* Hero of the Beach *

Forgot to mention two instances where I saved the day for pinball.

When I first went to find info on the Hershey Gameroom Show, the street address on Mr. Pinball was missing a letter, making it unfindable on all of the mapping programs I tried. So I emailed Mr. Pinball and he corrected it.

And way back in August of last year I blogged about the IPDb not having the correct lamp pages for Quicksilver. Well, last month I finally got a response:

Changes you submitted to the Pinball Database for the game
titled 'Quicksilver' have been accepted in whole or in part
by an editor!  Thank you for your submission!

The following changes were made because of your submission,
and may include additional corrections and listing changes
made by an Editor:

add new file Stern_1980_Quicksilver_Lamp_Driver_Schematic.jpg
 - Lamp Driver Schematic []  [#3643]
add new file Stern_1980_Quicksilver_Solenoid_Driver_Schematic.jpg
 - Solenoid Driver Schematic []  [#3644]
add new file Stern_1980_Quicksilver_MPU_Schematic.jpg
 - MPU Schematic []  [#3645]

You can see these changes at http://www.ipdb.org/machine.cgi?1895

I am remiss in my blogging duties

Yes, it has been two months since my last confession, but honestly there hasn't been a lot going on. There's been some progress on the work area, but not so much that I can really brog about it (brog == my neologism of the day: blog+brag). Ditto on the games... most of them are buried under the detritus of the cleaning effort.

I did go to the Hershey Gameroom Show two weeks ago. Whereas previous shows had multiple vendors and were more gameroom-oriented and not pinball specific, this show turned out to be nothing more than the Pennsylvania Gameroom Warehouse parking lot sale, albeit in a dumpy old agricultural fairground building. Lots of pins, mostly 90's but a few before and after, and one or two vendors that might have not been PGW front organizations, but that was about it. The flea market consisted of two vendors, both of whom were most likely guys who shovelled out the PGW dumpster. It was like going to the Republican National Convention.

Here's my problem with the pins that were there: Most of them has been lovingly restored cosmetically and were achingly beautiful, but most of them couldn't play for crap. Bad flippers, non-working switches, bad displays, games that rebooted, and so on... and all priced a few hundred dollars below PGW's showroom prices. Would I pay $2300 (marked down from $2700) for a Black Knight 2000 that spit out all of its balls? How about the T2 with one of the plastics on the playfield? Or Hurricane with a bump where the lower ramp connects to the upper that slowed down the ball and caused it to drop off the ramp SDTM? They obviously spend all of their time getting the games to look good at the expense of basic functionality. IMO, you can't have one without t'other.

However, it was worth the trip for one thing: They had a working Lotta Fun. I played that a bunch of times so I could experience what my game will be like when it's fixed up. I also got plenty of cell phone pics of the backglass so I can try to reproduce it -- at least so I know what numbers correspond with what lights (I wish I'd taken a real camera, though). I was also surpised to find a modern Gottlieb game that I actually enjoyed playing, Title Fight. I has some fun in the old school section playing Centaur, Xenon, and Silverball Mania, all canted at bizarre angles on the uneven exhibit hall floor... Xenon was so far off kilter that the ball would stop in the tube.

I didn't buy much... my biggest purchase was a copy of Mad Dog and his Art, Gene Cunningham's somewhat amateurishly made love letter to pinball uber-artist Dave Christensen. I'd been meaning to buy a copy the next time I made a Illinois Pinball run, but it was there and I wasn't buying anything else so I went for it. It's a little disappointing... I'd like it to be about twice as long with more pictures, especially of the playfields. Maybe not worth the ~$35 price, but it's not a travesty, either.

Moan moan moan. I don't have a lot of good things to say about anything, do I?

Next weekend is the York show, which should either wash the bad taste out of my mouth or poison my perception of pinball shows forever.

