Here is my karma, illustrated: So we picked up my daughter from college today. On the way back, my wife wants to stop at the Emmitsburg Antique Mall, a dumpy old warehouse filled with kitsch and freakish oddities the likes of which you can't imagine (ok, try this: A carved wooden statue of a naked man with a machete, holding the severed head of a man). I ask her jokingly if it's worth my time to come in and find the pinball machines. She says no pinball machines here, hon. In fact, there's probably nothing that would be of the slightest interest to you (though to be fair, she probably didn't know about the naked man/severed head statue). So I ended up walking the dog around dumpy old Emmitsburg in below 40 degree weather until I saw my daughter walking desperately in the cold, so I passed the dog on to her and went inside. I wander around for 10 minutes, and -- you may breathe easy, we have finally gotten to the point of this paragraph -- damn if I don't find the one pinball-related item in the entire place, a translite for Fire! in a light box in a booth filled with fireman fetishiana selling for $165.
Hey, here's something for the obsessive-compulsives: While getting the link to Fire!, I noticed there was a playfield detail picture that didn't look right, and after a quick search I found that it actually belongs to the older Stern game Wild Fyre. I'll send them an email about it when I get back to the big computer. Of course, if they correct the pic the link above won't work, but this one which doesn't work now should.
I bought some more stuff. A guy on Mr. Pinball was selling a bunch of interesting stuff: he was parting out a Centaur, and had a bunch of neat playfields (and a Spy Hunter... oh snap!). I immediately saw that I could snag a bunch of parts that I needed for the big ugly guy, so I put in an offer on the ball launcher and everything related to it. I also bid on the plastics, magnet, and for fun made some low- and medium-ball offers on the other playfields. We agreed on a price for the magnet ($15), couldn't come to terms on the plastics -- at $80, I thought he was charging too much for an incomplete set, as he valued OEM status much more than I did. He wanted $75 for the launcher, and I initially was going to pass on it, but decided that it is a lot of parts & fabricating one was going to be a nightmare and accepted his price. They arrived last weekend, so now I pretty much have everything I need sans plastics to put together the playfield. I probably won't get to it for a while, but at least it's all there for when I need it.
I think I mentioned how I put up a picture of Silverball Mania in my cube to inspire me to keep working on the playfield project. Well, it turns out that after a few weeks of staring at it, I really like the SBM artwork! Maybe not so much the wizard at the top who has just ripped my balls out and it showing them to me,
but I like the metallic man and woman erupting from the central ball shooting blasts of lightning through the spinners, 
and the tiny wizards coiled through the ball return lanes, and the women on the outlanes swathed in ribbons of mercury symbolically lifting your ball up and into the return kicker. Well, maybe I think too much about these things, but I do really like the art.I also have a line on a Totem playfield, which I think was also via Mr. Pinball. It's not in super-great shape, and it's a 4 hour drive to New Jersey away, but it's only $50 so I'll probably go for it. It would also be my first Gottlieb game, which I'm sure will offer its own set of challenges.
And another thing? The Speed Racer movie trailer is frickin' awesome.
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