Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

Since my report last month about how the new air conditioner was all but installed I'm sure you expect that it's been in the window for weeks now, keeping us comfortable in the nights of the last reliably warm days of late summer/early autumn. And so it has except instead of weeks it's been a couple days.

So here's my excuses. The first is that despite my general confidence in the Magic Mount system I was not perfectly sure that the brackets it mounted to, glued as they were to the window frame interior, were secure enough. So I found another screw-free mount, this one a footer to put underneath the air conditioner, and I liked it. It snaps into place inside the windowframe and leaning against the skirt of the roof between the first and second floors of our house. Between the two things feel very secure, which is good for my confidence in the whole thing.

The remaining catch is that the air conditioner came in two parts, a shell that you can use to make sure you have the thing installed correctly, and then the actual hundred-plus pounds of mechanism that slides into the frame. To keep from sliding loose, the mechanism screws in, in four spots, to the frame. Two of the spots are inside, but two of the spots are on the outside, accessible only by ladder. I needed to wait for bunnyhugger to be free to spot me. But then two days a week she's at work until close to or after dusk. One or sometimes two days a week, recently, we've had pinball events taking us away in the evenings. Or other appointments. Or, on the weekend, things like going to Michigan's Adventure or visiting her parents or so on.

So this Saturday, with bunnyhugger at a pinball tournament and not likely to get back before sunset, I noticed our neighbors on that side of the house having a cookout. After I found a tiny bit of garage work to do and got to small talking with them, I explained I had to do something on the ladder, and the guy visiting (a boyfriend(?)) was happy to spot me. Once I had the mechanism installed and screwed in upstairs, I got out the ladder and set it up to the air conditioner. There it was but the work of a moment to screw the last two screws in. Little work tip for this sort of thing: get a small bar magnet; it's a great way of making sure you can't drop the screws.

Anyway I thanked them greatly, and we talked about Cedar Point's Halloweekends a little (he'd never been, and I warned him not to go on a Saturday and not at all Columbo's Day Weekend). And then back upstairs to put the front cover on the machine, plug it in, turn it on and find ...

Oh, it's quite nice. Not quite silent but barely any noise compared to the old one. And it even has a remote so we can turn it on or off or change the temperature barely even waking up. For as frustrating as this was to get put together it's felt magnificent in operation, and I'm sorry it's only a couple days before I, most likely, take it out and set it in the attic for the winter. But we can at last claim the new air conditioner as a success.

And now, here's osme more looking over more pictures of Bronner's from bunnyhugger's birthday trip last year:

They sell a lot of cute mouse figures and I suspect the masked mouse was left over from five years ago.

Despite being mainly a Christmas shop Bronner's sells for other holidays too, such as Raccoon Pumpkin Festival.

Or here, with an ornament for the Singing Ghost Festival.

Here's some ornaments for people who want their trees to be a thing they eat.

And here's one for people who want mice that are Tron-style lightcycles.

This, meanwhile, is for people building their own Tom Servo ornaments.

Trivia: The Florida pavilion at the 1939-40 World's Fair was one of only two state buildings equipped with an air conditioning system. Nevertheless a brochure for Sarasota suggested that air conditioning was less needed in Florida than in other states. The air conditioning was pitched as ``designed to duplicate the balmy atmosphere one actually encounters in Florida''. Source: Cool Comfort: America's Romance with Air-Conditioning, Marsha E Ackermann.

Currently Reading: The Theoretical Minimum: What you need to know to start doing physics, Leonard Susskind, George Hrabovsky.

And now to gossip about the tournament. Much of this went down after we had left, so I cannot guarantee that I heard it right, or that even if I heard it right it was truly reflective of what happened. But something roughly like this happened.

Some necessary backstory. JM, who was making most of the rulings about the tournament, is a stage mom. His stage child: SPM, who is one of several inhumanly expert under-age pinball players in the state. I'm not aware of JM actually cheating on his behalf, but rules-lawyering or using judgement calls to support his kid's prospects and generate content for his Facebook page and I assume YouTube channel or whatever else? Sure. Again, nothing that so far as I am aware contravenes any rule, but that thing where you're out of touch with the level of sportsmanship everyone else is showing.

