I Thumb Through Your Magazines

It's been a while since I've written anything here. A while for me, anyway. I guess three days without an entry isn't much for some people.

On Sunday night, bethje and I watched I Spit on Your Grave. Honestly, I found the latter part of the film a bit difficult to swallow. After these four guys rape, beat, and try to kill this woman, they're not at all on their guard around her. She can easily lure them into situations that allow her to exact slow, exaggerated revenge. I guess the point was that these guys were such stupid chauvinists that they'd never suspect a woman could hurt them, but I still had trouble buying how dumb they were.

On Monday, we made our first visit of the year to Great Adventure. We had already paid for season passes, and picked them up at the park. While season passes are a good value, they're somewhat annoying in that they make me feel obligated to visit the park often, even when I really don't want to. It's like making a chore out of something that should be fun. A lot of things end up working out that way for me.

Anyway, the new roller coaster, Kingda Ka, was running. Well, sort of. We decided that would be the first thing we would ride, but when we got there, a security guard said they were having technical difficulties, and the wait could end up being around five hours. Fortunately, it turned out not to take that long, but it was still annoying to wait there while the thing wasn't even running. Finally, they started it up again, and we made it to the front of the line, and boarded the ride. Then they had ANOTHER problem, and they made us get off again. By the time we actually got to ride, it had been over two and a half hours since we started waiting. I've waited that long for rides in the past, but it doesn't bug me quite as much when the ride is actually moving.

The ride itself was fun, if short. Even though it had the longest, steepest drop in the park (and in the world, if their advertising is to be believed), I didn't really think it was as scary as some other roller coasters, because there isn't that much build-up. At the beginning, they start you off at a high speed, and the train climbs the first hill (the big one) really quickly. The track also twists, so you don't get much of a sense of perspective. At the top, you can see how high up you are for a split second before you drop down. I think coasters are scarier when you get a good sense of just how high up you're going, and how far you're going to drop. Still, it was definitely a fun ride. I just hope that, next time we go there, they've worked out all the bugs. Really, when a ride has THAT many technical difficulties, you have to wonder why they're bothering to run it at all.

After leaving Kingda Ka, we rode on the teacups and the carousel. We were going to ride Superman, but that was also having technical difficulties and temporarily not running. (Maybe we just picked a bad day to go.) The last thing we got a chance to ride was Skull Mountain, because a storm suddenly came up. There was thunder, lightning, and heavy rain. As far as we could tell, all the rides were closed, so we ended up leaving. Driving back to Beth's house was somewhat difficult, what with the torrential downpour. We eventually made it back, though, after stopping for dinner at Applebee's. I had a bacon cheeseburger (which was okay, but not great; Ruby Tuesday has much better burgers), and the Apple Chimicheesecake (which was quite good) for dessert.

Back at Beth's, we watched Bend It Like Beckham, and then went to bed. I had some dreams about going back to college. Then I got up to take Beth to the bus stop, and then went back to bed, and had a dream where I thought I had broken Beth's DVD player.