Matt McIrvin's Freaky Alternate Reality

March Hare Madness is a pinball tournament with two elements. The ordinary is group matchplay, with each round setting people in a group of three or four people on a randomly-drawn game and awarding ratings points based on the order of finish. The absurd is the Critical Hit deck, a deck of cards which give the player the option to cast ``spells''. These allow mischief or advantages like covering the display screen so no one knows their scores, or swapping someone from your group into another group, or requiring someone to stop play immediately. Given the International Flipper Pinball Association's strong attitude that sanctioned pinball contests should only test pinball skills and not nonsense like ``can you play with your arms crossed'', you may wonder how they sanction the Critical Hit deck. It seems to be a moment of youthful whimsy they can't bear to repent.

Every player was dealt three cards to start, and would get another card if, in a round, they collected an extra ball (most games make this attainable, and some make it easy), or if you finished in last place (consolation, and getting more cards in play). My initial set of cards was one good card --- after the first ball, swap my position, and score, with the player of my choice --- and two lousy ones --- give another player's game a shake to give them one or more tilt warnings. Over the night I would collect only a couple more cards, those also uninspiring ones. Cover the display screen. Something else I forget and that tells you how much I figured I could play it. So I ended up going the night without playing anything. Even the good card, swiping someone else's score, I was never far enough behind at the end of ball one (or behind at all) for that to be worth using. I guess I ended up in bunches of people with a similar dilemma; the only time a card got used against me all night was the stop-playing-now card that RED dropped just as I was getting multiball going on Medieval Madness. I got a compensation ball, as the card specifies, but probably missed out on first place because of that mischief.

Other people, though, were having a good time with their cards, and causing a good bit of mayhem. There was a lot of playing the cards to eject someone from their group, since if you know you're playing, say, DMC on Rush, a game he can play approximately forever, you maybe will take your chances with literally anyone else. And if your group just had DMC land in it maybe you want to change the game away from whatever you're stuck with to something he maybe won't play for so long. And if maybe you're someone else in the group DMC just got put into and you liked the old game better maybe you'll drop the card that makes every group change their game. So at the end of every round was not only the wait for other groups to finish but also a pause while everyone figured what they wanted to do to force bunnyhugger to adjust the official tournament settings on her iPad Mini.

With experience everyone got better at this pre-round fidgeting. The first time around took a while, though, and bunnyhugger feared that the tournament --- even though it started at the early hour of 6 pm --- wouldn't finish at a reasonable hour. The particular dread is of a tournament that hits the bar's closing hour, but any time after midnight is still rough considering she and I have to be at work Wednesday morning. I said, with confidence, that the six qualifying rounds would be done around 10 pm and the whole tournament done by midnight. In this, I would be wrong, but I would not be so terribly wrong. The last round of qualifying finished a little after 10 pm, and the last playoff game would finish somewhere around 12:15; we were able to leave for home about 12:30. Could have been about an hour worse before it would have been really untenable.

And now we're closing off the ZooAmerica part of our Hershey Park visit.

And here's some more black vultures, hanging out and doing their vulturely business.

Meanwhile the rabbits work on leaf-clearing detail.

Goose with a rabbit who's suspicious of all these photos I'm taking of them.

Oh, and here's a porcupine that turns out wanted to sit up top on a tree trunk. Also turns out porcupine tails are longer than I think.

There's supposed to be a grey wolf somewhere in this enclosure but I don't know, the camouflage and everything, no telling where they might be.

And uh ... oh, uhm, so turns out the black vultures were volunteer exhibits that ZooAmerica does not want to have around and is hanging effigies to try chasing them off. If the effigy plan is working then the black vulture population must have been something else before they started.

Trivia: During the transearth coast Apollo 8 required only one small midcourse correction, a 15.0-second maneuver using the service module's reaction control system for a change of 4.8 feet per second. Source: Apollo by the Numbers: A Statistical Reference, Richard W Orloff. NASA SP-4029.

Currently Reading: A History of Fireworks: From Their Origins to the Present Day, John Withington.

Two weeks before March Hare Madness, the springtime charity pinball tournament bunnyhugger runs --- and the one supporting the charity from which we got beloved rabbits Stephen, and Penelope, and the mouse Fezziwig --- it was nearly scuppered. bunnyhugger discovered the tournament wasn't on the upcoming-events calendar. While she had --- after the scare of being several days late registering Silver Balls In The City --- picked dates for all the charity tournaments, and scheduled all the regular league and women's league events for the year, she had somehow overlooked actually scheduling March Hare Madness. We've had the event creep into early April before, much as the NCAA tournament does, but the thirty-day rule wouldn't even let it be early April; it'd be, at earliest, mid-April and very close to the pinball tournament behemoth that is Pinball At The Zoo.

For a second time, though, and an even more generous time, the Master of the Events at sanctioning body International Flipper Pinball Association granted mercy, and allowed bunnyhugger to schedule the event despite it being only a couple weeks out. Possibly they trust bunnyhugger's good intentions and that she is reliable and regular enough that no one could suspect she was sneaking in tournaments to fiddle with rankings. Possibly the 30-day deadline has always been squishy-soft and we're only learning this a decade into things.