A case, and one we did witness: in semifinals SPM had chosen to play Banzai Run, a late-80s game with a dirtbike-racing theme famous for having a second, vertical playfield as the backglass. It's wild. It's also hard; a two million point game will win you most any match. SPM, as player one, was having a runaway game, on the third ball already somewhere up around eight million points when nobody else was above one and a half. This tournament, like most pinball tournaments these days, had a ``runaway play'' rule for this sort of thing, where someone is declared the winner because c'mon, nobody's topping that. (If someone does top the score where the runaway player is stopped, they're both assigned first-place finishes.) JM refused to call runaway play on SPM, waiting for SPM to break ten million points and roll the game's seven-digit score. It's fun to see, yes, and JM was bragging about it on the SPM Facebook group and all, but it's also a lot of waiting around, dragging out the tournament without any possible effect on the outcome.

As we were leaving we heard a minor flap erupting over SPM's choice of Rush for the next game. A playoffs rule (a common one) was that you couldn't pick the same game more than once all finals, and SPM had already played Rush in a tiebreaker playoff advancing from the previous round. However --- and I think this the correct call --- the tiebreaker choice was a random choice made on the computer so SPM didn't make it. Still, there were complaints that SPM could play Rush for hours, and look what he just did on Banzai Run, a much shorter-playing game, why put everyone through that? It turns out SPM took second place on Rush, so it wasn't as bad as might have been. He and RLM had traded first and second places and with RLM taking first place on the third game (Jungle Princess) he and SPM were on to finals with MSS and JTK.

Nothing much to say about the first game, Grand Prix; SPM won, MSS second, JTK third, RLM last. The next game, Galaxy, was weird. The table was built in the early 80s, by Original Stern. But a couple years ago someone put out a revised ROM, new rules that make the game more impenetrable. This Galaxy 2021 is more obscure in part from lack of experience, in part because the game still has only a couple 15-segment LEDs to show all information so all the new stuff is cryptic reuse of the scores of whoever isn't up at the moment. Sometimes something causes scores to start rolling up on some not-currently-up player and nobody's quite sure why or what it signifies.

But a good thing about the ROM is that it adds a ball save; 1980s games would only give you the ball back if you didn't make a single switch hit, for points or not. This ROM, you get some relief after plunging the ball or making some shots that the Galaxy 2021 designers judged too likely to drain to be fun. At one point, RLM's ball drained right after doing a something and the game announced --- vocal directions, ``callouts'', being part of what Galaxy 2021 added --- that the ball was saved. Nobody had any idea why he had a ball saved, and they went around asking the other players and JM and MJS and everyone agreed, yeah, looks like he got a wild stroke of luck.

And then it turned out it was not RLM's ball. It was SPM's, with the points RLM was scoring going onto SPM's score. Why? Who knows. These fan-made game ROMS can fix outstanding glitches in scores, but they're made by a couple guys who figure they're clever, not professional teams with rigorous debugging and quality assurance workflows. And even then, sometimes weird stuff happens. So, RLM stopped playing and, as is routine for this, SPM got to play an extra ball after the game with those points added to his score. SPM was upset that the progress he'd made lighting up shots for more points was lost but there's no way to reset the game to exactly the state it had been in.

Ordinarily, someone who plays out of turn takes a last-place for that round. That wasn't called this time around, for the solid reason that everyone, tournament officials included, thought he was legitimately up. MSS took first place, RLM second, SPM third and JTK last. (This incidentally made it impossible for JTK to take first place, but he could still get second.) And then the next day JM would grumble in pinball forums about the unfairness he had witnessed at some tournament of the person who played out of turn not being disqualified, to the disadvantage of SPM. (Although not actually: all other things being equal, the change wouldn't have affected the final finish.)

