Sometimes, hopeless romantics like myself hang to things for far too long, such as a dating partner who doesn’t read very much, or who dislikes bikes. Sometimes it takes a clear signal to remind us that we need to move on. Such was the case with my love affair with the Blackberry.

I had been hanging on to it mostly because I didn’t have a great reason to toss it, though I’ve been wanting an iPhone for years now. Thankfully, the Blackberry, named Nietzsche, leapt out of my hand and splashed down into the filthiest pub toilet in the neighborhood, providing me with an excellent excuse to chuck it, as well as a great reason to wash my hands.

Okay, full disclosure: it is also true that some weeks ago, upon seeing me using Nietzsche, an iPhone-addicted Cheryl remarked “They still make those?”, but this had no bearing on my loss of interest in RIM products, I assure you. It was mostly the urine.

At any rate, a few days after splashdown, my brand spanking new iPhone 4 arrived and was christened Hemingway. With Hemingway came the opportunity to try out some of the GPS-based cycling applications in the much-vaunted App Store. There are a ton of these, but seemingly none with a clear lead in terms of reviews. I downloaded one of the free ones, BikeMate Lite, and tried it out on the Faster Mustache Imminently Terrible Grind of Atlanta (FMITGA for short) last night.

It was simple enough to use; I merely pressed “START” and then dropped Hemingway into a jersey pocket, protected by a high tech plastic ziploc-style iPhone condom I happened to already own. I then commenced to crank myself up Atlanta’s least enjoyable hills, choking back sobs all the while.

Halfway through the ride, I checked on the application, whose main interface looks like this:

I am doing 0mph at my desk.

I realized that the application was recording everything in metric units, so I touched the “option” button to change this. I was met with this screen, which consists of the real “Option” button and a long list of advertisements for other app store products in addition to the advertisement ever-present on all Bike Mate Lite screens.

Now, I realize that whoever made BikeMate Lite wants to get paid for their efforts, and I support that, but this kind of seems like overkill to me. The application also lacks any elevation data for rides, as far as I could tell, which is a feature I missed sorely.

To my way of thinking, the “Lite” version of a program should be an excellent preview of what the full version will be like in the same way that a first date is a preview of what actually dating someone will be like, outside of whatever they are glossing over or exaggerating, of course. With that in mind, I just don’t feel that BikeMate Lite and I are a match.

I believe that you get what you pay for, and since I paid zero dollars for this application, I should be pretty happy with the fact that it recorded my position and speed just fine. It even saved the route and will show it to me on a little map whenever I want. As far as I know, the full version of BikeMate is the greatest GPS-enabled cycling application ever conceived, but I don’t feel like spending even a couple of bucks to find out as my overall experience with BikeMate Lite could be summed up with a shrug and whatever consonantless noise one chooses to make in these circumstances. I suggest “Uuoee”.

If you want an application to record your route, speed, and to show you as many ads as it possibly can, then BikeMate Lite might be for you, but in terms of GPS-aware cycling applications, at least, I’m continuing my search for a better option.

There is a widespread popular misconception about people who like guns, which is that they necessarily want to use those guns to shoot people. If I were mad enough at some person to do bodily harm to them, I’d much rather punch them than shoot them with a gun. I don’t want them to die before they have time to realize how wrong they are, after all.

Thinking about this gun/punch comparison has made me realize that you just don’t see a lot of long range punches. It would be pretty awesome to be a punch sniper. Maybe ninjas can do it; I don’t know. This is an excellent built in safety feature that punches have over guns. Rare is the child in a movie about gang violence who has been hit accidentally in a drive-by punching.

I’m not saying that punching kids is okay any time, mind you. Unless they deserve it.

Shooting and hitting things, though, does have an awfully primal attraction, which is why I took the time to watch the first five minutes of a new History Channel show called Top Shot. Here’s the Wikipedia knowlege on the show:

The show features 16 contestants, split into two teams of eight, competing in various types of shooting challenges. One by one, the contestants are eliminated until only one remains. That contestant will receive the $100,000 grand prize and the title of “Top Shot.”

