Yesterday I blew off work and joined my buddy Chris for some roller coaster action. We decided weeks ago that we wanted to go out to our local theme park, Six Flags over Georgia, and ride some coasters this summer. Chris manages his schedule with ruthless efficiency, so he put it on the schedule for yesterday and planned accordingly.

I manage my schedule with feckless buffoonery, so I wrote it down and immediately forgot about it.

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.

In the process of writing today’s post, I googled for a hilarious thing to link the words “avert your eyes” to.

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.

Last night, a strange sensation overcame me. I felt decidedly odd, but was not able to determine the source of it. It wasn’t a bad feeling, precisely, or a good one; just odd.

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.

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…

An associate of mine, who shall remain nameless because I let slip to her some sensitive hermitage-related details, successfully talked me into leaving my lair and viewing a film on Saturday night. I figured I was going to be the recipient of some hermit-related chiding, so I decided to head that off at the pass.

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.

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 am reading “Into Thin Air” by Jon Krakauer, about his trip up Everest. Its a pretty amazing book, and it is serving the purpose for which I bought it. That purpose was to decide if I wanted to someday attempt to summit Everest or not.

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.