BoatBanter.com - View Single Post

On 20 Sep 2004 11:16:45 GMT, (Bilgeman) wrote:

tomf123 quips:

-Yep - it's Monday, sure as heck. :)-

Bilge-Yep, all freakin' day.

Say, chum, you seem to have an IQ above room temperature, and to know the
difference between a bow pulpit and a saloon urinal...

What the hell's the deal with this newsgroup...is there a computer terminal in
the day room of some looney bin somewhere?

A lot of the posters in this group seem to sorely lacking in heavy meds and
long term, probing bouts of intensive therapy.

It was those damned movies, right?

Too many booger-eaters saw "The Perfect Storm" and "Pirates of the Carribean"
and decided to "run off to sea" and be Depp, Clooney, and Wahlberg, right?

I swear to Almighty, some of these drooling half-wits should have a mast
riveted to their foreheads and be flying 4 black balls from it.

I wouldn't trust some of these clowns to captain a rubber duck in a sitz bath,
let alone a motor or sailing vessel on the high seas.

ROTFLMAO!!!

Man, I love a good turn of phrase and some of those are classics. Mind
if I put them in my "All Time Great Sentences" folder? With proper
credit of course.

Well, it's like this. Over the years, long time denizens of Usenet
have basically run out of things to say. They pretty much have seen
every on-topic question four times and the net result is the Off Topic
musing and wanderings that currently infest most of the more popular
newsgroups. There are even newsgroups designed just for random
musings - alt.fan.tom-servo is one of the more notable ones. You
think this newsgroup is the day room of a cracker box palace, try that
one for a while.

However, that's off the point.

It would seem that once the long time members of any given newsgroup
get bored, all bets are off. It usually starts with a random comment
like "You know, those freakin' losers on the" and it degenerates from
there. Those who can turn a phrase and have some practice at
hyperbole annoy the hell out of those who don't think as fast or as
well (and I'm not casting any aspersions there - some just aren't as
practiced as others) - the name calling starts and their off running
the great game of "did not - did so".

All of the OT posts, name calling and puffy tall talk mask the great
store of knowledge and skill hidden between the other posts. Even
there, however, there can be conflict - there is a poster here who
hates FICHTS, for example, and will go to extreme lengths to make sure
that everybody knows it.

Other forums have taken up the slack of handing out knowledge in a
moderated and civil fashion - message, email and other groups tend,
usually sponsored by one thing or another leaving Usenet to it's
unusual brand of universal anarchy cleverly disguised as democracy in
action.

Last, the participants in a Usenet group have to be willing to engage
in this type of behavior. There are groups where there is a certain
amount of self and group enforced discipline keep things on-topic and
rolling merrily along. This is not one of them.

I wandered in here a while back to ask a question about a Christ Craft
I was thinking of restoring, received an answer and have been in and
out as time permits. There are plenty of lurkers here who
occasionally pop out, answer a question, then fade back into the
woodwork. Others multi-task on-topic and off-topic inbetween other
things. I am here because I'm on a new medicine for my arthritis and
it isn't working as well as it should so instead of being on my boats,
I'm hanging here during the day and inbetween working in my shop tying
flies, fixing/making rods and the occasional woodworking project.

To tell you the truth, I like this bunch. Compared to other
newsgroups, this is pretty sane in the long run.

You just have to seperate the wheat from the chaff if you will.

And with that, I'm off taking our new wards to school, play with the
dogs and I might take a ride down to the shore and watch the waves go
by.

Peace, love, knockwurst and beer.

All the best,

Tom
--------------

"What the hell's the deal with this newsgroup...
is there a computer terminal in the day room of
some looney bin somewhere?"

Bilgeman - circa 2004