Sixteen expert marksman? Shooting challenges? Winning money? It all sounds pretty manly and extremely awesome. It was with high hopes for such that I started the show. Sadly, the colossal lameness of the format hit me like a speeding ninja sniper punch delivered directly to my pants citizens.

It is shot in the MTV Real World style. If you’re not familiar with that style of television program, it essentially revolves around the idea that there should be one minute of stuff going on followed by three to four minutes of people giving retrospective monologs about how they felt at the time. It makes perfect sense if your show is about what happens when a bunch of self-absorbed people’s egos rub together, but is out of place and off-putting on Top Shot.

The History Channel has stopped short of making all its marksmen wear ball gowns and speak at all times in high-pitched impressions of the Queen of England, but is probably considering these measures for next season. Seriously, guys… way to take a show about marksmanship and turn it into something that no self-respecting man would admit to watching.

I try not to cry on my gun for fear of rust, so I usually just sob into someone else's big strong arms.

What’s next on the lineup, the Boob Hour featuring only male breasts?

Now, I realize its hard to take a marksmanship tournament that could pretty much be decided in a day and stretch it out into 12 episodes or however many, but you’ve gone too far. Top Shot even has an elimination challenge style ceremony where players vote each other off the show. It is a mockery of all things man.

I think you guys could have spent a lot more time coming up with some cool shooting challenges so I could watch highly skilled people shooting guns. Instead, I’m watching a grown man bitching about some other grown man taking charge of a situation without asking for permission. Or I was, at least, before I turned it off, never to watch again.

Honestly, I weep for the state of manhood in this country. Openly. In a sun dress.

While I was traveling to the greater Los Angeles area last January, some jerk relieved me of my sunglasses. They were stuck in the side pocket of my laptop bag when I left Atlanta, and completely missing when I arrived. I guess its possible that they wiggled free of their own accord, but I kept them in their special place in my bag made to keep things from wiggling free.

They were a great pair of sunglasses, and lasted me a couple of years. They rested comfortably on my face and protected me from harmful rays, which is why, upon discovering their absence, I fell to my knees and vehemently cursed the west coast of the United States, air travel as a whole, and the sun itself.

That done, I excused myself to my fellow travelers and got shakily to my feet in the baggage claim area. Thankfully, like any person with tremendous unfounded self esteem, or perhaps merely unbounded vanity, I carry a backup pair of shades at all times when traveling. I placed them on my face and carried on about my business, vowing to select and purchase a replacement pair when I got home.

Top Cruise is standing on Anthony Edwards in this picture.

I chose a pair of aviator-style sunglasses from Randolph Engineering, as an homage to one of my favorite movies of all time, Top Gun. After all, nothing makes women hotter than dudes in aviator sunglasses who feel the need — the need for speed!

The glasses themselves are of excellent quality and are very comfortable on my face. So far this summer, however, they have failed to show the sorts of results with the ladies I was expecting. I’m pretty sure that’s only because I’m not blasting Kenny Loggins’s hit theme song, “Dangerzone“, loud enough, though.

Now, I should interject that I am pretty sure that I’m a wolfman, or at least, have some wolfman heritage. I was adopted by my parents at the age of 4mos, so my true parentage is unclear. I could easily have wolfman parents. My chief piece of evidence is the aggressive nature with which my body grows hair. That, and my proclivity for roaming the streets late at night, howling at the moon and biting people.

Nowhere is my aggressive hair growth more apparent than between my eyebrows, where each brow strives earnestly to grow out to meet the other. I pluck these hairs regularly, especially since one feature of these Randolph Engineering shades is that they provide a viewing window for your unibrow.

I do my best to keep the area nicely plucked so they can work their Kenny Loggins/Tom Cruise magic to their fullest potential. I know that they will come through for me, but just in case I’m also working on my smile. Check it out!

