moonhare

FAE has been quietly using they/them pronouns for years now, without getting much attention. And dressing in more feminine garb on more occasions. And, on the explicit word that nonbinary people were welcome in the women's tournaments, started playing in them in October. Which retroactively made all the pinball play they'd done in open leagues and tournaments count them towards the women's finals. FAE plays only in Lansing, plus Pinball At The Zoo this last year. This meant they were both unknown and under-rated: consider that they got into the top eight of women in the state on the strength of two league finishes and a couple not-large tournaments, plus a mid-pack finish in Pinball At The Zoo. FAE was my and bunnyhugger's pick for person most likely to win it all, and nobody but us seemed aware of them.

And our forecast looked likely to pay off: they beat their first-round opponent in four straight games, and their second-round in five games. KEC was next and would put FAE to the strongest test they faced all day. But KEC beat FAE on Mustang (her choice), then FAE returned the favor on Lethal Weapon 3. On The Who's Tommy and then Uncanny X-Men FAE racked up two more wins, bringing KEC to the brink of elimination. Then on Scuba --- her pick --- she came back and handed FAE a second loss that round. On to FAE's last pick, Paragon.

Paragon is a game I want to like. It's a wide-body, usually a sign of so much good pinball idea they couldn't place it all. It's got a neat bunch of art this time I don't think plagiarized from Boris Vallejo. But it is a brutal game, prone to sudden, abrupt ball drains. Even the tutorial video the IFPA has shows the skilled player teaching you how to play the game unable to keep the ball alive.

And, somehow, FAE was keeping the ball alive, accomplishing such impossible feats as spelling out the word PARAGON in the lights, a feat good for like 80,000 points on a table where 50,000 will give you a good finish most of the time. KEC went up to her last ball down something like 150,000 points and the game just does not let you get that many points.

Yet ... somehow ... she didn't lose the ball. She just kept on shooting it up into as safe a shot as Paragon has, putting up small but reliable points over and over, the wood-chopping approach that will win you games if you don't have an unlucky shot. And she kept having lucky shots, right up to the point that she too completed the PARAGON spelling, all but eliminating FAE's lead. A little bit more play and she would bring this expert player to a seventh game, that would be KEC's pick.

She didn't. The ball bounced off a something or other and drained and when the bonus counted up she was just short. One more hit on the bonus-multiplier targets would have won it. One or two more shots up into the upper playfield where bonuses build up and letters get awarded would have done it. It would have been plausible that she'd have gone on to finals, but she did not. All she had was the strange consolation that everyone in the venue was congratulating her for an incredible rally and agreeing that it sucked it wasn't enough.

And finals. FAE versus two-time women's champion JL. The match started on her game, Jungle Queen, which decided it wanted nothing to do with her and gave FAE a win. Lethal Weapon 3 was similarly not giving JL nearly enough time to play. The next game, Space Shuttle, got interrupted on JL's last ball when, down a hundred thousand points or something, the spinner that's essential to any wood-chopping play got stuck. PH was able to open the table and fix it easily, but what flow JL had started gathering was gone and she drained the next shot. Finally, playing demoralized, FAE crushed JL on The Uncanny X-Men, beating the former state champion four games to nothing.

FAE had come from obscurity to win it all, and they never faced a closer match than KEC with her outstanding-but-not-enough Paragon.

And now, back to Tuscora Park. We'll get to carousel fun soon.

Something delights me in seeing the train wriggle its way back along the track here.

Maker's plate for the Superior Wheel.

And the ride sign for the roller coaster, which --- to my surprise --- I don't think we have any photographs of from up-close. No recent photographs anyway.

Several plaques dedicating the carousel and its building.

bunnyhugger enjoying a ride on the carousel. I had a feeling this was a ride it was okay to take a careful picture or two on.

I guess bunnyhugger did not think it was all right I was taking pictures during the ride. Sorry.

Trivia: Challenger astronaut Ronald McNair hoped to bring a saxophone into space on STS-51L, to play with electronic musician Jean-Michel Jarre (on the ground) a composition Jarre had composed, ``Rendez-Vous VI''. He was blocked from bringing the instrument to space, on the grounds of objections from ``someone in the chain of command''. Commander Dick Scobee would say it was his call: ``I decided Ron could bring his sax if Judy [ Resnik ] could bring her piano.'' Source: Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space, Adam Higginbotham. McNair had played his saxophone in space before, on STS-41B (also the Challenger), but accidentally recorded over the tape of his performance before landing.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 81: Steam Rocket to Infinity, Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

