Foo Thik Not Like This New Thing Call a 'Wheel'

Ricky Sprague uncovers the first known example of an op-ed piece.

Comments

[Fist of Etiquette]

It's a living...

[sarcasmic]

The first progressive.

[Res Publica Americana]

Technology may change, but shitheads stay the same throughout the ages, and some seek power -- which gives us people like FDR, GWB, and BHO.

[wylie]

Foo Duk Raaaaagh, Gar Woor Brak, and Barak Hussein Obama.

(racist? prolly. against cavemen)

[Res Publica Americana]

OT: http://www.examiner.com/gun-ri.....xt-tuesday

Will anything worthwhile actually come out of these investigations, or is it just going to die down with the ATF going back to butt-fucking the Constitution into nonexistence?

[BakedPenguin]

It's the BATFE now. They had their bailiwick expanded. Due to their outstanding competence, no doubt.

[Mister DNA]

BP, was that you asking about the Libertydrome channel yesterday?

If so, were you able to check it out? I've been emailing with some folks today, and the Institute for Justice (ij.org), Foundation for Economic Education (fee.tv), and The Atlas Network have all signed on, so there's going to be shitload of new content over the coming days/weeks.

[Pro Libertate]

If you're going down that path, why not BATMAN? Um, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Machetes, Automatics, and Nukes?

[Pro Libertate]

Or maybe BATSHIT: Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Swords, and Hostile Information Technology?

[CoyoteBlue]

So they'll be providing all those items (at gov subsidized rates) to citizens, foriegn gangsters and crazy guys in woods?

[Pro Libertate]

They kill people who use any of those things. I'm not real clear on that, but I think I'm right.

[cynical]

Firearms and Explosives? Not appropriate. Now, Shotguns, Handguns, Incendiaries, and Tasers, that might be acceptable.

[cynical]

Fuck, I should have kept reading.

[Mister DNA]

George H. Smith's Atheism, Ayn Rand, and Other Heresies has a chapter with enlightenment-era fainting couch opinion pieces bemoaning the increasing literacy rate and how Ye Olde Candy Shoppe was selling candy to the children packaged in (gasp!) Thomas Paine tracts.

[Hugh Akston]

I would think the first editorial would be a cave painting reading STOP THE WHEEL with a big red line through the whole thing.

[The Other Kevin]

Would that count as the first Friday Funny?

[Quetzalcoatl]

It would be too intelligible.

[Paul]

With an editorial two years later demanding the wheel be a universal right.

[Mister DNA]

I'm sure there was a lot of editorializing against the dangerous discovery known as "fire" back in the day. If the clan gets torn apart by wild animals during the night, so be it - that's nature. Cro_Magnon man has no business rubbing sticks together to artificially thwart Gaia and endanger teh childrens.

[The Other Kevin]

Plus carbon emissions. Don't forget about that. Bet during the ice age, they were pretty alarmed when the big thaw started to happen.

[Mister DNA]

I've often wondered if there was ever a period in human development where we - instead of marveling at a beautiful sunset - were reduced to terror at the falling of the sun.

There may have been early editorials demanding state regulation of Big Disc In Sky; and sure as the sun sets, someone took credit for ensuring that the setting sun would indeed come back 12 hours later.

[sarcasmic]

Sun worship is the oldest known religion.

[Destrudo]

Unrelated: Sarcasmic, you live in Portland also? I couldn't help but notice your complaint about the food truck wasteland that is maine, and how we only have the occasional hot dog cart.

[sarcasmic]

Closer to L/A.
My wife and I would love to quit our jobs and run a food truck, but there just isn't a market.
Look at the restaurants that do well. They suck. A food truck would be a wasted effort.

[Ska]

Yeah, Mr. DNA's post reminds me of Apocolypto about 25 minutes in. And that's the late 15th century.

[Jim]

No no no...were you here on the big thread we had the other day on the proper use of circles with lines through them?

If your text said, "Stop the Wheel", and had a line through that, then you're promoting the wheel by negating the statement which supports stopping it.

Then again, maybe the line only negates the exact word it touches, depending on who you ask.

It was a really shitty thread.

[Pro Libertate]

What? I liked that thread. Obviously, the truth is that anything within the circle is opposed.

[Hugh Akston]

I do remember it, actually.

[Jim]

I will consider myself pwned *hangs head in shame*.

[Max Stirner]

That reminds of this.

http://dresdencodak.com/2009/0.....e-fiction/

[Joshua Corning]

Science fiction does have a strong Luddite element to it.

