"On July 5, Pamela Guillen, 40, reportedly suffered a severe subdural haematoma and brain compression after hitting her head multiple times on the X2’s headrest during the [roller coaster] ride."

"She began vomiting and lost consciousness before being rushed to the hospital... Surgeons removed part of her skull to relieve pressure on her brain. She regained consciousness two weeks after the ride and has since had to relearn how to walk and talk.... Six days later Naomi Greer-Wilkinson suffered a traumatic brain injury after riding the X2. Greer-Wilkinson, a 25-year-old from Los Angeles... remains in a coma, connected to a ventilator and feeding tube.... Christopher Hawley, 22, died in June 2022 after hitting his head multiple times against the back of the seat while riding the X2. After finishing the ride, he fell to the ground and became unconscious. When doctors treating Hawley removed part of his skull, they found his brain was so swollen it was bulging out of an opening they made to relieve the pressure...."

From "Two women suffered brain injuries after rollercoaster rides/The X2 rollercoaster at Six Flags Magic Mountain, California, is marketed for the 'ultimate daredevil'" (London Times).

"Soren Kierkegaard, the 19th-century Danish philosopher and father of existentialism, saw in the fear of heights a metaphor for all human anxiety."

"Standing at a precipice, Kierkegaard imagined, a person becomes instantly and acutely aware of their power to jump — and with it, the dizzying breadth of human freedom...."

Writes Chris Hippensteel, in "To Confront My Fear of Heights, I Crossed a Chasm on a Cable/A jittery hiker signed up for a via ferrata tour on the cliffs of an Adirondacks gorge. Here’s what he learned on the ledges, rungs and exposed bridges" (NYT gift link).

"Despite their dramatic vertical settings, via ferratas are, in terms of technical difficulty, not that far removed from a playground jungle gym. Climbers are harnessed in along the entire route, keeping at least one carabiner clipped to the safety cable at all times. Though the danger is limited, the exposure is not — exactly the type of challenge I was seeking...."

So it's like a roller coaster or a horror movie — packaged, safe fear. You're not really experiencing what  Kierkegaard was talking about because you've got a harness and are always clipped to the cable. You don't have the freedom to jump.

If he had the chance — did he? — would Kierkegaard ride a roller coaster?

"Euthanasia Coaster is a hypothetical euthanasia machine in the form of a roller coaster, engineered to humanely—with elegance and euphoria—take the life of a human being."

(Euthanasia Coaster from Julijonas Urbonas.)

"... either for dealing with overpopulation or if your life becomes... too long."

Ridiculous WaPo headline + photo combination.

"A detached Romney tends wounds in seclusion after failed White House bid"?

He doesn't look detached or wounded and he's obviously not in seclusion while riding a roller coaster. The text emotes:

Gone are the minute-by-minute schedules and the swarm of Secret Service agents. There’s no aide to make his peanut-butter-and-honey sandwiches. Romney hangs around the house, sometimes alone, pecking away at his iPad and e-mailing his CEO buddies who have been swooping in and out of La Jolla to visit. He wrote to one who’s having a liver transplant soon: “I’ll change your bedpan, take you back and forth to treatment.”

The media never got Romney, did they? WaPo is presenting "I’ll change your bedpan" as abject and pathetic. Are they only pretending not to understand or does it truly escape them?

A walkable roller coaster.

Here.

And here's a bike-able roller coaster.

"You can have a roller coaster ride with a nice guy in a sweater."

Dita Von Teese.

"The Goracle's powers seem to come from his ability to scare the bejesus out of people."

"'We must face up to this urgent and unprecedented threat to the existence of our civilization,' he said. And: 'This is the most serious challenge the world has ever faced.' And: It 'could completely end human civilization, and it is rushing at us with such speed and force.'... Oil demand: 'This roller coaster is headed for a crash, and we're in the front car.' Polar ice: 'Like a beating heart, and the permanent ice looks almost like blood spilling out of a body along the eastern coast of Greenland.'"

We were talking about khat, and Kev said...

"I thought khat-blogging had kind of gone out of style lately."

I thought I'd do a post with a LOLcat, saying something on this theme, so I went to Flickr to find a picture of a cat, and I got pleasantly distracted by this comment on the photograph that I blogged yesterday. Screen grab:



See? The commenter — jjmadison — has a cat face avatar and his comment — "wow, all that on two packs of Splenda??" — continues the drug theme. Ah! My drug of choice is synchronicity. I'm high on it now. I'm even singing: Oh! Oh! Oh!

Not really, but I do have to shout above the din of my Rice Krispies.

