Matt McIrvin's Freaky Alternate Reality

The original plan for New Year's Eve was that we might go out to the Lake Victoria Lights Show. This is this guy who's set up a bajillion lights around his house and a low-power FM radio station playing music they're synchronized to. But New Year's Eve Day started with the 412th day in a row this season of a light snow turning into a mushy, icy crud on the roads. I dealt with enough of that popping out to Meijer's for hors d'ouevres that I wasn't looking forward to doing that, only at night, and on country roads, and bunnyhugger took a look out the window and agreed.

So instead --- with no New Year's Eve tournament that we hoped to attend, nor the desire to go to our hipster bar and face that crowd on that night --- we stayed home, with the old movie-and-snacks plan. This would turn out to be our chance to watch the Alastair Sim Scrooge, which we'd missed over Christmas proper, and once again we noticed things we hadn't before, like the way Scrooge's pleading with Jacob Marley foreshadows his begging Ghost of Christmas Yet-To-Come. We keep digging out new stuff; that's part of what keeps us from getting exhausted with the movie.

Also in looking for a short to precede the movie bunnyhugger found a copy of the Betty Boop's Grampy where he brings Christmas to an orphanage, which is pleasant in that way every Grampy cartoon is. The next thing on the compilation was a baffling early-30s thing with no credits titled The Snowman, one of your generic human-and-animals-dance-until-they-accidentally-create-a-snowman-who-comes-to-life-and-is-mean-and-scary cartoons that ends when the (sigh) Eskimo runs into what looks like a power plant that turns out to be the factory controlling the Northern Lights, cranks them up to 11, and in an light show that we agreed would be really something if this were in color, melts the Snowman. bunnyhugger was able to follow all the clues, however, and discovered just where the short came from. It was Ted Eschbaugh, this indie animated movie-maker, who did work with Van Beuren studios occasionally (gratifying my hunch that it was Van Beuren, even though this short was not) and who was stumbling out of complete obscurity into mild obscurity; he's got a footnote in a much bigger cultural history as the director of the 1933 The Wizard of Oz cartoon, the first (known) cartoon and color production based on that story. She also found a decent, color print and yes, the short is much more interesting that way.

So with that happy discovery and a lot of popcorn eaten we were in good shape to eat a lot of oven-heated snacks --- they all came out of the oven and toaster oven together, for once! --- and have the wine leftover from Thanksgiving to ring in 2026.

Now to ring in, oh, like 3 pm back that June Saturday at Plopsaland De Panne:

Looking up at Heidi: The Ride --- you can see a train just crested the hill --- although admittedly it does look like most any modern wooden coaster.

The area we had our lunch in, with Heidi: The Ride in the background and track for Nacht Wacht over it.

The castle for Nacht Wacht's Draconis. Now, why would we be sitting here again if we'd already eaten?

And here's why! There was a parade and we wanted a good vantage point for it. Here's the leading edge of it.

I tried taking a movie and got interrupted partway through, but, this will do. I think the float might be representing Heidi.

And here's something pirate-based. You've seen pirates before.

Trivia: Among the requirements for manned spacecraft ground tracking developed in spring 1959 by the Space Task Group and the Tracking And Ground Instrumentation Unit was that ground station placement should ensure there would never be more than ten minutes between loss of signal at one station and picking up of voice contact at the next. (The space medicine community pushed for continuous voice contact, which proved impractical fro the time.) Source: Read You Loud and Clear: The Story of NASA's Spaceflight Tracking and Data Network, Sunny Tsiao.

Currently Reading: A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II, Maury Klein.

PS: What’s Going On In Thimble Theatre? You forgot about Thimble Theatre, right? October – November 2025 in a comic strips update I could've run anytime the last two months.

Silver Balls '025 would be the 150th pinball tournament bunnyhugger has run through Matchplay, a web site that does great at organizing matches and keeping results straight and all that. It would also be the first one she's run without using her computer to do the computing work. She had a used iPad Mini, formerly her mother's and replaced as a Christmas gift, for the work and did it in a trial by fire, for the biggest and highest-profile open tournament she runs in the year.

Or almost. There were fewer people this year than usual --- 21, I think, with a couple leaving early --- including the absense of a couple people like MWS and BMK. It might have been the weather; they promised snow starting about 9 pm and that'd be lousy to drive home through. It might be the way the state pinball rankings shaped up this year; there weren't many people who could push themselves into contention, or improve their standing worth anything, by taking a high rank in this tournament, partly because a huge tournament in Bay City the weekend before took that spot. No telling. Still, people came, people bought in raffle tickets --- the raffling off of a couple boxes of charity prizes also being done by an app on the iPad Mini --- and there were some random draws for door prizes, t-shirts and the like, so that all went well enough and left bunnyhugger with a fattened wallet to bring and deposit later than she really wanted to.

