Numb : 99
Subj : Huge Bovine Guidelines #1
From : KIWI
Date : 01-04-87
Time : 12.09
- Introduction and Basic Premises -
I'm sure that a lot of you have noticed the several obscure references to a
fictional user of this BBS, Huge Bovine, and have probably thought to yourself
"I would like to write some Huge Bovine messages. I wonder how I can do
this. Perhaps Kiwi will upload a set of guidelines." Well, dither no longer,
for here is the first installment of...
The Official Huge Bovine Blither Guidelines
Probably a few of you remember Zimbob. He was a quite blitheracious character
whose principle characteristic was that he was BAD. Absolutely everything
about Zimbob was BAD. He was the root of all BADness. There wasn't a good
thing you could say about him, except that he was very far away from you, and
you couldn't even say that. Indirectly, another attribute of Zimbob was that
he was EXTREME in the extreme. He was completely singleminded in his pursuit
of badness.
You should portray Huge Bovine as at least as extreme as Zimbob. Except,
Huge Bovine's principle characteristic is that he believes the only worthwhile
activities are those that help perpetuate the species. He believes that
one should completely disregard the pleasure of sex, and consider it only
a means to an end. Huge Bovine considers future generations as his top value,
just as Zimbob considered badness his top value. However, unlike Zimbob, Huge
Bovine is not content to work singlemindedly toward his goal--Huge Bovine will
not be satisfied until everyone else in the universe is working toward it too.
Huge Bovine, though, is also a more complex character than Zimbob. Huge
Bovine has many other attributes, e.g. he is a member of the genus Bos. But
his second most important characteristic is that he never actually works
toward his goal; rather he concentrates exclusively on getting others to do
so. Perhaps this is because he knows the futility of a single person trying
to increase the population megafold. No matter how much sex he has, he's not
likely to singlehandedly increase the population by more than a few thousand.
So, he deems it much more effective to spend all of his time preaching and
none of it practicing. Huge Bovine is completely oblivious to the fact that
if all people adopt this strategy, the population will die out in one
generation. But, whatever his reasons, he must never be shown in a
blitheration actually doing what he tries to convince others to do.
A fine example of a Huge Bovine message was the first time he was ever
referred to in a blitheration. This was Krill's infamous "A Day in the Life
of B6". Here is the relevant excerpt:
Numb: 44
Title:Rock
From: HUGE BOVINE
Date: 04-01-86 Time:11;29
Kumquat, you're right, but for the wrong reasons. The reason rock is bad is
that by listening to rock all the time, kids don't have any time to breed.
This beautifully illustrates both of the Huge Bovine principles in action: he
is advocating propagation of the species where it is completely
inappropriate, and he is trying to convince other people of his value(s).
One important side-effect of this second-hand approach to his goals is that he
is a LOSER. He is perpetually failing, because his approach makes him unable
to directly cause his aspirations to be fulfilled. So, he must never be shown
in a position of power, authority, or success. He should constantly be
imploring others to propagate the species, and constantly being frustrated
because his weak arguments are so unconvincing. More often than not, by the
end of the message, he should be at the point of desperation and very angry
that no one is doing as he wishes.
To be continued...
--Kiwi
Numb : 125
Subj : Huge Bovine Guidelines #2
From : KIWI
Date : 01-18-87
Time : 16.38
Part II
- Biographical Notes -
These details will necessarily be sketchy, as each of these ideas is such that
it provides subject matter enough for a complete blitheration. (Hint.)
Huge Bovine was not born, nor was he hatched. He is one of the strangest
gynecological anomalies ever observed: he was an abortion--who survived.
When in elementary school, he was ostracized by the other children because he
thought "Mary Had a Little Lamb" was a sad song about an abnormal pregnancy.
He was expelled from high school for copying another student's genes during an
exam.
Because he was worried about the temperature of American testicles, he
patented a style of jeans with a freon-cooled crotch, but was unable to find
any investors.
He was excommunicated from the Catholic Church because he not only wanted to
ban contraceptives, he wanted to outlaw the rhythm method, too.
