ginzo

My last coaster was the left side of Space Mountain at Magic Kingdom. The next coaster I'm going to ride is the Cornball Express.

Fail. There's nothing wrong with giving a little support to another site member. It's called "courtesy". I really liked the film and thought it was one of the better films I've seen in the past few years. Ellen Page was brilliant. She effortlessly fell into her role and gave Juno a rather uncommon dose of charisma. I also really enjoyed the soundtrack and some of the dialog. Since I'm a huge Arrested Development nerd, I'm bound to love any movie with both Michael Cera & Jason Bateman in it. I was sad that they didn't share any scenes together. Does Juno fall into the august domain of my very favorite films? Nope. It's definitely not in the same league as The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, et al. But Juno is really good, really original, and I personally found very few flaws in it.

This was very true of our trip to the Mason GWL during the weekend. We only got 2 rides on the Proslide Rocket, the main reason we had for going to GWL, because the lines for it just SUCKED. The line almost reached the bottom of the stairs at one point. The only reason we got a second cycle was we ran to the Rocket first thing Sunday morning. We got one cycle in and by the time we got off the line was already at least 30 minutes long. Totally unacceptable for what they charge. The lodge wasn't even that crowded when we went. I can't imagine how much it sucks on the really busy weekends. We also had to wait quite a while to get rafts at one point and had to fight off some pretty aggressive people trying to jump line. We also had to wait a good 30 minutes when we got there only to be told that our room wasn't ready yet. They really need to fix this process. Maybe they could get a self-check-in kiosk or something.

There were at least a dozen foreigners on the TPR Midwest trip who know of Stricker's Grove. I found it very tough to finally make it to Stricker's Grove for one of their two "OPEN" days. Independence Day usually involved other plans and I also never wanted to be overwhelmed by the summer crowds at the other Ohio parks in August, so I never traveled to Ohio that time of year. Maybe they should move one of the open days to earlier in the season. Doesn't the difficulty in getting the Stricker's Grove credits make them more desirable than they would be if the park had more regular operating hours?

Speaking of visors, I want one exactly like this: I've searched and haven't found any nearly that cool.

Two things: 1) Don't skip Mind Bender. It's at least as good as Goliath. Be sure to get at least one cycle in the very back and one in the very front. The back seat has awesome drops and high forces in the loops, while the front has ejector air coming up the hills. 2) If you hear banjo music, run! Edit: If your parents have a problem with paying for 2 nights in a hotel, try this place: http://www.motel6.com/reservations/motel_map.aspx?num=4111 We stayed here when we went to SFOG. It's not a luxury hotel, but it's newer and is very clean with modern fixtures. Definitely one of the nicer budget hotels I've stayed in.

Hahaha. This is great.

Oh is it really rough now? Wow, that sucks. Don't know from personal experience yet, but many people have reported that.

It's a shame this coaster is a death machine. It looks like a neat design and the outside looks fantastic.

^Ha. The sad thing is he said he'd been on both coasters. I don't know how anyone could have ridden both and not noticed that Nitro has a ton more air. It's not even a matter of opinion or anything. Granted Nitro just has a bunch of floater air, there's still way more of it than MF will ever have.

Ugh. I deal with malware problems at work all the time. It's amazing the number of customers have infected machines that wind up flooding out their network connections. They then call the provider (aka me) and complain that their connection is slow. We just had a case last week where we had to bill a customer to help him find the PC that was messing everything up. Macs can be a solution on an individual basis, but they are NOT a solution to the overall problem. If Mac became the predominant platform, then the sociopathic idiots who code all this crap would just start writing more malware that infects Macs.

I'm not sure that's a valid statement, to be honest; speaking as someone who doesn't live in the United States I'm not hugely enthusiastic about visiting your country around either of the two public days; the July 4th weekend costs a small fortune in flight tickets, and August is way too hot for those of us used to western Europe. How many overseas people have even heard of Stricker's Grove? I think you're one of like 5. Your situation is quite singular and not cause for Stricker's to drastically alter their operating schedule. It's a VERY local park. Heck, I think most people in this area barely know it exists. Why don't you send them an email? Maybe they'll get a kick out of someone from so far away wanting to ride their coasters and make some sort of special arrangement for you.