Another example of how my life juxtaposes rather nicely: I was listening to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on the ride, and that same week I had Netflixed the first season of Pushing Daisies, both of which are narrated by Jim Dale. As my mind wandered during the drive, I kept thinking Jim would say, "The facts were these: At this point Harry Potter was 16 years, 51 weeks, 3 days, 5 hours and 23 minutes old."

Here's the thing that I noticed about Pushing Daisies after watching all 9 episodes in a two week period: The costume designer loves the cleavage. 'nuff said.

I also don't think I've mentioned my latest acquisition (aside from the usual small pin parts that I've picked up here and there when eBay exudes them): After looking for ages online, I finally got a pachinko machine from a local garage sale in July. My wife alerted me to it, so I stopped in and took a look. They were asking $25, and it had no balls and was missing parts. While I was looking they offered $15. I thought I'd make them sweat, so I left and ran some errands, and when I came back they asked $10 and I took it. I bought a load of balls on eBay, but I want to clean it up before I set it up. Another wonderful project that will fill my copious free time!

Short, yet action packed

This is going to be a short post because I'm tired and my hands are sore. My group at work is being beaten down by an impending release date so I'm working a lot. My wife got a job last month as an activity coordinator for an assisted living facility, which is good for us financially but she now spends a colossal amount of time on the computer researching activities for the old folks.

I did block out a bunch of time to work on the Doctor Who Dalek Wobble Head kit. It arrived about a week after I paid for it, then it sat around for a few days. Since I don't have a lot of free time, I started doing micro bursts of work on it -- removing stuff one day, fitting it the next, drilling holes the day after, etc. This put me in a pretty good position when my wife's dad and brother showed up for a 2 day visit, which kept her occupied so I could devote some large chunks of time to the process.

Installation was generally pretty easy. I liked the shunts they had to attach new wires to the boards... you plug in their plug to the appropriate location, then plug the real plug into that. Very slick. Of course, since my wiring is different from a standard game I had to do a little fiddling about, but nothing more complicated than before.

Of course, it wouldn't be my Doctor Who if something didn't go wrong, but I did get it to the point where the head would run in test mode. Here is (I think) my first ever blog video:

I'll go into the mighty saga of what went wrong, what went wrong with the going wrong, and what happened when things just fell off a cliff in a later post. It stopped short of the game being left a smoking ruin, but just barely.

But I'll go out on a high note. The state is building a new highway near my house which they've been planning on doing it for almost 50 years now (literally -- it was first proposed in the 1960's). One of the houses we looked at before buying this one was demolished as part of the construction. So a few months ago the dog and I decide to take a walk down the cleared path of destruction where it will be built, and it was kind of fun. So a few weeks ago we wanted to take another walk and see how things are progressing... but this time, we did so when there were a couple of workers doing things on the site. We stayed well out of their way and looked around some more, but it was hot so we turned back after a short trip. So, about three days later, signs such as the one pictured showed up around the entrances to the job sites. I am 100% confident that the signs appeared because the workers saw me walking around and figured I was there to deliberately hurt myself and sue the state or to steal a couple of the 50 foot concrete and steel beams they're using to make the bridges. There are also a group of security guys driving between the job sites on weekends. Regardless, I am partly bummed that we can't walk there any more and partly elated that my actions appeared to have caused such a kerfuffle.

Joe Entropy: Making a difference in the community.

Many are called, few have chosen to pay $300 for a moving Dalek head

As the title indicates, yesterday I got the email offering the purchase of a Doctor Who Wobble Head kit. Of course, I had already talked myself into buying it, so without much ado (other than finding a browser that the site worked with, newly downloaded Firefox 3.0 not being among them) I plunked down $290.75 and eagerly await my booty.

That not being chump change, I feel like I should actually install it promptly. This has lit the fire of righteous fury under me to create a work area in which I could actually do the work necessary without injury. That means the timetable for the swapping of my wife's and my work areas suddenly has a deadline, and I work great with deadlines.

