You got to make the morning last

Last Tuesday was the final league night for Season 15. There weren't any great fiascos of games going down, which is a mercy. There was a minor fiasco in that we learned the bar has got a live band playing every Tuesday, now, and starting at 7 pm rather than 9 pm. If they started at 9 at least most of league nights would be finished, typically, before they started. It seems to be a band-in-residence; at least, they were the same ones who'd been there the previous league night and they talked about being there for future Tuesdays. It's not a bad band, with music comfortable to olds like me and bunny_hugger. Still, we'd rather there weren't a band, or weren't a band through the whole of league night. No way of knowing how long it'll take for the bar to get bored of this and go on to something else.

Also, the bar added the Rush pinball machine, too late to put in the roster for this season but we could make it the side tournament. When I heard about the game I joked that I would love its guaranteed 17-minute minimum play time. I thought I was joking. The game had been in the venue for a couple days but all the better players already knew how to play it so it went on forever. I didn't, mind you, which bodes ill for finals. But it was crazy long-playing; a single four-player group for the side tournament took about fifty minutes and that was with my racing to the drain.

So not just would that make the side tournament go on forever, but during the finals of the side tournament, the game crashed, forcing a replay of the whole thing. (Almost; one player, who'd finished ball three, had already gotten last place.)

Also dragging the night out forever: Uhm, me. Sorry. But --- despite going in to the night miserable (our goldfish had died and I had a freak-out about how I'm never going to have a job again) and despite the lousy start on Rush --- I had a crazy good night. Like, everything was coming together. Had a really good, satisfying game of Stranger Things, and then went on to a game of Batman 66 that just would not end, and just kept getting better. This went on so long that the next group --- bunny_hugger's --- got stuck behind me, waiting to see if I would ever finish ball two. I did, eventually, many days later, with a bonus score of 994,000,000. Batman is a high-scoring game, but that's bizarrely high-scoring. That bonus on that one ball alone would have been the second-highest score of the night, so I way overachieved. It was similar but less severe on Kiss and then on The Beatles, a game I love but had lost the touch of since the pandemic. I had it back, not least by watching how other people made the all-important loop shot. At one point I shot the loop hard enough that the spinner wasn't even registering, which would make me angry except that's so wonderful. I was starting to think I'd have my first-ever night where every game was above the median --- which would raise me in the standings, possibly to fourth place and a first-round bye in finals --- when Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles hit. Nobody's good on this game, so I felt good: I just had to get like four million points to hit the median. I did not. I couldn't get anything going at all, and I even had the thing where the ball launches, drains, ball-saves, and drains the same way. So with the second-lowest score of the night on Turtles, I did not rise out of fifth place. (It turns out I could not have gotten to fourth place anyway, not even if I had first-place finishes on every game of the night.)

Another delay: two players had to come late. MWS, fresh off being the last person to lose Betrayal Legacy the night before, had to arrive late because of work. And he was particularly eager to put his scores in, in the hopes of bettering his top-four seed. DMC, also a top-four player, had work making him late. MWS even drove all the way from Flint just to drop in, play his games, and head out. I followed behind, fortunately, because while he was playing Batman the game froze up and hard-reset, wiping out his score. Fortunately since I was watching I could attest that he had at least 350 million, and he could take compensation balls for what was lost. I had just meant to be curious but it turned out I was serving a useful role. MWS also had a killer game of Batman, putting together, with compensation, about 1.8 billion points. That's well below what I did, which is good, because if he had beaten my 3.2 billion I'd have had to run him over with my car. DMC had a much shorter night, when he finally arrived, having absolutely rotten games on everything but Stranger Things. Still, by the time he was done, it was well past midnight --- the bar had turned off all the machines upstairs (they close at 1 am these days) --- and we can't do that anymore. We're going to have to put in rules about how late someone can start late.

Here's some more of that bridge in Okemos that I assume isn't there anymore.

Walking across the street that's only busy when you actually try to cross it (I mean, look how far in the distance the stop light is), so here's a view of both bridges from the median. Also you can see the board they post all the mandated work information about there being a minimum wage and how they don't discriminate against anybody who can prove they're doing it.

And here's the camel-back bridge. It's a stylish look that you don't see in concrete these days.

A view that makes the bride look about twelve feet long; it's closer to a hundred feet, so it's got some substantial length to it. On the side is what looks like a balcony; I think it's the remains of a former pedestrian crossing on the side of the bridge, taken out because there's no good reason for a person to be walking down the middle of the two bridges.

Trivia: There are claims the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne had a sandglass that would run for a full twelve hours before needing turning. Source: The Calendar: The 5000-Year Struggle to Align the Clock with the Heavens --- And What Happened to the Missing Ten Days, David Ewing Duncan. (Authorities dispute whether this was possible, eg, whether there even were sandglasses at the time.)

PS: Here Are Past Years' Pi Day Comic Strips for people who want to see many syndicated cartoonists noticing that π sounds like ``pie''.