The tournament itself started a little past the scheduled time, with bunnyhugger's voice fading under the stress just as her megeaphone was fading under battery fatigue. I had to repeat some stuff for her. But we were under way, groups of three or four players. In the fair-strikes format, the person winning a game gets zero strikes. The person coming in last takes two strikes. Everyone else takes one. The big difference between this and progressive strikes --- where you take one strike for everyone who finishes ahead of you --- is that near the end of the night, when there might be three or two people playing, someone's always taking two strikes in a round, cutting the finale rounds in half.

My first round was in a match against DMC, a very much stronger player, on Kiss, a game I'm good on, and some other people. DMC had a lousy first and second ball while I had my decent-but-not-exceptional play. And then DMC went and had a ball that not just kept on going on, but kept getting to higher levels of achievement, climaxing in something called Kiss Army Multiball that I have never, not in a decade of playing this game, seen or even heard of before. He said it was a surprise to him too, though I don't know if he meant he didn't expect to attain it or didn't know it even existed.

So, I took a single strike. And I got a single strike on the next game, Metallica, ordinarily a strong one for me but today being mean. That's all right, though; I figured if I averaged one strike a round I'd be in a good place overall. Then on the next game, Attack From Mars, I finished last, taking two strikes. I made that up the next round, The Addams Family, just squeaking out bunnyhugger to her delight. So the next round, Mandalorian, yeah, I took last place again and now I was in the do-or-die position where I'd have to win every game to continue. That sound be on Stranger Things, where my path once again crossed bunnyhugger's.

Stranger Things is another of those games that's usually in my back pocket, but I just wasn't having it balls one or two. Meanwhile FB, a new guy, was calmly running away with it. My last ball I would have to make up a hundred million points to beat him and, you know? For a while it looked like I might do it. I fell far short in points, about forty million or so, but that's because I had the bad luck to drain at the start of an Upside-Down Mode that, completed, would have brought me pretty near the top.

So I indirectly mentioned how I gave one strike to bunnyhugger. She had a frustrating tournament, taking one strike in every single round until that Stranger Things game where, thanks in part to my strong finish after a mediocre start, she got two strikes and was knocked out. I did try to help her to at least a third place, which would have let her continue, offering advice on how to get the (timed) skill shot, but the game didn't let her play long enough and, critically, never gave her --- and only her --- a chance at an Upside-Down Mode that's normally good for tens of millions of points. Had she got that even once she'd likely have gone on at least one further round and then, who can say where she'd have ended up? We tied, instead, just above the median for the whole group.

In the rounds after we were eliminated more people gained their seventh strike, three in the next round and then one more each round after that. Finally we were down to three people, DMC (no surprise), FAE (also no surprise), and DG, who was having a killer tournament. He started everyone by beating both these A-rank players in The Munsters, and was doing pretty well on Deadpool until a catastrophic moment. After DMC put up a monstrously high third ball, DG went up for his turn, forgetting until after he plunged that it was FAE's turn. This meant that he took a last place for the round, automatically, and that knocked him out. FAE finished out the game even though DMC observed --- and we didn't quite understand it at the moment --- that the outcome didn't actually matter. DMC would win unless FAE beat him two rounds straight, whether or not FAE took first place this game. (FAE did, it happens).

The next game, drawn up at random, was Rush, which you'd expect to be an automatic win for DMC. I mean, you know DMC and Rush. And yet, somehow, FAE won, getting halfway to overtaking the guy who'd been on top of the tournament all day. Next game, randomly drawn: The Simpsons Pinball Party, which DMC started out by putting up about ten million, a plausibly winning score, right away. FAE would need until the end of ball two to match this. DMC plunged the third ball, which pinged right into the outlane --- bad luck --- and we discovered that the game had no ball save.

Every couple years someone at Stern pinball gets the idea that factory settings should include zero ball save time, and everyone hates it because modern game design supposes you should have some minimum play time, and they go back to being normal for a couple years. But Simpsons was one of those no-ball-save games (The Munsters is another), and the game was probably reset to factory setting a couple weeks ago after MWS's Saturday tournament and nobody complained to RED about the problem since then.

And now this change just screwed DMC out of --- well, he'd still have had to make up FAE's score, plus enough on top for whatever their third ball would have been. But screwed him out of a chance to play, and it sucks to lose that way and it kind of hurts to win that way too.

But it was a win, FAE's third(?) in a row at Silver Balls, which would earn them permanent possession of the trophy if we had a travelling trophy.