So let's throw shame to the wind and turn the camera towards the parts of the basement that I usually aim it away from. On the right is my wife's work area. In all fairness, this was briefly organized, and over time has become a desperate cry to be featured on one of those HGTV house cleaning shows. And after it became slightly messy, anything even vaguely craft-related was just tossed in, sort of like compound interest for disorderly spaces. Note the exposed sewer pipe in the background... if that isn't a blog post that's just waiting to happen, I don't know what is. Not shown: The partially collapsed drop ceiling!

On the left is my personal superfund site. And this is after some organization earlier in the year... it used to be worse. And while my wife's area is a collaborative effort, this room is pretty much all me because I'm the only one who can squeeze into it without knocking down precarious piles of stuff, thereby blocking the escape route. So you can see this is a mighty labor that even Hercules would pale at. Say, speaking of the labors of Hercules, maybe I can clean my wife's stuff by breaking the sewer pipe and the resulting river of filth would carry away the mess.

And of course it wouldn't be a blog post without a few new purchases. Here's a mostly populated Pin*bot playfield that I got a few weeks ago. It's pretty thrashed cosmetically, but I figure if that's a problem I can move everything over to the unpopulated playfield. Getting this was kind of a pain... the guy who sold it to me was in California and had never sold a playfield before, so he lacked the basic shipping skills, namely accurate pricing and the acquisition of cheap boxes. The original shipping estimate was $140, but I asked if he could do UPS which should be ~$70. He said fine, so I bid and won. Then he sat on it for a few weeks, during which he said he was trying to get a box. Finally he bought a $15 box, which I called bullshit on and suggested he go to a bike store where they'll give you bike boxes for free (like I said, he was new to this). After much haggling, harsh words, and a few angry tears he finally got it to UPS and they wanted to charge him an oversize box fee... hello? Measure the frickin' box BEFORE shipping! So he cut the box down to size at UPS and shipped it for $75. When I got it, it was basically floating free in the box with a handful of styrofoam appliance packing pieces inadequately protecting it. I could reach into the box and touch the unwrapped playfield. I wanted to kill the guy. By dumb luck it did arrive in reasonable condition, but I think I'll be buying my playfields locally from now on.

This just arrived this week, bought from the guy who sold me the non-working "100% working" WPC display board a few years ago. It's the base and functional parts of Rudy's head on Funhouse. The picture was terrible and the description was practically non-existent (the title was "Funhouse pinball Rudy part" and the description was "You are bidding on a Funhouse Pinball rudy parts". Seriously.). But I won, and it actually turned out to be better than I expected. It's got the jaw piece, the kicker, and three of the four coils. If I could get the jaw motor and gear box, that's really all I would need to play the game, since the face and eyes are all just eye candy anyway.

I don't expect to be buying much for a few months, since eBay season has come to an end and the wobble head has put me either really close to or slightly over my debt ceiling of $1000. So it's as good a time as any to get organized so I can prepare for the new fall season, when I'll have to sell a bunch of boodle to return to solvency.

5 minute post... Go!

Last minute addendum! I forgot that for the first time, I won a door prize at the pinball show! Obviously, it's not a pinball machine or flat screen TV, since I probably would have remembered that on the first go round. It's a Pinball Wizards tiny travel alarm clock/calculator/
world time zone thing. I don't know what I'll do with it, but how can I not use it? It's a Major Award!

Actually, one place I could use it is in my new work area! My wife complained that she doesn't have a place for her crafts today... actually, she does, but it's a disaster area (to be fair, not entirely of her own making). We were going to set one up for her in the laundry room, but it's not an ideal space (near water and generally filled with dirty clothes), and it's currently piled to the ceiling with eBay packing supplies and boxes. So she said today that she wishes she could have a room for her crafts. After some negotiating, it was decided that I would move my pinball stuff out of the fake bedroom in the basement (fake -> no closet) and move her craft stuff into the bedroom. She would be away from water and have a whopping two windows for light; I would have a large work area near my games that is convenient to our primary drain pipe, so when it bursts it can spray warm effluent all over my $1000+ collection of playfields!

