June 25, 2007

More Every Day

A lot of ReFi posts (where 'a lot' should be scaled to the relatively geological update frequency around here) have been inspired by some familiar old phrase catching my eye in a recent comment, and today's edition is a good example of such: in a thread about a SCOTUS decision, relatively newly registered user quarter water and a bag of chips trots out a classic oldie and gets my mind wandering googleward. The phrase?

"America sucks more every day."

It was familiar, and no shock that: a user named wakko went on a spree with it, a while back. Here's the offical wakko-ASMED tally, in order of posting

America...



wakko vs. SCOTUS pot decisions
wakko vs. CPB funding cuts (with acknowledgement) (amberglow follows up
wakko vs. the 22nd Amendment (and mk1gti with the followthrough)
wakko vs. library snooping (and quonsar rebuts)
wakko vs. eminent domain (with plans to leave, and a response from Pollomacho)
wakko (verbose!) vs. nuking Iran (with credulous signed reply from DuffStone)
wakko vs. IP law
wakko vs. the Trademark Dilution Revision Act
wakko vs. slippery slopes
wakko vs. Katrina FEMA

This sort of willful memedom can't hope to go unnoticed; in a Metatalk thread, Steve at Linnwood calls wakko on it and wakko asks for numbers in response.

That does it for the pure specimen—what we might call The Wakko—but there are variations to be found.

Other things that suck



- wakko thinks Canada sucks like America sucks
- wakko takes on Canadian copyright reform, American bedamned—between these two and the next, you wonder if he made good on that plan to depart America, above...
- wakko changes his mind about Canada thanks to legalized gay marriage (and fungible has been paying attention—I wonder if I should try to bring him in as a co-author?)
- sciurus indicts Metafilter itself
- in 2001 (!) quonsar gets prescient in talking about how the economy sucks
- and then in 2006, quonsar gives it to beedogs.com—apparently a meta-wakko reference?
- fungible, not letting the torch die, knocks the comics page (and America while he's at it)
- weretable and the undead chairs gives Joe Liberman the more and more treatment
- gigawhat? gets positive and praises Metafilter
- Moving to the far tail of the meme, Alvy Ampersand was wondering why Bush sucked less today
- jonson more-and-mores nicwolff, and wakko corrects his form!

Other verbs than sucking



There are a few specimens to be found that closely match the overall template of "X Ys Z [and Z] every day" while diverging from The Wakko; most of the memetically proximate examples are cited above—clear or arguable examples of a species of what the folks at Language Log like to call "snowclones"—then there are these, which likely do not owe any direct deference to today's phrase but which nonetheless manage to do something more every day...

- Divine Wino appreciates
- tehloki misses
- nofundy thinks the military will swing away
- ODiv wants to run
damnitkage thinks The Handmaid's Tale comes to life
- shminny loves AskMeFi

And so on; there are, aside from things which do something more every day, also many examples of things of which one might do "x or more every day", which is just the completely wrong neighborhood, thanks very much.

And here, finally, NDcent on the philosophy of sucking less every day. Homage or happy accident I do not know, but there it is.

Further notes



Two more things:

1. I found no sign of any version of "sucks more X day" for any non-'every' value, nor any attestations of "sucks more every X" for any X other than 'day'.

2. qwaaboc, who inspired this whole thing, also recently decried wrong-door raids, which is particularly interesting—repeated homage?

No, as it turns out, and so we proceed to the coda.

Sockpuppetry sucks more every day



Through the magic of the admin interface, I have slightly more mojo for ReFi research than I had for previous entries, and one of those tools is IP searching. Which makes it a lot easier to find sockpuppet accounts—multiple accounts registered and operated by the same user—and, well, what do you know:

quarter water and a bag of chips is wakko. And he was StrausborgSeacaucus in the mean time, though the latter never mentioned America (or anything) sucking in the form underdiscussion. So apparently America sucking skips generations. Also, it looks like he's still planning the move out of the US. And not content with just the old material, he's been testing the waters with a brand new catch phrase, "west of the beb", used thrice thus far.

Weird stuff.