Brains, Brawn and Bronze

Peter Harris has organized an Intuit trivia team for Corporate Challenge for several years. This year, Dustin couldn't make it and Pete asked me to substitute for Dustin. But today Pete got sick, so Mike's brother Paul was reigned in at the last possible second. Changing things up worked out pretty well; we wound up with 72 out of 100 possible points, enough to earn third place. (The winning teams had 74 and 78 points.)

I'm ashamed that I couldn't remember Major Don West from Lost in Space and that I put Chariots of Fire in 1980 instead of 1981. (To be fair, I did a lot of "ARGH! Was it 1980 or 1981?" Should have second-guessed myself.)

Thanks for inviting me out, guys! 

The Bermuda Triangle

The Bermuda Triangle, Earl J. Woods circa 1981-1982, coloured pencil and construction paper

Sometime in grade six or seven I created this poster of the Bermuda Triangle, complete with locations of ships and plans that supposedly went missing in or around the Triangle. Amusingly, even my then-credulous pre-teen research concluded that even if a bunch of ships and planes had gone missing in the Caribbean and mid-Atlantic, most had been lost outside the boundaries of the phenomenon. I must have spent a lot of time on this, because the coastlines seem pretty accurate and clean to me; it looks as though I marked out gridlines and then drew in the bits in each square. The ships and planes were cut out of black construction paper and glued onto the map. 

O Atari, Where Art Thou?

Today Sean and I visited Mom and Dad to help them carry some drywall downstairs. At the same time, we began the painful process of sorting through the old junk that Mom and Dad want us to get rid of - including our old Atari 8-bit computers. Here I am with the Atari 130 XE that got me halfway through university. I'm afraid it's off the the Eco-Station for you, old friend.

Halfway through university I picked  up a more powerful Atari 520 ST. The infamous screenplay "Toilet Chase" was written on this machine.

When the 520 ST crashed, you had to twist it and drop it to get it working again. This was Atari's real-life, no-kidding solution. As the years went by I had to twist it harder and harder and drop it from greater and greater heights to get it working again. What a great computer, and I say that without a trace of irony. 

S is for Sean

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House of Cards

Because they're all amusing, you see.