"Don’t thank me, thank the moon’s gravitational pull."

Ah, MacGyver.

The thinking man’s hero, solving problems with his flair for cobbling together hastily improvised feats of engineering. Give the man a ten-speed bicycle, two bottles of Polish vodka, a tube of toothpast and an eggbeater, and he’ll whip up a particle accelerator. This favourite ’80’s television show of every tinkerer, hacker, engineer and evil chain-smoking twin sister had a dedicated legion of fans, including my friend Herb, who went so far as to get the license plate MCGYVER (unfortunately, the 7-character limit on Ontario custom plates meant that he could only get an approximation of the great impromptu inventor’s name).

Would you believe that there’s a Web site that houses every MacGyver episode? You’ll need my friend Bram Cohen’s great P2P software, BitTorrent, to download the files (they’re in .AVI format, as in the dreaded Windows Media Player). If need help deciding which episode you’d like to see, you might want to consult this episode guide.

I’m going to have to download the series finale, which I missed. From what I hear, it involves time travel and supposedly they reveal MacGyver’s first name. Now that’s must-see TV!

(This entry’s title isn’t a MacGyver quote that was ever used in the real show — it was from a MacGyver episode that the Simpsons were watching.)

An aside

Second-string TV shows seem to be a recurring theme this week. Last night at the Thirsty People of Toronto Meeting, one NTN Trivia game that had me completely stumped was one centred entirely around the Naval legal action series JAG. I’ve seen only three episodes, and one was at Kansai International Airport, and it was dubbed into Japanese. The only two things I know about the show are:

• The main character, the JAG, is a Judge Advocate General.
• His co-star, Catherine Bell, as my housemate Paul would say, is hawwwwwwwwwt.

[Mucho thanks to skimpIzu from the #infoanarchy IRC channel on freenode.net!]