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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

Photo Copyright 1997 Joe Schwartz (joe@joyrides.com)

I’m thinking about when the last time I went and rode the coasters was. I know I was with Cheryl, so that would mean it had to be… let’s see — carry the one, divided by pi, plus four equals — whenever that was.

Anyway I do remember clearly riding a coaster named the Georgia Cyclone on that trip. It’s a big wooden coaster, a mirror image of the famous Coney Island Cyclone. I also remember saying when I got off it that I had been in more comfortable bar fights. I swore I would never give it another chance to abuse my skeletal system.

But Chris wanted to ride it, and we were right there, and it had been a while since the last time, and I’m in much improved physical condition than I was then. I am an Ironman finisher after all. How bad can it be?

Answer: Pretty bad.

It remains an excellent way to test the rebounding ability — or lack thereof — of a man’s spine, much in the same way that a croquet mallet could be used to test the sturdiness of his kneecaps. I’m fairly certain I am at least 1/4 of an inch shorter than I was yesterday, and my height is one of my favorite things about myself. As such, I believe that Six Flags should build and staff a chiropractor’s clinic immediately to the right of the exit. Mind you, I have never visited a chiropractor, but if there were one at the exit of the Georgia Cyclone, I would have tried it out.

It still has the moments of floating, and the riding down hills at terrific speed, which are a lot of fun, but at the bottoms of the hills my body was subjected to such a pounding I thought we must certainly have left the tracks and headed over a pile of boulders instead. I would liken this elation interspersed with abject spinal distress to making out with the prom queen for two seconds, then being set upon by an alligator for two, then repeating the process again and again.

Certainly there is an ingredient of age here that is making the experience less enjoyable. Many years ago I rode the Cyclone as a child and thought it was great fun, but in the intervening decades there has been some hardening, some cracking, some fading of colors. Perhaps some parts are creakier now than they were back then, and let’s not forget that the coaster itself is also getting older.

If you’re wondering whether or not you should try it out, you probably should. Perhaps you are younger and more supple than I, or you have had your spine replaced with a piece of steel reinforcing bar. Or, perhaps you are drunk out of your mind.

Whatever the case, I wish you a glorious experience and a speedy recovery from the Georgia Cyclone.

As a result, I now know that Verne Troyer, the actor who played Mini-Me in the Austin Powers movies, has a sex tape. What a glorious cornucopia is our Interplops!

My only concern for Vern is that sex tapes are kind of done already. I mean, the original sex tape, Tommy Lee and Pam Anderson’s honeymoon tape, came out in 1995 or so I believe. That’s a year or two before even Austin Powers came out. Come on, Vern!

At least he’s got the angle (if you will) of being a little person. That adds a bit of flavor to the whole situation, I think.

Sex tapes are so wildly overdone now, girls don’t even flinch when they’re naked in front of cameras anymore. It used to take some cajoling to get girls to allow themselves to be photographed naked, but nowadays you’re likely to see a group of college girls flashing a shelf of webcams in Best Buy just in case one is hooked up.

Personally I am saddened by this. I mean of course I love to ogle naked female parts as much as anyone, but trying to talk girls into being photographed used to be a challenge that has of late become somewhat less challenging. My collection of compromising photos, all taken with permission, has lost some of its luster.

It saddens me, and makes me feel as though I come from a forgotten time.

Yes ladies, back in my day we had to pursue you for your nakedness. Now you guys post boob shots to the internet without any prodding at all. Maybe I’m just old fashioned, but its my opinion that if there’s anything a man needs, it is a challenge.

I am highly in favor of personal liberties, and I think if a consenting adult wants to share his or her naked body with other consenting adults then their right to do so should be supported with the full force of Lady Liberty’s own righteous green rack.

I just miss the secret covetous feeling of having a photograph that no one else has.

I retired to my mirrored room and pranced around with my ceremonial scimitars for a while, declaring over and over in a deep bellow that “I am the handsomest of the gentlemen” complete with ballet-like fluid arm gestures, but while it lifted my spirits, it did not dispel the feeling.

Then an associate of mine contacted me to ask if I’d like to go see a movie, and I replied with an uncharacteristic “yes”, even though I do not normally go on dates with dudes. He wanted to take in the film Kick-Ass, and I had been hearing around the neighborhood that it was really good. I remember distinctly the girl at the bike shop saying so.

The title certainly sounded like something I wanted to see. I cast my scimitars aside, looked it up on the interplops and watched the trailer.

“Oh,” I thought. “No, this isn’t something I really want to see.”

Still, I had made a date and I keep my word even when I don’t want to.

Honestly, it was a pretty original movie. Whatever else I think about it, they at least managed to make something that I hadn’t seen before. Never before, for instance, had I seen a teenaged girl kill so many people, or seen on screen a creepier father/daughter relationship than hers with her father.

More disturbingly, I had also not ever heard a girl of that age use language like the word that starts with the letter “C” and rhymes with “bunts”. I’ll be honest, it really wasn’t an enjoyable experience.

I do not consider myself a prudish person, and in fact I may have committed some fairly filthy acts in my time, but as an uncle to the sweetest, prettiest, smartest female child ever born (currently aged two) I was kind of appalled that a girl child that young would be allowed to say such a thing on camera, or at all.

The only time that word is appropriate is in the context of a movie like Trainspotting, I think, and that landscape is no place for a girl, her ass-kicking abilities notwithstanding.

I approve of her character being able to take care of herself and not fearing any attacker. I myself taught my sister the proper way to deliver a punch (something I regretted deeply after the fact), but the stabbing and the slicing and the needless hooker killing is too much for me.