[omg]

I'm so happy I saw that. I always remember feeling a little ridiculous at some of my English teachers in grade school who kept giving examples of science in real life and then comparing them to disasters in fiction, saying THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN SCIENTISTS PLAY GOD. "Jurassic Park" would be an example they would give. I always thought the teachers were full of shit.

[Pro Libertate]

Know what? We bring back the dinosaurs, we'll fucking extinct them again in short order. No problem.

[omg]

It is a bit weird to make a movie that is essentially saying that humans aren't very good at killing animals. I think this is something humans excel at, personally.

[Quetzalcoatl]

Tell that to the villagers in India.

[Pro Libertate]

It made no sense at all.

[Joshua Corning]

We bring back the dinosaurs, we'll fucking extinct them again in short order. No problem.

That or modern bacteria/viruses and the lack of digestible food will kill them off before that.

[Pro Libertate]

I bet they'd not even survive to adulthood.

[R]

No shit. Hell, we've even got rifle cartridges made specifically for that, just in-fucking-case.

[Max Stirner]

Frankenstein is obviously the worst example of the "scientists playing God" trope. I liked it when we read it in AP Lit, but I couldn't understand what was actually immoral about recreating life. If anything, he was a douche for abandoning his creation, but nothing Frankenstein did in the first half could be considered "evil" by any means.

[Max Stirner]

Frankenstein is obviously the worst example of the "scientists playing God" trope. I liked it when we read it in AP Lit, but I couldn't understand what was actually immoral about recreating life. If anything, he was a douche for abandoning his creation, but nothing Frankenstein did in the first half could be considered "evil" by any means.

[Joshua Corning]

If only Krugman and Friedman were this good.

How far we have fallen.

[sevo]

"If only Krugman and Friedman were this good.
How far we have fallen."
So easy, even a caveman can do it.

[A Serious Man]

Make wheel require cavement alter rocks. Me think this be bad for earth. Me propose cap and trade for right to carve rocks and cut trees.

[Big Wood and Bone]

Me propose cap and trade for right to carve rocks and cut trees.

By capping rocks we will encourage the development of environmentally friendly rock alternatives.

[Quetzalcoatl]

We are approaching peak rock!

[Episiarch]

STEVE SMITH WRITE FIRST RAPE EDITORIAL! MAKE RAPE UNIVERSAL RIGHT! STEVE KNOW IT IN CONSTITUTION SOMEWHERE, JUST NEED TO GET SUPREME COURT TO AGREE!

[Steve Smith]

INVENTION OF WHEEL SADDEST DAY IN YETI HISTORY. MOST HUMANS TOO FAST TO CATCH NOW. STEVE MUST BE CONTENT STALKING HIKERS. ARRROOOOOO

[Elena Kagan]

I like the hang of your gut.

[Res Publica Americana]

Who's Steve Smith?

[PapayaSF]

An old H&R meme.

[Episiarch]

Someone isn't up on his H&R memes. To be brief, Steve Smith is a sometime lefty commenter who we created a joke rape Yeti mythos around. I'm sure someone can scare up a link or links to the initial creation of the meme, and I believe credit for the creation goes to Warty.

[Warty]

I think SugarFree and I get equal credit. He tracked it down once. If I remember right, he gets credit for calling him a sasquatch (I called him a shaved albino gorilla and them a super mutant), and I get credit for calling him a rapist who talks in caps.

And then there was some dude named Bellicose Brandenberg who thinks I stole credit for the meme from him. He calls me an asshole every time he comes here now.

[Bellicose Brandenberg]

You're an asshole. That is all.

[sarcasmic]

Who needs the Soap Opera Network when you've got Hit and Run?

[Bellicose Brandenberg]

Asshole!

[Warty]

Source material

[Joshua Corning]

SugarFree|11.18.09 @ 11:04AM|#

Warty called him a shaved gorilla, I called him a shaved Bigfoot. Still hazy on the rape angle.

Bigfoot and gorrilla automaticlly lead to Rape...so no one can claim credit for it.

Also you and sugerfree were way more fun back then. What happened?

Lastly: ASSHOLE!

Really lastly: where did the angle that you were a rapist come from? Was it derived from STEVE SMITH or did it predate it?

[SugarFree]

I was, am, and shall always be delightful.

[Episiarch]

Just keep telling yourself that and maybe one day it still won't come true. You're the worst lay Warty ever had.

