Author: Rory

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News Team, Assemble!

Taking part in table quizzes is one of my favourite activities. It allows me to display my two great virtues: always wanting to show off how much I know, and being a really sore loser. Sadly I was only able to really demonstrate one of those virtues yesterday, as the Channel 6 News Team scored a massive victory and humiliated the opposition. They got served! (did I mention I’m also a sore winner?)

We took our team name from Anchorman, and in the spirit of acting like idiots for the sake of entertainment each of us took on the persona of one of the original Channel 6 team. As I was the team member with the strongest fondness for lamp I became Brick Tamland, weather. This suited me well as I have an IQ of 48 and am what some people call “mentally retarded”. Still, in between putting spoonfuls of mayonnaise in the toaster I think I managed to get some answers right. Fantastic!

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On Matters of Interest

It occurs to me that having redirected the feed from Soylent Red to here, people are going to miss the post over there about over here. So here it is:

It’s been a long time coming, but I can now finally declare that Soylent Red is dead. It may protest otherwise, but it will be stone dead in a moment. It’s been nailed to the perch for a while, and will soon be pushing up daisies.

Fear not, however. For one thing, fear is an inappropriate response to the death of a blog. For another, I’ve started a new blog. It’s at roryparle.com, which is a domain that I’ve had lying around for a bit. It has the great advantage of running on a blogging system that was not written by me, which means I don’t have to be the poor fool who fixes things when they inevitably go wrong. Huzzah! This should mean more frequent posting because I will no longer be approaching the composition of a blog post with the trepidation ordinarily reserved for man with magnets strapped to his body walking into a knife shop.

I’ll get onto sorting out feed redirects in a moment, but if you want to be sure not to miss anything you can subscribe to the feed directly.

This site will remain up, but stagnant, for the foreseeable future.

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Platoon

I’ve just taken another significant step on the road from fake movie buff (“I love movies, me.” “What do you think of the Godfather trilogy?” “Um, yeah, I’ve been meaning to see those.”) to real movie buff. Platoon has sat on my DVD shelf for the last half year, ever since my last abortive effort to see it was scuppered by the shoddy workmanship of the Chinese DVD manufacturing industry (“Yarrr!”). Back then I settled for a long-overdue re-watching of Se7en, the better known sequel to S6x, to meet my John C. McGinley-viewing needs.

Still, the urge to see Platoon remained, so it got thrown on the DVD pile during one of my then-frequent purchasing sprees. And there it remained until today. I was looking through the available films on ScreenClick (our poor-man’s Netflix) compiling my wishlist, when I realised that I had an unwatched classic sitting on the shelf.

Not just one classic, actually. Today’s viewing was a toss-up between Platoon and Goodfellas—I know, I know, I suck at movies.

So that’s how my Sunday evening turned into a viewing of a bloody war movie filled with death, and guns, and War-is-Hell, and betrayal, and honor, and deceit, and that one guy with a massive scar, and McGinley—I swear to God this is true—saying the line, “Hey their Bob-o,” in exactly the same way he delivers it in Scrubs, and napalm, and the quiet religious guy who goes crazy.

Now I don’t want to give that whole spiel of an introduction and then finish with a one-line review. So I’ll do a two-line review instead. Here it is:

Well worth the wait.

Best. Death. Ever.

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Yes Please

Regular readers may know that I’m something of a fan of one Danny Wallace. Not just a fan, actually, but a subject—Danny is the king of his own micronation, The Kingdom of Lovely, of which I am a citizen. He’s also The Leader of my not-cult, Join Me (it’s not a cult; it’s a collective).

Danny has a new book out, called Friends Like These. It’s about a quest (oh yes! another one!) to track down a bunch of old friends Danny went to school with twenty years ago. To promote the book, the Danny Wallace Appreciation Society group on Facebook ran a competition in which people were asked to submit their stories of how one of Danny’s previous books—Yes Man—had affected them.

It seems I won. Nice one. I look forward to the copy of Friends Like These I won to join the other two I accidentally pre-ordered.

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Yak Shaving

I just re-discovered a wonderful term I hadn’t heard in many years: yak shaving. Seth Godin has a great description of the concept:

Yak Shaving is the last step of a series of steps that occurs when you find something you need to do. “I want to wax the car today.”

“Oops, the hose is still broken from the winter. I’ll need to buy a new one at Home Depot.”

“But Home Depot is on the other side of the Tappan Zee bridge and getting there without my EZPass is miserable because of the tolls.”

“But, wait! I could borrow my neighbor’s EZPass…”

“Bob won’t lend me his EZPass until I return the mooshi pillow my son borrowed, though.”

“And we haven’t returned it because some of the stuffing fell out and we need to get some yak hair to restuff it.”

And the next thing you know, you’re at the zoo, shaving a yak, all so you can wax your car.

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Spelunking

Pushy Guy
Sir, would you like to join the caving society?
Acquiescent Guy
No, thank you.
Pushy Guy
Come on, it’ll be fun!
Acquiescent Guy
Okay…
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