More on this story as it develops...

Lucky!

My lazy ass is still catching up... 100% of this post is vintage stuff.

I suppose Mrs. Entropy is very tolerant of my hobby. Financially she can't really say much because she spends a lot on sewing, knitting, et cetera, though I'm currently outspending her by almost 2 to 1. She's sort of accepted the amount of space the games take up, and was even willing to allow Quicksilver in the living room, mainly because she likes the art (as I believe I've mentioned before, she's pretty non-committal on Black Knight, Doctor Who, and EBD, but she is heavily irked with the way Mr. Barbarian is drawn on Paragon... he has the body of a dwarf and his right arm and wing are not anatomically possible). She's even sat with me a few times and watched This Old Pinball vids and Pins and Vids 2 & 3... on the last two, she even asked for more information about Wizard Blocks, and was kind of interested in the process of manufacturing Big Bang Bar. And a couple of times she's been very helpful in reading part numbers out of game manuals while I type them in to Illinois Pinball's search engine. My sense is that a lot of Pin Wives are openly antagonistic to their hubbys' hobby.

But realistically, I could probably use some actual friends who play pinball. I think the last time I had friends to play pinball with was high school and college, which is kind of pathetic... and not tele-pathetic, either. I've thought about going to one of the FSPA nights, but they don't meet local to me any more and the remaining meetings are a pretty big schlep for me, though the one in Virginia is only about a half hour from my work. And in addition my meet & greet social skills are poor at best and I worry about what to talk about when the subject of pinball has been exhausted. I think I'm
at my best when people need something from me and are forced to seek me out. Well, that sounds kind of pathetic too. -_-; Anyway, I honestly don't know what I'm going to do about it, but I supposed we'll see.

But enough about my tedious life. As previously reported, I went to the Pinball Wizards show in Allentown and had a pretty good time. I probably say this every year, but it seems like there was a lot more junk this time... games with whole flippers not working (I'm looking at you, Tom Tom!), games that were pretty much never turned on for the whole show, features not working, blah blah blah. But there were a few standouts... I enjoyed playing Gottlieb's Roller Coaster, an early 70's game with proto-habitrails. And I had a hella fun time playing Balls-a-Poppin, a 1956 game with multiball and an auto-plunger. The big surprise this show is I spent less than $100. Now, this isn't for lack of trying, I just don't have a lot to get these days that they sell at shows. Classic Playfield Reproductions came down from the forests of Eastern Canada for what I think is the first time (at a show I've been to, anyway) and they had a grab bag of repro plastics for Pin Bot that I needed... I had to force my brain to remember which plastics were missing on the playfield I had just bought (a populated one this time -- like I said, my ass is lazy, and I am behind; I ended up buying one or two that I had, but in general did pretty well and only didn't buy one). Out in the flea market I picked up a Funhouse subway ramp and a crapload of plastics (several almost complete sets) from a guy for a pretty good price... I had to run back and forth between a parts Funhouse and the ramp, trying to make sure that it was indeed the ramp I needed. I also speculated and bought a beautiful TOTAN subway ramp for $10, hoping I could sell it for more on eBay... which in fact I did, I cleaned it up Sunday, posted it, and it sold for almost $16... I probably made only $3, but small victories count, too! I also put up a few of the extra Funhouse plastics -- a set of the pointing hands -- and that sold for $3 or so, which is bonus since all the plastics together cost me $17. And, of course, I delivered the High Speed cabinet to the guy's proxy... that's a first for me, actually bringing something to a pinball show.

