So, big thing happening in pinball this month was Pinball At The Zoo, in Kalamazoo, but before that was the Lightning Flippers women's tournament that ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bunnyhugger organized and ran and competed in. This was made as an unofficial launch party for Pulp Fiction, the newest yet retro-styled pinball machine at our local barcade. Eight people attended, meaning there could be two groups of four playing for a nice satisfying pinball experience, although one group being put on Pulp Fiction every round (the other got put on a randomly chosen game) meant that, by luck of the draw, bunnyhugger played it four rounds in a row.
And then in playoffs came that dreaded moment: I had to make a ruling. This because bunnyhugger had a problem with the game she was playing (Pulp Fiction) and she can't very well rule on herself fairly. Arguably it's only a little more fair to have me ruling on her, although in this case the ruling was pretty near pro forma.
The trouble was that one of the flippers got out of alignment, so that it was coming down to more nearly horizontal than to sloping downward when the flipper button wasn't pressed. We lacked any way to fix that so I had to rule: the game had failed catastrophically and it would need to be replaced by a randomly drawn other game. This would end up being James Bond 007, and in the next round, Star Wars. Luckily, RED --- who maintains the games there --- was around, or came back (he'd been at the bar earlier and I thought he had left, but maybe was wrong) and fixed it up for the last round.
The change of games hurt, though. bunnyhugger had come in first place three of the four times she'd played Pulp Fiction that day, and while she was in third place on her last ball she was in good shape to take second place. On James Bond, though, she finished last.
And then a day or two later she realized I had made an understandable mistake in my ruling. She had called me over for the malfunction on ball three, after players one and two had already finished. Player one (KEC) had a lower score than anyone else and so had a fourth-place finish. Part of the standard International Flipper Pinball Association rules set (which we use as the basic template) has it that if a game is pulled for a catastrophic malfunction, then only the players whose position is not yet determined should play the new game. So the replacement James Bond should have been only three players.
It's a natural mistake; the circumstance where that rule comes into play are rare. And if we suppose that the three people who should have played James Bond finished in the same order, and that the other two games finished in the same order, then it wouldn't have made a difference in the finals. bunnyhugger would have taken third place by a slightly higher margin and KEC would have had a slightly lower last place, but the standings would have been the same. Still, annoying to get it wrong.
Despite the Taco Tuesday incident bunnyhugger's father did not burn down his house or my car, so the 4th of July we were back in Lansing and walked out to see the fireworks. Or maybe something else ...
In the park were a couple people filling up Chinese lanterns, which let us see just how you do launch them and also that they're way bigger than we thought.
Seriously, I'd have put the lanterns at like a foot tall and it's four feet at least. Note the firework of a distant land just past the tree line.
Here's one ready to be released.
And up we go! Some of them needed a couple tries to get going, but they're easy to re-catch and re-release if needed.
There goes one into the sky that was actually darker than this.
Better idea of how dark it was at the time, with one lantern released and three more getting ready to go.
Trivia: Andrew Carnegie donated the funds for 7,689 church organs. Source: The Uncyclopedia: Everything You Never Knew You Wanted to Know, Gideon Haigh.
Currently Reading: Slime: A Natural History, Susanne Wedlich. Translator Ayça Türkoğlu.
