When I was in undergraduate school at UC-Irvine, I lived in a Newport Beach summer rental during the winter, so it was fairly cheap for the area. It was next to the beach, so I could fall asleep to the sound of the ocean. Nearby, there was an entertainment area, Balboa Fun Zone, with an arcade (the area was in an INXS video “Devil Inside”). It was full of video games (late 1980’s) which I am generally bad at. However, it did have Skee-Ball, where you roll a ball into a series of rings, the smallest at the center giving the most points. You collected tickets as you played, and could redeem them for a prize at the end. I loved the Skee-Ball, and would play for quite a while, redeeming my tickets for some useless trinket at the end.
At the same arcade, there was a game called Whac-a-Mole. This consisted of little mole heads that popped up and you hit them back down again (with a mallet that looks like a giant marshmallow on a stick). I tried this once or twice, but it was too close to video games for me. I am not great at the hand-eye coordination exercises.
Today we are doing studies with the trigger again. I am using this period of time to check and see if two fixes I made worked. They seem to have worked, but two more popped up! I was just reminded of this game. I take my (soft) mallet and whack the moles down, and then they just pop up again, somewhere else. I hope when the game is done, and the moles are gone, I get enough tickets to redeem them for a really nice prize.
