Ad homina homina homina

eBay sales are officially closed for the summer -- my sales have sucked, and my friend Jan agrees -- so it's time for our last DIA for a while. The target sales moved the DW index up almost 7, so now I've paid for almost 80% of the cost of my parts machine. Overall, the DIA rose just under 3. New today is the Loser 500, which basically means that after my recent purchases, I owe my family $380. With no eBays for a while, prospects for paying it back are pretty poor... we'll have to aggressively pursue our auctions come September. I usually get a little cash for my birthday in October, too, but I do have two pin shows coming up this fall. Hopefully there won't be too much to buy, he said optimistically.

Good news on the Centaur front. The Harlem Globetrotters targets showed up, and they are very clean and fit perfectly! Even better, I removed the 5 target bank from Skateball, removed the center target and tried it in the ORBS position, and it fits perfectly, too! I was a little worried because the right half -- the BS targets, if you will -- were not aligned to the point values on the playfield. On the left is the picture of the test fitting -- excellent space shuttle target in with the skateboarders, I really have to commend the arcade operator who did that one. On the right is detail from a pic on IMDB. The targets there don't line up, either... mine don't look much worse than the real ones. That's good news for me -- one less thing I have to buy. So this afternoon I tore apart the target assembly and dumped it in the dishwasher. It is astoundingly filthy... in addition to the Dust, I think the same super-genius that put the goofy target in greased the mechanism. Well, a trip through the heavy wash cycle should bring it next to godliness in no time.

I've been playing a lot of Eight Ball Deluxe, since it's the only game that's working and not buried under a bunch of crap. I've had some pretty good games, too... even completed the backglass DELUXE for what may be the first time since I bought it.

I really can't think of anything else to say, so here's something I've been meaning to add for a while. A few months ago I was listening to Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly read by Paul Giamatti... I read it when I was in college, but remembered almost nothing about it. Anyway, I heard this passage of classic paranoid Dick about a third of the way into Chapter 6. For some crazy reason, it seemed eerily appropriate for the hobby of pinball game ownership... I can only surmise that 1) I'm paranoid, or 2) my cats have been sabotaging my games all these years. I should probably just drop some Substance D and mellow out...

Item: One of the most effective forms of industrial or military sabotage limits itself to damage that can never be thoroughly proven or even proven at all to be anything deliberate. It is like an invisible political movement; perhaps it isn't there at all. If a bomb is wired to a car's ignition, then obviously there's an enemy. If a public building or political headquarters is blown up, then there is a political enemy. But if an accident or a series of accidents occurs, if equipment merely fails to function, if it appears faulty especially in a slow fashion over a period of natural time with numerous small failures and misfirings, then the victim -- whether a person or a party or a country -- can never marshall itself to defend itself. In fact, Arctor speculated as he drove along the freeway very slowly, a person begins to assume he's paranoid and has no enemy. He doubts himself. His car broke down normally. His luck has just become bad, and his friends agree. It's in his head! And this wipes him out more thoroughly than anything that can be traced.

How to get me to blow my load

Well, Centaur arrived today and I had to change my pants twice. It's in about as good shape as I would expect for the $225 range... not pristine by any stretch of the imagination, but not completely thrashed, either.

There are a couple of wear spots where we would expect, along the ball launch trail and in a few high traffic areas. There is some discoloration where the plastic posts hold up the lanes along the top -- my wife noticed this and thought it was fading, and it took me a while to figure out what it was (when I did, she took my incredulous tone to mean that I couldn't believe she didn't know what it was, but I was incredulous because I'd never seen anything like that before). There is mylar protecting most of the playfield, especially the inserts... it doesn't look as bad in person as it does in the pic -- there's a lot of glare from the flash. There's also an OK touchup job around the baby Centaur head on the hilt of the whip... I've seen worse (like the white-out touchup on the pool balls of my EBD or the Xenon I saw where they loon repainted the bonus light circle over the head -- I wish I had a picture, it has to be seen to be believed). See a nicer version here. But let's face it, I didn't pay for a beautiful reproduction, I paid for one that's been around the block a few times, and not as many times as some. I think it's a good playfield for the price and for my purposes.

The back definitely could use some cleaning... I can test out some cleaning techniques that I'll need when I sell my spare playfields in a few months. I was happy to see the teardrop shaped pop bumper mounts, as I recognized those from when I disassembled Fathom... one less thing I need to buy.

I made my first purchase for Centaur... a guy on Mr. Pinball was parting out a Harlem Globetrotters playfield, and I bought the inline targets from him. That means I can keep the EBD one that I have, because if I can rebuild Centaur from scratch, I can also rebuild my thrashed EBD as well.

