The votes are in and the winner of the highly coveted Man Boobz Troll of the Year Award for 2012 is … MRAL!
Wait, you say, he wasn’t even on the ballot?
Well, no. The troll that got the most votes from you, my dear readers, was the verbose anti-Man Boobz crusader known as Steele — also known as Mikhael Varpole and, briefly, as Torvus Butthorn. Indeed, Steele cruised to victory, getting 47% of the vote, as compared with the 33% received by Tom Martin, his only real competitor. (Dr. Pell came in third, with a mere 6% of the total.)
But as it turns out we’ve been played, big time. The troll we know and love as Steele turns out to have been MRAL all along.
Yes, that MRAL – the long banned commenter who cannot seem to walk away from this blog. We’ve uncovered and banned many of his previous sockpuppets, but somehow he managed to slip his boldest sockpuppet right by us.
Oh, sure. I and others here often wondered if Steele was for real; it seemed pretty clear to me that he couldn’t possibly believe everything he said. But it wasn’t until I went back to some of “Steele’s” earliest comments here, in preparation for this post, that I discovered how justified these suspicions had been. Turns out that one of “Mikhael Varpole’s” IP addresses matched one used by an earlier troll, Scooby Doo on Zombie Island, who had been outed as MRAL a couple of months earlier.
D’OH!
“Torvus Butthorn” really should have been a dead giveaway. But otherwise the highly dedicated MRAL did a masterful job of keeping his troll character consistently ridiculous yet plausible enough to not be an obvious phony, and of hiding his particular obsessions in such a way that he didn’t give himself away.
So, congrats, MRAL, and you’re banned again.
After this, the rest of the results are a bit of an anticlimax.
Sunshine Mary wins the Special-est Snowflake award for Female MRA Trolls, with 52% of the vote. Driversuz comes in second with 32%.
Tom Martin easily wins the Worst Human Being award with a stunning 73% to David K Meller’s 22%.
Some Guy Bored With Your Schtick wins Most Tiresome with 58% of the vote; Diogenes is a distant second with 24%.
And JudgyBitch wins Most Pathetic Vote Beggar.
I hope they’re not all MRAL too.
THANK YOU. I’m sure Google could have told me, but still. Much thankfulness.
Again, I’d be unlikely to get a purebred, but I’ve always love Irish Wolfhounds. 8-10 years is TOO SHORT. 🙁 Of course, I also have rats, and 2-3 years gets… difficult.
22 is amazing! Oldest cat I’ve ever met (to euthanise) was 24… and looked around 10, he was amazing! But started having seizures that weren’t responding to treatment. I only hope my cats get anywhere near 20.
I have 8 cats, 2 old boys (10ish and anywhere from 12-17) I adopted in the last couple of years and the rest are 5-6. I am NOT looking forward to them getting old together. 8(
Whoa, eight! Most I’ve had was five. We have two now, one’s five and the other sixteenish. I can’t imagine attending to the needs and wants* of eight kittehs!
It is rotten when several are likely to go around the same time. Magnus and two of our others went within six months – Mags and one of them in about a week of each other. Not a good time.
You mentioned euthanasing one – are you a vet, or work at an animal shelter? (Ignore me if that’s something you’d rather not mention online.)
Judaism says it’s a woman’s right to a decent sex life. If she isn’t getting one it’s grounds for divorce. I like Peur-eh. I like black teas. The trick to chinese green teas is to use cooler water to brew them.
I keep meaning to ask … when was Bill Bixby a Scooby Doo villain?
Or is that Bert Convy?
About green tea…yes, I know, which is part of the reason the Japanese teas are more user-friendly for beginners. Even if your water is too hot it doesn’t make them undrinkable.
Wow. On the one hand, I’m disappointed my candidate (Tom Martin) didn’t win… but that is some pretty solid trolling there. Though I seem to be one of the few who doesn’t feel like congratulating our Troll of the Year. The more I see of him, the bigger the side-eye. (At least this means I feel better about using my free time writing about aliens and mythological Jewish empires?)
I drink a good amount of peppermint tea. I get nauseated really easily (yay, eating disorders) and it seems to help calm my stomach. Which is nice, since though I can and have forcefed myself for weeks on end, I really prefer to enjoy my food.
@ LBT
Nope, I’m with you. His dedication to pestering the people on this forum isn’t impressive so much as it is disturbing. There is something very wrong with that boy.
