Posts Tagged ‘pinball’

I sat down for a long interview with Steve Ritchie Pinball designer extraordinaire at Pintastic NE 2022 day 1 in Sturbridge ma at the Sturbridge Host Hotel

The greatest thing about the man and this interview is the joy he clearly has in the hobby and the game that has no diminished over the decades.

Here are a few shots and interviews from day one of Pintastic NE 2022

Todd Tuckey checks out Toy Story 4

There is one in the extra ball lounge but the line to get to it is always long

speaking of the extra ball lounge

The Weird Al game was here too

The Weird Al Pinball game at Pintastic NE 2022

of course not all that is here is pinball, there are some classic video games and memorabilia here to wit:

Like me the folks from the Bottomless pit of treasures have not missed a pintastic

Speaking of someone who is at every Pintastic

Gabe noted I looked a tad tired as well. He must be right because I crashed in my room and slept like a log for 10 hours

I’ll be putting up individual posts of my interviews with Steve Ritchie and Todd Tuckey but lets close this post with the coolest image of the day

Ritchie playing one of his game

You don’t get cooler than a designer playing one of his own games

Today is the feast day of St. John Fisher and St. Thomas Moore who choose to die rather than betray the faith for gain in the world.

Given what we’re seen from the church lately with Bishops and priests (with some notable exceptions) unwilling to stand for the faith and Public servants either not enforcing the laws or enforcing them selectively based on political allegiance they seem to be saints critical for our time.

I’m shocked they haven’t been dropped from the calendar.


My wife is a blueberry person and would regularly buy muffins at Hannaford market. However a bit ago she cut open her muffin and there were no blueberries inside. This is despite the fact that the price for the Muffins has gone up considerably.

It led to some drama when we cut open the 2nd Muffin of the two pack:

All of this brings to mind Casino:

This is actually the “broken windows” theory of enforcement where if you take care of small things you cut down on large one.

Under the left this has become passé and we’re paying for it.


There have been a lot of excuses for the failure of Lightyear by the defenders of Disney, none on them involved the decision to push homosexuality in a film for kids.

Alas for the woke crowd unlike schools they can not compel attendance in theatres so if parents don’t want to push this junk on their kids they don’t have to.

The real fun is going to come with the new movie Minions: The Rise of Gru. You see if all the Disney apologists are right then this movie should do just as badly as Lightyear because all of the same issues they claim are holding back Lightyear’s take will still be in play when it comes out.

Of course if Minions The Rise of Gru is as big of a hit as it seems likely to be it will just be another proof of the media as the lying propagandists that they are.

Not that they care anymore, they’ve given up on worrying about the pretense of being objective.


Speaking of schools here is another bit from that stuff I hinted at earlier that they are teaching elementary school kids in the Lawrence school system.

More of that Critical Race Theory that doesn’t exist

Funny for something that the left/media claimed was just a right wing fantasy there sure seems to be a lot of prepared items ready to be disseminated to public school kids in lieu of teaching thing useless things like reading, writing and arithmetic, particularly in schools were the parents don’t have a lot of other options.

I had planned to write something more extensive today about but I had forgotten about Juneteenth being a national holiday so the school crowd I tried to contact for comment might not have been in so I figured it would be fair to give them another day just out of fairness.

Of course I suspect I’ll be a tad busy the next few days…


…as PintasticNE begins tomorrow night and I plan on enjoying myself to the fullest.

As a teaser I have an interview with the owner of Cape Cod and Beyond a company that rents out machines who came down the house to pick up the Batman 66 machine that my sons and wife rented me for my birthday.

I suspect that you’ll see a lot more of these rental companies and the price of Pinball machines and the potential for investment continues to grow, but I think the real driver is the problem of where do you store these things if you don’t have to room for it.

The nice thing about a rental is there is always a fresh machines in your hands.

For the next four days I’ll be knee deep in pinball and I’ll forget about Biden, the Gas prices, Bad Government, and the lot.

We all need a few days away from it.

You might recall a while back I did an interview with a young woman from Iraq who told me her story of live there, fleeing the country and coming to America and what it meant to her.

Yesterday I attended her college graduation in Worcester. Her class was a cacophony of people, a majority were woman and people of color

Now bad for a land of inequality and oppression eh? Of course I suspect if you tried to make that argument to Hanna she wouldn’t buy it.

From refugee in fear of her life and oppressed because of her sex and religion to college grad in the US.

Here is the base interview from 2018

Her graduation is not a bad ending for that story but of course the story of this young lady is just beginning.

Postscript: Speaking of happy ending when I got home from the Graduation guess what I found at my house:

Happy Birthday to Me

Maybe that’s why DaWife wanted me out of the house on my Birthday. So two happy endings in one day!