Argent

well, missing out on crysis 2 cuz its on origin won't make me loose any sleep. but from the moment they announced the service, i've been dreading this sentence: "mass effect 3, an origin exclusive..."

meh. if i remember the story correctly, he was supposed to drive a works prepped mercedes 450 SLC that year, but at the last moment mercedes decided to get cold feet and keep on being in racing hibernation (until a few years later, sauber all but shamed them back into embracing racing again, but thats another story.)

he drove a few rallys with a privately prepped porsche because at the time his deal went south, all the works teams were set. the next year he signed on with opel, and won the WRC championship with the RWD ascona (which, frankly, was a crap car at that point in time -- making his win just that much more impressive.)

next stop was a return to fiat/lancia (he'd won his first WC in '79 - i think - with a fiat 131 abarth, which wouldn't be all that bad unless you consider that this was the vehicle cesare florio & co. put into the field to more or less succeed the lancia stratos...ech), where he drove the RWD (and achingly beautiful) lancia 037 rally for a few years.

by that time RWD was pretty much a no go for a winning ride and he finally landed at audi for the remainder of his WRC career (including a romp up the pikes peak hillclimb, again, if memory serves right.)

when group B cars got binned in favor of the infinitely less interesting group A cars, audi fielded the 200 quattro model, which still is a bit of a mindboggler to me -- the thing was an E-class/5-series type luxo barge and everyone else was zipping around with hot hatches like the lancia delta.

long story short, audi had won pretty much everything BUT the safari rally, an event rohrl detested and usually skipped. but the audi overlords wanted this one bad and hooray, they 1-2'd the event, with rohrl finishing 2nd -- and audi quit WRC at the end of that season and hasn't been back since (first they went off to pikes peak, then imsa GTO and eventually le mans.)

rohrl eventually wound up road racing for porsche and has been with them ever since. he finished 7th at lemans in a 961 one year (961 = road racing version of the 959) and imo still is one of the greatest pure drivers of all time. he just had the misfortune of never really having the best vehicle of his era (never drove the a110 alpine or stratos, went to audi right when peugeot started kicking their butts and again -- he won the WC in an opel ascona. not quite a yugo, but...)

just boggles my mind that we'll be seeing duke nukem forever before HL2E3....

my favorite one season wonder: the adventures of briscoe county jr.

uhm...to my knowledge, joe hill is stephen king's son.

what, no 'barkley vs. barney II: the reckoning'? boo.

you can watch quite a few episodes (if not all of them; i haven't checked) on netflix' instant streaming service.

some things are best not remembered.

i'm guessing now that obama is eating vanilla ice cream, some folks will now decry it as the most sinister flavor of ice cream, ever...

hmm. my interest in SC2 just perked up a bit more....