OK, now I have to pause while my brain plays the Harlem Globetrotters cartoon theme song ("*whistle whistle whistle* hey! what? chicka chicka boom, Globetrotters, chicka chicka boom, oh yeah"). If only I could turn my massive knowledge of trivia to profit, I would be in great shape. I was a contestant on Who Wants to be a Millionaire, and I came within half a second of winning the fasted finger round once and just missed my second chance -- I put H.L.Menken after Edward R. Murrow temporally. Would that I had won, because the woman who did choked before she got to the $1000 level, so she went home with zilch -- she didn't know what a tome was, poor fruit.

Yeah, OK, there was that business of Pinball Rebuilders Strictly Cash and all, but that was before my eBay auctions sold for less than half what the same items sold for a month and a half ago. I discover this anew every year: Stuff stops selling as well and at all during summer. Maybe because people are on vacation and not nosing around eBay. I dunno. But I'm going to wait until fall before I start selling again, much to the chagrin of my bank account and my pinball restoration projects. So we'll see what I choose to afford until that time...

Not much else to report... I'll be trying to shirk dog duty (no pun intended, eww) as much as possible for the next few weeks so I can start the rebuilding project.

A freakish new way to blog!

I'm typing this using Google's Blogger widget for the Mac. It doesn't look like I can upload pictures or anything, and the typing area is even smaller than the regular Blogger window... so I don't think this will make me a believer. Oh well.

OK, I'm done now. Honestly, I have yet to find anything compelling about widgets. Apple made them out to be this incredible productivity booster, but I'm just not seeing it.

DIA movement will be coming soon. I put the Doctor Who targets up on eBay, and they've both already got bids with less than 24 hours to go.

Just to show that I'm not as completely pussy-whipped as I make myself out to be, I told my wife about the Centaur playfield today. Of course, it helped that when I brought up the subject, her first reaction was horror at the possibility that I'd bought another full game. And since it's the backglass she has a problem with -- she is disgusted by the fact that the titular character has his pubes showing --
my just getting the playfield is probably a relief to her. Strangely enough, she has a problem with Paragon, another Paul Faris game... as an artist, she's offended by the design of Mr. Barbarian Warrior. He has no neck and he has the proportions of a Lord of the Rings-type dwarf. Of course, the backglass never bothered me, since I rarely take my eyes off of Ms. Cowering Barbarian Princess' tits. For the record, from an artistic standpoint my wife likes Quicksilver (that's why she agreed to allow it in the living room), is OK with Mr. Cowboy in EBD and Doctor Who, and had no memory of the Black Knight.

So anyway, some new developments in the Centaur parts saga: As I suspected, repro plastics are available, and Illinois Pinball has the best price at $100 -- they're the guys I bought the DW mini-playfield cam from. PBR probably has the targets, most likely for $4 a piece, which would be a total of $48 -- it would be nice if PBR had this stuff on their web site, but their site sucks dead donkey dicks, so the only way to find out anything is to call them. If they don't have them, there are other guys around the internets that do.

Boy I wish Bally had a parts inventory in their manuals like Williams does. I did sit down with the Fathom and Skateball manuals and found some common parts... but darn it if they don't have a four target bank between them. Fathom does have two sets of three targets with memory, so if I can figure out how to jury-rig the memory coils onto a regular set of four targets, I could get off easily. I'm reasonably certain that SB's five target bank will fit the ORBS targets if I just edit out the center target. Sine SB is almost completely populated, it will probably donate the most surface parts.

Hey, in the last post I mentioned all the games I could think of with inline targets... well, damned if I forgot one that sitting in my basement right now: Eight Ball Deluxe. And Super Duh... I've got a spare partially populated playfield, which includes the inline targets. They're pretty messed up, but the main problem is that the targets have broken off from the base, and I would be replacing the targets anyway.

"This is what I love about pinball restoration," he said facetiously.

Enough about Centaur. Hey, here's two cool things: My correction to IMDB was accepted, and the title of the game is now Spider-man. Hooray! I am a contributor to the community. Second, my curiosity got the best of me and I posted to rgp about the odd state of my Dalek head connectors -- they more pins than the ones in the manual -- but there were apparently too many more interesting posts about people complaining about bad game sellers and telling Pingeek to go to hell, so nobody answered me... until I got a response from Pfutz! That's right, the Davros of the DW pinball game! He pointed me at a link I'd been to in the past but hadn't looked at wrt this problem. I responded with some details about the wiring and a fanboy gush, but there's been no follow ups. When I get some free time -- probably never -- I should activate the Dalek head using the secret setting, run the head test, and see if any of those mystery wires are active.

Not much else... Centaur is going to be kind of a money pit for a while, so I'm going to have to get aggressive about selling some of my spare parts. I'm trying to commit to not buying Centaur parts on credit if I can avoid it, so that means I have to pay back the $400 or so I owe the family before I make any major purchases (like the targets and plastics). We'll see how my boys can swim when the auctions finish tomorrow.

