But I digress...

First I have to start off with the eBay Loser of the Week. This guy posted a set of Centaur plastics that were "New NOS (Used)". The title of the auction included New and NOS but strangely enough not used. And these things are warped, a few are cracked, and the upper left one is in three pieces. So I send him an email saying that (imo) New, NOS, and Used are three different things. He replies and says his bad and he's updated the auction. Now it just says NOS (Used). So I send him another email, and then he relists it without the NOS. Ultimately, I think he was just careless because he has other items that he's selling that are actually NOS. My wife the conspiracy theorist believes that he was hoping to get away with it. Anyway, I wouldn't buy from him anyway because he's charging $15 for $8 worth of shipping, so the minimum price is $40, and I can get a brand new set from IL Pinball for $100+shipping.

Speaking of Wall of Voodoo (which we were, really) right after I wrote the WOV stuff, a guy at work pointed out that Stan Ridgway, the WOV lead singer, was doing a 25th anniversary of Call of the West tour and was in town on the 2nd. My wife and I were totally there. It was mostly empty... for the whole show, I doubt there were more than 10 people in the balcony and maybe 40 on the floor (compared with when we saw The Residents at the same place, which was a lot more crowded). But it was a great show. He played about half WOV songs and half solo songs. It was pretty cool... a nice nostalgic rush. They also had copies of WOV's first album on CD for $15, which go for $50 on eBay.

But I digress, so back to pinball: I have finally leveled up my soldering skills to introductory board level! I replaced the little things that drive the lamps in Eight Ball Deluxe on the Lamp Driver Board. About a week ago while my wife and I watched an old Tom Baker Doctor Who on DVD I pulled out the components -- I think they're SCRs -- that failed the continuity test and correspond to lights on the playfield that don't work. I sucked the solder out of the holes (I had inexplicably lost my solder sucker, so I had to buy a new one from Radio Shack, which I think is better than my old one anyway). Then last night while we watched the commentary on said Doctor Who -- it was the last episode with Sarah Jane Smith in it, which I'd gotten a hankerin' to watch after the Sarah Jane episode of the new Doctor Who... and the Doctor totally didn't leave K-9 with her, he didn't even get K-9 until he was with Leela, even my pathetic neurons remembered that!... but I digress -- I soldered new SCRs in. I only had one size... I got some of what I thought were the bigger ones at Pinball Wizards, but I don't think they're the right kind (and like a dumbass, I paid like $2 a piece for them, and Great Plains sells them for .55!). Anyway, I plugged the board back in, and now all the lamps driven by SCRs that I replaced work great! Mostly they were all but two of the 9-15 target lights. My next job is to test the SCRs on the other two games of that ilk, Paragon and Quicksilver, order enough parts from Great Plains, and solder some more.

My new favorite comic strip these days is Lio. It's reminds me of the Addams Family in that it's weird, creepy, and morbid, but incredibly funny. And it's so much better and more authentic than the generally lame Addams Family tribute by the Non Sequitur guy, The Gravesytes (which is almost exactly like the Addams Family except that it's usually not funny and, like just about every other Non Sequitur strip, it's just a vehicle for the writer's cynicism and bitterness).

But I digress... new arrivals from eBay -- and I thought I'd written about these, but I guess not -- are a set of Xenon drop targets with memory that I can use for Centaur, which were about $30 with shipping. I need to get new 1-4 targets from PBR, but that can wait. I also got an incomplete set of Eight Ball plastics for the playfield for $20
w/shipping. Without realizing it, the set had all the ones on my playfield that were broken or missing, plus I have a few extras to sell.

Through random Internet searching, I found that the guys who put out the Gottlieb Pinball Hall of Fame are putting out a version for Williams in October, just in time for my birthday! The game list is pretty good -- Gorgar, Pinbot, Funhouse, Black Knight, Space Shuttle, Whirlwind, Firepower & Taxi -- and it's only $15. I think there might also be two hidden tables, because the descriptions for the other platforms include two more games, Jive Time & Sorcerer.

But I digress...