(Caution! Do not try this at home! These are
proffessionals!)
The Web page that brings up the question:
"Will this anal-retentive attempt at preserving the humor of the newsfroup that
is the superset of all the groups on USENET be the death of spontanaity in
alt.stupidity?"
Well, I thnik not. The world supplies thousands of stoopid events every
day. No one in this froup should run out of fresh material. Or
something. But I decided to provide information about the group
that isn't covered in the
alt.stupidity FAQ.
My own (offline) files that I've been collecting since 1994. (Nowhere near as
comprehensive as Jesper's. I tend to collect only the ones which mention
me.)
The alt.stupidity news froup. Set
your killfile to delete all the clueless crossposters and you will
find some stuff in the remainder that is truly funny.
Credits:
Most of the references to Stoopidians who contributed to this...thing, are
mentioned with their contributions (boy, I'll bet they're sorry!).
Even worse, here's some that get global blame. (In some kind of order, but
beginning with me!)
Bill Wilkinson (me!): After falling down from the ceiling,
I'd logged
in and discovered that I'd opened a can of bacon by uploading some stuff called
Stoopid Stuff. Then I fell over.
Adam Jewell (Yes, it's the very same General Amp who led the successful invasion
of Mars in 1997.): If it wasn't for him, this...thing, would have been called
"Stoopid Stuff."
John Patrick Lodder: He risked the wrath of the other Elder Stoopidians by
revealing the trooth about the Bunny and the Toaster.
It's a point. It's the dot that separates the alt and the
stupidity in alt-dot-stoopidititity. Now, when someone sends a
post asking what the point of alt.stupidity is, you can tell them.
This number popped up in a post and it stuck. It's from
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Does anybody
have the original message? I've stupidly grepped through 2000
posts, but can't find its origin.
Magnus Mulqvist is the resident
warlorder of alt.stupidity. If he can't figure out what it
is, he grabs Fragarach
and chops its head off. Becasue of him, there are
very few bad .sigs in alt.stupidity. He's far more effective
than those fine folks in alt.fan.warlord, where the battle
against bad .sigs rages on every day.
We give (l)Laura credit for coining the term, but it appears
all over Usenet; so who knows? (Actually, Google shows it first
being used by
someone flaming someone else in talk.bizarre in 1988.)
Spatch and Papa Legba fought it out for the title of alt.stupidity
god. Spatch won and Papa Legba subsequently vanished. Not that I'm
implying anything. No sirree! After all, Spatch promoted me to be the
Patron Saint of Something here on alt.stupidity!
Wayne Kesslar posted a message in late '94 or early '95 that mentioned
mouth figurines. (This was before he started publishing his Play-A-Days.)
Tortess was fascinated by the idea and brought up the subject in a followup.
It caught on and generated several threads that lasted for months.
In 1995, steersdd@cc.memphis.edu would post messages and wish
us a nice weekend in his/her .sig--no matter what the day of the
week was. Nosy might have been the first to point out in a followup
that it was Thursday.
You can go to the top of this page.
Or, you can go to the
Things page.
Or, you can go to Hell.
Or, you can just
The information on this series of Web pages are
intended for scholars with too much time on their hands and who are
researching a subject that would--upon publication--make them
truly deserving of the Golden Fleece Award.
