I better do it again
The Women's International Pinball Tournament began about 10:30, with everyone gathered around for greetings, brief description of the rules of the tournament and the instruction to not play tournament games except as part of tournament play. And a group photo, involving the usual sort of fussing and inability to just tell people, short people up front, tall people in back. No matter. In moments, tournament people were passing sheets out, setting them on two tables in each three-table bank, and people were looking up what games they were on and what they'd be playing.
bunny_hugger's initial set was Bank 6, ``Grace'' --- all the banks had women's names --- with the games Aladdin's Castle (a genie-themed electromechanical), Paragon (an early solid-state), and Star Wars (the modern Stern game). My heart sank when I saw Paragon was in her set and again when I saw it was her first game. Paragon is a game everyone agrees they should love. It's a wide-body game with a great Boris Vallejo-y theme of muscle men fighting dragons. It's got a lot of great, fun-looking elements. The problem is the game is not at all fun. It is a game without safe shots, where even doing something right can leave you draining. Even the Pinball Arcade video game version, where they tweak the rules of physics to make the game kinder to players, is a brutal drain-fest. I could only watch from afar as everyone in her group went up, plunged the ball, collected their bonus, and walked away, disappointed. There was a moment when it looked like the randomness of fate meant bunny_hugger would get a second-place finish but no, the last player on the last ball had a rally --- she actually played a couple of flips --- and bunny_hugger sank to third.
The electromechanical Aladdin's Castle --- she beat me on that two games to none when we played at Indiana Beach a few weeks ago --- was no nicer, and while she recovered some on Star Wars it was still not good. Pinburgh, old and new, and WIPT, score rounds by how many players you beat in all. Three games, with four players each, mean you could score as many as 9 wins. She got 3 wins and 6 losses this round, putting her in the tie for 46th place among the 63 players.
Her next round was Eleanor, a set made up of Deadpool (modern Stern game), Doodle Bug (wonderful funny electromechanical with a good central gimmick), and Seawitch (early solid state with a playfield that, slightly modified, became Stern's late-2010s game The Beatles). I felt confident in her ability to beat anyone on Doodle Bug, and while Deadpool might be a coinflip --- normal play relies a lot on ball saves that would be turned off on this table --- Seawitch, which could be played more or less like The Beatles with no multiball, was in her wheelhouse.
It was not. bunny_hugger does not see how Seawitch is much like The Beatles at all, and getting the good-scoring mode on Doodle Bug going requires much more experience with the table than she's had. She has another 3-6 round, dropping her to 58th place.
Round three, Maya, playing with other people who are having lousy days including the woman who was now in last place. Here the games are The Mandalorian (Stern, 2002), Target Pool (electromechanical), and Genesis, the early solid-state game of my famous controversy-laden 2017 finish. She cannot repeat my stunt, where I surprised everyone by getting the 6x playfield multiball started, but neither can anyone else: no one can dial in the ramp shots that start that. However, she does finally have a round with more wins than losses, going 5-4 and pulling herself up to 49th place.
It's lunch break. I quietly hope that HMZ has spontaneously chosen to text her and that his advice can rally her spirits at all. He has not.
And here's the Old Newsboys float, with their Vaguely Peanuts mascot! Every year they sell one (1) spoof newspaper issue as a way to provide shoes to children, and if they do other stuff than that and this parade I haven't heard about it.
I believe this is a snowplow from the capital city airport, so, I guess it's good they didn't need it. (It's been a couple years since there was any snow to speak of on the ground during one of these parades.)
Here there's a couple reindeer fursuiters milling around in lights and skirts. They might actually just be local furries taking the chance.
The linen service enters the parade each year with this dramatically purple truck. The 90 in front is new and I guess this year will be 91 or left behind altogether?
Here's the R E Olds Transportation Museum bringing some of that Big Head Energy.
Big Head Ransom Olds in front of the capitol. I like the woman on the lower left with her mouth agape, like, that's Ransom Olds? ... Context clues tell me it must be, yes!
Trivia: Karl Landsteiner's initial, 1901, research into human blood types divided them into three groups, A, B, and C. By 1936 he had divided them into the modern A, B, AB, and O. Source: The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human, Siddhartha Mukherjee. Other researchers had similarly found blood typing and used classifications such as the Roman numerals I, II, III, and IV (with different researchers using the same numerals for different types).
Currently Reading: The Oregon Trail: Yesterday and Today, William E Hill.