Uncle/Niece Seal of Disapproval

I mean, why kill the hooker? Where’s the female-to-female courtesy? She’s already dressed horribly and consorting with lowlifes. I mean, how do you even know she’s in cahoots with those guys? She’s probably just there trying to make a buck, and her only crime apart from ones against good fashion sense was delivering the second worst line in the film after the C-word one.

It must be said, I’d also never imagined McLovin as a superhero, but I have heard him called the “fastest kid alive” so I guess he had the chops.

My last problem with this film is that it’s one of those where filmmakers pretend that you can trick a pretty girl into liking you. I realize this is only a movie and that no one is supposed to take it seriously, but there are millions of dorky teenaged males out there watching this and being influenced by it.

In the story, the hot girl somehow gets the idea that the main character is gay, and he plays along in order to spend time with her. Then, later, he confesses simultaneously, after breaking in to her room, that he is the superhero AND not gay, and she immediately has sex with him.

This next part is so important, I’m going to emphasize the whole thing by bumping up the font size.

Guys: listen up. This is you twenty years from now talking. Ignore what anyone tells you. Ignore what you see in this movie, in romantic comedies and in every sitcom ever produced. They are lying to you.

If you want to hook up with a girl, you have to go for her on that level from the start.

Do not befriend her and then reveal your feelings later on in some sort of big display. Trust me on this. It will not work.

Nine times out of ten, she already knows what your feelings are anyway. You are about as likely to compete with her on that level as she is likely to compete with you in sports or video games.

So anyway, points for originality in some ways, Kick Ass, even though I think you took a few missteps.

Now, if only I could sort out my own feelings, having gone on a date with a dude. Hm…

I drove to her apartment building and hunkered down in the lobby to wait for her to emerge wearing a trench coat, fedora, and huge dark sunglasses. I thought the concierge might have a thing or two to say about me lurking and having every appearance of a charlatan, but he merely regarded me briefly and went back to concierge-ing.

It would have been even more appropriate to appear swaddled entirely in animal skins and smeared with the ashes of a wood fire, but I didn’t think of that until too late, and anyway it was too cold to be prancing around barefoot.

It’s tough to find a casual shoe that matches animal skins.

Finally my associate came down and discovered me lurking in my hermit-away-from-hermitage getup, and then sat on me and hugged me and we were away.

You don't know me, you never saw me, I wasn't here, medium popcorn please.

The upshot of all this is that I finally saw Avatar in 3D this weekend. I’m glad I saw it before it left the big screen. I might have had some trouble making sure that not one of the Na’vi has nipples on my home TV. But no, they are completely nipple-free, which destroys one of my criteria for a good movie. Namely, naked girls.

James Cameron has wisely forced everyone to wear nerdy black spectacles when watching the movie, so that your subconscious nerd feels glad to be seeing scantily clad alien babes rather than full nude alien babes. It’s a swindle, people!

The movie does have a lot of flying creatures swooping around, which I am willing to accept as a stand-in for a car chase, and a lot of rounds of ammunition get fired off, so those two criteria are certainly met.

However, it also has a lot of the Papyrus font in the titles and subtitles, which rubs me slightly the wrong way, like getting a warm hug from someone who burps loudly at the end.

Still, it was good to see the film, and good to get out of the house, though I forced my associate to promise not to tell anyone I said that. I also drank a huge soda and ate popcorn, though I can still only chew with one side of my teeth thanks to my recent dental nightmare.

I was glad to get to use the soda cup filling robots in the theater as well. You use a touch screen to select the flavor of your future fatness, then press a huge button and the machine pees a finger-thick torrent of the stuff directly into your cup. It is marvelous. I bet kids love it.

All things considered, I had a great time and enjoyed the movie.

I assume there will be an “Empire Strikes Back” style sequel to come in the next few years, and I look forward to it as well.

I’ll go the animal skins and wood ash route for that one.

I’m still up in the air, you might say. Truthfully I am reserving judgment on whether or not I want to attempt it as a goal until I try my hand at high altitude tomfoolery on Kilimanjaro later in the year. For all I know, the weasels that inhabit my brain cavity and do all my thinking may explode at that altitude, causing me to expire.

Krakauer describes Kilimanjaro as “Physically grueling but technically undemanding”. I should be able to get some idea from my trip whether I would want to go a further two miles vertically, the difference in altitudes of Everest’s peak and Kilimanjaro’s. Yeah. Everest is truly staggeringly tall. I estimate that it is nearly as tall as my opinion of myself, something that has never been successfully scaled.

Meanwhile my friend Nick reports that he was recently in a helicopter a mere ten feet over the treetops doing wild banks and turns somewhere in an unnamed wilderness. He realized that he was going to have to spew his lunch, but didn’t want his companions in the chopper to know. So he reached into his pocket for his Nalgene bottle, unscrewed the cap, barfed discreetly into it, and secreted it away in his jacket again.

Son of a bitch, Nick is having more fun than I am!

But back to the lecture at hand. Since I am something of a font nerd, I was taken with the print in the Krakauer book, which I correctly guessed to be Caslon Pro.

It’s a great looking font. If I ever get to write a real deal book, I would like to have it printed in Caslon. It just looks so serious and groovy, like a tweed sport coat with leather patches at the elbows, which is how I require all my dates to dress themselves. I also demand that they smoke a pipe. I hope you’re listening, ladies.

So, I’m enjoying “Into Thin Air” and I recommend that anyone interested in Everest or breathing without a lot of oxygen read it as soon as they have time. If you’re wondering whether you might like to climb it someday, well, you probably shouldn’t.

More to the point, I probably shouldn’t.