RealityChuck, you're an ignorant twat.

Let’s go to the quarry and throw stuff down there

Shut the fuck up, you drooling fucking abortion.

Was anybody else surprised to see fucking come after drooling? I just tried it both ways in my head and fucking drooling abortion seems much more natural. Or am I devoting too much thought to this?

No, I agree. Fucking drooling abortion does work better.

Up yer hole with a MelOrol, Alice.

Certainly more than i put into the post. :slight_smile:

This thread is a triumph of irony. Dopers ganging up on someone for being a condescending know-it-all.

It’s not for being a condescending know-it-all. Well, it’s partly for being a condescending know-it-all but mostly it’s for being a wrong condescending know-it-all. Blake is possibly the most condescending person I’ve ever had the misfortune of reading, but he’s pretty much always right with cites so what’re you going to do? Chucky, however, fancies himself an arbiter of How One Should Appreciate Art and frankly that’s like yelling King of the Hill on a dirt pile at a neighborhood playground. E’rybody’s gunna push you off!

I actually noticed the wording and kind of savored the mildly unique sequencing.

And anyone that didn’t just has no business reading Pit posts!

Ehhh, I guess YMV. To me, Blake is the Bricker of GQ. Often mostly correct, but also usually answering a question that wasn’t asked, and so often nearly correct that it’s not worth reading their posts to sort out the truth from the near-truth. Then again maybe he’s changed in the past few years. I wouldn’t know.

I wasn’t trying to say that mhendo erred in his forming of the phrase; I would like to know if what I see as the more natural construction occurred to him first and he chose to vary it or if what we see is what came unbidden from his brain.

Perhaps. I don’t recall people taking issue with most of the things he’s said but maybe they’re all just tired of the same old song and dance and I mistake the silence for approval.

I suppose one hazard of being a condescending know-it-all is an inability to recognize when one is wrong. The thread I most associate with Blake is this one, where he spent pages claiming that one meter was the absolute upper limit on how far any animal can jump, despite numerous cites to the contrary and obviously mis-reading his own cites. When I occasionally see his name now, I remember that he’s the panthers-can’t-jump-40-inches guy and interpret accordingly.

And it’s not like the Straight Dope have a shortage of condescending know-it-alls. Most of them seem to prefer sticking to Great Debates, where being factually correct takes a backseat to being as insulting as possible without actually breaking the rules. Still, some, like Blake, John W. Kennedy, and (apparently) Reality Chuck, post in other places where they can be “experts” and snide assholes at the same time.

John W. Kennedy! I suppose we don’t hang out in the same places around here; I’d forgotten he was a member; I found him to be pleasant enough know-it-all in the text adventure newsgroups ages ago. But I recall he can’t pass up disparaging economics literature every time QWERTY v. Dvorak comes up, which of course rankles me (an economist).

Er, sorry, back to your regularly scheduled pitting.

Would that make him Peggy Hill then? :smiley:

I saw/was part of a similar situation. he was debating someone else, something about weeds or something, I decided to google to see if he was right and I found research by OSU that not only countered what he said, it did it in a way that was almost the perfect wording to counter his statement. He never acknowledged it.

Schenectady’s finest Science Fiction author is at it again:

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=14777849&postcount=15

I’m completely unfamiliar with Blake, but I read that link and he came off well. There were half-a-dozen bad thinkers there ("Hey a deer can jump over a 6’ fence, dude!) but Blake just put out the best research available and defended it in non-dogmatic fashion. He certainly didn’t claim that “one meter was the absolute upper limit.” The fact that you claim he did shows that you have no business pitting him for inaccuracy.

Near the end of the the thread Mangetout planned to do a simple test that would have provided the proof that everyone in the thread (including Blake) would have accepted:
*He said he would suspend a piece of meat above a cat and see how high the cat could leap to grab it. No running start. Nothing to bounce off of.

Measure the height and subtract the full extension of the cat’s height (likely a few inches longer than a normal extreme stretch.)*

Damn it, he didn’t come through. It wouldn’t have been exact, because it’s very hard to measure the maximum stretched distance of a cat’s body, but it would have been accurate enough to serve as evidence.

In fairness, he’s closer to being right there than the poster he’s responding to. However, underweight riders are never disqualified; they just pile on the weights until the horse carries the minimum weight.

I don’t get this.

Is he correct in that post, or not? If he is, what’s the big deal? If not, then point out to him where he’s wrong.

I’m sure there are legitimate complaints to make against the guy, and a couple of the examples in this thread seem on point, but attempting to correct misinformation about a factual issue does not make someone an asshole.