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[Roadgeekteen]

Randy was actually a good guy. He was pulling everybody's legs with the "svartzie" comments. I conversed with him a few times and he was genuinely concerned with my well being at the time. He was trolling.

What is a svartzie?

Yiddish pejorative .. sort of like the N-word. From the German Schwartz which means black

Z981

I watched a rucka rucka ali song about that word.

[hbelkins]

Why does Chris Bessert find everything ironic?

Is Chris even a member of this forum?

Yiddish pejorative .. sort of like the N-word. From the German Schwartz which means black

So now we know what Mel Brooks meant by "Use the Schwartz!"  He was injecting a little "Blazing Saddles" into "Spaceballs."

[J N Winkler]

Is Chris even a member of this forum?

Yes, but not at high posting volume.

[empirestate]

Can't go too much further on this without bringing up Tom from Ohio (a later entrant into the Golden Age that was m.t.r.—rather like Elmo to Sesame Street).

As for Chris Bessert, as I recall he was the go-to authority for Michigan highways, and a more-than-decent cartographer as well.

You could do a search for them on the misc.transport.road (locally called MTR) newsgroup, then.  But I'll save you the trouble:

Tim Brown = bandit957 on the AARoads forum here, has a tendency to say really off-the-wall things.
Carl Rogers = from California, coined the term "viatology" for the "scientific study of roads", would send out full press releases for posting a single photo to his website, was basically a narcissistic and pompous ass.
Randy Hersh = deceased, formerly a New Jersey cab driver, would constantly berate regions, politicians, and persons (including HB) he didn't like.
Bobby Peacock = might be on this forum, but I'm not 100% on that.  From somewhere near the Great Lakes.  His attitude rubbed several people the wrong way on MTR (much like SPUI/NE2 here on AARoads).
Bob Chessick = from Pennsylvania, in the early Internet (and MTR) days he tried to capitalize by charging people to use his roads website.  In terms of Pennsylvania info, Jeff Kitsko (of PA Highways) offered it for free and basically did Bob's website in.

(EDIT:)

Something else that might be worth mentioning in any such book would be the EPIC flamewar battles between Scott Kozel (Beltway here on the forum, former VDOT planner) and John Lansford (former NCDOT civil engineer who basically disappeared after Usenet newsgroups fell by the wayside).

iPhone

[hbelkins]

Except TFO was a fictional character; a sock puppet of an MTR regular. I did not know TFO's real identity until he revealed it to me at a road meet. I think it's a fairly open secret these days but I won't otherwise reveal it except to say he's a member of this forum.

All the others mentioned (Tim, Randy, Calrog, etc.) are or were real people.

[empirestate]

Except TFO was a fictional character; a sock puppet of an MTR regular. I did not know TFO's real identity until he revealed it to me at a road meet. I think it's a fairly open secret these days but I won't otherwise reveal it except to say he's a member of this forum.

Oh yes, that was well known at the time. But I don't think at all that it precludes including him in a retrospective.



iPhone

[Roadgeekteen]

Except TFO was a fictional character; a sock puppet of an MTR regular. I did not know TFO's real identity until he revealed it to me at a road meet. I think it's a fairly open secret these days but I won't otherwise reveal it except to say he's a member of this forum.

All the others mentioned (Tim, Randy, Calrog, etc.) are or were real people.

I heard Calrog was really bad. Why?

[empirestate]

Except TFO was a fictional character; a sock puppet of an MTR regular. I did not know TFO's real identity until he revealed it to me at a road meet. I think it's a fairly open secret these days but I won't otherwise reveal it except to say he's a member of this forum.

All the others mentioned (Tim, Randy, Calrog, etc.) are or were real people.

I heard Calrog was really bad. Why?

He was like the Michael Scott of roadgeeks.


iPhone

[hbelkins]

Except TFO was a fictional character; a sock puppet of an MTR regular. I did not know TFO's real identity until he revealed it to me at a road meet. I think it's a fairly open secret these days but I won't otherwise reveal it except to say he's a member of this forum.

All the others mentioned (Tim, Randy, Calrog, etc.) are or were real people.

I heard Calrog was really bad. Why?