Excessively long answer for Kitteh: I’m a vet nurse. 🙂 Going back to uni next year though, still tossing up whether to go for vet in 2014. I have been in the industry for about 7 years, nursing on and off for about 5, but only finished my certificate in 2011. But obviously that experience would be extremely useful in vet! Tossing up whether I really want to deal with 5 years of study + getting established + such long days and not really great pay for the expectations.
8 kitties is not so bad! I fostered 5 kittens that would have been PTS for ringworm when I was an animal handler at the SPCA (they euth because it’s SO contagious and takes SO LONG to get rid of and there are SO MANY kittens, it really is sensible… but you get really sick of killing cats and I already had ringworm from a complaint case -neglected/abused dog- anyway) and kept them (I no longer foster :P). A couple of years later I took 2 kittens from work that at 16 weeks were petrified of handling despite time with them (our vet will take surrenders, desex/vacc etc and sell, and desex mum for cost). Then one was probably stolen (he’s microchipped and registered so I just hope he’ll come home one day 8( ).
A few years after that when I was volunteering I took an old boy who was going to be PTS at the SPCA because he had a fairly bad heart murmur, then last year I took an old extremely obese girl because her owner who loved her dearly had to go into a home and her family didn’t care. Horribly, she was killed by one of our dogs when my partner left her alone with him and she was probably drinking out of his bowl. She’d become our most attentive kitten and it was awful.
Last but not least a client of ours had an awesome older cat that basically she let her now-husband push out by his dislike and addition of multiple dogs that chased him: brought him in underweight and half-starved with an old abscess, first time she’d seen him in 8 months and her neighbours brought him round… I offered to take him. (He does fine with our dogs because they aren’t loose with the cats.)
So yeah. They don’t get the attention 1-3 cats would, or even 8 without all our other beasts, but they get daily cuddles and are super affectionate/happy, and I’d never want to have just one or two again.
@hrovitnir do you work in the US? I just finished a training course for vet assistants (can’t afford to go into a tech program atm), and I’m having the worst luck finding a job 🙁
You made it past the 5-year mark, which is where 50% of people burn out – got any tips for staying sane?
Best of luck timetravellingfool with your OkCupid Adventures!
Cassandra: Sorry, I didn’t write that well. I’ll blame the hour, and the horrid symptom of this cold (my right ear is clogged, on the inside, so I am half deaf. It’s unpleasant, disconcerting, and reminds of being deathly ill with something else).
It was a general observation, since most non-tea drinkers don’t know, and the common wisdom is the water needs to be boiling.
Blech, I hate it when one ear is blocked, it makes you feel so unbalanced.
There was a time when we had a lot of animals. Some of them (the snakes/mice) didn’t take large amounts of time, on an individual level).
Some (the chickens) were more resource than pets. We had a lot of eggs.
The Horses took work, and so did 50ish guinea pigs. The dogs took time.
But if you look at absolute numbers of animals, it was sort of scary.
I find it also moves the world further away, and so I am muzzy-headed. I think I feel vaguely alienated. That, and the sense of constant pressure, it’s not as if one can stop noticing it.
But I have decent coffee, and cheese, and spinning I can play with, and the like.
Awww man, the summer before last I suffered from two really stubborn ear infection in a row which left me nearly completely deaf (but luckily in no pain) for over two weeks at a time.
Ever since then, every time I get a cold my ears get blocked up and I lose my hearing.
So I can sympathize with your plight pecuniam.
I felt like a right prat the last really bad cold I had. I was doing an internship,and one job they asked me to do was to transcribe the recordings of some interviews they did. I literally couldn’t do it because my hearing was so poor! I had to tell them I couldn’t do it because my ears were blocked, they were fine about it but talk about embarrassing.
Try to imagine attempting to review music when one of your ears is temporarily out of service. It’s especially hard when using headphones, since a lot of music now is balanced in such a way that some parts of it you only hear through one side.
Yeah. I suspect this is related to the aforementioned deathly ill. I’ve had intermittent issues with my ears ever since. Allergies seem to have been added to the list. I’m also prone to wax blockages (as I head toward TMI), because I have very narrow exterior canals.