It was not all coolness, though. Harshness came in the form of a Doctor Who parts machine that a guy was selling for $250. I dithered about it for a while, then looked around for an ATM so I could come up with $$$, and in that time someone more decisive bought it. It was a relatively unfaded cabinet, it had the Dalek on top, but the rest was wrapped up so I couldn't see it, but I find it hard to believe that I couldn't have gotten that much and more for it on eBay. And I've had good luck with the parts DW and High Speed that I wanted to see if I had actual instincts that I could use to help pay for my purchases. So, that's this year's One That Got Away.

In an attempt at sociability I did speak to a couple of people, and played a doubles game of Maverick with a guy who I was initially beating but who proved to be a pinball savant. I don't think he totally pasted me, as my last two balls were pretty good, but he was definitely out of my league.

I think the rest of the day was pretty uneventful. Anyway, it's getting late so it's time to wrap it up.

Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me

Right now I'm waiting... waiting for downloads of Daniel Pinkwater books & podcasts to finish, waiting for my wife to finish watching Bones (which I would love were it not for all the disgusting dead bodies), and, I guess, waiting for an absolution that will never come. So I might as well do a little more catch-up posting.

Shockingly, my first topic is about Doctor Who. I'm on the mailing list for the DW Wobble Head, where Al of Pins and Vids fame and his pal Mark are reproducing the mechanism to make the Dalek head move as it did on the prototype games. They say they're really close to finishing, and I potentially have the tough choice of whether to spend $275+/- that I don't have on this thing they're unlikely to make again, or... well, let's face it, if you've read more than three posts you know that my ability to piss away money I don't have is the envy of the Bush Administration. Purchasing is pretty byzantine... basically, they're making 10 sets, and the 40-odd people on the mailing list will be offered a chance to buy in the order that they expressed interest. So without getting too mathy on you, I should have roughly a 50% chance of getting the call to adventure. I feel kind of obligated to go for it since I believe in my heart of hearts that my cabinet was a prototype at some point, and it longs to return to its divine state of being. I am but a humble vessel in its quest for enlightenment.

Here's how I justify funding it: Right now I owe my family about $700 for purchases, plus a few bucks here and there -- for example, I just bought a Pin*bot skill shot ramp on eBay for about $18, which isn't included in the total -- so as long as I keep the total I owe under a nice, round, arbitrary amount like $1000, I should be OK.

Well, my wife finished Bones but now she's watching Battlestar Galactica, which I like but I've only watched the first two episodes and I am so anal about watching things in order that if I even walked into the room while episode 408 was on my head would explode. I mean, I'm working my way through Thunderbirds on Netflix, and I'm watching it in order even though it doesn't involve any kind of story arc or character development to speak of. I'm also watching Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot, which is at least marginally serial... and I'm also submitting episode summaries as I watch them to IMDB. When I was a kid, I only got to see Voyage Into Space, so I'm having great fun watching the entire series.

OK, I'm trying to think of stuff that is less pinball-related than this, and I'm having a difficult time doing so. My apologies to the hard-core.

Hey, this has nothing to do with pins, but is cool for me... I had a question answered by The Straight Dope Advisory Board! It's not as cool as having my question answered in the column, but it's the next best thing. There's even a little discussion topic devoted to the answer to my question. Cecil actually answered a question of mine about 10 years ago, but I asked it under my real name so I'm not going to link to it. See if you can guess which one it is!

Well, BSG is almost over so I'll probably rejoin my wife.

Wait, I thought of a short pinball thing! I have finally, against all odds, got Quicksilver in service again. It has been unplugged lo these many months because I wanted all of my games to be plugged into real surge protectors, not just power strips. I bought a big 'un for the four games downstairs and a smaller one for QS in the living room, but the surge protector required a three pronged outlet and our house, built on or about my birth year, is strictly two pronged. So, over Memorial Day weekend I cleared off all the crap my family has been leaving on the game, swapped the outlet (over the course of two days -- yeah, I kind of suck at this stuff, but I did it right, the ground actually works and everything), plugged the protector into the wall, plugged the game into the protector, and played a fun ol' game. So, I've got my one fully working game up and running, and that's always a good feeling. ^_^;