Sunday, January 01, 2006

beginnings

in the winter of 1994, judy fisher, my then girlfriend, alerted me to an item on a frisbee newsgroup that purported to have been written by a member of my ultimate team, cojones. the post was rife with misspellings (a facet i later learned had been affected deliberately to lend the piece authenticity) and generally trash-talked its way to a prediction that we (cojones) would beat boston's dog in the coming national championships. we did not, and it turned out that the post was actually written by a member of dog as a ruse to psyche his team up. what is funny is that at the time no one on cojones knew about the newsgroup, rec.sport.disc. we were not nearly so techno savvy as the boston bunch, so they had been able to concoct and execute this elaborate ruse without us ever knowing about it. it was only judy's keen eye (she was also from boston) and her divided loyalties that allowed the ruse to ever become known.

some years later, i began to post to rsd with relative frequency, and eventually became a habitual poster of some reknown. in other words, i followed a trail blazed by boston some three years earlier, and i freely admit it.

this morning i found parinella's blog, read it with some amusement, and noted that he had written about me with a seemingly sincere certainty that i would never see it. i did see it, i did respond, and in turn i did set up this, my own blog.

having noted that jim has been blogging here since august of 2004, i have shrunk the time it takes me to follow in jim's footsteps from slightly more than three to slightly more than one year.

in the words of p-funk, gaining on ya.

3 comments:

parinella said...

It was a guy in Boston on one of the lower level teams (Goody's future brother-in-law, in fact) who posted that, not Jordan or any other DoG member.

Welcome aboard.

Anonymous said...

Or as P-Funk actually said 'gaming on ya'...

Anonymous said...

Back before spam, it was easy to create the fake email personas of "NYNYDisc@aol.com" and "BigEgoUlti@aol.com", start posting a fake Battle of the Big Shots on r.s.d and have people buy it without question. I played both sides and created a pretty good show. I remember hearing random people talk about it at tournaments, "did you read what NY said to Boston on rsd dude? Holy shite!" I remember getting emails from Boston players saying "that was a hilarious post! Who is this?!?!" and stringing them along with "Come on, re-read the posts, plenty of hints! See you at practice." And now that you mention it, maybe not so many emails from NYers, though I remember at least one. I eventually outed myself as the prankster, which didn't earn me as many points with the r.s.d crowd as I hoped. It turns out they really wanted more of the "real confrontation!" I wish I had all the original posts and emails.