He was kicked out of the "Right to Life" organization because of that fiasco
with "Blither Bloopers and Practical Jokes", even though it wasn't entirely
his fault. Really, though, they expelled him because he kept insisting that
foreplay be abolished, because it wastes too much time.
He ran a fractional reserve sperm bank in his basement, which was closed down
by Governor Celeste during the Ohio banking crisis for having too high a ratio
of stock to liability.
He has spent years unsuccessfully trying to figure out which chromosome or
chromosomes are responsible for the desire to breed.
--Kiwi
More to come in a few days...
Numb : 113
Subj : Huge Bovine Guidelines #3
From : KIWI
Date : 01-22-87
Time : 08.45
Part III
- Guidelines for Subtle Touches and -
- Minor Aspects of Huge Bovine's Personality -
The fact that "Huge Bovine" means "Big Cow" may be alluded to, e.g. with puns
like "udder" instead of "other", or "you're the Bos", or "the patter of
little hooves", but it should never play an essential role in the plot of a
message.
Huge Bovine is an extremely loud talker, and completely unaware of it. If for
some reason he has need to whisper inconspicuously to someone, he should use
the loudest stage whisper he can manage, and inadvertently monopolize the
attention of the people he was trying to keep from noticing him.
Huge Bovine is a fanatical communist. He believes that the government should
not sit around merely letting those who want to breed breed, but that it
should actively coerce people into breeding, and use taxes to reward people
for breeding. Another major reason he rejects capitalism is since the only
valid motive for any action is propagation of the species, and the profit
motive is not exactly the same thing as the propagation of the species motive,
it is wrong.
His taste in art is extremely limited: he believes that if a work of art does
not serve to convince more people to copy their genes, it is not good art. He
does, however, enjoy movies that simply portray the advancement of communism
or the spread of his philosophy, even if they do not make any attempt to
justify the causes.
Huge Bovine believes that every single aspect of your personality, including
language spoken and whether you prefer metal or plastic aglets, is determined
exclusively by your genes.
Huge Bovine is an atheist and scorns the Bible, except for one line: the
command in Genesis to "be fruitful and multiply".
Huge Bovine's style of speech will be the most difficult part of his
personality for all you aspiring Huge Bovine-blitherers to master. He blends
nineteenth-century formal mannerisms with twentieth-century uneducated
southerner (read: "redneck") colloquialisms by rapidly switching back and
forth between these two styles, sometimes switching two or three times in the
course of a single sentence. Note: he does not ever speak with a southern
accent; he merely occasionally borrows words and grammatical formations from
that accent.
He refers to the vagina as "the female aperture" and the penis as "the male
instrument", though he does not talk about them often. His three favorite
words are "whence", "thereby", and "ain't". (By the way, no, he does not know
the correct usage of "whence".)
He doesn't know the word "hello", and whenever he answers the door or the
phone, he says "greetings and salutations".
Huge Bovine believes that each of the sexes has been designed to fulfill
particular evolutionary roles, and that there is absolutely no overlap in
these roles. He thinks of women as being best suited to cook and clean, and
stay "barefoot and pregnant", and men as being best suited for all tasks that
require leaving the home, such as hunting, gathering food, and making war.
--Kiwi
Numb : 113
Subj : Huge Bovine Guidelines #4
From : KIWI
Date : 01-23-87
Time : 05.16
Part IV
- Example Huge Bovine Blitheration -
"Huge Bovine Watches a Movie"
It had been a long and hard, but fertile day. Huge Bovine had just finished
giving twelve six-hour lectures in a row at the prestigious Institute for
Population Growth, better known as the corner of 14th and High Street, across
from the Ohio State University campus. His audience was small--consisting
only of three hecklers and a policeman who forced him talk more quietly--but
it was hard work just the same, and Huge Bovine thought he had earned a little
relaxation. He flicked on the VCR, turned on the TV attached to it, and
removed from its sleeve the cassette of his favorite movie: "Red Spawn".
Huge Bovine had seen it at least 6.023 * 10^23 times, but he never seemed to
tire of it.
There was of course no copyright notice. Instead there was a notice imploring
the viewer to make as many copies of the movie as he possibly could, by
whatever means, legal or illegal, that were available to him. At last, the
action began.