If you are like me, and I hope for your sake that you’re not as it will save you a lot of awkwardness and explaining, you’ve read all the Harry Potter books. Actually it’s more true to say that Stephen Fry has read all the Harry Potter books to you, but still, you’ve ingested the stories.

Also if you are like me, you’ve probably seen all the Harry Potter movies, though it was a blow to my enjoyment of the movie to see Daniel Radcliffe, the actor who plays Harry Potter in the films, naked. I realize he’s a grown man now and he can do whatever he likes, but I don’t want to see any of the main characters naked because I know them chiefly as child actors.

I’m aware that people get older, but if Harry Potter is running around nude and getting bank loans and doing adult crap, that means I must also be getting older and should probably stop reading Young Adult fiction.

I console myself with the fact that I have an accountant, not to mention some retirement investments. Surely these are evidence of some form of maturity, even if the investments aren’t actually maturing. I’d have been better off investing in my sock drawer the last two or three years.

Thankfully there is someone out there trying to lighten the mood and take our minds off of these questions of financial stability and impending old age by poking a little fun at ol’ Harry Potter. A guy by the name of Brad Neely, as I understand it from Wikipedia, wrote and then recorded an audiobook meant to be a companion to the first Harry Potter movie. So, you turn on the audiobook and turn down the sound on your TV and watch through the movie with the audiobook playing in place of the original soundtrack.

All I can say is it is hilarious. Neely does a truly admirable job of mixing rich, flowery prose with fart jokes, and the clashing of the two had me pausing the movie so I wouldn’t miss anything while laughing my head off.

Characters are narcissistic, violent, sensitive, and threaten one another at every turn. It is everything that a movie parody should be and more, in the spirit of a much-more-thought-out-Mystery-Science-Theatre-3000 kind of way, except with a reasonably current movie. I can’t say enough about it. I loved it.

If you can get your hands on a copy, and I have utterly no idea how to tell you to do so, I highly recommend that you do, dear readers.

I never had to read Pride and Predjudice when I was in school, and having now read most of this zombified adaptation, I am very glad. It’s like reading a summary of a bunch of socialite’s Twitter accounts. I have some acquaintances whom I would consider to be Atlanta socialites, and believe me, there isn’t any more happening now among the cool kids than was in high school.

Thankfully, every few pages or so in the book, zombies attack and slaughter a few people, but its still not enough to distract from the boredom of the original story, and I had such high hopes based on the opening page’s merits. Honestly I think I am the wrong person for the book. Someone with a great sense of humor and a great love of Jane Austen’s original would likely very much enjoy it.

It starts with a really great sentence:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.

Further down the first page, a gentleman, Mr. Bennett, keeps his pimp hand strong. He says to his wife as she’s prodding him with questions:

“Woman, I am attending to my musket. Prattle on if you must, but leave me to the defense of my estate!”

Sadly, for me the book drops off sharply from there, though I did try really hard to stay with it through the whole thing. I made it about half way, but have now given up hopes of the zombie attacks increasing in frequency to the point where the tedious socialite stuff is completely overshadowed.

I don’t blame the author. In fact the zombie parts are excellent. The heroine, Elizabeth Bennett, is modified in this version into a highly trained martial artist and is not at all scared to whip some putrified zombie ass in large quantity. Unfortunately, the quantity is not nearly large enough for my tastes.

I suspect that the author tried to leave the book intact enough that fans of Jane Austen’s original novel would recognize much of the plot, but since I would rather do my taxes while in line at the DMV, I am the wrong person for it.

I would equate the experience to going to dinner with a friend who has a really boring/awful girlfriend, thinking that hanging with your buddy will be good regardless of how terrible she is, and then being annoyed when he lets her do all the talking all night, only interjecting now and again.

As I say, there is probably a huge section of literature fans who love this book, and it is a great idea for an adaptation. I am not a fan of literature, though. I’m just a guy who likes to read.