Mr. Potato Head looks great. I couldn't help but think about that Slate.com article where the author said AAs would be phased out within 10 years. WRONG Robotics technology is getting better and better and that means Disney will build better and better AAs. Is there anything on the drawing board to build a US ride that uses the Tokyo Pooh ride system? To me it seems awfully silly to spend 10s of millions of dollars to develop a ride system that you use twice.

Although we really enjoyed Wizard Quest, we wound up not doing Magiquest. It was really neat how Wizard Quest was set up in its own little maze where you had to do things like climb inside fake trees to find stuff. Magiquest, like you said, just seemed like scavenging around the hotel, which is a lot less immersive. With as huge as GWL is, you'd think they could make a dedicated area to the game.

The so-called re-theming of the former Paramount Parks is one of the most hilariously disinterested efforts I've seen. It reminds me of that cult classic film "Repo Man" where everything is generic. The main character opens up his fridge and it's full of cans labeled "food". That's about the level Cedar Fair is running these parks at when they're calling coasters "Flight Deck" and drop rides "Drop Tower". The effort is so bad it almost seems like a prank steeped in the mischievous tradition of the great Andy Kaufman. I had big hopes for Kings Island when the buy out was announced, but Cedar Fail hasn't done one good thing with the park yet. So far they've just taken Paramount's half-baked efforts to create themed attractions and crudely smashed them into generic parodies of their former selves.

^Ha. Maddox inspires civil discourse? Maddox is quite good at what he does: Writing comedic rants. I wouldn't really take him as a serious essayist on the issue though. Here is my favorite part of what he wrote on the subject:

^^There's a nice book on the history of Coney Island that has a lot of really nice pictures. I never purchased the book because it's been pretty expensive whenever I've seen it in B&N. http://www.amazon.com/Cincinnatis-Coney-Island-Charles-Jacques/dp/0961439289/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1208692958&sr=8-1

http://www.greatwolflodge.com/Locations/Mason/checklist/index.aspx I checked the Grapevine, TX location and the policy was the same except that the wristbands were $30. I'd really hope that they aren't selling the waterpark wristbands to anyone who walks in as this defeats the idea of paying for a fairly expensive room in order to get exclusive waterpark access.

Well you don't have to stay the night, but you do have to buy a room. I think that GWL guests can get you in for $20 though.

I stayed at GWL in Mason last weekend and had a similar experience with their two biggest slides up top. The capacity is HORRIBLE. The line for the Proslide Rocket was consistently 45-60 minutes. And they run their Rocket in total weaksauce no airtime mode. After hearing how great Deluge at SFKK was, I was thoroughly disappointed with this. One of the Crush 'n Gusher slides completely destroys GWL's Rocket. Overall, it's a pretty nice place: big rooms, nice slides. But it's not some place I'd want to go back because there's just not that much to do after you've been there for a few hours.

Sounds more in my price range than a $6 pretzel.

Hahahaha. Was that the guy who said that "based on this POV, I don't see how Nitro could have any airtime"?

A ~100% meat diet deviates far from standard dietary guidelines. You can't get the recommended 20-25 g/day of fiber by eating only meat. Fruits & vegetables also contain antioxidants that you can't get from meat. So, yeah you could live off of meat alone, but you'd be putting yourself at increased risk of cancer and heart disease and probably some other nasty disease states.

$6 for a pretzel, especially a mediocre theme park pretzel, is rape. So join me in not buying that particular item. I imagine they have some sort of snacks that are more reasonably priced.

The skill of the photographer matters much more than the equipment that they use. Someone with skill can take good pictures with any modern camera. A $10,00 camera will never make me take pictures as well as Ansel Adams did. Fancy cameras are basically toys that make the job a little bit easier. You only need an SLR if you're taking shots of things in motion, like, say, a moving coaster train. Or little kids that run around a lot.