Hello all you pinballers out in Lansing League Land. I hope you’ll forgive me for the brevity of this recap for the league night of 2/11, as I was first under the weather and then had a huge pileup of exam grading, all of which has left me short of time. Last time we played the bank Ceryneian Hind, which commemorates the labor in which Hercules (or Heracles if you’re old school) had to chase down and catch a deer sacred to Artemis. I went into the attic and dug out a pair of home-made Bambi ears that I wore to a costume party wedding reception (the theme was “The Movies”) back in the mid-2000s. I already have a deer hat (famously used as the sorting hat for league) and a pair of light-up antlers with ears lying around, but I thought I had to be a hind specifically, which is a female deer, so I couldn’t wear antlers. I later learned that a peculiar characteristic of the Ceryneian Hind in mythology is that she had antlers. Oops.
I went to both school and league despite being well into coming down with some sort of cold (which later turned quite nasty). I desperately wanted to avoid giving it to anyone, so I had planned to wipe down the flipper buttons and lockdown bar after each of my balls using some sanitizer wipes the upstairs bar had lying around. Unfortunately this backfired almost immediately. On Star Trek, it started registering switches as I wiped over the flipper button, then eventually fired the ball into play for no apparent reason. Our new player Jay rushed to take control of his ball, but unfortunately he drained quickly and the phantom switch hits had killed his ball saver. I called Joseph over for a ruling as I thought I might have to be DQ’d for playing out of turn since it may have been my actions that caused the ball to go into play. Joseph studied the rule book for a long time before coming over and saying that he believed it to be “accidental interference” rather than playing out of turn since it could not be expected that touching the flippers would launch the ball. We also could not be sure that touching the flipper was related to the switch hits because it seemed to continue after I was no longer touching the game at all. Joseph ruled simply “play on,” meaning I may yet avoid getting the “worst score” award again this season.
In any case, I was afraid to touch the game after my ball after that, so I switched to rubbing my own hands down with the sanitizer wipes after that. This turned out not to be the wisest idea either since that night I looked down at my hands and suddenly realized my knuckles had a red rash all over them and one spot was even cracked open and bleeding. Yes, I gave myself a chemical burn using surface sanitizer to disinfect my own hands. I really hope no one got the damn cold after that. I ended up getting so sick by Wednesday night that I cancelled my Thursday classes.
This league night saw the return of a long-ago familiar face, Rick of Nomad Kitchen (the bar’s old restaurant). We used to all love his fries with Nomad Sauce! Apparently Rick is going to start playing in the league. I can’t recall if he ever played in league before (in the Matt days) or just played with us casually. I know a couple of times he ran his own equivalent of Tuesday Night Smackdown before we started having those, which awarded a free burger from the kitchen as a prize.
We had a lot of other stuff going on this night including qualifying for Destrier of Death (the Black Knight tournament designed mainly to let people put authorized scores up on Stern’s leader board), the Stranger Things launch party, and the usual Tuesday Night Smackdown which was on Jurassic Park. I put my two Stranger Things scores in knowing I would not have time on the next league night, and I ended up ranting much too angrily afterward about how I never should have tried to do scores while sick (they were not good). This broke my New Year’s resolution not to get angry about pinball, which I have mostly been pretty good about, but I think being sick tends to make me more emotional and my bad behavior can be forgiven. Joseph did a new leader board-eligible score on Black Knight, though it has since been knocked totally off the board by a last minute rush of high scores in a tournament that got barely any attention for most of its run. Mike has also lost his first place standing and is in the middle of the pack.
The Tuesday Night Smackdown was on Jurassic Park and our champion was Danny. Joseph had designed the medals since I forgot to do it before work, and I think he put candy hearts on them. Donny won the B division on Guardians of the Galaxy and was well pleased to get his plastic medal since it was his first pinball hardware. I definitely remember how excited I was to win my first trophy (a Zen tournament, with Joseph) and in fact it is still in pride of place on my mantel.
Tonight we will be vying for the Girdle of Hippolyta, commemorating the time Hercules persuaded the Queen of the Amazons to give him her magic girdle (which unfortunately ended in tragedy due to a misunderstanding of his intentions by the other Amazons). We will also have Stranger Things qualifying before league and finals afterward, plus a Smackdown on Star Trek: The Next Generation. See you all soon!