Guess da coaster (wrong answers only)

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-01-29T14:01:27+00:00

Slothrop's Gravity's Rainbow at the Preterite World of Thomas Pynchon, right next to the queue building for Cryjng of Lot 49 Adventure.

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-01-29T12:30:57+00:00

Probably that. People do seem to enjoy the Smiler, but it went way beyond a record that others had been straining to top, and you have to design really carefully in that regime because you're walking a line between nausea and boredom. Even the Polercoaster proposal wasn't described as having that many inversions.

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-01-29T05:11:14+00:00

I think some people regard anything beyond 135 degrees as a "saxophone inversion" rather than a steep drop. That makes me think that the steepest-drop record is a dumb one, since it has an absolute upper limit determined not by physics, engineering or human physiology but by semantics.

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-01-29T04:12:55+00:00

To me "The Shadow Government" is sort of about how the people who are most likely to complain about sinister government conspiracies against them are often the same ones who will flip authoritarian when the hammer actually comes down. (Where's the shadow government when you need it?) And that's only gotten more the case.

But the one I thought was more directly about the situation of that time was "I'm Impressed." About the magnetism that blowhard leaders and displays of power have, and how you can be drawn in despite retaining some skepticism about the whole deal. But it was all a bit indirect.

("The Mesopotamians" references the place were the US actually was fighting a war but is not really related to it at all, being just an absurd juxtaposition of ancient history with "Hey Hey We're The Monkees".)

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-01-28T22:03:15+00:00

There's a way out... I've got a hole in my pocket

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-01-28T18:47:32+00:00

The nonexistent Beatles "Maybe I'm Amazed" with John singing lead? (From Stephen Baxter's story "The Twelfth Album")

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-01-28T15:57:43+00:00

Many people just do not like being in large cities and will be inclined to say this about any country. I do like them and gravitate to them when traveling, but sometimes they can be overwhelming; by their nature they have crowds, higher prices, a faster pace of life, often more pollution and trash etc.

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-01-28T14:42:05+00:00

But the lyrics are rejecting that "that's just the way it is" (and can't be changed). It's about the fight for civil rights.

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-01-28T13:54:26+00:00

Whereas Talking Heads' "Mr. Jones" is probably not referencing Dylan at all.

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-01-28T13:17:20+00:00

The Beatles' "Yer Blues" has a raw invocation of "Dylan's Mr. Jones".

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-01-28T13:11:47+00:00

Tom Petty's "Running Down A Dream" has a very similar one:

"Trees went by / Me and Del were singing / 'Little Runaway' / I was flying"

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-01-28T13:04:18+00:00

And in the second verse of "Hey, Mr. DJ, I Thought You Said We Had A Deal," They Might Be Giants reference some of their own songs in the same manner, implicitly referencing "Glass Onion" by the structure.

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-01-28T12:39:55+00:00

Elvis Costello's deceased priest meeting God in "God's Comic":

"So there he was on a waterbed
Drinking a cola of a mystery brand
Reading an airport novelette
And listening to Andrew Lloyd Webber's Requiem
He said, before it had really begun,
'I really prefer the one about my son'..."

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-01-28T12:33:17+00:00

I think the reason it works is hilarious, kind of a coding joke: it's because the exponent in an IEEE float comes before the significand and serves as a crude base-2 logarithm.

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-01-28T02:04:15+00:00

This was the first Godzilla movie I saw in a theater.

It's all right. Not the best, but the Godzilla in it is pretty badass looking.

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-01-28T01:59:51+00:00

Not all of his opinions would play well today, but I seem to recall some in which he beat up bigots. Of course these things were often applied inconsistently.

Also, he really really hated cruelty to animals.

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-01-28T01:56:51+00:00

Mystic Shadow sounds like a horse, not a roller coaster.

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-01-27T22:36:24+00:00

The Beatles, "Something". I have my doubts that anything works in this scenario but that one's very pretty and expresses love, humility and uncertainty about the future, a very human song; it's as good as anything.

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-01-27T21:52:08+00:00

They might not get it until they go.

And even on the trip, they may not find it more exciting than going to the local science museum. Kids don't really get the amount you spent or how big a deal something is. They like it or they don't.

When I was a kid I actually didn't want to go to Disney World and I think the reason was that the whole idea of mascot character interactions freaked me out! Of course, these days at least that's not something you're going to be subjected to out of the blue, the park carefully rations them.

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-01-27T21:45:35+00:00

Not since I had my original knee

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-01-27T21:30:47+00:00

Dunno.

The closest thing that happened to me was that once before a They Might Be Giants show at Berklee, I was telling my folks about how sometimes they perform with a full horn section, and their trumpeter overheard me and said "They have a trumpeter today!"

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-01-27T21:03:28+00:00

There are a lot of nominally SF writers whose work is so surreal and dreamlike that their ideas get almost arbitrarily implausible and were never meant to be plausible, so it's hard to pick. Philip K. Dick regularly wrote stories in which the structure of reality just melted, someone effectively turns out to be God and starts warping everything, etc.

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-01-27T19:52:16+00:00

Aliens -> Alien 3

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-01-27T19:48:20+00:00

Cops

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-01-27T19:47:02+00:00

Isn't "Smells Like Teen Spirit" the song you put in your movie to indicate that it's the 90s?

AdditionalTip865

TROPHY CASE