So I went out and bought a two carat ring, and both of them you ate

Rabbit, rabbit.

Had some weirdness break out at pinball league last Tuesday, something I'd been meaning to get around to mentioning. One is that we had a very warm day, with rain, so that the poor battered roof of our barcade gave away again. Midway through the league night people were running around to find RED and warn him that a lot of water was dripping on The Addams Family. So it had to be unplugged, and pulled away from the wall, along with a slate of other games. Also, luckily, none of those were games that we were playing that night, so it didn't hurt any league play.

By coincidence, pulling the tables away from the all and turning them off caused them to form a little arc facing Junkyard. And ACE, one of the new players this season, observed it looked like they were paying their respects to Barry Oursler. Oursler was a designer of many pinball games, including Junkyard, and news of his passing came out early last week.

The game malfunction we did have was Game of Thrones, where the right flipper button fell off the machine. (And RED, the technician who fixes the things, was the guy who did it.) There was one other group supposed to play the game Tuesday (the other groups would play next league meeting) and since he broke the game on ball three, when he was the last player, with a score he was content accepting he figured, no harm done. Unfortunately it turned out the other group hadn't played, so we had to pull Game of Thrones --- a hard, but popular game --- and replace it with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles --- a hard, but loathed game. Exciting stuff.

The side tournament --- the supreme Tuesday Night Smackdown, since it was the 22nd --- was on Guardians of the Galaxy. I was lucky enough to be able to play for the championship medal. I was not lucky enough to actually play my second ball, which launched, leapt out of the pop bumpers and drained out the left outlane, got the ball save, launched again, and leapt out of the pop bumpers and rained out the left outlane again. I had a great third-ball rally, milking a Groot Multiball --- MWS was awestruck that I apparently hit a super jackpot for 75 million points, more than he'd ever seen --- but when it ended, I knew MWS had won. I told him so: unless he tilted out, he had me. And he tried really hard to not score, based on how much trouble he was having, but he didn't drain fast enough. So I got second place which, for 2/22/2022, I'd argue is the true championship position.

bunny_hugger meanwhile played the undercard, a separate game on Batman '66. She had forgotten much of the fine points of the game play, and wasn't able to get the multiball started. Not that it mattered much: one of the other players had a second ball that put up something like a billion points, a great score even on that game with sometimes preposterous high scoring. So she, too, finished in second place on her contest, again, arguably, the true championship position. The two of us took home no medals, just bragging rights.

Near the end of the night bunny_hugger, reasonably proud of her score on AC/DC, asked what my score on that table was. I told her I couldn't tell her, because she'd hit me. Anyway, both of us seem reasonably safely in the A Division, not least because we have 24 people qualified to play in finals and so can have a 12-person A Division, our biggest ever.

Here, have some pictures of our pet rabbit being adorable.

Here's she's loafing. See her feet? No you do not, they're just gone.

For some reason they call this pose the ``dead bunny flop''.

POV: you're a carrot about to see those teeth get used.

And here she licks her paw without bothering to lift her head off the floor.

Trivia: Taze Russell, founder of the Jehovah's Witnesses, forecast 1914 as the date for the end of the world.
Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards. (So says Richards. On reading around it looks like he, at least at one point, saw October 1914 as the time when the Second Coming of Christ would see things like the sudden destruction of all world governments. If Wikipedia's not misleading me, he took the actual outbreak of World War I as the start of Armageddon.)

Currently Reading: Sucker's Progress: An Informal History of Gambling in America, Herbert Asbury. Ah, so Vicksburg really cracked down on the gambling sharps running roughshod over all morality and all that ... once a rumor got started that the big gambling-house runners were planning to foment a slave insurrection that would see the city destroyed and then ... ... ... and profit! Stay classy, South. Also Asbury quotes an 1850s source to reassure that the stories of light-skinned enslaved women being put into gambling pots as the stakes was an invention of the novelist and dramatist rather than something that ever happened in real life. So, uh, I guess there's that, then.