What was I thinking? and other stories

This turned out to be a good weekend for eBayin', but kind of a bad weekend for buying things I don't need that I don't have space for. I got two games this weekend. (*rolleyes*)

Machine #1 is at least on-message, though I think I paid too much for it -- not in a heat-of-the-moment last minute panic way, but a cool, rational, I- am- making- a-conscious -decision - to- pay- this- much way. This is a High Speed, a game which showed up in the UCLA arcade just after I dropped out, but which spanks me mercilessly because I have a hard time making vertical flipper shots. I realized while driving to pick it up that it's my fifth Steve Ritchie game. It's not a working machine... it was intended for the playfield project, which lately I've been anticipating starting while not actually doing so. Here's the thinking: I get a High Speed playfield, albeit one that is worn; it has a transformer and power driver board, which if working will provide valuable voltages; and I can sell the backglass and spare boards, which hopefully I can somehow demonstrate are working or not too battery acid damaged to the eBay community. Now, whether that warrants paying $330+gas, I dunno. That turned out to be a convenient use for the $300 that my Dad gave me for Christmas. Pickup went really smoothly... I drove up to the guy's house in Hagerstown, MD, which was about 100 miles round trip. The guy looked like he did a lot of pinball fixing up and had a couple of interesting games. I surmise that he was a bachelor, because his house was kind of a mess and the whole downstairs was pretty much devoted to game repair. The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful.

Machine #2 was a total lark, a Bingo game that sold for $5.50 because something had been dropped on it, breaking the backglass and head. I bid on it thinking it was 2 hours away, but it was in fact three. So it was $5.50 plus $60 in gas and food. :P I set off this morning and the drive up was pleasant... it was up near Reading PA, and I passed through Lancaster and saw Amish buggies on the side roads. I was listening to my daughter's old audio book of Star Wars Episode I The Phantom Menace, which is better than the movie but much in the same way a firm, solid turd is better than bloody explosive diarrhea. And it was diarrhea that I was expecting to be good, too, so it's bloody explosive disappointing diarrhea. I remember sitting in the theater opening day in 1999 -- I'd taken the day off work and watched all three of the first Star Wars movies, though I had to fast-forward through a lot of Jedi because I ran out of time -- and at some point while they were being chased by the giant fish I realized that this was not the Star Wars movie I'd waited 16 years for... actually 19 years, since Jedi wasn't the movie I'd waited 3 years for back in 1983. And it just never got much better, either. My daughter loved it, but she was only 11 at the time.

Sorry, that was so totally off topic.

It was a very drab, rainy autumn day, and it started snowing about the time I arrived. It turns out the guy's house was also Mindgate Hypnosis, though I don't know if the guy or his wife was the hypnotist. He was helping another guy who apparently had gotten a refrigerator from him, which was lucky because the other guy had a hand truck which made getting the game up the steep basement steps across the dogshit strewn lawn and into my car in the light snow a lot easier. I had been teetering on the edge of thinking it was a huge mistake until I saw it, and I knew that the Patron Saint of Lost Causes, which according to the Wikipedia is Saint Rita of Cascia (also Saint Jude, but he's for lost and desperate causes, whereas Rita is for lost and impossible causes. I didn't feel this was a desperate situation, so Rita wins. She's also the saint of sickness, wounds, marital problems, abuse, mothers, and [unofficially] baseball). I still don't know if I can do anything with it, but I guess we'll see.

The first -- and really only for now -- order of business was to identify it. A few minutes with imdb and the heretofore unknown Bingo Pinballs site showed that we have a Bally Lotta Fun from 1959... which my wife pointed out was the year she was born, and imdb says Bally released Lotta Fun two weeks after her mother released her, so that's kind of cool. Looking at the game, the playfield looks OK, most of the wood could probably use refinishing, and the cabinet has been painted over. It's just one of those crazy impulse buys that I have no idea when I will be able to work on it.

I wonder if there's some kind of 12-step program for people like me...