Title TK

Been under the weather for a couple of days...

and I've spent most of my time here at the PC.

I read the Heinlein story Ron linked to. It starts slow, but by the end of the first page I was into it enough and it finished quite nicely. I had to put entirely too much thought into figuring out a tesseract, including consulting Wikipedia, but it paid off. Reading well-written Sci-Fi makes me wonder why Sci-Fi is often treated with the kind of contempt that ought to be reserved for fan fiction. Of course the answer is elitism, which is unfortunate. The same issue occurs with comic books. I suppose it's just the eternal need to create a lower class to spit on.

Speaking of elitism and Wikipedia, I discovered Uncyclopedia, which is a parody of Wikipedia, magnanimously hosted by Wikipedia. I spent a large part of the day reading articles, which range from wildly hilarious to really stupid. Like Wikipedia, Uncyclopedia is a great idea. Also like Wikipedia, it is in the clutches of elitist editors and admins who have suddenly decided that they are the ultimate arbiters of information/disinformation and humor. Actually, I shouldn't say elitist. I should actually say dickhead. I created a satire of the ETSU entry at Wikipedia and added it to the Uncyclopedia and within minutes, it had been deleted.

Here's the entry:

ETSU (expanded East Tennessee State University) was founded on October 2, 1911. It is a third-rate, land grant school located in Johnson City, Tennessee and is operated by random ideas written on pieces of paper pulled from a top hat.

ETSU was founded as East Tennessee State Normal School, but it was soon discovered that there were no Normal People in Tennessee to attend the school and no one was going to travel to East Tennessee without a gun in their back, so the name was changed to East Tennessee State Teachers College in hopes of attracting teachers to the campus. The ruse worked and hundreds of hapless teachers were enslaved, giving ETSTC its' first educated faculty. In 1963 a massive amount of misprinted textbooks were delivered to ETSTC as the publishers thought ETSTC was a landfill. Now, with both teachers and albeit misinformative textbooks, ETSTC changed its name again, to East Tennessee State Universatee, taking the spelling from the Merrium-Wabstars Dictionaery they received as part of the textbook shipment.

Due to the large, indigenous inbred population surrounding the area, ETSU is noted for its' Bluegrass and Country Music program. The school's most famous alumni is Kenny Chesney, a two-time, two-time Inbred Music Assocation Entertainer of the Year. The school's second most famous alumni is Timothy Busfield, an actor who dropped out of ETSU. This is highly representative of ETSU's student population demographic: 50% local inbred, 50% imported slacker. While ETSU offers many bachelor programs in the liberal arts and even graduate programs in medicine (although the AMA recommends patients who see a degree from ETSU's medical school to flee the premises immediately as they are likely in a Tijuana abortion clinic), most ETSU students graduate with
Associates degrees from local community colleges.

Athletic Sports Sports-like teams, nicknamed the Fuckinqueers in honor of the surprisingly large gay community in Johnson City, compete play fail miserably in the NCAA Division I Atlantic Sun Conference. The programs were previously affiliated with the Southern Conference, but they were kicked out of the Southern Conference when ETSU dropped their football program after the 2003 season due to financial losses. The sports-like teams play in the Mini Dome, which is a large barn that was previously the women's dormitory. The Mini Dome serves as Johnson City's only landmark eyesore and most locals are quite proud of having the distinction of being host to the only indoor arena on a college campus that is not used for football. Apparently the university recently uncovered a large stash of gold doubloons and is planning to use the money to reactivate the dormant football program, because that's the only fucking way any idiot could justify bringing football back to ETSU.

ETSU is also known for having lots of different trees on campus, which would be fucking awesome if you could park your goddamn car in the trees, since the majority of the parking spaces available are so far from the classrooms that even Jesus would be pissed about how far he had to walk.

The listed reason for deletion was that it wasn't funny, which I know to be bullshit because I don't need some dickhead admin to tell me I'm funny. I am fucking hilarious. I sent a request for further explanation to the dickhead admin that deleted it and his reasoning changed to the article being a violation of the vanity policy, which is a policy that more or less prohibits articles that amount to "someone I know sucks" or consists of in-jokes that have meaning to five people. That's not an unreasonable policy, but my article is based on the concept that Southerners are stupid and the experience of attending a poorly-run public university more interested in athletics than academics. The ratio of universal jokes to in-jokes is about 1:1, although some of the in-jokes are universal enough that the ratio isn't an issue. For some reason, I decided to pursue the matter with another admin because the only legitimate issue is the humor, which the dickhead admin decided he was the sole arbiter of by deleting it instead of tagging it for speedy deletion and letting other comment on it. I'll keep SGM updated on the story, unless I decide to quit caring seeing as how I just blogged about a deleted Uncyclopedia article. I can blame it on the fact that I've been sick and bored. This is actually the nerdiest post ever at SGM, covering Sci-Fi and comic books as well.