Well. Last game went to Cirqus Voltaire, and not the Cirqus Voltaire you could play in pinball simulation. MJS, I mentioned, has a prototype of the game with a notably different set of rules. It's obscure but in a different way than Galaxy 2021 is; you can see the finished ``normal'' game from it. SPM does not have a good game on this, though. When a ball drains he grabs the machine and shoves it so hard that the head of the machine crashes into the head of Pulp Fiction, next to it. The game, not unreasonably, slam tilts, the extra-hard game-ends-right-now that comes from throwing the machine around harder even than a tilt allows. SPM protests that this is some freak event because he didn't touch the coin door and, yes, bashing into the coin door is one of the things that causes a slam tilt, but it's not the only thing. 90s games, like Cirqus Voltaire, could have three separate mechanisms for slam tilts and only one of them was protecting the box with all the money.

I'm not sure whether SPM lost from points or if the slam tilt --- as normally happens, even in tournaments where people agree the slam tilt was unfairly triggered --- disqualified him. I suspect it was from disqualification as JM's later trawling of pinball ruling forums asking about RLM not being disqualified for playing out of turn makes more sense.

Anyway, JTK takes first place, MSS second --- securing him the first-place for the tournament --- and RLM third, with SPM taking his second fourth-place finish of finals here. This, by the magic of how playoff rounds are scored, puts SPM and JTK in a tie for second place, with the tiebreaker on Subway, one of those one-player games.

JTK makes a terrible mistake on the first or second ball, trying too hard to save it and so tilting. Thing with these really old, one-player games is they have no bonus score, so the only way to punish a tilt is to end the game. And so SPM has a laughably tiny score to beat to take his second place, which he does easily and then ... he just ... doesn't stop playing. Nothing really says you have to, just the general sportsmanship rules, but it's not like he's having so awesomely great a game you want to see how it turns out. SPM ends up not wanting to pose for winners-circle photos and I believe he didn't say anything congratulatory to MSS or conciliatory to JTK. You get a teen being less gracious in defeat than a grown-up but still, he is old enough to at least shake hands or something.

So that, and after-tournament forum-shopping for people to say how terrible that was, was the weird postscript and what all they got up to while we were driving home. Had I known we weren't going to the beach after all I might have stuck around to see the finish, although the scene might have been unpleasant enough we'd have only felt bad for seeing it. As it was someone as they were saying goodbyes asked MJS when the next tournament would be and he said ``never``. Probably that's just the expression of the end of a long day where weirdly many things went wrong, and he'll feel different when there's a little distance from the event. I'd hope, anyway.

And now for the last of our visits to the Kiddie Kingdom Carousel that November 2024 day ... but the park was still open for another two hours so you're not done with seeing night shots of the park just yet!

Back again to the Kiddie Kingdom Carousel for the last rides of the night but, fortunately, not the last rides forever.

Picture from atop Baxter's [citation required] head looking out at the Kingdom.

And here's bunnyhugger leaning back on Spot [citation required]. Raptor's in the background. I like that she's leaned almost out of frame; makes the picture more interesting, I say.

She poses for me on the ride.

And a hug, just in case we should have been the last members of the public to ride the carousel.

Oh, nice! Spot and Baxter, if those are their names, lined up by the sign introducing the carousel, in their resting place for the night. They should pay me to use this for a postcard.

Trivia: Between 1880 and 1896 wholesale commodity prices in the United States dropped by one-third, and would not reach the 1880 levels until about 1909. Source: Telephone: The First Hundred Years, John Brooks.

Currently Reading: The Theoretical Minimum: What you need to know to start doing physics, Leonard Susskind, George Hrabovsky.

After the tournament re-started I got what should seem like good news: to play Whitewater. It's become one of my comfort plays in virtual pinball, and on this actual table I've been doing pretty nicely. The bad news: against TY, one of the strongest players in the state. He creamed me. And then Fast Draw, oftentimes savior of my night at RLM Amusements, against JTK, who kept having good balls while I did not. Finally I got called up on Star Gazer and put up a killer game, maybe my best single bit of playing all day. But I was already 2-3, five rounds in.