[Troy]

I knew that Sugarfree hasn't been fun since the last millineum.

[SugarFree]

Oh, I don't think the running joke is that Warty is a rapist, just that he is a disgusting sex pervert with abnormal genitalia.

[Warty]

If I'm less fun now, it's all Epi's fault.

[Warty]

Also, it's hard to believe that that shit happened two years ago.

[Jim]

My god, that was so beautiful it was like going back in time and viewing the first sunrise. I finally know the origin story of STEVE SMITH.

[Episiarch]

No it's not. We're still using memes from when BSG ended.

[Pro Libertate]

It's worse than that.

[Episiarch]

Worse than what? The end of BSG? Nothing is worse than that.

[Pro Libertate]

True. I just meant that we have some tricks that date back further, to before the time the Galactica came to Earth. I mean this one, not the other one. The real one. Except that this is the real one.

Fucking stupid story.

[Joe M]

That got me thinking: what is everyone's earliest contributions to H&R? This is the earliest one I could find myself in. As a bonus, it includes comments from both R C Dean and Lonewacko.

[SugarFree]

Mine. But I lurked for years.

[Episiarch]

Didn't you scare one of my earliest up once?

[SugarFree]

I can't find anything before 6/7/07, but I know you commented before that.

[SugarFree]

Aww... our first akward flirtation...

SugarFree|8.29.07 @ 3:00PM|#|show direct|ignore
Episiarch,

I always meant to tell you that I like your handle. I love how Brin turned "Danikenite" into a swearword while building a universe based on his ideas. (Although I always felt the last book of the 2nd trilogy went a bit tits up in the end.)

[Episiarch]

Memories...back then, I didn't realize what you really were.

[SugarFree]

You were so young and pretty then, with skin as soft as a baby's asshole and eyes like two pissholes in a snowbank.

[Pro Libertate]

I've been here a long time. I'm not sure when I first commented, but I've been reading the magazine for at least 16 years (maybe longer) and have been reading stuff on the website for most of that time.

[Joe M]

Here's a pretty old one

[Pro Libertate]

Ah, yes, my pro-Sauron days. I've since learned that he was really only rhetorically a libertarian, not so much in practice.

I'd posted before that. I think the archive is truncated--they lost a server or something. Or maybe I'm confused.

[Joe M]

You're right. I know there have been times when comments disappeared into the tubes before, and it seems like Hit & Run was around before 2002.

[Pro Libertate]

Wikipedia says 2002. That could be right. I started commenting sometime in 2003, I think. I was reading the website way before then, though.

[Joe M]

So they may have the entire H&R history online. Most impressive. 'Twould be nice to get an official statement. Maybe they'll do a ten year anniversary cruise in '12.

[Pro Libertate]

I looked around the Wayback Machine once, and I remember thinking at the time that John may have been one of the earliest of the commenters still commenting.

[Warty]

Here's mine. I'm glad to see that I was being a dick from the get-go.

I lurked since probably 2002 or early 2003, but I didn't get around to posting until 2007. You're all so unlucky.

[Pro Libertate]

Say, I solved the moral dilemma about meat-eating in that thread:

Pro Libertate|3.16.07 @ 12:52PM|#

Perhaps we need due process for the animals we kill for consumption and other uses. Try them en masse, convict them, condemn them, then have lunch. If the animal feels that its confinement and/or method of execution is cruel and unusual, it can file an appeal after calling its lawyer.

There! Everything is settled!

[Warty]

Looking through my earliest posts is strange. I had forgotten that I actually tried to have earnest discussions way back then. Ugh.

[Pro Libertate]

Be ashamed, Warty. Be ashamed.

[JW]

The earliest I can find of mine is from May 2006, but I lurked for a while before then. There was another JW, lower-case, who preceeded me, so his entries gum up the searches before 2006.

[Pro Libertate]

I'd sue for trademark infringement.

[Warty]

You can tell Google to do a case-sensitive search, right? I think you can.

[JW]

Can you? I know you can't sort results by date. Stoopid Google.

[Pro Libertate]

Maybe another search engine?

[JW]

What's a search engine? I use The Google.

[Joe M]

This may or may not help.

[Aqua Buddha]

I forgot my earliest handle - who knows how long I've been posting.

[PapayaSF]

This is my earliest, according to Google

I started reading the magazine during the Carter administration, you whippersnappers. (But dropped my subscription about five years ago as an economy measure. Sorry!)