Bad move, human

It's astounding. Time is fleeting, madness takes its toll. But listen closely -- not for very much longer -- I've got to keep control.

Yeah, I remember buying the playfields; drinking those moments when the blackness would hit me and the void would be calling: Let's buy some playfields again!

It's just a jump to the... OK, it's sad, I can still recite Rocky Horror lyrics from memory. But what's really sad is my latest purchase. But let's be fair... this one is from my A-list: a Centaur playfield (drool drool drool). I've been watching it all week, fixating on it, obsessing a little perhaps. Tonight it ended, and the winning bid (just over $228) was higher than I wanted to pay -- heck, I wanted to pay the $1 opening bid -- but lower than my maximum, even after a last minute bidding frenzy adjustment.

On our right is the auction picture. It seems like it's in pretty good condition, though I guess I'll find out for sure when it arrives. You'll notice that this is my first non-populated playfield, so this will be a little more of a challenge. Here's my thinking on that: Most of the parts should be readily available... posts, screws, lamp sockets, etc. I can cannibalize some from other games, like the non-bbq'd Fathom parts and stuff I'm pulling off the Doctor Who parts game that aren't likely to sell. So that leaves what's unique to this game:

- Plastics: I think I can get repros of those.
- Metal ball guides: I can probably repurpose them from other games, like Skateball.
- Targets: Tricky, but I think doable. The plastic targets can be had as repros. For the mechanisms, you have the 1-4 on the right, which I think can reset individually, like EBD. Then you've got the ORBS, which are standard targets but with a gap in the middle. Finally, you've got yer Queen's Chamber, which I'll bet are the same size as other inline targets like Paragon, Dolly Parton, and Harlem Globetrotters (sadly, the Fathom inlines are only 3 targets). I'm sure I can find hardware from other games that will fit these guys.
- The Magnet: Hopefully it's a standard magnet. ^_^;
- The Ball Trough: Unfortunately, DW only serves three balls and Centaur has five, so that's sad. But I may be able to used the serving mechanism and launch coil from DW. The Orbian Attack track underneath is just a metal rail, so I can have Hephastus create that in his forge.

And aside from the couple of dozen parts that I can't imagine existing (honestly, who would have thought there'd be a little metal thing that resets the Dalek targets?!?), I will be ready to destroy Centaur in no time! Oh, and I have to build the controller and create a framework to run it, but that should be easy!

OK, so I'm a little giddy.

And just to show you how whipped I am, I'm going to have it sent to work so I can sneak it in under my wife's radar. Oh, I am quite the little devil, aren't I? And anyway, it's the Centaur backglass that are grounds for divorce in our house, not the playfield.

It's late, and I should get to bed, so I'll save my interesting Doctor Who news for later. But here's a bit of out of character crude scatology: Last night I found a tick on my dick. I had my wife pull it off (the tick, you numbskull), and as a bonus it was a deer tick so I can start looking for rings around my penis to indicate the onset of Lyme Disease.

Next up: How the hell am I going to pay for this crazy thing?!?

Bleagh

Not much to write about, so this will probably be pretty short. I had a Trader Joe's energy drink today -- only 99 cents, which would be great, except it didn't taste good, was fully carbed so it would wreak havoc on my churlish figure, and it gave me a nasty headache. Other than that it was great. Luckily, Andy's Convenience near my work got a load of $1 Vault Zeros in on Friday so I can wash away the lo-cost nastiness.

As predicted, I didn't get any pin stuff done this weekend. Barely started a long term cleaning project. Nobody's bidding on my auction. They don't like me. :((( And I've got multiple chins.

I looked at the FSPA places to play pinball site and it said that the LOTR game near my house was gone! I stopped in and confirmed. What a sad day. Frodo has gone into the west, and this time he took Sam and the whole Fellowship with him.

I was on Darwin duty tonight while my wife and daughter went to Target. After he went to sleep (someone has to stay in the room or he wakes up and tries to find us), I stayed in the room and browsed on my wife's laptop. Found an rgp post with a link to pure pinball porn, a guy with step by step pix of unpacking his Stern Spider-man game. I had to change my pants at least twice.

Hey! IPDB has Spider-man listed as Spiderman, which is technically incorrect. Spider-man is the Marvel Comics super-hero, while Spiderman sounds like some old Jewish guy from New York. I immediately posted an update... we'll see how that goes. Sadly, the Gottlieb Amazing Spider-man is spelled correctly, and we know that consistency is the hallmark of a well-crafted database.

See? Short.

My Trip to the Old Country

Well, I just flew in from the Ancestral Birthplace, and boy are my arms not capable of avian-style flight!

