We had the finals for the Other Pinball League last Friday. In this, the league was broken up into eight-person brackets, by order based on how we finished during the regular season, and from those seeds placed in double-elimination groups. I was put in the C division, and immediately double-eliminated. I put up a decent game of The Wizard of Oz, against someone who put the #6 high score on the table. (And this without extra balls, not allowed in the tournament!) I failed in the consolation round too, losing at Embryon and some other game just as quickly but man look at that Embryon backglass art and ponder the deranged mid-70s SF novel and/or prog rock album it represents.
Our home league's superstar was playing, in A division of course, and we waited and watched to see how he did. The trouble with double-elimination games for really skilled players is it can take a long, long time especially on modern games to get eliminated. The contests started about 7 pm and it was well after midnight before they even got to the tiebreaker game. Sadly, our guy lost: he put up a respectable eight billion points on Attack From Mars to a colossal eighteen billion, and the tiebreaker of Cirqus Voltaire, well, I blame a bad tilt. But our home league has its finals next week, and there's always next season.
Thanks to this contest I am at this very moment of writing ranked 4,317th on the International Flipper Pinball Association (out of 23,917 registered players). 
bunny_hugger is ranked 6,629th.
On my humor blog, our pet rabbit gets ready to play the part of a raccoon. If that doesn't interest you, then since last week's pondering On Underwear Procurement Difficulties In The Era Of The Second World War have been several things, one or more of which you might like instead:
- Felix the Cat: Astronomeous, a 1920s black-and-white cartoon that has some strange elements in it.
- Statistics Saturday: The American Films Of Alfred Hitchcock Ordered By How Many Words Wikipedia Uses To Describe The Plot, which is exactly what it says on the label, and good luck guessing which film had the longest-to-describe plot.
- Math Comics, And, What The Heck, A Comic Strip Whose Existence I Can't Explain (spoiler: it's Reply All and Reply All Lite)
- Unintended Results: Books About Movie Musicals Edition, as my reading is leading me into certain peril.
- Dream World Tips: Brushes With Rock Fame, but I think it's useful advice regardless.
- How Things May Be, if this Internet of Things really takes off after all.
Trivia: In 2007 the NASA budget for planetary exploration was about three billion dollars, larger than the American market for college textbooks and resales ($2.3 billion), but smaller than the fast food industry in Los Angels ($3.4 billion). Source: Voyager: Seeking Newer Worlds In The Third Great Age of Discovery, Stephen J Pyne.
Currently Reading: Dangerous Rhythm: Why Movie Musicals Matter, Richard Barrios. (It's an entertaining book but also very snarky. Barrios gives the impression of having seen every musical and possibly every movie ever made, and it can be hard keeping track of an argument that jumps across seven decades of movies when there's diversions in the main text and in the footnotes so very often.)
PS: Reading the Comics, July 24, 2014: Math Is Just Hard Stuff, Right? Edition, as it's been a week of comic strip that mention mathematics but don't get into really deep topics.