To save you tedious detail, I had a lousy day. At no point would I ever have more wins than losses, and a two-game winning streak on FunHouse and No Fear would be my longest of the day. And lousy as this is, bunnyhugger arguably had it worse. She re-started the tournament with three losses in a row --- so at one point was 0-5 --- and she likewise never put three wins in a row together. But after an appalling start she did get generally better, particularly with a great game on Meteor and a win by a whisker on Scared Stiff. She built herself up to five wins, four of them in the last seven games. Me, I just slumped around there all day.

Things weren't all bad, tough. Not for us; our play was just bad. But JTK had a killer tournament, qualifying with 13 wins out of 16 rounds, on top of the pack ahead even of CST, RLM, MSS, and wunderkind SPM. At one point CST came over to me showing the standings and joking, who's that guy on top? He's a skilled player, certainly, but he was playing above his average Saturday.

JTK's winning ways would continue in playoffs. In quarterfinals, playing sets of three games against the same four people in a round, he took first place finishes on Godzilla and Tommy, guaranteeing he moved on even if he didn't do anything on Target Alpha (where he got third). CST got knocked out this round. In Semifinals JTK got two first place finishes again, on Royal Flush and Blackout, and with a second place on No Fear he was in good shape. In the Finals round he, at last, finished a game at the bottom with a last-place finish on Galaxy. Combined with a third-place on Grand Prix and a first place on Cirqus Voltaire (MJS has a prototype version of the game, with a weirdly different rule set nobody knows fully), his unstoppable play finally ended and he got a tie for second. (MSS would take a first place on Galaxy, and second places on the other two games, good for a first-place finish in that round and the tournament.) JTK played a one-game playoff with SPM, losing when he forgot he was on a single-player, tilt-ends-game machine and nudged too hard on the first or second ball.

We know that only from reports; we left at the end of the semifinals round, as it was already quite late and we were still figuring to go to the beach the next day. Had we already decided not to go, we might have stuck it out to see what happened. But finals and the extra playoff did drag things out quite a while longer, perhaps longer than MJS really felt like watching over games being played hard and worn out; there were a surprising number of game malfunctions. That number is two, which isn't much, but is abnormally high for the place.

I may not have had a good day playing pinball competitively. But I did have a triumph otherwise. This was on MJS's newest, oldest game, Bally's 1935 Golden Harvest. This is a flipperless pinball game; you get ten balls and try to launch and nudge them into holes in the playfield. Collect the Harvest Moon and groups of similar targets --- two carrots, three tomatoes, four ears of corn --- and you get money back. MJS has a cup of nickels by the game and you're free to keep trying. bunnyhugger kept getting close --- for a while she had dialed in a hard plunge that would drop a ball in the Harvest Moon, the one thing every payout requires --- but not completing other sets. Me, it took a while but I found the soft plunge and lots of tapping the game that would get me the Harvest Moon, and managed to get enough potatoes for a six-nickel payout.

Also I got a haircut. This might seem strange, but there's a logical reason behind it. So it turns out SVB, who's a regular at Grand Rapids tournaments, is a former hair stylist and had her gear in the car. Apparently she often gives RLM a trim before his tournaments. This fact got talked about and someone got his hair trimmed --- SVB used one of the chairs and a patio table set up outside for this --- and, you know? I've needed my hair thinned out a little and brought into some order. So I was her second client of the day as people wandering outside to the pizza buffet wondered, the heck were they seeing? And it was just what you thought.

So, I can wish I had done better in the tournament, but then my hair would now be a bit more unruly . Who's to say what's better in the long term?

Back to a half-dozen pictures of Cedar Point from our close-of-the-season visit last year. We're getting close to the Kiddie Kingdom carousel's final ride for the year but, fortunately, not forever.

The band organ on the Kiddie Kingdom carousel hasn't run ever that I have seen, but they at least have the shell still.

Here's a view of the carousel and the princely head on the rounding board there.

Here's a shot I haven't done in ages, the ground-level view showing the ride floating above ground. You can see the ring of light from the center of the ride.

I'm sure this is from some game meant to be played with the kids and an app.

A good photo concept that didn't quite manage to find a focus: looking straight up from the Iron Dragon queue where we can see (up top) the Iron Dragon return leg, (on bottom) the Top Thrill 2 second tower, and (on the left) Rougarou's lift hill and first drop.