PS: What's Going On In Prince Valiant? Why is Prince Valiant in Italy now? November 2025 - January 2026 in case you missed my comic strip recaps sooner.

bunnyhugger called everyone together for final announcements, rules explanations, and a group photo --- I took the pictures --- at the scheduled noon, and we learned afterwards that Ypsi Pinball Podcast had supposed that all this stuff would be finished before noon and people would start going into games. Also bunnyhugger only started writing out the first round of matches --- top seed versus 16th, 2nd versus 15th and so on --- after the announcements, though either of us could have started writing that out as soon as we had the full attendance confirmed. It's always the things you think you don't need to coordinate.

bunnyhugger's first round, and the one the streamers chose to start with, was against KEC, and as everyone noted was a repeat of finals from two years ago. They would start later than the other groups, just because bunnyhugger was busy giving every other group the chance to start, and I think they ended up later than that because their first game --- Jungle Queen, one of KEC's picks --- was occupied. In the tournament format chosen every competitor chooses three games --- a classic, a middle-era game, and a modern game --- at the start of the match, before either of them have played anything against each other, and they will sometimes have to wait for another group to finish.

bunnyhugger won the classic Jungle Queen, thereby relieving my first worst fear, that she'd get swept. The next game was one of bunnyhugger's, Stranger Things, which she's played competently a fair bit locally but hadn't much touched in Fremont. But she had to have some picks for a modern-era game, and this seemed the friendliest of those available. It was not; she kept having trouble just timing the skill shot to start the game and took a loss. Back to KEC's games, the middle-era The Addams Family, where KEC had a disappointing game to bunnyhugger's really good in-the-groove play. This had the mildly embarrassing thing in bunnyhugger's last ball, where she overcame KEC's score, that while she had surely got the points she needed there were modes going one after another so she couldn't see the score to be certain. On to bunnyhugger's mid-era pick, FunHouse, which as the streamers noted was a game she just had to play and also that she'd be doing all the game's call-outs along with.

The irony for all of bunnyhugger's love of FunHouse is she isn't a particularly strong player at it, and the table was playing tournament-grade hard. But she had a fair game put up and was ahead at the end of her three balls, as the podcasters noted, the first time this match someone might win their choice. And then KEC --- who, Addams Family stumble aside, was playing really strongly --- went on a tear and blew past bunnyhugger's score. On to game five!

This was KEC's modern pick, the Stern game Mustang, and she knew the game in a way that bunnyhugger just doesn't. We used to, well before the pandemic began, have the game locally, but nobody much liked it or knew what to do with it then either. I've since played it enough in The Pinball Arcade app to be decent at it, in simulation, but there's no transferring that knowledge or experience orally, especially given how much of it is that I don't know how to describe what I'm doing besides making the yellow-lit shot. So for the first time someone defended her pick and she had a three-to-two advantage on bunnyhugger.

On to bunnyhugger's last pick, the classic game Scuba, a 1960s table with the smaller-model flippers placed about four yards apart. The gimmick of this game is you get the big points if you complete a set of five mini-targets that are blocked from the flippers by pop bumpers, so you have to aim to the sides of pop bumpers a lot until you get lucky. This era of game is always one of bunnyhugger's relative strengths but again, that luck element ...

Still, the choice was working out nicely, bunnyhugger being ahead at the ends of the first several balls, and while KEC was coming up, that's an era where it's inevitable you'll get a house ball, or a ball that pings wildly and goes out the enormous drains. Or that just dies when the flipper touches it, and can't be sent anywhere but the center drain. At the end of who knows how many rounds of the competitors trading physical places the podcasters said that was it, ball five, and bunnyhugger had won and they were going on to game seven.

It was not the end of the game. There was one ball left, and bunnyhugger played a little, and KEC played more and got that fifth hidden target, opening up a world of more points. She would beat bunnyhugger and, oh dear, knock bunnyhugger out of contention. For the third time in four tournaments my dear bride wouldn't make it past the first round.

What she did make it to? Back in June? Tuscora Park. Here's pictures to prove it.

A nearly decade-old plaque from the National Carousel Association commemorating Tuscora Park for operating the carousel.

And a slightly older plaque in better shape from the same group commemorating the same thing, as if the National Carousel Association got the idea of commemorating Tuscora Park in its head and the park wasn't going to turn them down.

The carousel's chariot, a nice long lion-esque dragon.

A sign warning what the rules are for each of the rides. The roller coaster, alas, is only open to those under 17 years old. It's your standard Allan Herschell Little Dipper, a knee-banger from the very old days.

Some of the kiddie rides, your usual sort of flat rides of things that go in circles.

