This week’s One for Friday offering is less about music, and more about another one-time obsession of mine. This is about pinball.

I was a little pinball addict when I was a kid, begging for quarters whenever I was dragged along to a tavern or bowling alley that had the dinging, thumping diversions shoved off into some corner. This was the day and age when Pong was cutting-edge technology so there weren’t many other options beyond playing the silver ball. Even though I was a teenager during the time when video games first reached phenom levels, it was always pinball that held a stronger allure, a sense that was compounded when I went to college and found myself blessed with a circle of friends similarly drawn to the game.

Part of that subculture occasionally involved late night, barroom conversations centered around speculation over what we’d do if we could design our own pinball game. We might choose an especially unlikely movie to get the pinball treatment or even our shared local workplace, and then we’d brainstorm about what images might be on the targets that got knocked down or what sound clip might play when the quarters were put in. There may have been a drunken sketch or two on napkins, but no evidence remains of that. It was entirely fanciful, of course. No one could ever build their own, professional-level pinball game. Well, at least we couldn’t. Apparently someone could.

I don’t know much about Benjamin J. Heckendorn, but what else would I ever need to know except that he built that: a fully functional pinball game centered around Bill Paxton, the actor who I’ve referred to as Ice Pax ever since a certain mid-nineties movie poster inadvertently convinced me that it was the perfect moniker for him. In making this beauty, Mr. Heckendorn has lived out one of the shared dreams of my band of friends. For this, I salute him with a song from the band that Bill Paxton was in during the late eighties, the new wave outfit Martini Ranch.

Martini Ranch, “How Can the Labouring Man Find Time for Self-Culture?”

(Disclaimer: Martini Ranch’s Holy Cow seems to be out of print, and I don’t think Amazon has it available digitally either. This song may very well have landed on a compilation or two that are still available. The novelty factor of Paxton’s involvement alone may have been the impetus for such a move. However, a very cursory attempt on my part yielded no such available release, so this is being posted with the belief that it is otherwise unavailable. If anyone with due authority to do so asks me to remove it, I will gladly comply.)