Wonderful Insult
 

"You couldn't get a clue during the clue mating season in a field full
of clues in heat if you smeared your body with clue musk and did the
clue mating dance."

... and sang "mmmm pump me full of clue you big dirty clue monster", whilst rubbing your nipples with cluefingers?


perhaps?

Can we be best friends? :-D

is that from Blackadder?

yes it does have a whiff of the 'cunning' about it, doesn't it?

I'm embarrassed to say that I don't remember where I first saw it, but it was a quote that I copied to a sticky without noting the author or source.

Googling (http://www.google.com/search?q=clue+mating+season) seems to indicate that it might have been by Edward Flaherty.

I first saw it used on alt.tasteless circa 1995-1996, I believe by a great writer known on usenet as "Tae."

Googling on the Groups, the oldest version I can find (it's not verbatim, but others soon evolved it to something similar to what was quoted above) was in April 1996 on alt.revenge:
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.r...f88efb71d0f24a

Fantastic find, CH. ;) Someone along the line bowdlerized "horny", I guess. I certainly never saw the original - I'm not much of a "groupie", except AppleScript's groups and OS X groups.

The search is kinda fun: Here's James Robertson: The users I know are so clueless, that if they were dipped in clue musk and dropped in the middle of a pack of horny clues, on clue prom night during clue happy hour, they still couldn't get a clue.

I was searching on alt.tasteless (because of CAlvarez's reference) and then alt.revenge (because an alt.tasteless post referred to it), but when I redo the search across all groups, I find an instance in Dec 1994:
http://groups.google.com/group/bit.l...ef4b8c1a31f425

A bit more clawing around found this:

"The users I know are so clueless, that if they were dipped in clue musk and dropped in the middle of pack of horny clues, on clue prom night during clue happy hour, they still couldn't get a clue."
--Michael Girdwood, in the monastery

You couldn't get a clue during the clue mating season in a field full of horny clues if you smeared your body with clue musk and did the clue mating dance.
--Edward Flaherty (who was an economist)

But I can't find the source of either.

It is certainly possible that such a witticism could have been "first made" by a number of people in parallel. Early in the life of the internet, only the clueful people could connect to and use it, and I found most people on the internet to be quite high on both the literacy and creativity scales. To some extent, this insult has a certain amount of obviousness to it and since so many variations of "lack of clue" were in use at the time, it would make sense for multiple people to use it without hearing it first.

Or, I could just be clueless on this one.

Someone hand me the musk.

Wow, I just looked and I have usenet flames saved in a file dated 1994. Damn, I'm old.

This is slightly off topic but still on the origins of insults. I propose a lengthy and costly search for the origins of the use of the 'shm' prefix to deride something (as in "Windows shmindows"). If anyone wishes to fund such research please send me money :)

Money, shmoney.

Oh well, looks like wikipedia beat me to it anyway.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shm-reduplication

This is bringing back memories of using my acoustic coupler (under a pillow to block out any ambient noises that would throw errant characters into the stream) :eek:

--- hooked up to a VT-100 so I could talk to a remote VAX at blinding speeds (NOT). Before that, I used an ASR-33 Teletype (10 baud) with a paper tape reader as the only IO to a DEC PDP-8, serial number 12.

Compiling Fortran II took three passes, booting the machine required keying in (from the front panel switches on the PDP-8) the entire boot sequence after which you read in the OS on paper tape. We thought we'd died and gone to heaven when DEC came out with asynchronous mag tape drives for the 8.

CAlvarez is old, schmold....

You win!
------------

ok....either its because i've literally just woken up and nothing is working yet, or this is a genuine "wtf?"

i'll try reading that again after an espresso...

Make sure you read the whole thread.

No need for espresso, this is a genuine wtf, MBH. I couldn't resist - on Saturday, I'll turn 69.:eek:

I believe the first PDP that I got to touch was an 11, but I can't be sure. It was at a printing company, and I didn't work on it professionally, just got to tinker one evening.

I thought it was bad when I had to work on a Tandem Non-Stop which required setting the registers on dip switches, turning the key each time you set a byte, to get it to boot. Or the Heathkit H9 which required entering the boot code in hex every power-up.

But think about it, CA - it was tedious sometimes, but it was a ton of fun. We got a D/A convertor for the PDP8, and a rack-mounted Tektronix oscilloscope that fit into the standard 19" PDP8 rack. I spent a whole Saturday one time writing code to output X, Y, Z coordinates to the scope (Z was brightness) so I could write "Hello World" on the oscilloscope screen, using "Z" to turn off the dot between letters. Thought I was a genius. :cool:

NovaScotian, you win...

I got to do sysadmin work on a typesetting system running on J11, that's a souped-up PDP 11. Four of them, actually, with two systems being up at the end of the night being enough to get the newspaper out on time.
Amazing machinery with fascinating fail-safe features, considering the age of the hardware.

Building a system with that level of reliability is still a challenge even today.