If you grab him by the angles and give a good tug before you start to twirl....
You can get some SERIOUS distance!!!!
Seriously though, yeah I'm making a note to my admins to keep an eye out for hacks that add hooks to the showthread_query to be sure they do that.
Either way I'm VERY glad they added that, it'll allow me to do SOO many of my custom hacks without editting the file
Just wish they had something similiar for the postbits in PMs