"Flame war" - circa 1872

[REWahoo]

Folks apparently took their scrapple seriously in this heated "thread" published in the NYT: The Great Scrapple Correspondence of 1872

Thread drift...?

By the fifth day, most letters paid only lip service to scrapple. The frugal nature of the dish became an opportunity to hold forth on everything from the rising cost of living to women’s ruinous spending habits. As X. Y. Z. saw it, at the heart of the “great scrapple correspondence” lay the central question of the nineteenth century: “How shall the middle classes live?”

Amazing how this 138 year old rant sounds like it might have been posted today by any one of a number of our more colorful members:

Let a few of your economists try the following recipe and they will find it is all it is cracked up to be: Take a calf’s left hind leg and let it hang until it will just stay hung without falling, then take it down, after cutting the bone out chop the meat into pieces about the size of a walnut, put them on the roof in a rain-storm for twenty-four hours, after which (if a cat don’t get them) boil with a pound of licorice-root, let the lot gently simmer for a few minutes and then add a paper of Lorillard’s century tobacco with a little old rye whisky, and you will have the meanest mess under the sun - except scrapple.

My favorite comment:

We’ll never know whether the tirade killed the thread or the editors did. Then, as now, board moderators answered to no one.

 

[73ss454]

REW, you have too much time on your hands. (heh)

 

[REWahoo]

That's one of the perks of retirement.

 

[73ss454]

I remember!

 

[REWahoo]

Save your money and someday it may happen again.

 

[ziggy29]

Wow -- not about politics or religion or operating systems. Or the SWR, even...

 

[HFWR]

By the fifth day, most letters paid only lip service to scrapple.

Heck, we only need five posts...