Author: Rory

It’s better than the last two. Not that that’s such a huge achievement. Supporting cast was uniformly excellent. Cruise was Cruise. You know he’s good, even if his crazy antics make you not want to admit it.

I’ve added a very rudimentary photo gallery over there in the navigation sidebar. The page just shows thumbnails of my recent posts to Flickr sorted with most recent first. I decided to make it live straight away rather than wait until I’ve put more polish on it because, let’s face it, how likely am I to put more than the absolute minimum work into it?

Reading blogs is my World of Warcraft

I’ve just realised that I’ve had a link sitting in my bookmarks toolbar for about a month waiting for me to post it here. It’s a video of an Audi ad done in the style of MC Escher. It’s worth checking out if you haven’t already seen it.

I know that this is all over the blog world right now but just in case you’ve missed it so far I would urge you to check out Stephen Colbert’s speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

I had never heard of Colbert or his show The Colbert Report before yesterday. The Colbert Report is apparently an American satirical current affairs progaramme along the lines of The Daily Show. His speech tears into Bush without mercy, and POTUS and his supporters, sitting only meters away, are clearly not amused.

Everybody asks for personnel changes. So the White House has personnel changes. Then you write, "Oh, they’re just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic." First of all, that is a terrible metaphor. This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg!

There’s a full transcript online at Daily Kos.

Last week I met a friend of mine who I hadn’t seen in a while. By some route we ended up talking about that Family Guy episode where Peter wishes he had his own theme music. At the time I wasn’t able to decide what my own theme music should be, but that’s been solved by the Blog Things theme song quiz:

Your Theme Song is Back in Black by AC/DC

"Back in black, I hit the sack,
I’ve been too long, I’m glad to be back"

Things sometimes get really crazy for you, and sometimes you have to get away from all the chaos. But each time you stage your comeback, it’s even better than the last!

It turns out much fun can be had by co-opting the cards that come with pictionary for your own games. After a standard game in which Gary and I frankly obliterated Karl and Laura we decided to find some other uses for those little cards that tell you what to draw.

Charades has always been one of our most hilarity-inducing games, so we set about miming as many things from a single card as we could in a minute. Each card has ten things listed on it but the closest any of us got to that was eight, when I got a particularly easy set of things to mime. The worst any of us did was when I had decided to mime the things in the order they appeared on the card rather than skipping the hard ones. It turns out 60 seconds is not long enough to mime "boy scout", so I got a big fat zero.

Having exhausted ourselves laughing at a you-had-to-be-there comment from Karl, no-one wanted to stand up to mime. So we switched to password, where you have to describe the word you’re given without using the word itself. That proved easier than miming and we all managed to get through all ten words on a card in the time limit a few times, despite some deliberate screwing around ("In the old days they used to raise the corner of the vendor’s tent in order to clutch at the sweet fruit inside" for "shop-lifter").

It’s endless, turnless, rule-less, senseless games like this that always end up keeping me up until three or four o’clock in the morning. Yawn.

I just got an email from Play.com telling me that my order for Pearl Jam’s new album (imaginitively titled Pearl Jam) has been posted. This is despite the fact that it’s not supposed to be released until next Tuesday. I beat the system.

Was I the only person to notice this new question on their census form?

It’s time for another Top 5. This time I’m going to indulge my somewhat shameful pro-wrestling fandom and tell you my five favourite wrestling signs, those badly-drawn and badly-spelled cardboard signs that marks and smarts use to dispay their allegiances and, often, their names. I fully expect that this post will be of very niche appeal.

5. "2"

It’s lost all of its humour now due to severe over-use, but this sign was very entertaining the first time I saw it. It’s a succinct commentary on the absurd frequency of "near fall" two-counts. Taking the piss is what wrestling fandom is really about.

4. "Eddie Guerrero Mows My Lawn"

Good old fashioned racism in this one. Latino people mow other people’s lawns apparently. Funny. This sign also spawned the follow-up "I mow Eddie Guerrero’s lawn" sign as he grew in popularity.

3. "Fuck The FCC"

Unlike the previous two signs, this one didn’t lead to a host of copycats. In fact it barely appeared on TV at all. There was much pausing and re-winding involved in finding out what the person in the front row had done to attract the attention of the venue security. It turns out he had held up this sign, and got kicked out of the arena for his troubles. I hope the FCC were watching.

2. "Tazz"

Fans frequently carry signs with their names written on them and a downward-pointing arrow, presumably to help their friends and family spot them in the crowd. A heel at the time, Tazz carried on this tradition while sitting in the crowd behind the announcers’ desk disrupting the show. The only thing better than the fans taking the piss out of the show is the show taking the piss out of the fans.

1. "But He’s From The USA"

How many times did I complain about the irony of geographically-impaired fans chanting "USA" in opposition to Muhammad Hassan, often while he faced non-USian opponents, before one brilliant fan produce this sign? Absolutely brilliant.