Froggie pointed out his many faults rather succinctly upthread. Basically, Carl was very condescending. He would post to MTR every time he uploaded a photo to his site. Not a page of photos. Not a huge dump of photos. One photo. His idea of a road video was to take a video of himself standing in front of a sign or road talking about it (and then he dropped logs in the punchbowl like the US 31W song.) He incessantly referred to US routes as "federal routes" even though US numbered highways are under the jurisdiction of the states and the numbers are assigned by a voluntary organization, AASHTO, and not by the federal government. He would pay the PRWeb firm to issue press releases when he would go on a trip, or as Froggie mentioned, when he posted an update to his site. He also referred to an "East Coast Hive Mind" because so many of us the roadgeek community (corrected to not use the inclusive "us" since I'm not located there) are concentrated on the east coast, particularly the mid-Atlantic/eastern seaboard and New England. That led to C.C. Slater designing an "East Coast Hive Mind" logo and selling shirts featuring same on Cafe Press (which several of us bought and started wearing to meets.)

We can all be asses at times, but I'd be hard-pressed to name anyone who actually liked him.

He seems to have dropped off the face of the earth. I don't even know if his Twitter account is still active, since I would never deign to follow it. (He pronounced Twitter as being the future of viatology after Usenet faded into oblivion.)

And about viatology...

http://www.millenniumhwy.net/Viatology.htm

[J N Winkler]

In MTR there were a number of regulars who were not accepted by the community at large, but Carl Rogers was one of the few who gave the impression he was there primarily to push other people's buttons.  One of his favorite tropes was to fixate on something another poster said, label it a "dysphemism," and via an elaborate chain of reasoning suggest that the poster was helplessly driven by shame over an inadequacy of some kind, usually sexual.

I really objected to this because it was very corrosive to a sense of comity and shared purpose.  The rest of it--the overt narcissism inherent in using a press-release service, branding his website "Worldwide Highway Library" or whatever it was, giving badly composed single photos the marquee treatment--I could just ignore.

Randy, who had no illusions about what Carl was really up to, commented several times (in private email to me) on his psychological acuity.

[Roadgeekteen]

Except TFO was a fictional character; a sock puppet of an MTR regular. I did not know TFO's real identity until he revealed it to me at a road meet. I think it's a fairly open secret these days but I won't otherwise reveal it except to say he's a member of this forum.

All the others mentioned (Tim, Randy, Calrog, etc.) are or were real people.

I heard Calrog was really bad. Why?

Froggie pointed out his many faults rather succinctly upthread. Basically, Carl was very condescending. He would post to MTR every time he uploaded a photo to his site. Not a page of photos. Not a huge dump of photos. One photo. His idea of a road video was to take a video of himself standing in front of a sign or road talking about it (and then he dropped logs in the punchbowl like the US 31W song.) He incessantly referred to US routes as "federal routes" even though US numbered highways are under the jurisdiction of the states and the numbers are assigned by a voluntary organization, AASHTO, and not by the federal government. He would pay the PRWeb firm to issue press releases when he would go on a trip, or as Froggie mentioned, when he posted an update to his site. He also referred to an "East Coast Hive Mind" because so many of us the roadgeek community (corrected to not use the inclusive "us" since I'm not located there) are concentrated on the east coast, particularly the mid-Atlantic/eastern seaboard and New England. That led to C.C. Slater designing an "East Coast Hive Mind" logo and selling shirts featuring same on Cafe Press (which several of us bought and started wearing to meets.)

We can all be asses at times, but I'd be hard-pressed to name anyone who actually liked him.

He seems to have dropped off the face of the earth. I don't even know if his Twitter account is still active, since I would never deign to follow it. (He pronounced Twitter as being the future of viatology after Usenet faded into oblivion.)

And about viatology...

http://www.millenniumhwy.net/Viatology.htm

Wait! are Calrog and Carl Rogers the same person?

[1]

Wait! are Calrog and Carl Rogers the same person?

Yes.

[Alps]

In MTR there were a number of regulars who were not accepted by the community at large, but Carl Rogers was one of the few who gave the impression he was there primarily to push other people's buttons.  One of his favorite tropes was to fixate on something another poster said, label it a "dysphemism," and via an elaborate chain of reasoning suggest that the poster was helplessly driven by shame over an inadequacy of some kind, usually sexual.

I really objected to this because it was very corrosive to a sense of comity and shared purpose.  The rest of it--the overt narcissism inherent in using a press-release service, branding his website "Worldwide Highway Library" or whatever it was, giving badly composed single photos the marquee treatment--I could just ignore.

Randy, who had no illusions about what Carl was really up to, commented several times (in private email to me) on his psychological acuity.

He was only able to push a few people's buttons, so he wasn't that acute. Most of us had him figured out in a few weeks and just laughed about him.