Woah pecunium, 50 guinea pigs? Did you eat them or were they pets? The most rats I’ve ever had was close to 30 and I know someone that had nearly 100 at one point – don’t work as too disabled, took a lot of rescues. That was a brief peak though.
emilygoddess – I live in New Zealand. Job market’s not great, don’t think it’s as dire as the US though. Re: advice, it’s hard to say! There was actually a year in there were I went elsewhere but that was due to working with some unbelieveable arseholes, not the job. I don’t know if I would keep doing it forever due to the crap hours and crap money but maybe if I worked somewhere good? I do love the job for all that it’s a lot of cleaning. I was amazed when I came back to realise how much I enjoy it. Unfortunately my boss is absolutely awful, and I cannot keep working for him, so that solidifies my need to look at a higher paying career.
Nurses in NZ do all the cleaning, we also do the handling/holding for bloods/taking bloods and place catheters in some clinics. Run diagnostic tests, take radiographs, monitor anaesthetics, scrub in to assist with surgery in some cases, can do dentals and sometimes neuters. But I believe techs in the US do some consults and just get the vet if needed? We don’t do stuff like that.
For advice in general I feel it’s finding a point between too soft and too hard. Helpful, eh? 😛 Having started at the SPCA I was pretty OK with euthanasia from the start and I can’t really tell you how I was. Periodically you really like that animal or you’re having a bad day and it makes you cry but normally it’s sad and you move on.
You have to do a lot of things they don’t like, and you have to hurt them. You don’t get a lot of time to pat them and a lot of clinics can frown on you making time to do so. HOWEVER I’ve noticed almost all the nurses I’ve worked with that have stayed more than a year or so have ended up losing empathy and I do not approve. Little things like keeping cats in carry cages when you’re not sure how long they’ll be stuck there because it’s annoying to clean out another cage after they leave. Not checking litter trays one more time before you go home because you are so over it by then, but they usually need it done. Kicking a dog’s cage because it’s waking up disorientated from anaesthesia and won’t shut up.
I don’t know if that’s at all helpful. I feel I could do this job forever if I worked at a clinic I liked. One woman on my course worked somewhere that she absolutely loved, that was always really busy, that had specialists but also did lots of low cost stuff, did small and large animals, and *everyone got on*. Jealousy.
Good luck!!
hrovotnir: We got them as a sort of rescue (petstore my ex was working went to purely reptiles) and since guinea pigs who don’t breed by 3-4 months can have serious problems if they later get pregnant (hip fusion), we wanted to be sure anyone who got one of them from us couldn’t accidentally cause problems. So we made sure each female had littered once.
That adds up.
But they were so much fun to watch; and the sound when one went to feed one of the pens… Sheer joy.
Hrovitnir – thank you for that really long reply! 🙂
I think you’d like the clinic I go to. They’re definitely an empathetic bunch.
I had a laugh when I was up there recently. One of the nurses had her dogs in for the day. One was the biggest standard Poodle I’ve ever seen – not fat, just really, really tall. His name was … Dave. Like another client said, what else would you call a French poodle but Dave? (My French cafe-owner rolled his eyes and said “Why didn’t they just go for Bob?” when I told him this.)
Anyway Dave was mooching around the back office, which you can see from the reception desk, and He Did A Smell. Talk about biological warfare. You could practically see the Cloud of Death rolling out, up and over the desk.
And boy did Dave look pleased with himself!
Did we really just get this far about “proper tea” on a predominantly leftist forum without a Proudhon joke?
@Cloudiah – Should we add something about DKM’s doll fetish and list him as largely inactive? Or dormant, maybe, like a volcano?
lowquacks, good to see you! How was your Christmas and New Year?
Ahh, yes. That’s a lot of guinea pigs! I sometimes think it’d be cool to have a ton of guinea pigs all doing there own thing in the back yard. 😛
Re: Dave, ohhhh yeah. I love human names for animals, the more jarring the better. And standard Poodles are cool. 😀
hrovotnir: Guinea pigs will eat anything which is vegetal, so they will be on dirt… well no, they will in short order be on a bed of compacted pellets.
That layer (we’d move the enclosures every three weeks or so), was amazing compost. I’ve never seen any manure which was better than guinea pig scat for using as compost. And it doesn’t reek, the way compacted horse manure does (the urine doesn’t end up with the sulphurous notes, and I don’t think it ends up being anaerobic).
Rabbit makes pretty good manure too.
Chicken manure is also incredible and I can totally recommend it as a compost starter.