Notes from Maine - 2023/10/22
The vet came out and X-Rayed Earl’s feet last week. He’s one of the big, goofy horses who lives with me. The feet were fine. We were looking for any sign that he has (or has had) laminitis. There was no sign. The vet said, “I don’t know about this rough area here, and do you see this little chip? I’m going to send it down to a surgeon to get their opinion.”
I already know their opinion. Surgery. If you spend your whole career stabbing animals to fix them, you start to believe that every problem can be fixed with a precise stabbing. This surgeon has already stabbed Earl. The whole experience was a giant pain. Finding a trailer, borrowing a vehicle big enough to haul that trailer, training him to get on a trailer, getting him off the trailer, and then worrying constantly while he was in recovery—everything about horse surgery is terrible. Try to convince a 2,000 pound horse that it’s in his best interest to get back on the trailer when the last time it led to a horrible, two-hour ride. Horrible.
Still, if he needed the surgery, I would have to consider it.
But, bear in mind, there was no evidence of laminitis—the reason for the X-Rays. Earl is currently walking around with no issues. So the idea of surgery is one that the vet invented on the spot. I’m not sorry that I asked for X-Rays. I really wanted to rule out laminitis, because there are steps I would take to lessen the impact of that, but I’m not trying to find solutions to problems that haven’t presented themselves. The farrier will appreciate the X-Rays. They provide, real, actionable evidence of the way Earl’s bones are situated. I guess farriers enjoy that kind of thing.
I went to a Halloween party last night. It was bigger than I expected—I only knew about half the people there. After sampling some food, I went to a quieter part of the house where the pinball machines are located. I know these machines very well. One of them I restored, and the other I rehabilitated until it was playable. They’re still in good shape, which is nice to see. I imagine that a lot of the machines I fix are just going to sit, neglected and rarely used, but not these. I met a woman named Brenda who encouraged her young child (I can’t guess the ages of kids… 10 maybe?) to play one of the machines. The kid had never touched a pinball machine before but was immediately hooked.
There are pinball tournaments online now. I’ve watched more than a few. Two players are currently bouncing back and forth as the number one and number two winners this year. Escher Lefkoff and Jason Zahler have been winning quite a bit. They’re both nineteen, both travel around the US and sometimes Europe playing pinball, and both of their fathers are often in the same tournaments. You can see similarities if you watch Steve Zahler play and then watch his son. Escher seems to have diverged in style a bit. The fathers both lack plasticity in their play. You can tell when a pinball player is trying to force a particular outcome. It almost always leads to an early exit from the tournament.
One of the interesting things about watching pinball is the variety of machines the players are pitted against. There might be fifty machines available, usually arranged into groups. In order to win, you need all the requisite flipping and nudging skills, but you also have to have an intimate knowledge of the rules of each machine so you can find the greatest scoring opportunity. There could be a shot worth a million points, but it’s too hard to hit. In that case, one might opt for a safer way to grind out the points.
Newer machines will have displays, sound callouts, and fancy lights to point you towards valuable shots. With older machines, the clues will be subtle if they exist at all. You might suspect that the older players have an advantage with the “Classic” machines, but it’s rarely true anymore. At the top level, it seems like everyone knows everything about all the machines. The tournaments this year have been so lopsided, that I overheard a competitor referring to the tournament as “Jason Zahler’s college fund.”
Maybe one of these days we’ll see Brenda’s kid at a tournament. I wouldn’t be surprised. That kid looked absolutely hooked.