Actually, I came back a week ago. It was a rough trip... my wife's back went out, so we spent a lot of time dealing with that. Our day at Disneyland -- my Ancestral Workplace, since my first non-suck job was there -- was especially rough. But we did bring home two suitcases and a box of precious memories from my child & young adulthood, which I plan to hawk on eBay for as much as I can get... my wife's back forced an air change in our travel plans, so I ponied up another $400 in plane fare. It appears that the dog and our trip together are pushing the $3000 envelope, and I was reluctant to ask my dad for a loan since I'm keeping him in reserve for my daughter's Spring 2008 tuition. I've never sold more than $2000 on eBay in a year, and that was when I sold my copy of Apple ][ Ultima for $600. So we'll see how things go.

Speaking of eBay (and we were), my part sold for a cool $21 to a guy down under, so I ordered four more -- one for me and three for the other interested bidders. The guy who sold the first one relisted, but he doesn't sell to other countries, so I'm charging a dollar more than him and yoinking up the international market. We'll see how it goes.

There were two pinball-related incidents while in California. My daughter wanted to go to the beach, so we headed for the Santa Monica Pier (that's not its precise location... Google Maps is a little off), where (along with UCLA and Westwood) I cut my teeth on arcade gaming. There they had a bunch of games: South Park, Star Wars Ep 1, Jurassic Park, World Poker Tour, Austin Powers, Elvis, the new Harley Davidson, The Getaway, the Most Popular Pinball Machine of All Time, and Terminator 3 (*phew!*). They were all in the 75 cents a game neighborhood, as well as uniformly filthy and rundown... just like arcades are supposed to be! I played World Poker Tour because I had never played it, and it was in OK shape, maybe a little slow, and coated in Dust. I have to admit I was distracted by the woman's boobs on the backglass. ^_^; Next up was Elvis, which I've only played once. The left flipper was weak and the jailhouse rock flipper (or whatever) could just barely flip. Addams Family had weak flippers, but for some reason I shot a bunch of the loops on the left through the bumpers, which I usually can't make. When I played Terminator 3, I discovered that the playfield lights were out, so I had to guess where to shoot thing. There were also no RPG balls in it, so that kind of sucked. Overall, it was worse than a trip to Crab Towne USA (btw also a bad location in the GooMap), if you can believe that.

The next day we went to Disneyland, which as I mentioned was not as fun as it could have been. I was pleasantly surprised to find that since my last visit in September that pinball had returned to the Starcade in Tomorrowland! They had a Pirates of the Caribbean (duh!) and a Monster Bash. I fully expected the Disney techs to keep the games in tip top condition, and I was not disappointed with POTR. It played like it was brand new, which for all I knew it was. And I gave it a thrashing it won't soon forget, making the #1 high score, though not grand champion, :( . With my plethora of free games, I played a round against my daughter. Unfortunately, she was ready to move on after that and I still wanted to play Monster Bash, so after some fussing they went off and rode Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (sadly not a ride friendly to my wife's back) while I played. MB was disappointing, because the flippers were weak, which made hitting Frankenstein, the Bride, and Dracula tough. In spite of that I did spank out a good game, completing the monsters and getting one of those Monster Bashes I've heard tell of. Sadly, though, I used up any potential pinball credit with my family... as my daughter and I were doing a post-fireworks pre-closing scamper through as many rides as possible, while running between Splash Mountain and Space Mountain I finally saw the Indiana Jones Pinball Adventure in the corner of the shop in Adventureland... I had read about it, but didn't find it last time I was there because... I was digging in the wrong place! Actually, I was looking in the wrong shop... I looked in the one near the Tiki Room, and the game is in the one near the Dr. Jones ride. Anyway, we had 10 minutes before the park closed, so there was no way my daughter was going to let me play a game. Next time I will build time into the schedule for that.

One more encouraging thing before I go... while we were driving around through Westwood, I saw an arcade where Westworld (the place besides the pier and UCLA where my tooth cutting was done) used to be. There had been some bogus African art shop there for the longest time since Westworld finally closed about 20 years ago, so I was glad to see an arcade there again. I didn't get a chance to go in, and it's probably filled with DDR and Virtua Street Kombat 5 Xtreme, but it's nice to see. I'll add that to the itinerary for the next trip.

I probably won't be posting as much... Darwin is sucking up what little free time I had to begin with, and it's all I can do to keep the house from being condemned. But I'm going to try to get some pinwork in this weekend... I took down the picture of Doctor Who in my cube and work that's supposed to inspire me to fix it up and put up a pic of Black Knight, since I feel that's really close to working. We'll see...

OK, here's a sad trivia... while doing links for this, I noticed in the Star Wars Ep 1 IPDB entry that Williams announced they were closing their pinball division on my 37th birthday...