I was not present for the league meeting of August 11. Instead, I was just wrapping up an amusement park tour of New England, with visits to six parks in Maine, New Hampshire, and Connecticut. At the end of the trip we drove to New Jersey in order to visit a couple of our old familiar haunts before I flew home and Joseph stayed behind for another week to call in at his workplace in Trenton (he has worked from home since moving to Michigan). So on the very evening league night was happening back home in Lansing, we were at the Silverball Museum in Asbury Park, New Jersey. We even played make-believe league games on all but one of the night’s chosen games. (We could not do a dry run on The Walking Dead, as the Silverball Museum doesn’t have that one. In fact, they have only two Stern games: The Simpsons Pinball Party and The Sopranos.)
A street in Belmar, New Jersey. Joseph and I had just eaten dinner near here and were about to travel to Asbury Park to spend the rest of the evening at the Silverball Museum.
So all of that is just an explanation for the lack of a League Night Update for meeting #3. I wasn’t there, and probably shouldn’t do another attempt at writing a recap of a meeting I didn’t attend. It was apparently a rather small crowd. I know that at least Alex, Sarah, Aaron, Joseph, and I were all missing. (Joseph and I did makeup games after Joseph got home.) And the standings show a shakeup in the upper echelon. Chris, though the week’s highest point earner, is still wounded from his slam tilt of Junk Yard during the league season opener, and Alex was set back by the missed week. As a result, Mike S. is number one in the overall standings for the first time ever, with a 13 point lead over Chris. Joseph is currently third, trailing Chris by 10 points. The season isn’t half over yet (though it will be by the end of the night), so there is still a lot of possibility for further position swapping at the top.
And worth mentioning: we found pinball at two of these amusement parks! One of them (Quassy) just had a single game, and it was South Park, and we couldn’t tell whether it was possible to play. But another (Canobie Lake Park) had twenty-one pinball machines, every one of them a quarter to play, including even the 2013 Star Trek. They also had a Hercules, but that was turned off, possibly because it’s very hard to tell whether Hercules is turned on or off.
Oh yes, Canobie is a pinball mecca! They proudly advertise on the side of the arcade that there is pinball inside, and by God, there is. A whole wall of it, in great condition, with a sign above reading “PINBALL ALLEY.” All a quarter. If they had only had FunHouse, I would have been certain I had found paradise.
Also, I realized, we found pinball at another park too. Funtown Splashtown USA in Saco, Maine, had a Family Guy. And for the first time I could hear how the machine stole a couple of sound cues from 1980s pinball machines like Space Station. I had never heard before. And, of course, a Family Guy machine stealing licks from an 80s property shows whoever worked on the license was thinking this out.