And while it was past midnight, it was not so outrageously past midnight. We got home and to bed at a reasonable hour for New Year's Eve Day, ready to see what 2026 might start like.

But for now, you're going to see what Plopsaland was like in its 25th year and final month under that name!

Peeking around the track of SuperSplash; you can see some animals that I don't think were Heidi-linked particularly. As you get back to the station you see them, though.

People getting into a train car.

And here they're ready to dispatch.

Here's a close-up of some control button with the thing.

And here's a view out the window of the station, which is pretty nicely decorated, you can see.

We're ready for the next ride, and here's the exit side.

Trivia: In 1920, at the start of Prohibition, the United States Coast Guard fleet consisted of 26 inshore vessels, some converted tugboats, and 29 cruising cutters, one of them based in Evansville, Indiana. Congress would not approve any significant additional appropriations for five years. Source: Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, Daniel Okrent. Okrent mentions this was for just under five thousand miles of coastline, which I think means he's discounting Alaska entirely, which is fair because Alaska at the time had about twenty people so smuggle whatever you want in, it doesn't matter. But also you kinda can't actually measure coastline, thanks fractals, so I'm not sure what the five thousand miles represents.

Currently Reading: A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II, Maury Klein.

[Stop-motion animated snowman voice] If I live to be a hundred I'll probably never forget that year that --- you won't believe this --- the world almost missed Silver Balls In The City. You don't know the story? Well, let me tell you ...

bunnyhugger's Silver Balls has always been one of the last pinball events of the Michigan calendar and this year planned to be no exception, with the event --- a ``fair strikes'' tournament, where you play until you lose enough times, last one standing the winner --- set for the Tuesday between Christmas and New Year's. Except that earlier this month bunnyhugger discovered that while she had created a Facebook Event for it and been publicizing it in the Lansing and the Michigan Pinball communities, she hadn't registered it with the International Flipper Pinball Association, the sanctioning body for competitive pinball. They require a thirty-day notice before an event takes place, the better to avoid shenanigans where people try to cheat their way in a close pinball standings race by opening something only the conspirators have a hope of playing.

What to do? Run it as an un-sanctioned event, kneecapping participation and --- the true point of it --- charitable donations to the Capital Area Humane Society? Run it thirty days from the date of discovery, which would put it not just into the New Year but past even Twelfth Night, the latest anyone could plausibly care about a Christmas-themed event? Ask the IFPA if they'll allow an exception because there was no attempt made to hide this event from anyone, just an absent-minded oversight?

After encouragement from me, bunnyhugger took the last course, and the IFPA, possibly just relieved any woman is still talking to them, approved the event with a bit of don't-do-it-again scolding. bunnyhugger went on to register every event --- league night, side tournament, women's tournament, and charity tournament --- for 2026, so that's covered. And we could trust that nothing would stop the tournament now.

When I got home from work --- inexplicably we had to come into the office the Tuesday between Christmas and New Year's --- bunnyhugger was distraught. Her plans for upcycling donated trophies had gone wrong, and went wrong very badly, consuming way more time and proving impossible without hardware that she wasn't sure any hardware store near us had. She spent many of the hours of the night in more aggravated improvisations of a workshop, and then --- sleeping so long she lost the time to make the cookies she had promised for the tournament --- running to hardware stores to get things that might help, and might yet help, but would not help this tournament.

She had got the trophies for the final three finishers assembled, but only just, and she was not able to find the laminate sheets and insulated jacket to run the placement finishes through the laminator and was about to give up on them. (Fortunately I knew where these were.) It would take hours for the trophy toppers to really set, and a day or more for them to be really secure. All we could do is trust that people wouldn't touch the Santa figures on top, and hope that they wouldn't fall off in loading them to my car or bringing them into the venue.

However, the important thing, is that Silver Balls '025 did happen.

And before I reveal how it happened, let me share Plopsaland De Panne pictures, like you've been enjoying since before Silver Balls:

A zone of fun in the park, where kids can pedal miniature cars around on a replica city street. If I were a kid this would have been my most favorite attration ever.

Isn't that great? Traffic lanes and curbs and confusing arrays of signs? Just fantastic stuff.

Kid giving some adults a high-five for managing a loop around the city square.

And here we are returned to the front of the park and the playful fountain. Note the shops in the distance have backdrops featuring a fake partly-cloudy sky that's a little weird to see against the actually partly-cloudy sky.

And now ... that tower ride seen earlier, SuperSplash. Wonder what that means!

And here's the station. You see one of the riders is all set to be super splashed.