This would've been a more interesting ride to Young Me since the chains would make it feel more believably like flying.

Trivia: The word basmati, as in rice, derives from the Hindi for ``fragrant''. Source: Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World's Smells, Harold McGee.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Sundays Supplement Volume 19: 1957, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle. I know it's hard to build a narrative over the Sundays but boy, do Sims and Zaboly lean heavily on ``Popeye goes fishing'' or ``Oscar and Swee'Pea try to get Popeye to buy them an ice cream soda'' premises.

Sunday opened with drama. It was snowing, as it had been, but it was snowing more intensely. And it didn't just look likely to keep doing that; it looked likely to intensify. The National Weather Service forecast was putting up new levels of watches, warnings, statements, and other ominous forecasts of how awful it would be. Using last year as a guide to how long this year's finals should take, we could see ourselves getting out just in time to hit the worst of the evening's storm.

We figured it likely we could stay an extra night. The Gerber Guest House had many rooms and it's far from peak tourist season. But we'd have to get in touch with the AirBnB host to arrange this. (It turned out we could also have contacted them through a more direct booking service, but we wouldn't find that out for precious hours.) But Monday was not promising to be any better, except that we could expect to do the driving in a sunlit snowstorm. And it wasn't just us; FAE rode with us and would have to stay an extra day if we didn't drive back that night.

As the person who'd be driving I made the call: whatever we faced would be better driven through in daylight. I offered to FAE to pay their room, trusting we could renew it (and we would), to remove that from being a consideration, and they accepted (to bunnyhugger's surprise; she expected they would thank me for the offer but decline the cash). With that settled we just had to make arrangements through AirBnB with whoever our host was! ... And they weren't answering messages right away. And we had to leave for the tournament soon. We weren't in danger of missing the official start of the tournament, but we were going to cut into the couple hours of practice time before the event began, and also, competitors get nervous when the tournament director isn't around crazy early. We had to save bunnyhugger from messages about how she wasn't at the venue yet.

The question was, do we prepare the room for check-out? And more importantly, do we take our stuff or just leave it in the room trusting they won't change the codes on us? I thought the thing to do was take the most important stuff, the things that would be catastrophic to lose or be separated from (laptops, medicines, the Pinball Box containing all our tournament-running supplies, which would have been going anyway) and quickly realized this list came to everything but our dirty laundry? And even that, I wore some event T-shirts I couldn't expect to replace, so ...

So we ended up packing up everything and taking it out to my car, but also did not pull the bedsheets and toss the towels in a heap like we're supposed to do at check-out. bunnyhugger left a note to the housekeeping service to explain things and we'd just have to hope it all came out sensibly. Which it did; within a couple hours we had our room rentals extended another day, room code unchanged, and we got back to find the room untouched by housekeeping or anyone else so far as we knew. The only harm done there is our laptops got quite chilly.

With Cedar Point visited for June what's next? Amusement parks, that's what, and our extreme summer trip (we spent the entire week in the 90s). Starting off, our smallest and shortest visit, Tuscora Park in New Philadelphia, Ohio:

Establishing shot, one of those tolerably symmetric views of the park. It's both a fountain and a drinking fountain here!

I didn't notice people tossing coins into the small amount of water but it seems like that's got to happen too.

And here's the thing that brought us here, the antique carousel. Less so the pool, which was closed by the time we got there.

While the park has a miniature train, it also has a piece of train-themed playground gear.

This was the first time I'd seen this picture-communication board for overloaded kids to point to what they want or need. (I've since seen them at other parks.) The other side is in Spanish.

And here's a view of the carousel, dead center, with the band organ behind it, so you know we're there for real.

Trivia: The winds from a 1999 storm caused the Eiffel Tower to sway about four inches. Source: Force: What it means to push and pull, slip and grip, start and stop, Henry Petroski. Which which you consider how little surface area the Eiffel Tower presents to the wind is a heck of something.

Currently Reading: A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II, Maury Klein.

Saturday, the day of the open pinball tournament, we got up early enough that had we hustled we might have got to the venue in time for the official calling of the roll, just in case enough people were absent that we could have got in as ``non-dead bodies''. It would transpire that that everyone who expected to play was there; I don't think there was even a need for the official alternates. (This is not to say I wasn't startled when I saw a list of matches and that there were multiple people who had no opponent. This is because I forgot that the 24-person championship gave the top eight seeds a first-round bye.)