Now, somewhat giddy, I do still want to make that LOLcat, and I search my Flickr photographs for "cat." But I haven't been good about labels over there, and the collection of "cat"-labeled photos seems a bit absurd. There's a latte with a foam cat face. A picture of a poster that says "Don't Shoot the Cat." There's the very young me with a cat and my same-age son with a cat:



[ADDED: Yes, Chris is holding a "Hilter cat" and we were just talking about Facebook groups like "G-D BLESS HITLER," but stay away from the Nazi synchronicity. The brown-shirt acid that is circulating around us is not specifically too good.]

There are the pages from my Amsterdam sketchbook about the Cat Museum — the Katten Kabinet. There are some bat orts.

Most absurd, there is a set of LOLcats, made from photos taken of paused — pawsed — frames from the movie "La Dolce Vita."

What was that all about? Don't you remember back on August 11, 2007, when TRex said "Every time I look in over [at Althouse], something so weird is going on that I feel like I just bumbled on to the set of a Fellini film," and I was all:

"Im in ur hair/Lickin ur i"
"Im ur soul/gettin outta heer"
"Ur head/my roller coaster"
"Im ur/windsheeled wipurrz"

But these Rice Krispies were enough, and I don't want an egg at this hour. So I look to you, dear readers, to pick up Kev's khat-blogging theme and make some LOLcats. You can make them here, and you can email them to me at annalthouse (at) gmail (dot) com.

I'd love to pass out some of the Althouse blog drugs: frontpaging and tags.

And I'm hoping TRex will bumble over here and see that something weird is going on. And also that something crawls from the slime at the bottom of a dark Scottish lake.

UPDATE: From Lem:



AND: From Zachary Paul Sire:



AND: From Palladian:



From Kev (who started all this):

On the Santa Monica pier.

The amusement park:



Things you might not notice unless you go to the enlargement: pigeons on the roller coaster, toddler has a red squirt gun, the man in front is not eating a hot dog (but a striated pastry of some sort).

Note: We see men in shorts here, but I don't disapprove. It's the beach and the shorts are longish. Many men are wearing heavy blue jeans, which seems unwise. I think the striated pastry guy has the best fashion sense: lightweight, light-colored, long pants.

The merry-go-round:



The Lobster — a pretty good restaurant, with a great view:

The 50-foot Michael Jackson robot...

It roams around the desert and shoots laser beams. Shouldn't there be a Colossus of Las Vegas? We need more wonders of the modern world. The eastern United States has its Statue of Liberty. Why not something to express the spirit of the West?

For a depiction of a colossal Michael Jackson, go to 3:54 in this old video. Perhaps the Las Vegas project will have our robo-Michael busting out of a roller coaster cage. I love the way that video represents Jackson as the victim of our crazy ideas about him, with the poor man breaking free of the amusement park we made out of him.

The folk literature of those who choose not to exercise their right to remain silent.

It's the People’s Voluntary Disclosure Form, the VDF:

For many people, the urge to explain, if not to confess, is as urgent as it was for Raskolnikov in “Crime and Punishment.”

“My name is Paul Cortez,” is the Melvillian first sentence of the V.D.F. statement handwritten by Mr. Cortez, a yoga teacher who is awaiting trial as the suspect in the fatal stabbing of a dancer in her Upper East Side apartment.

What follows is a three-page roller coaster ride of love, sex and betrayal, culminating in an alibi. On the day of the victim’s death, Mr. Cortez wrote, “I knew something was wrong, so I called back several times.” When she didn’t answer, he called clients, watched a football game with a friend, “then read a little and went to bed. The next morning about 10:30 I found out from my mom Catherine was Dead.”

The last word, “Dead,” is capitalized for emphasis.

Prosecutors love to have defendants volunteer an alibi because it shows what they call “consciousness of guilt.”...

“Everybody talks,” said Daniel J. Castleman, chief of investigations for the Manhattan district attorney. “Almost nobody doesn’t talk. And the reason for that is that people think they can either talk their way out of it or mitigate the crime. It’s human nature.”

Human nature. Without it, there'd be no crime in the first place. The defense lawyers will keep their jobs, and they will tear their hair out forever over all those confessions. Go ahead. Confess! It's good for the soul. But that's not why they're doing it -- according to Castleman. People think they can either talk their way out of it.

Cedar Point.

Last month, when I was planning my drive out to Ithaca and back, lots of readers advised me to take a quick detour from I-90 and go to the roller coaster paradise at Cedar Point. I didn't. But Rick Lee did and has the pictures to prove it.