Before I start the recap for July 12, I need to recount a story I had forgotten to put in the previous recap, and that is something that happened at the very end of the night when a few of us were still hanging around playing Avengers. I was trying to do some Calculus homework at a table nearby, and suddenly I heard Mike and Allen taking turns rattling off lists of very random-seeming words that started with “A.” I got up and asked them what they heck they were doing and learned that Josh had bet Mike and Allen $500 that they could not guess his middle name. He added that even if they could guess it, they wouldn’t be able to pronounce it. Due to his pinball initials, JAB, they knew it started with an A. I made two guesses and got it on the second one. Josh got a look on his face like I had just thrown a snake on him. Unfortunately, he says that he specifically did not extend the bet to me or Joseph. The actual middle name is left as an exercise for the reader.
Now on to the current recap. It was Night 5, and we started a new rotation of the banks called Athena and Hades. We had a couple of fluke occurrences, one of them being that Derik came to me to say that his group had their game of Cactus Canyon reset when a little kid came up and hit the start button. I’m surprised that happened, since I think it would have required holding the button down for several seconds, but that’s as much as I know about the situation. The other is that Allen played out of turn at one point, forcing me to rule a DQ for him on one game. Since that got entered as a zero machine score, I told him that he was definitely “in the running” for the Worst Score Award for Season 16. He said, “In the running? You mean someone’s going to do worse than zero?” I said, “Well, someone could tie it.” His reply was, “What do we do then? A one-ball plunge off to break the tie?” Everyone loved that idea and someone else added on the idea that the plunge off should be on The Flip Side, which I use for tiebreakers in my charity tournaments.
Speaking of charity tournaments, the week following last league night (in other words, as of this writing, last week), was the summer charity tournament, Rocket Robin. Ever since the first one I have been reusing a piece of art I drew for the original poster, which I was very proud of. The art depicts a robin saluting, wearing a cap with a logo on it, standing in front of a retro-futuristic spaceship. My inspiration for this art was the 1950s TV show Rocky Jones, Space Ranger, which was a favorite of my father’s growing up. As a result I saw it on VHS a lot as a kid. The robin’s cap and the spaceship are both taken from Rocky Jones. The reason I point this out is that near the end of league night, Joseph asked if I noticed what was showing on The Avenue’s TV. I looked down from the mezzanine and to my surprise it was Rocky Jones. I thought this seemed auspicious for the success of my upcoming tournament and said so.
Our Tuesday Night Smackdown was played on the brand new Guns N’ Roses game. Allen already knows the game inside and out and was freely offering advice. No one was surprised when Allen got the A division medal (which I drew a rose on). Tim won the B division game on Indiana Jones. Tim has a lot of good luck in the B division, or as he calls it, the Best Devision. He had a walk-off Ball 3 win, but since the tournament was over he went ahead and played the rest of his game after I took the winners’ photo, and set the Grand Champion score.
At the end of the night, Joseph and I played Guns N’ Roses with Jason, who also knows the game very well and was teaching it to us. To be honest, it’s so complicated I could only retain one or two things he told me. I’m not the greatest with modern rulesets. I did get to play a song, though, and of course being a Paul McCartney fan I picked “Live and Let Die.” The game puts on an impressive light show and is very fun and exciting to play, especially when you get the song multiball going.
That’s all for last time’s recap, just in time as usual for our league night tonight at 7. We’ll be playing the rest of the Bank 5/6 rotation.