A slightly overweight, obviously wealthy middle-aged man wearing a three-piece
suit and puffing away at a huge cigar walked across a field. Out of the
corner of his eye, he noticed something unusual, and it elicited a sudden look
of terror on his face. The camera quickly panned to view the cause of the
man's distress: a young, obviously fertile communist male wielding a machine
gun. A spray of bullets entered the capitalist's chest, and he fell to the
ground after only the briefest groan. As he fell, far in the background,
another capitalist, similarly attired, entered the screen. He was immediately
gunned down. This time, there was a close-up of the blood spurting out of his
chest--in slow motion. Once it was over, the camera pulled back to reveal
several more capitalists standing around nearby counting enormous piles of
money, conspicuously labeled "Abortion & Contraceptive Profits". They too
fell under a swarm of bullets. The camera pulled back still further to reveal
several extremely fertile-looking communists, who were clearly responsible for
the last blast of gunfire. Soon, it was evident that there were literally
thousands of capitalists nonchalantly walking about this field, and thousands
of communists carrying machine guns. The communists open fired and
capitalists fell in great numbers before they had time to react.
This same scene with this same action--communists gunning down
capitalists--was continued for approximately five hours. Huge Bovine had
carefully counted all the characters: 22,874 capitalists all lost their lives,
and none of the 22,875 communists shown was so much as injured or maimed.
When this was all over, and the field was covered by seventy layers of
bloodstained capitalists, the communists then walked over their corpses, past
a nearby hill, and arrived at a city with a large sign proclaiming it
"Capitalistville". Some of the communists stopped to repaint the sign
"Dictatorship-of-the-Future-Generations-ville", while the rest proceeded to
enter the houses and drugstores of this town and destroy all
the contraceptives they found. Box after box of birth-control pills,
condoms, IUDs, etc. were thrown into a huge bonfire at the city hall and
burned. Once this solemn ceremony was over, the communists then entered the
homes of the fallen capitalists, killed all the infertile women (victims of
hysterectomies and menopause, but not the prepubescent girls, of course), and
raped the rest. No words were spoken at any time during the movie.
Huge Bovine rewound the tape and turned off the TV and VCR. "Ah", he thought
to himself, "after inspiration like that, I ain't gonna go to sleep merely
because of fatigue! No, I shall stay up and write a few hundred angry letters
to the editor of that there newspaper that carried an article proposing that
this country switch back to a gold standard. Aargh! What we need is
something useful with which to back our currency, not some scarce metal what
scarce plays any role whatsoever in the reproductive process! I've got it:
Spanish Fly-backed currency!"
--Kiwi
Numb : 114
Subj : Open the Floodgates!
From : KIWI
Date : 01-23-87
Time : 05.23
Well, that should be enough to get all the hordes of aspiring potential Huge
Bovine blitherers out there going! I hope you will all carefully analyze the
previous sample blitheration, in order that you may better make your messages
meet its high standards. Note how many different Huge Bovine themes were
combined: public ridicule, fanatical communism, the desire to make copies even
applied to the movie itself, applying species-propagation where it so
obviously doesn't belong (the gold standard), the preposterous style of speech
("scarce metal what scarce plays any role whatsoever..."), etc. Notice that
Huge Bovine is so convinced of his theory of sex roles, that in the movie,
even the evil capitalists' women stay in their homes during the entire battle.
Good luck, and may many copies of your blitherations be propagated throughout
the BBS world!
--Kiwi
- Addendum to Huge Bovine Guidelines -
Huge Bovine never smiles--he grins.
Huge Bovine has no sense of humor whatsoever.
He is also very, very naive; he thinks that since his ideas about propagation
of the species make sense to him, they should just as easily make sense to
others. So, he is extremely baffled when his ideas are rejected, and by the
fact that they are so unpopular. In addition, he believes that EVERYONE
(except the contraceptives manufacturers) shares his premises, and that
whenever anyone takes an action which is not directly related to furthering
the species, it is not because they intended to do so, but because they made
a mistake (and are therefore disappointed in the results, but would be
elated if someone would explain to them the nature of the mistake).
Huge Bovine always prefers quantity to quality.
--Kiwi