But we did also miss the giving out of instructions and the group photo and the start of ceremonies. I blame that it was nice and cozy in a mattress much less worn-out than ours. Also little things like bunnyhugger going off to find coffee and along the way discovering the first dozen living rooms. Also I had my first cup-of-oatmeal instant breakfast in maybe forever and that reminded me that I do like oatmeal. It doesn't just have to be just for pet rabbits who aren't taking their regular food.

We got there in the middle of the first round, and joined the good number of people hanging around the front of the building. The back room had all the pinball games up for tournament play. And, as non-competitors, we did our best not to venture in back except to use the bathroom and hope the bathroom would hold up to the strain under it. It did, which was, pardon me, a relief. The port-a-potty brought in the previous Sunday was still in the parking lot, I assume for insurance.

So I mostly stayed up front. Some of this was working on little goals of my own, like playing Creature From The Black Lagoon well enough to get Super Mode started. I failed at this, although I did get to playing the game much more reliably well than I had before. Also I gave some fresh tries to Led Zeppelin, a modern Stern pinball game that I've never had a good time on. You know what? I still don't have a good time on it. I mentioned to KEG --- formerly of Lansing, now an out-of-stater who would the next day become the first non-Michigan woman to compete in the state women's championship --- how weird it was they made a game with absolutely no fun in it. She agreed, although she did manage to put together an actually good game. Still, it's a lemon of a table.

My other pastime was watching the stream of what was going on in the next room over. If you'd like to see that stream, you can watch all nine hours of it here and if you see me in the video somewhere it's news to me. But it was fun sitting around with other pinball people and talking about the games. One guy mentioned he was surprised to learn that I was funny. Maybe I'm being too reserved in my normal play.

There were people who filled out brackets to see who did their best predicting the championship. I was not among them, although if I had, I'd have put my money on JPJ who did, in fact, go on to be the champion for the fourth time in a row. But there were many matches that I would have called wrong, if I'd been asked. AJH losing in the first round, for example, or TY losing to DLO.

Also something I didn't imagine would happen? The march of JBS all the way to finals. JBS also made history by being I think the first non-Michigander to play in the Michigan state finals. He's from Toledo, apparently, so gets to a lot of southeast Michigan events. I won't say anything against him, though, as I'm not going to rag on anyone who's still masking. JBS goes farther than that, bringing with him some kind of disinfecting light gadget that I'm not sure actually does things, but that he does wave across the buttons of the pinball machine before his every turn.

Anyway, I felt enough that a Michigander should win the state championship that I was hoping someone would knock him out. And it took until meeting JPJ --- who's currently ranked the 10th-best player in the world --- in the finals for someone to do. JPJ knocked out JBS in four straight games, which is even better than I'd imagined. Still, heck of a finish.

We stayed through to the end of the day, of course, and closed the place out. And then had to turn around and come back because FAE had forgotten their laptop. Fortunately AJH was only a minute away and was able to come back to let them in. Could have gone much worse.

Now let's share some more pictures from Cedar Point back on Juneteenth.

Now here's something we haven't seen on the Frontier Trail before: a map! They've been playing up, some, the history of the park as part of nostalgia marketing and some of it's included this guide to what you can see if you take pictures and put them through that Photoshop filter that turns it into line art. The actual trail does not curve nearly this much.

And here's the sun coming out, as seen from near Thunder Canyon, the water rapids ride.

The former location of Snake River Falls, with the track of the shoot-the-chutes now gone.

The boats across the lake were used for the short-lived revival of the river boat ride, and now they're being props again.

New this year: they renovated the Happy Friar food stand out of existence and into this new structure. Instead of a walk-up stand you now go in, but they have trays full of the cheese-on-a-stick hot-dog-on-a-stick, and fries ready to pick up and go, which is speedier. I don't dislike it, but I'm sad they reduced the happy friar art from a large three-dimensional cartoon board to a restrained little sign. Maybe it's period-appropriate to the era of we've-heard-of-the-Tudors-but-aren't-going-crazy but it's less fun.

And look at that, a train running on Top Thrill 2!

Trivia: In the final Congressional debates for what would become the 25th Amendment Senator Robert F Kennedy inquired what the proposed amendment meant by a President's ``inability'' to perform the duties; was it total inability? Physical? Mental? Senator Birch Bayh, speaking for the amendment, offered that it should be taken to be anything which presented an inability to perform the constitutional duties of President, and should not be limited to mental disability: ``It is conceivable that the President might fall into the hands of the enemy, for example''. Source: One Heartbeat Away: Presidential Disability and Succession, Birch Bayh. Kennedy also pressed on the question of how long a disability should be expected to last and Bayh offered that it should not be specified in the Constitution lest it complicate a crisis.

Currently Reading: A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II, Maury Klein.