July: Very uneventful month

So let's write about it!

Since giving up on the cash 'n' carry thing, I've actually been spending my family's money quite liberally. I bought new targets from PBR for the Centaur target banks I have (the inlines and ORBS). I bought a plastic and two bumper caps for Mr. & Mrs Pac-man from a guy on Mr. Pinball. I got a desoldering tool so I can make my board repairs, because I can't find my old one. A couple more purchases are in the pipeline, but I'll wait until they actually arrive before I blog 'em.

But the big purchase at $112 was a parts tumbler. It's a Dillion CV-500, actually made for cleaning bullet casings or something... who cares, I hate guns anyway. My old tumbler was a rock tumbler that worked pretty well, but was tiny. This is a lot bigger -- not big enough to hold my largest parts, but still plenty big. It was waiting for me when I came back from the Anime con -- it was delivered on the same day as Deathly Hallows. So I loaded it up with some corn cob media and dumped some parts in and have been polishing those shiny bastards ever since. It's been running almost continuously for a week, so today I shut it off for a break. I'll need to shine up some parts I want to sell, like some of the Fathom target assemblies.

Other than that, things have been all quiet on the pinball front. I've been listening to TOPCasts... a lot of them are interesting, a lot of the guests are nice, a few come off as jerks. I guess he abandoned the tech shows and focused on the interviews... they kind of function as an oral history of pinball, especially when he has legends like Alvin Gottlieb showing up. I tried listening to tonight's interview with Margaret Hudson -- after all, I've been staring at her artwork a lot with all the EBD I've been playing, and she did M&MPM as well, so I was interested in what she had to say -- but she was a tough interview. Shaggy would ask her a three or four sentence question, and she would respond with a short sentence. She just didn't seem to have a lot to say... like C3PO, she was not very good at telling stories... well, not at making them interesting, anyway. My computer lost the connection at about the 20 minute mark, and I didn't make much of an effort to retrieve it. I'll listen to the podcast.

Off topic, but last night my wife went to see Transformers (her choice!). We used free tickets we had gotten when "developmentally challenged" child freaked out during a showing of Meet the Robinsons... I wasn't really bothered by it -- I had a kid, I can ignore stuff like that -- but I didn't turn down the free tix. It was just as well, because Transformers was one of the stupidest movies I've seen in a long time. I was in college when Transformers first came out, and it wasn't Japanese, so I didn't pay that much attention to it originally, but I'm a sucker for a cool robot movie (Gigantor, Iron Giant, etc.). It was my first Michael Bay movie, and now I believe what everyone says about him... and it certainly makes that song from Team America that much funnier. It was a 2 hour and 23 minute movie, but he could have trimmed an hour of dumbass expository crap from the beginning without losing anything worthwhile. I wanted to stand up and scream, "Shut the FUCK up and show us the damned fighting robots!" The robots themselves rocked pretty hard. Mid-air transformations, crazy-ass CGI stunts -- the fights were great. But any time John Turturro was on screen, I just stared at the ceiling and thought about O Brother Where Art Thou. His character was stupid, worthless, and a complete waste of screen time. Worst. John Turturro role. EVER. And if Angelina Jolie wasn't already estranged from Jon Voight, this movie would have caused it. Of the humans, I didn't have a big problem with Shia LaBeouf or the soldiers, but as for the rest, I would just as soon see them on the cutting room floor in Transformers: The Fan Edit.