To analyze --- you can't dissect him, predict him
When she won the Michigan Women's State Championship back in January bunny_hugger was nothing but elated for hours. Then it set in that she would be expected to go to the Women's North American Championship Series. This is independent from the Women's World Championship --- that she attended back in 2017, when the pinball scene was incredibly smaller --- although it happened it would be in the same venue and the same weekend. The world championship, in fact, would be spread across two days, with a format evocative of Pinburgh, multiple rounds of match play followed the next day by finals. The North American championship would be quicker, a single-day affair, played as a series of best-of-seven single-elimination matches, like the individual state championships were.
The Women's championships were held at the Wizard's World arcade, in metropolitan Fort Wayne. This is a city I know mostly as the halfway point on the way to Indiana Beach. But it's a mere two hours away, and on the nice direct route of I-69 from our city to theirs. There's pinball leagues we've attended that are closer than that. I'd suggested we might go down some weekend or other and get some practice time in on the actual tables that they'd play, and then every weekend got busy.
The weekend before the tournament, bunny_hugger accepted the suggestion that she go down herself and enjoy the time on her own without my being all like this around her. She even went to spend the night, trying out the hotel she'd picked for our visit and making herself available for one of the weekly women's tournaments Saturday morning. She'd text me now and then with updates about what she was doing and how bothered she was by some of the silliest mods made to games there. Among other things many of the pinball machines have custom replacements to the knobs at the end of the plungers; FunHouse, for example, has tiny replicas of the head of Rudy, the ventriloquy figure/puppet/mechanical man star of the game.
Friday evening, she would be informed, the women's league was having finals. If they did, she never spotted it. Over text and SpinDizzy Muck chatter this seemed curious to me, but now having seen the place ... it's possible there was a tournament going on and she didn't see it because they keep the place pretty dark after all. That and there are a great many games, enough that you could have several events going on at once and still have space for random non-participants to play. I would see that come to pass.
Saturday morning would bring disappointment in the women's tournament. Not for the result: she won first place, including a plaque. But in the turnout. She was it, as far as she could tell, and when she asked the owners --- who'd gotten to know she was there from Lansing --- if she had missed the organization of the tournament, he paused, made some calls, and got two other women in, allowing for the smallest possible International Flipper Pinball Association-registered tournament.
Meanwhile, on my own for a day and a half, I ... tried to go to Taco Bell for dinner, found the line was 812 cars long, and went to Penn Station for an artichoke-and-mushroom sub instead. There, a pack of teens had ordered apparently one of every kind of sub they offered, so the small and overwhelmed staff every few minutes came out with a different hoagie that went right past me, sipping my Mountain Dew Zero and refilling it immediately, to set before a bunch of kids with their phones on mini-tripods, like they were livecasting having a chicken marinara sub. They finally delivered one to me, around 140 minutes after I'd ordered, and I resisted eating it until I got home. Next time, I'll try not to be down to the last two fast food places in town.
Meanwhile back in August at the Jackson County Fair we got out of the exhibition hall and into the light ...
You see? I love the way the sun outlines whoever these people walking in our direction are.
bunny_hugger getting ready for next year's county fair by taking pictures of this year's chickens.
Chicken deciding whether to just ignore me or to have words with me.
The chicken chose having words.
bunny_hugger explains to a chicken what she's there for and how the photographs will be used.
I'm not sure, at this remove, what caught me as so cinematic about the feathers around a chicken's legs but it did, so here's one of nearly 46 pictures I took along the theme.
Trivia: In 1974 the United States's hundred largest industrial firms accounted for 35.8 percent of the gross national product. By 1998, they provided about 17.3 percent. Source: The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge.
Currently Reading: The Sum of the People: How the Census Has Shaped Nations, From the Ancient World to the Modern Age, Andrew Whitby.
PS: What's Going On In Prince Valiant? Who is this Flamberge that's been captured? January - March 2024. I love these weeks I cover a once-a-week strip because they're shorter to write and I can get less wrong at once.