HTBT Background



This section of our website is primarily a response to a serious problem with one of the primary forums available for discussion of recumbent cycles on the internet. The Billy Goat Gruff poem is probably a good place to start if you're not familiar with the chaos on our recument newsgroup at Usenet, or don't even know what that is.

I (Wayne Leggett) decided to set up this group of poems in January of 2007 as an alternative to posting them directly to the newsgroup. I had originally knocked off a poem (Edgar Colon) about a real jerk who was being truly annoying and offensive, as a kind of private affair, sharing the link to it only with a few folks on the group that the TROLL had abused without much incentive.

Then a little later I did the more socially acceptable goat poem and gave it a more broadly accessible link. Shortly after someone posted the link to the group, and I responded with a couple of quicky rhymes in reply, mostly downplaying the whole deal. After a brief flack, described in the Boers, Bores and Boors poem, it joined the ranks, and the precedent was set for my posts on the topic to be written in verse. When the TROLL returned after a short (sort of) absence, he seemed a bit mellower, and I honestly thought he might respond favorably to a playful but firm series of suggestions to comply with netiquette. Silly me!

Anyway, that was the first round of poems I wrote on the subject, all still archived on various Usenet servers. By the Summer of 2005, I was pretty fed up with this jerk, and gradually whipped up another round of poems, most of them substantially snippier in tone. Finally, I acted my age and stopped the steady flow of poesy. I took a few more shots at the putz early last year (2006), mostly in prose, and some of that may find its way to this site eventually. Then around Christmas the TROLL was making (yet another) gesture that he may buzz off, after a few more anonymous blanket SPAM attacks (really nasty stuff!). As the TROLL got snottier and more blatantly hypocritical, finally I couldn't resist taking a couple of snipes at him, having a little fun with making them rhyme. However, the poor old fool who relishes any attention, no matter how negative (and scathingly accurate about his dishonesty and general inadequacies as a human or as a writer), blasts off a series of profane, almost incoherent rants in reply to anything I post at ARBR, which has to be very annoying to the sincere folks who go there expecting it to be a relatively straight forum for recumbents.

The last step in this process (entropy?) is this. I'll try posting poems here that will provide a bit of amusement for the many people at ARBR who deserve to see fairly honest and insightful criticism of the verbose, rabid TROLL who has made that newsgroup such an unpleasant place to visit. ENJOY!

NOTE TO READERS: Please let me know your reactions to this section, especially if there are other posts you would like to see added.

HTBT Index

Last updated Jan 13 2007