if it's there. Or to not face too directly the heartbreak of such a great location being unsupportable. Ask in confidential channels if you really want to know.

Trivia: Michigan's eastern border was set by the 1783 Treaty of Paris, which set the boundary between the United States and Upper Canada as the middle of Lake Erie ``until it arrives at the water communication between that lake and Lake Huron; thence along the middle of said water communication into Lake Huron, thence through the middle of said lake to the water communication between that lake and Lake Superior''. Source: How The States Got Their Shapes, Mark Stein.

Currently Reading: DC Comics: Sixty Years of the World's Favorite Comic Book Heroes, Les Daniels.

And then, like, twelve minutes after we got there the VFW closed for the night. Here's a row of solid-state games, a particular delight, mostly turned off. Notice there's pinball playfields hung as wall decorations, too.

The playfield for Data East's Secret Service, one of the first pinball games I really got into as a young undergraduate. It's ... not a great game, since Data East never figured out how to make a rule set that had something like balanced scoring, but there's a bunch of fun shots, including the upper playfield flipper created by someone who thought he was Pat Lawlor or something. This is a correctly formed pinball joke so you shall now laugh.

A couple of stragglers, caught still playing games at 10:00 when the night ended. Unfortunately for them, it's F-14 Tomcat.