[libertarian pedant]

The wheel was invented way past caveman times. To put things in perspecitive, the Incas did not have the wheel, nor did the Egyptians (which is part of the reason why they were run over by the Hyksos - the other part being massive corruption and entitlement among the noble classes)

[Young-Earth Creationist]

You can't prove that it wasn't invented by a caveman, and perhaps just did not spread out of his tribe, or was not found to be useful at the time, etc.

Therefore we can conclude that cavemen did, in fact, invent the wheel.

[Mike Laursen]

Or some caveman launched a successful editorial campaign against the wheel.

[Pro Libertate]

Actually, for relatively simple technologies like that, we don't know for sure. There's an assumption that rollers came first, but the wheel could've popped up earlier than we think.

My Neanderthal ancestors had flying cars.

[sage]

I thought the DOT invented the wheel.

[Pro Libertate]

That's false. They simply introduced the legislation that made it possible.

[sage]

Sounds like a scam to me.

[Pro Libertate]

Yes, they can be credited with directly inventing scams.

[Fartriloquist]

That's why ancient Egyptian art always shows their chariots up on blocks.

[sevo]

"That's why ancient Egyptian art always shows their chariots up on blocks."
Fiat built Egyptian chariots?!

[Pro Libertate]

Hey, yeah, they had wheels four thousand years ago. What kind of crap are we being sold here?

[libertarian pedant]

It's not like the egyptians didn't eventually expel the hykos and reestablish their kingdom.

[R C Dean]

With the Aztecs, their chariots were up on blocks in their front yards.

[M.C. Boone]

The first hillbillies.

[libertreee]

You mean Pharoa's army used traverses instead of chariots? No wonder they got drowned in the Red Sea!

[space biologist]

Well the hyksos were semites so it's entirely possible the exodus tale is the expuslion of the hyksos from Egypt, by which time the egyptians would have had the chariot.

however, akhenaten is generally reputed to be the first monotheist (thus inspiring the unendurable John Glass opera), and he was definitely post-hyksos.

[JD the Elder]

It was Philip Glass, and I liked that opera.

[Another Isolated Incident]

Narcotics cops raiding a Staten Island home found a jungle of marijuana plants inside.

Brother's Keith Harrigan, 47 and Craig Harrigan, 49 and his 18-year-old son Mark, were charged with criminal possession of marijuana. They were also hit with grand larceny and theft charges for ripping off electricity for the grow lights.

Nothing else happened.

http://articles.nydailynews.co.....pot-plants

[SugarFree]

No one ever gives credit to Ted Bundy for all those girls he didn't murder.

[Warty]

He never murdered, say, Lady Gaga. That is his worst crime.

[Aqua Buddha]

Munich, 1927: Hitler walks past an elderly Jewish couple. Nobody hurt.

[Au H20]

I would be more interested in hearing how Foo avoided rape from Steve Smith.

[Quetzalcoatl]

Steve Smith was considered a pretty good-looking fellow back then, so I'm sure he had girls all over him.

[P Brooks]

the Incas did not have the wheel, nor did the Egyptians

You don't need wheels when you have spaceships.

duh

[Pro Libertate]

I flew the Great Pyramid to a planet in Andromeda once. It's not a bad way to travel--those ancients, despite their primitive ways, had some advanced notions about comfort, let me tell you.

[space biologist]

+1 AU

[heller]

#87 Velvety

[Riposte]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDIQGmglFW8

[P Brooks]

It's funny (in the not-at-all-amusing sense of the word) that our new troll would try to use his "and nothing else happened" trick on us.

Does this also apply to MADD and their "ONE DEATH IS TOO MANY" logic?
Breaking news- all over America this evening people stopped off for a few drinks with their friends, in private homes and public establishments, and then went home to bed; and nothing else happened.

[P Brooks]

Breaking news- a group of college students, none of whom were over twenty-one, sat around drinking beer with their friends. Nothing else happened.

The horror.

[Pro Libertate]

The whore, uh? Did you go to Stanford?

[R]

Breaking news- a group of college students, none of whom were over twenty-one, sat around drinking beer smoking weed with their friends. Nothing else happened.

FTFY.

[Res Publica Americana]

Another Isolated Incident continued suffering erectile dysfunction. Nothing else happened.

[P Brooks]

I am not intellectually equipped for a Stanford education.

Take that as you will.

[Aqua Buddha]

My new mission in life is to have the last comment in every thread.

[P Brooks]

Mission accomplished!