Coincidentally bunnyhugger had been planning to get this event also sanctioned by the new Punk Rock Pinball Association, a group put together after the IFPA's big Trans Fail last year. The Punk Rock Pinball Association, with a different set of rules about how they rank people, doesn't mind double-listing events and the IFPA doesn't care, so, what the heck. Let's see what happens. This is how bunnyhugger came to run the first PRPA-sanctioned event in the new scene of ``Central, Michigan''. And it's given the 21 of us who played IDs and ranking positions on new leaderboards.

The time leading up to the tournament went as you'd expect: the tournament was forever away and then it was tomorrow. bunnyhugger ultimately had to order some elevator bolts, to secure the upcycled trophies together once she removed the old toppers, off Amazon since the local hardware stores have weirdly stopped carrying them, and she gave in to the time savings of getting a couple lovely gold-colored rabbit figures instead of finding what she might have in stock. This would give her the top three trophies with a refreshing minimum of work and stress. Then she remembered for this tournament she gives trophies to the top four finishers and had to put a fourth-place trophy together without the benefit of time for this stuff.

It would be a bit much to say everything was ready by the time I got home from the in-office day --- I was delayed by the construction zone around my office, too, cheating me of time to help with last-minute preparation --- but it was small things left over to work out. Figuring out which of the 40 games in the venue we were overlooking on the games list. Uncanny X-Men, turns out. Having a box to put discarded cards in. Finding a newspaper in case someone plays the card that requires the score display to be covered. Though we have a couple newspapers in the house waiting for recycling, we forgot them all, and I had to go out on the street to find an honor box and get a new copy. The only one left was the display copy, the one in the box's door's window, that had received all the insults of the elements. Finding the promotional stuff to give away. We have many translites but the most immediately available one was a Foo Fighters so, off it would go.

This sets the stage.

Now, let's get back to ZooAmerica a bit.

Those weren't just black vultures in that enclosure, though; there were bears, a bunch of them. Here's a brown and a black bear hanging out, looks like.

The bears pause to have a frank exchange of views.

Ground squirrels looking up to see what all the fuss is about.

Couple of ... I'm going to guess elk? ... hanging around in the quite large ground squirrel enclosure.

Oh, a photo sharing spot for people who like ... lions that can't give you The Finger?

As with any ample zoo enclosure you get a couple of wild rabbits making their home where the making is good.

Trivia: Apollo 8's astronauts were able to observe lunar surface details at sun angles as low as two or three degrees; prior to the flight, the lower limit had been thought to be 6 degrees. Source: Apollo by the Numbers: A Statistical Reference, Richard W Orloff. NASA SP-4029.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 88: Pappy the Beatnick!, Bud Sagendorf. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

Crystal died sometime today. bunnyhugger found her in the evening, when it was time to give her medicine, curled up inside the little wooden mouse house. It looked like she just stopped, one moment, and that was the end of a sweet little white mouse. It's fortunate her decline wasn't harder, or longer, or worse.

I don't know, have some Hershey Park photos I captioned before finding this mouse news out.

So ... ZooAmerica. Technically a separate attraction, but buying a Hershey Park admission buys you admission there too. So we took some time from the amusement park for that.

We got a hand stamp! Well, a wrist stamp. You can already see it sweating off of me.

The bridge over there is happy to greet you with animal puns.

That's the bridge back to the park, in case you wondered how to get back.

Up first, the Reptile House. Do you see a reptile in there?

Not sure why birds get in the reptile house but you know, ``reptile'' doesn't really have a taxonomically coherent definition and I think ``bird'' is pretty shaky too.

Venus fly traps! You know, just like fascinated you in second grade but you never actually saw because they grow naturally in like one-tenth of an acre of North Carolina and the second they're taken out of that environment they die and people keep plundering them because who doesn't want a plant that eats insects?

Sign telling us why we aren't seeing skunks and say, have flower names become the default idea for naming skunks? Is this Bambi influence?

Some animals of the southwestern United States here. Pretty sure the green round thing on the left isn't an animal though.

Tell me honestly: would having a heat lamp and a craggly stone to lie on fix you?

The big enclosure plus a historical photo of the same enclosure but from the 30s, where it looks ... surprisingly similar, really.

Oh, and then what might be over here, in the southwestern desert after dark?

Trivia: Apollo 8's S-IVB booster was, after translunar injection, sent into a solar orbit, with apehelion of 79.770 million nautical miles, perihelion of 74.490 million nautical miles, inclination of 23.47 degrees, and a period of 340.8 days. Source: Apollo by the Numbers: A Statistical Reference, Richard W Orloff. NASA SP-4029.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 88: Pappy the Beatnick!, Bud Sagendorf. Editor Stephanie Noelle. Yeah, we've finally reached 1959 and I don't know what Noelle is going to do when it reaches one of the select stories that King Features reprints in the endless Popeye reruns it has on the web and theoretically to newspapers, if any newspapers still run Popeye.