Trivia: The name of Cambridge's Magdalene College is pronounced ``Maudlin''; the college was named for Saint Mary Magdalene, but founder Lord Thomas Audley insisted on spelling it ``Maudelyn'', rhyming with his own name. Source: Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, Keith Houston. Re-founded, technically; it was a reestablishment of Buckingham College, which Audley had graduated.

Currently Reading: A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II, Maury Klein.

Saturday after Christmas we got to Crossroads Village. This was not quite the final night of the season for the historical-village-decorated-in-lights, but we figured to keep Sunday as a contingency in case, say, the weather were too awful to visit. It happens Sunday saw four billion inches of rain so it would have been impossible to visit, but the idea was sound.

The big question was which of the train rides to get tickets for. They run their 19th century train for a roughly 45-minute loop through holiday lights while the public address system plays music, and the last scheduled train was for 8:15. But often when the place is crowded they run an extra train, at 9:15, after everything else is closed and as it maximizes time in the Village it'd be the best train to get. So for days bunnyhugger watched the tickets for sale, and while every day up to Christmas they opened a 9:15 train, we never saw one open for the Saturday we planned to visit. Finally we decided to get tickets for 8:15 because who knew if there would be a 9:15?

This proved wise: there was no 9:15 train, this despite the village being extremely busy. So busy, in fact, that when we arrived the parking lot was full up and they directed us to park on the shoulder of a service road. We stayed at the village past closing, of course, and by the time we got back to the car mine was almost the only car along that road, and I observed, so many people must have thought I was a jerk parking there.

Also, mysteriously, at the entry booth they explained that the ticket we'd printed out online wasn't good for getting on the train. It had been, up until about a week before, when ``they'' changed the system on everyone and now they had to print out a ticket on the spot for us. I don't know what the system change was or why they'd implement a week before the new year but I also completely believe this string of events.

We got there in enough time we could see the holiday show which, as it's been for several years now, was a musical-comedy thing starring Santa and We Never Actually Call Him The Grinch, with numbers done by a polar bear, Rudolph, and Frosty. It's fun though we do miss the Victorian-ish Melodramas of a decade ago. We also got really distracted wondering if the performers in suit were doing their own dialogue, or if it was done by a voice actor in back, or if it was prerecorded. The case against prerecorded is there's a bit early on where We Don't Say He's The Grinch dubs one of the audience kids his new reindeer, and if the kid doesn't play along you're in trouble. The case for prerecorded is N T Grinch didn't actually ask or say the kid's name and why wouldn't you, if you could? Some year we've got to find out where they bought the script for this from and see how it compares to the published dialogue.

That small tent-based shopping village from the previous year was gone, but one of the buildings had, we were all but sure, a new store in it. The new store was selling, you know, crystals and inspirational candles and that other sort that's the modern version of patent medicines, so it has a weird authenticity-of-experience I suppose.

The most important thing, of course, is that the antique rides were running. Both the carousel and the Ferris wheel, the latter of which went a couple years without our seeing in operation. The carousel's still going at its six rotations per minute, and they were packed. Also, while we waited for one ride, a bunch of kids were doing six-seven at a kid on the carousel, so that's still a thing. And the Ferris wheel was going at good clip. We even got the lucky coincidence to be the last car loaded and the first unloaded, so we didn't sit swinging around in the cold breeze; we just got the fast spinning up and down.

Also, the carousel building still has the penny-press machine, and I brought a couple pennies for just this chance. bunnyhugger believes herself to have three of the four penny patterns they offer --- two Christmas and two Halloween --- but so far as I know has not yet verified this.

And now, a bit of Plopsaland De Panne, not including any roller coasters close-up this time.

Well, a little bit of roller coaster: you can see a bit of the Nacht Wacht coaster (Draconis) in the archway, in this passage through the building that hides its launch station. Behind the camera is the Heidi stuff; ahead of it is The Ride to Happiness.

Following this path, which also gets us closer to the front of The park. I admire the dangling flower light fixtures that look like something Roller Coaster Tycoon made up.

Now here's a silly parrot who thought we wouldn't notice them in the giant sugar bowl.

And here's a mouse who's snagged a teacup. I don't know how old any of these statues are or if they represent pre-Plopsa park features.

The turtle who's got their hat on is beside the teacup mouse.

And what the heck, have a mouse in a saucepan.

Trivia: A January 1969 planning document for the first moonwalk outlined a minute-by-minute work chart with the respective astronauts labelled A and B, without any identification of which would be the Commander and which the Lunar Module Pilot. Source: Chariots for Apollo: The NASA History of Manned Lunar Spacecraft to 1969, Courtney G Brooks, James M Grimwood, Loyd S Swnson Jr.

Currently Reading: A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II, Maury Klein.