Round and round till we reach the end
Back after lunch. Round 4 of the Women's International Pinball Tournament sees bunny_hugger, seeded 49th for her first three-player group. There's been a single three-person group all along, owing to there being 63 players attending. Scoring, based on how many people you beat on each of the three games, is multiplied by 1.5 to compensate for having two instead of three opponents, with the result being that it's possible to get half-scores. She plays Bank 7, Hedy, with several games that should be friends to bunny_hugger. The modern game is Family Guy, which was reskinned into Shrek and made much more playable. Both Shrek and Family Guy are the exact same game, just different graphics and playfield art, and she's learned Shrek from its time in Fremont. The electromechanical is High Hand, one of the 85 billion electromechanical games about knocking down drop targets that correspond to face cards. The solid-state is Stars, a game that I finally started to get the hang of playing while she played the Women's North American Championship back in March. She cleans up well this round, getting an adjusted score of six wins and three losses, her best round so far. It bumps her from 49th seed up to 37th, and if she could keep playing at that rate she might make finals yet.
The fifth round has her on Bank 2, Florence. Here the modern game is Stern's Avatar, based on the movie. She has played this before, but doesn't remember it; MJS had it in his pole barn for a couple months before forgetting he had it. The electromechanical is Williams's 1974 Star Pool, one of the 85 billion electromechanical games about knocking down drop targets that correspond to pool balls. (Not actually; the pool balls represent your bonus count, and the drop targets are spread far apart to lure you to death by trying to get a double bonus or extra ball or something.) It has this nice spinner target in the center, like a prototype to Tales of the Arabian Nights, but less spinny. And the solid-state is Eight Ball, the Fonzie-themed pool game that bunny_hugger remembers playing at Fremont and many Michigan tournaments. Unfortunately, she can't get enough together, and she gets three wins and six losses, dropping her to 48th seed. Now, even I in my optimism have to admit, she's not going to make finals. Not without a spectacular collapse of everybody on the bubble and her getting a perfect round.
Round six, the final one of qualifying, puts her back on Bank 4, Eleanor. Those games were Deadpool, Doodle Bug, and Seawitch, you'll remember. With in-competition experience on these tables back in round two she has every reason to do better than that 3-6. And she does, but only a little better, taking five wins and four losses. Another of the competitors went 8-1, just missing one of the medallions for a perfect round they were giving out. (bunny_hugger was in three rounds with competitors who went 8-1. Only four players the whole day went 9-0, though, none of them people bunny_hugger ever faced.)
Six rounds done, she had finished 25-29, part of a five-way tie for 40th place and five wins out of playoffs, and shuttering her participation in the first Covid-era Women's International Pinball Tournament. Once more I wished HMZ should happen to think to call her. If he does, he doesn't act on the thought.
I could use some cheer after that. Let's look at the Silver Bells Electric Light Parade some. Even if the Petoskey Steel Drum Band is gone there's still other stuff! For example ....
OK, I don't remember who all this is. It seems like some kind of boat themed thing so that's nice and did they just invent purple LEDs last year or something?
Camera guy trying to maneuver the boom to get a good view of the marching band that's at the capitol.
And here's a Christmas float featuring skeletons! I think there was an actual Nightmare Before Christmas float but this wasn't it. They just like their merry skeletons which, fair.
So it wasn't enough to have a Grinch, but Hagar Fox also has this big rendition of a fox behind them? That's not bad for a company that's now just a name owned by something with a less good name. But also ...
... Here's the Hagar Fox, as ever, doing some with with the crowd opposite the camera from me!
Anyway, here's the Quality Dairy cow. Not sure if the cow is for Quality Dairy itself or for their ATM partners of LAFCU; that credit union uses a cow for its icon as its first loan was for the purchase of one. Yes, that's a Bumble in front of the cow.
Trivia: In Congress's 1893-94 session, enacting the first peacetime income tax (featuring a two percent rate for incomes of $4,000 or more, the top two percent of income-earners), Congress was making a choice against another compelling candidate for revenue: increasing the excise tax on beer. Source: A Nation of Deadbeats: An Uncommon History of America's Financial Disasters, Scott Reynolds Nelson.
Currently Reading: The Oregon Trail: Yesterday and Today, William E Hill. So a neat thing is Hill drove what was possible of the trail and included a bunch of pictures of classic old portraits (pencil sketches, paintings, 19th century photographs) and then photographs from approximately the same spot, letting you judge how close the 19th-century portrayals were. Surprising consistent thing is artists making the mountains taller, which has got to be something in camera distortions for how consistent it is across locations and artists.
PS: What's Going On In Alley Oop? Is Alley Oop even in the comic anymore? May - August 2024 in a plot recap that lets you see some superhero action, or at least costume, on Ooola.