Weightless Trip to Nowhere Yields Thrills, Nausea
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Fancy an airplane trip that takes you nowhere, costs about &#36;3,000, and may make you vomit?
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I met an old friend for coffee in San Francisco yesterday afternoon, and had a few hours to kill before stopping in at the Wired reunion party. I didn't want to drive back to Berkeley because the weather was so crummy, and I was just across teh street from a movie theater and was just in time for the start of a movie that lots of people had been telling me to see. So I went. The movie -- The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I had no idea what it was about until the movie started, then I remembered hearing a Fresh Air show about it and finding it too painful to listen to. Now here I was in the theater, not just being asked to listen to it, but being asked to live it. Through some very wonderful film-making, you feel as if what is happening to the main character is happening to you. Or more accurately, probably, you get the slightest hint of what it's like to be this person. My immediate impulse, one which I gave serious consideration to, was to pack up my things and leave. Anything would be better than spending three hours living this guy's life.  Two things happen over time: 1. You get over it. 2. They change perspective, and instead of being inside his body, you move outside it.  I think those two things are the story we all live as we mature and learn to live inside our own bodies, with their limits. You learn to step outside and see the humor in your predicament. The main character says he lives in a diving bell because it's as hard for him to communicate with other people as it would be at the bottom of the ocean inside a diving bell. The movie teaches that it's not much easier for the rest of us, even though we can manipulate symbols better. On the other hand, of course it is. The film develops a relationship between the hero and his father, between the hero and his own children, his ex-wife, his lover.  We strive for deeper understanding of ourselves and each other. But it may be ridiculously easy to find the only meaning that exists, without language, without intellect, by just being. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly should probably be the picture of the year for 2007, it's that good. But like all great art it shows you something truthful about yourself, and you may or may not want to see it.
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Visiting Supermax, the "Alcatraz of the Rockies," reveals nothing so much as an astonishing and eerie quiet.
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Feel like a fish out of water? You may not be too far off.
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After a ride of some 50 miles straight up, SpaceShipOne paused poetically in the weightless black above the Mojave Desert.
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Get a peek at a pack of new flying games that will send your spirit soaring or make you sick to your stomach.
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Got a terminal illness? Hooray. In the movies, looming death means last-minute adventures and loads of uplifting life lessons
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Steven Soderbergh's unabashedly trivial sequel may be slim pickings, but when it works, it's a blast.
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It has been well recorded that the mid-nineties are best known for sudden popularity of independent cinema, but independent from what? The term "indie" is as slippery when applied to films as it is to music. The studio at the vanguard of this "revolution" was Miramax, which was long a subsidiary of Disney, and as for the "revolution" itself, it unleashed more painful and derivative Pulp Fiction clones than it did anything truly revolutionary. It was bled dry, turned inside out, repackaged, and sold back to the masses until it became the paradigm of unhipness. This seems to be the nature of all revolutions, from the Soviets to the Sixties; the bullshit always comes full circle.     While it's easy to be cynical of all so-called revolutions in hindsight, what one can't be cynical about is the intense enthusiasm audiences had for the so-called independent cinema of this era. To every person who ever dreamed of being in the director's chair, it seemed like all one needed to have the new hit movie was a vast knowledge of pop culture, the ability to write pages worth of rambling dialogue, and a Visa card.
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Unsuspecting residents are lured in by shiny, foreign objects that unleash a self-replicating worm and bring the virtual world to a grinding halt. In Game|Life.
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SIT down, strap yourself in and get ready for the thrill of a lifetime - again and again and again.  If you're fearless and just live for an adrenaline rush, then Britain's theme parks have some of the fastest, scariest and most gravity-defying rides in the world.
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In a wise new novel, life happens, haphazardly
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The spooky thriller 'White Noise' is too static to offer real thrills.
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Christian Bale's 63-pound weight loss makes this bleak thriller one of the few movies to scale the barrier between chilly fantasy and authentic cinematic nightmare.
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Daredevil jumpers might soon have a new rush to add to their repertoire: diving from great heights and making a safe landing without a parachute.
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Astronauts have long known that space travel is a good way to diet. The excitement of launch. Thrilling vistas seen from Earth orbit. Floating weightless. Maybe a touch of motion sickness. Who can eat at a time like that?
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They thought they'd never feel the adrenaline rush again. They were young, athletic, and the thrills they found in sailing a boat, fast, in conditions that put them right on the edge -- adrenaline conditions -- had been among those losses they experienced when accidents robbed them of physical function.