A last time, too! They reconfigured the Iron Dragon queue over the winter break so as to provide space for a line-cutters queue. So here's what it looked like back the way it had been forever.

Trivia: After federal court upheld Thomas Edison's light bulb patent on the 4th of October, 1892, Westinghouse announced to The New York Times that while he thought the decision wrong, it was no import, and the next issue of Electrical Engineer included the first Westinghouse ad for the ``stopper'' lamp, which would be a good enough bulb until the Edison patent expired. Also, the regular Westinghouse light bulb factory continued to make Edison-style bulbs. (Westinghouse was appealing the decision to the Supreme Court, which did uphold Edison's patent.) Source: Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World, Jill Jonnes.

Currently Reading: The Theoretical Minimum: What you need to know to start doing physics, Leonard Susskind, George Hrabovsky.

And a happy 75th Anniversary to Peanuts to all who observe.

The first thing we saw when we got to MJS's pole barn for the tournament was CST and wife coming in and parking beside us. We haven't seen them since ... not sure, really. Possibly the last time MJS ran a tournament. Always good seeing them, though, and refreshing some of the in-jokes we share.

Next thing bunnyhugger saw was some species of woolly caterpillar. A big one, trundling along at a heck of a clip, considering. She tried to pick it up and move it somewhere safe but the caterpillar wasn't having it. So, we just wish it well. We also spotted a couple perfect snowflake-globe mushrooms and some coffee-table-size toadstools, which is when I realized I didn't bring my camera and just had my phone if I wanted to photograph anything. (I would end up photographing a couple scores only, and that just because playing head-to-head on a single-player game you need some record of what everyone's scores were.)

We had maybe 45 minutes before the tournament started so, like everyone else, went to a couple games and tried them out and got the feel of them. Felt good, felt ready to play. It was to be sixteen rounds of Max Matchplay, where we don't wait for every one of the, in this case, 18 games per round to finish. Instead whenever there's enough players not playing, they draw up some new matches, picking pairs who haven't played before and putting them on games neither has played before. The people with the most wins go on to finals.

So, I started off on Iron Maiden, playing that guy I mentioned with the Gay Warming T-shirt. We both had lousy first balls. He had a killer second and third ball; I got killed my second ball. Third ball I started to rally and only ended up at about half his score, but, you know, if I'd got a multiball that was ready to go started I might have made it. Second round. Pop-A-Card against SMS (MJS's daughter and onetime top-female-Michigan-player). This is a single-player game, one from the early 60s where you can earn up to ten balls to play. I have a decent game, never collecting this earned extra balls. SMS has a lousy first and second ball, but she earns two more balls, and I figure she's sure to beat me. Yet it doesn't happen; my decent score holds up. I figure seven more wins and I'm in the playoffs.

But ... then ... a peculiar slowing-down happens. There are a lot of consultations between MJS who's running the tournament, and SMS, and JM who I guess was the tournament director? Or at least making the rulings. (There was some unintentional comedy of JM starting to make some announcement and then MJS going ahead and making sometimes the same announcement right over him. This sounds like MJS was being mean to JM, but I think it's more that waiting for JM to surrender the stage would be too long a wait.) It transpired that they had set up the tournament with the wrong format, doing it as sixteen discreet rounds where everyone had to wait for all 18 matches to finish, instead of where you make some more matches when people are available to play. There's some time spent working out whether they can change the tournament type (you can't), and then, what to do?

I assume they're going to have to call it a wash and restart the tournament from scratch. Which I'd be okay with, and bunnyhugger, who had two losses, would be great with, but I understand the people who'd have two wins being disappointed. They eventually do start a new tournament, one with the correct format but only fourteen rounds, and go to the labor of manually adjusting everyone's scores to reflect their first two rounds.

bunnyhugger pointed out, though, this meant the tournament software didn't know who played who, and could make people who'd already played play again. Like, she might have to play MSS, a top player who beat her in the first round. Indeed, probability dictates many people would get a rematch. For example, I got put up against Gay Warming guy again, although this time on FunHouse, and this time I managed a decent win. And, yeah, in the first round of the restarted tournament, bunnyhugger had to play MSS again, and took a loss again.

