And we're all a boy named Charlie Brown
After MEW and the Traverse City players left the player roster at the Michigan Women's State Pinball Championship settled down. I don't believe anyone else left, simplifying the problem of keeping track of who was where in the tournament, and I was better able to keep up with the dwindling number of matches and tracking who was where. The Ypsi Pinball podcasters/streamers had stuff to talk about.
They also had someone to talk with. bunny_hugger joined them in the booth for what was initially meant to be just a couple minutes of talk about running the tournament. But as she ran out of matches to play --- and with fairly infrequent rulings to make --- she kept going back into the booth, enjoying the chance to talk about competitive pinball without obvious fear of the camera. I don't know what exactly she said --- I wasn't in places where I could hear what she was saying and I haven't gone back to watch the stream --- but she was happy about that, at least, as the day went.
Her tournaments. To win among the 9th-through-16th positions bunny_hugger faced, essentially, the problem of winning an eight-player bracket tournament. Four people declining to play out their ties should logically have resulted in a four-person tournament. But because the tiebreaker brackets were filled based on the original standings --- the loser of the 1st-versus-16th match played the loser of the 8th-versus-9th, that sort of thing --- two of the players who left early ``faced'' each other in the first round. The other two withdrawing players forfeited their matches to people who stuck around, and as the pigeon-hole principle tells us, that means two people who were there had to play a round. Effectively, two people of the four had to play more matches than anyone else. And guess who one of those two people was.
She won that match, a mere three-game one to keep the tiebreaker rounds from taking longer than the main tournament. And she won the three-game match after that. All on track to at least take the consolation of being top of the people knocked out first round. And then, I am sad to report and was sadder to witness, she lost the final round, closing out the tournament as second-best among the first-round losers. And to a person who played one less round than she had; it's very plausible that had we balanced things correctly she'd have won. She won enough games to.
Otherwise, let's see. Back in the main tournament --- which had four upsets of the eight matches its first round --- HLC went on to beat KEC, last year's runner-up. But HLC went on to lose to MLS, one of the stronger players and a good bet to be champion this or any year. (MLS was the only player the whole tournament to sweep an opponent four games to none. On the other hand she was also one of only two people to win a match in seven games.) I wasn't sure whether to feel relieved by that. There's a sense of dignity in losing to the person who ultimately wins the tournament --- she beat everybody, after all, in a sense, not just you --- but there's also a sense of turnabout-being-fair-play if she's beaten. But, between knocking out bunny_hugger and knocking out KEC --- probably the woman we're best friends with --- I was fine with HLC getting knocked out.
On the other side of the bracket JLL, the inaugural Michigan Women's State Pinball Champion, had several nice wins, going 4-2, 4-2, and then 4-1 to make finals. It'd be a tough match against MLS and not made any easier by bunny_hugger's laptop running critically low on battery again. I had to bundle everything up to put off in the corner where it could drink up electricity a while.
MLS took the first game, The Six Million Dollar Man, a game people on their scoresheets insisted on abbreviating as 6M$M, which never stopped annoying me. But JLL tied it up on Monster Bash. And then took a lead on The Beatles, giving both of them a good game like bunny_hugger should have had. MLS then tied it back up with Iron Maiden, a game that had been everywhere up to the pandemic and then just disappeared from venues. And that wouldn't be the last time we saw it that week.
Whoever won two of the next three games would win the tournament. And on a game of High Speed --- the late-solid-state precursor to Getaway --- JLL took a win that I didn't see a moment of because of the above power problems. And then came Sky Jump, the one-player electromechanical, and a game I realized I was kind of visible in the far background during streaming and tried to be invisible about. MLS put up a score of 24,130, which you'll remember is less than the 28,500 which lost bunny_hugger the game first round. More importantly here it's less than the 35,990 that JLL scored.
And so JLL won, becoming the first repeat women's champion for Michigan.
Congratulations and good feeling abounded, of course, as did a bunch of photographs. I got to use bunny_hugger's camera to take the official-for-the-tournament pictures of her handing the plaque to JLL, and the trophies to the top four finishers. I also got to bang into the streaming rig and the guy holding it, as he was trying to position the camera to record all of this from the exact spot it made sense for me to photograph things. (Especially as the streaming rig carries lights, offering the hope of a better photograph.)
And then, in not too much longer, people collected their payout checks, gathered up all their stuff, and cleaned up the tournament space. bunny_hugger returned the coin door key. We got stuff moved to the car and bunny_hugger indulged my desire to play some of the games in the non-tournament area. (I wasn't sure if I would be allowed to play any of the tournament games --- set on free play --- now that the tournament was over. Probably nobody would have cared but I didn't want to presume.) I even pressured bunny_hugger into playing this 90s Gottlieb game, Gladiators, which on The Pinball Arcade is one of my favorite tables. It's the rare 90s Gottlieb game that's got a fun theme and pretty well-balanced, enjoyable modes, a lot of fun. The real table plays rougher than the virtual table does but it still makes a good impression, and bunny_hugger seemed taken by it. It's a shame that Gottlieb --- which by then wsa reduced to boasting in its flyers how their games were UL-listed --- couldn't do more like this.
We ended up staying at Crazy Quarters Arcade pretty close to their closing hour, which you'd expect of us. And drove home, trying to convince bunny_hugger that she'd be champion again someday. If JLL can do it, after all, it's proven possible.
And now after a needless delay here's more of Dollywood, and let me remind you, this is the short day when we were there only a couple hours and still rode all but two of the roller coasters. None of which you have seen yet!
There's the Dollywood train 'Cinderella' starting out its track. If I remember correctly this is one that had been built around 1940 and used in building the Alcan highway.
The train is mostly single-tracked; here's the split used to make a turnaround by the Country Fair.
The next Roadside Attraction, and the one seen from below the hillside: the Sky of Many Colors, which is a great idea.
That's what the sky looks like above you. That's just good.
Just past the sky bunny_hugger stops to get a picture of the Largest Bean Can. I must in honesty report we don't know how large the bean inside is.
Non-working pond at the park, part of some nice scenery. I think the Loading Dock over there might be one of the places you can pick up cinnamon bread but can't swear my geography is correct.
Trivia: One of the Sanskrit words for 'Monday' was 'Somavara', meaning 'cool' and 'moist' and 'soma'. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.
Currently Reading: Unconventional, Contrary, and Ugly: The Lunar Landing Research Vessel, Gene J Matranga, C Wayne Ottinger, Calvin R Jarvis, with D Christian Gelzer. It's a pretty nice industrial-grade history like you'd expect from this genre of book but I am a bit surprised that unless I missed it they didn't answer why NASA figured they needed a free-flying testbed for practicing lunar approaches. Like, why wouldn't something tethered from a tower be doable with a lot less complication? I guess if they want to do a long descent there's no building a thousand-foot-tall tower for holding a mockup craft and maybe they figured they wouldn't be able to get the accelerations accurate enough to be worthwhile but surely someone asked if they can just put a cockpit on a bungee cord and had to be told why not.