From Allentown to Our Town

Fortunately/unfortunately a lot is going on and I'm not writing any of it down.

Went to Pinball Wizards in Allentown two weeks ago. The night before I checked rgp to see if there were any up-to-the-minute reports, but all I found what this noob report. I was surprised that he did not point out that when he was walking around the Flea Market in the rain, he got wet.

Drive up was uneventful, except for seeing a truck shedding a retread and an Amish guy driving a buggy.

Spent yet another all-time low amount of money, $50 including admission and a pita sandwich at the Middle Eastern place in the farmer's market. There just wasn't much on my list... my games are working too well these days, or I already have the parts I need to fix them. There wasn't anything in the flea market that really jumped out at me, even though I brought a fat wad of cash with me after last year's Doctor Who incident.

There were some pretty good machines there, and several that were comically malfunctioning... such as the Funhouse that didn't have use of its left flippers, or the Mystic with no feature lights. But after so many years -- I think this might be my 10th year going to the show -- since I assume there will be a whole bunch of crappy games, I'm not as annoyed as I used to be. As with bad movies, the key is low expectations.

I did finally get to play the new Indiana Jones game, which I found reasonably fun. Unfortunately the sound was turned down too low for me to hear what is reportedly the worst Sean Connery impersonation that anyone has ever been paid to do. They had a CSI there, but it had a crowd and I didn't have a chance to play. And I did get to play the aforementioned Mystic, which I was looking forward to because I hadn't played it since my college days and I had co-done an adaptation of it in my VP salad days. I was kind of cheesed that it didn't work, because its tic-tac-toe conceit relies pretty heavily on feature lights. But I amused myself by sending a text message to my wife with a picture of the game and the text "Why are they hurting the Mystic?" which is hysterically if you've see The Fall.

I toyed with the idea of buying LEDs for Paragon to reduce its power needs, and even went to the point of trying to estimate the number of bulbs on one that was there, but when I showed up with cash in hand to the people hawking them said they were out of the #44/47 bulbs. Later I was sort of glad, because fixing Paragon's power problem by reducing the power consumption of the machine isn't really fixing it, it's just putting the problem off by a few years. Maybe that's cool for the National Debt, but this is pinball, which is serious. But that got me thinking about LEDs, and I think I'm going to buy some and install them on Quicksilver. Partly for fun, partly on the off chance that in a few years incandescents will be impossible to find, but mostly because QS is the most visually striking of all my machines and LED bulbs will probably make it more so. Their other-worldly glow is well-suited to the game and its theme of big-headed naked women in a dimension of liquid mercury.

On the way home, I finally stopped at Pakha's Thai House Restaurant, which is located outside of Harrisburg. I've been passing this place every year since it opened and have always been curious about it -- I wouldn't expect Dillsburg PA to be the center of a huge Thai community -- but the food was pretty good and pretty cheap. It appears to be where all the cool kids in the Harrisburg area hang out, and based on the photos behind the cash register, the Fox 43 news team from York is quite enamored with it.