But we were off again, ready to play. I needed seven wins to make the playoffs and bunnyhugger needed eight. It could happen.

Back to pictures of Cedar Point from closing day 2024!

The sun's setting on Blue Streak. I like the light on the smoke effects and reflecting on the porch of the Chickie & Pete's, which did close forever sometime before this day, actually. It's now just an empty space.

Bench at the Kiddie Kingdom that's perfectly fine but we keep expecting to be renovated out of existence some day.

And peering up into the tower with the Kiddie Kingdom banners on it. I don't think it ever occurred to me before that you could just walk into it.

Looking west at the big loop of Raptor, well-framed by the Sky Ride lines.

And back to the Kiddie Carousel, loading up on rides on all the rabbits just in case the rumors of the ride's sale came true.

And here's a slightly tilted angle of the same ride. Also you can see it was finally at least chilly at the park.

Trivia: The Sigma 7 logo on Wally Schirra's Mercury capsule was designed, and painted onto the capsule, by Cece Bibby, who did the logos for two other capsules. Source: Sigma 7: The Six Mercury Orbits of Walter M Schirra, Jr, Colin Burgess. Burgess doesn't specify which of the other capsules she painted, but her obituary on collectSpace says they were John Glenn's Friendship 7 and Scott Carpenter's Aurora 7. It also has other artwork, some of it a bit risque, that she made for the space program.

Currently Reading: Some more comics.

So the news, as of the close of business, is the good one that I have a job tomorrow. That is, the state legislature and governor are confident they have a budget deal in place and while they might technically be missing the constitutional deadline to have it finalized, they expect to have it by the time any checks need to be paid. So we don't get to officially see what the exact contingency plans were for a furlough.

Most likely, at least, since (a) nothing is finished until it's actually signed and (b) some of my work group's funding is federal and the federal government is right now a pile of grifters and scammers and cynics who think they can outwit the nuts. And a Democratic party that is almost ready to write a firmly-worded open letter, if that wouldn't be too divisive.

I'm glad, in the main, to be locally stable at least and to have income and all that. Part of me did think it would be nice to have a vacation forced on me. I could take time off whenever I wanted but it's hard to think to do that, especially if it's not in connection to an event like an amusement park trip. If I understood the plans correctly I wouldn't actually be off, as I'd be needed to maintain a particular essential project, but that essential project has almost no work to do on it so if I wanted to spend the day reading FurAffinity nobody would know or care.

And as long as I'm talking about today's developments instead of the pinball tournament last Saturday, let me share another bit of news. After the majority of a year without, we again have a coffee table in the living room. We never did find a suitable one in the thrift stores. This one was a piece of furniture being discarded by some folks down the street moving out. It's a simple wood table, its most decorative flourish being that its legs arch outward just enough that it suggests a pyramid without being one. It needs a little care, that I'm sure we will get around to providing, but it's just about the right bit of what we needed.

In pictures, let's go back to not quite eleven months ago as we made a trip to Cedar Point just the Kiddie Kingdom Carousel was being sold and we'd never see it again. (It has not sold, and we saw it plenty in 2025, and know of no particular reason to expect not to see it in 2026 as well.)

Another picture from the middle of the Kiddie Kingdom Carousel platform. They were generous about letting us dither around taking photos. Relatively small crowd day, after all.

More from the inner row, with a view of the other two rabbits, coming up just in the sunlight there.

I think I took this one by accident but I like the hint of movement you get with it. That shadow is not me holding my arm at an unearthly angle; it's the horse's leg.

Some lawn and planted areas near ValRavn, and the grease trucks located around where the Siren's Curse has grown up.

You look at a spot like this and you could almost imagine Cedar Point's this tranquil backwater. Note that the shadow is not some carousel horse's leg but just me holding my arm up.

And here's people walking into the sunlight. The foreground roller coaster on the left is ValRavn and on the right, Corkscrew.

Trivia: One of the Sanskrit words for 'Tuesday' was 'Bhaumavasara', meaning 'of Mangala'. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.