[Roadgeekteen]

In MTR there were a number of regulars who were not accepted by the community at large, but Carl Rogers was one of the few who gave the impression he was there primarily to push other people's buttons.  One of his favorite tropes was to fixate on something another poster said, label it a "dysphemism," and via an elaborate chain of reasoning suggest that the poster was helplessly driven by shame over an inadequacy of some kind, usually sexual.

I really objected to this because it was very corrosive to a sense of comity and shared purpose.  The rest of it--the overt narcissism inherent in using a press-release service, branding his website "Worldwide Highway Library" or whatever it was, giving badly composed single photos the marquee treatment--I could just ignore.

Randy, who had no illusions about what Carl was really up to, commented several times (in private email to me) on his psychological acuity.

He sounds like a stupid person who wants attention.

[MNHighwayMan]

In MTR there were a number of regulars who were not accepted by the community at large, but Carl Rogers was one of the few who gave the impression he was there primarily to push other people's buttons.  One of his favorite tropes was to fixate on something another poster said, label it a "dysphemism," and via an elaborate chain of reasoning suggest that the poster was helplessly driven by shame over an inadequacy of some kind, usually sexual.

I really objected to this because it was very corrosive to a sense of comity and shared purpose.  The rest of it--the overt narcissism inherent in using a press-release service, branding his website "Worldwide Highway Library" or whatever it was, giving badly composed single photos the marquee treatment--I could just ignore.

Randy, who had no illusions about what Carl was really up to, commented several times (in private email to me) on his psychological acuity.

He sounds like a stupid person who wants attention.

Or like an intelligent person who knew exactly what he was doing.

[Roadgeekteen]

In MTR there were a number of regulars who were not accepted by the community at large, but Carl Rogers was one of the few who gave the impression he was there primarily to push other people's buttons.  One of his favorite tropes was to fixate on something another poster said, label it a "dysphemism," and via an elaborate chain of reasoning suggest that the poster was helplessly driven by shame over an inadequacy of some kind, usually sexual.

I really objected to this because it was very corrosive to a sense of comity and shared purpose.  The rest of it--the overt narcissism inherent in using a press-release service, branding his website "Worldwide Highway Library" or whatever it was, giving badly composed single photos the marquee treatment--I could just ignore.

Randy, who had no illusions about what Carl was really up to, commented several times (in private email to me) on his psychological acuity.

He sounds like a stupid person who wants attention.

Or like an intelligent person who knew exactly what he was doing.

Be so annoying that you are banned from a forum before doing anything on it? Or is there a joke i'm missing?

[MNHighwayMan]

Be so annoying that you are banned from a forum before doing anything on it? Or is there a joke i'm missing?

That's the modern definition of what a troll is.

[Roadgeekteen]

Be so annoying that you are banned from a forum before doing anything on it? Or is there a joke i'm missing?

That's the modern definition of what a troll is.

A long time ago, before I joinned this forum, I was a troll on reddit. Don't troll anymore.

[ET21]

Be so annoying that you are banned from a forum before doing anything on it? Or is there a joke i'm missing?

That's the modern definition of what a troll is.

A long time ago, before I joinned this forum, I was a troll on reddit. Don't troll anymore.

You sure?

[Takumi]

Be so annoying that you are banned from a forum before doing anything on it? Or is there a joke i'm missing?

That's the modern definition of what a troll is.

A long time ago, before I joinned this forum, I was a troll on reddit. Don't troll anymore.

Maybe not intentionally...

[Roadgeekteen]

Be so annoying that you are banned from a forum before doing anything on it? Or is there a joke i'm missing?

That's the modern definition of what a troll is.

A long time ago, before I joinned this forum, I was a troll on reddit. Don't troll anymore.

Maybe not intentionally...

What do you mean? I might be annoying but I don't troll.

[1]

He's not trolling. By definition, trolling is intentional.

However, unintentional incompetence can be a problem.

[US71]

What do you mean? I might be annoying but I don't troll.

Perhaps not intentionally, but some of your posts could be construed as trolling.

[Alps]

Be so annoying that you are banned from a forum before doing anything on it? Or is there a joke i'm missing?

That's the modern definition of what a troll is.

A long time ago, before I joinned this forum, I was a troll on reddit. Don't troll anymore.

Maybe not intentionally...

What do you mean? I might be annoying but I don't troll.

Suuuuurrrrrreeeeee

[US71]

Courtesy Urban Dictionary :

TROLL

One who posts a deliberately provocative message to a newsgroup or message board with the intention of causing maximum disruption and argument

---

Giving you the benefit of a doubt for a moment, you may not intend to troll, but some of your posts could be interpreted as trolling. Posting to annoy (as you admit to doing) could be construed in some circles as trolling.