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.