Currently Reading: Some comic books.

MJS, with the pole barn full of pinball machines, scheduled one of his occasional tournaments for last Saturday. When bunnyhugger told me of the possibility I leapt at the chance; that's the sort of thing I'd love doing for my birthday, sure. MJS had capped attendance for the event at forty people, although it seems that he took even more than that. And yet some of those people didn't attend; in the end there were 37 or something folks attending. We know of at least two of the people who missed it, including MWS who texted later in the day his humiliation that he forgot about the tournament and overslept.

I know MJS accepted more than the nominal forty because one of the women who's gotten really into pinball thanks to bunnyhugger's tournaments in Lansing, chatted with me during league on Tuesday to ask what to expect. I didn't know what the tournament format was and so offered --- correctly --- that it was probably going to be like the matchplay tournaments done for Lansing women's tournaments much of the time. That is, random pairs drawn on randomly drawn games with people who win enough games going on to finals. She was glad to know that but was more interested in, you know, what are the people like?

I'm extremely flattered to be trusted as someone who can offer advice on whether a setting is safe. But --- as I pointed out to her --- my experience is as a tall white guy who looks like he belongs by default in any pinball setting. I've found MJS's tournaments good, pleasant things fun to be at, and that I haven't encountered things that seemed obviously unwelcome. But, I mean, I thought it was a kind reassurance when our local barcade put up signs saying if you thought your drink was tampered with get a bartender's attention, and it took me hours to realize you don't put up a sign like that unless you have non-ignorable reports of someone tampering with women's drinks.

Well, I offered my opinion and all the qualifications I could, and I guess she was satisfied with it. But, like, one of the people there --- and whom I played twice (there's a story to that too) --- is a guy with a T-shirt saying his politics are that he supports (reconstructing this from memory) climate's right to choose, gay warming, and bans on assault marriage. It's the kind of thing that's funny if you don't think deeply about the joke structure, which is built on this ``oh those politics they so stoopit'' premise overlooking that politics is how society chooses how to treat the vulnerable. And I've seen him wearing it multiple times. Maybe it's just a lucky shirt, maybe it reflects nothing more than yeah, it's funny in the way ``Pangean Reunification Movement'' bumper stickers are funny. But you can see why if you were suspicious of the guy, this would not put you at ease.

She attended the tournament, though, and did no worse than bunnyhugger and I did, and she seemed to be enjoying the experience. I haven't heard that she's stopped talking to me although how would I? Seriously as we have no means of contact except through bunnyhugger or at pinball events and we haven't been to another since then. A bad enough experience would get news through, of course, unless there were focus-pulling drama in the final rounds of the tournament. But how would that happen?

On that cliffhanger I leave you with more from our final visit to Cedar Point last November, here. Hope you like carousels!

National Carousel Association plaque from 1978 commemorating what was then the Kiddieland Carousel. I note the National Carousel Association Census now gives the carousel's creation date as circa 1921, although it doesn't know where the original location was. Just that it seems to have been in Memphis to about 1925, and at some point got to Hunting Park in Germantown, Philadelphia, until 1968 when Cedar Point got it.

Detail of one of the wooden boards lining the roof of the carousel. I must have noticed they're all numbered before but if I wasn't going to see the ride again I'd have to get a snap of unimportant details like this.

And here's two of the rabbits, the black one being the inspiration (in inverse) for bunnyhugger's main character.

Here she is getting the first of her possibly-last rides on it.

And here's a photo of the two rabbits from the inside, the traditionally less-decorated and less-interesting side.

The bunnyhugger rabbit from the non-romance side.

Trivia: The earliest versions of the game that became Q*Bert had the protagonist shooting the enemies with his nose-gun. Warren Davis, a programmer actually assigned to the game Protector, made the critical suggestion to change it from killing-enemies to saving-the-main-character, and passed along Ron Waxman's suggestion that the pyramid blocks change color, which gave the game a clear objective. Source: The Ultimate History of Video Games: The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World, Steven L Kent.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 73: Loch Mess, Clotland, or, Messy Business in the Loch! Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.