What'd life be without homegrown tomatoes

Rather than tell you about my mathematics blog how about some pinball-related pictures from last month? You'll like those, and also what they have to hint about upcoming events in this journal if all goes well.

Excitement coming soon! bunny_hugger is running the first Michigan Women's State Pinball Championship, and was recently sent the plaque that the first-place finisher is to receive. We took it to a tournament of the Lansing Lightning Flippers, the women's tournament series, so the participants could see what they have to aspire to in these tournaments.

And the mug for the tournament, made by bunny_hugger (who runs the Lansing Lightning Flippers tournaments) too late in the night for her comfort. She always makes them closer to deadline than she wants and she should start now for the next Lightning Flippers tournament, but hasn't the time to right now.

Also someone brought a tomato to our hipster bar and left it on a table so I took a photo of it and here's my album cover, you're welcome.

007, the new James Bond-themed pinball game, is just out but already players one and three have a serious problem with score plagiarism. Note by the way this is the score after two balls, so it's not like they both just had a ball with one bad bounce immediately after the ball save turned off; they had two rounds of house balls like that.

House bird! We noticed this odd, huge woodpecker at our feeder in the snowstorm right before Christmas.

That mysterious woodpecker on one side of the feeder with a more normal sparrow or such on the other side.

Trivia: China closed its ports to Arab mariners in 878. Source: The Riddle of the Compass: The Invention that Changed the World, Amir D Aczel.

Currently Reading: A History of The World's Airlines, R E G Davies. Published 1964 so it's a bit outdated but a neat glimpse. The author's note has this charming first paragraph: ``Reference to airlines is usually made in the singular, although, (as with Damon Runyon's use of the present tense) the reader may occasionally find exceptions''. The notes also include things like what the author means by an airline, or that the text will ``normally'' use Arabic numerals for aircraft designations even if Roman numerals were often used for the airplane.