It has become traditional hereabouts that, when a troll posts a diary, we ignore the content of the diary and instead post recipes. The idea is to make use of the thread that the troll started without feeding the troll. Recently some of us have been wondering who started this marvelous tradition (for example
here and
here and
here). I believe I have found the answer: it was
kid oakland.
kid o posted Daily Kos's first anti-troll recipe in
this comment. The key grafs:
Don't feed this troll...but if you must comment...consider participating in a tradition we have here on dKos: responding to trolls with random discussions about food.
What's your favorite recipe that uses spinach?
I love it steamed and then cooked in a skillet with scallions and butter and hint of bacon. But, hey, I'm from California....
kid o posted this on July 29, at what I think would have been 2:42am in his time zone. In response several posters advocated other methods of cooking spinach. I submit that this was the origin of the tradition of posting recipes in order to hijack troll diaries. It is a solution that, as far as I know, has only been suggested once, by WendellGee, in this comment.
kid oakland posted the fateful comment to a diary by torch, who had been previously identified as a troll (in fact a new incarnation of an old troll, popcorn). You can find torch's diaries here. People had attacked torch as a troll in previous diaries, but neither in them nor in any other earlier diary I have found are there any anti-troll recipes. Yet almost exactly 14 hours later, we find Maryscott O'Connor giving the now-standard response to a diarist she considered a troll, here. (In fact that diarist was not a troll, just too quick to cut and paste from Drudge.) torch was soon met with General Tso's Chicken (zeke L's recipe) on a diary charmingly titled Can Kerry's extreme makeover fool independents?. Horvo soon met with the same treatment here, though that seems to be another case of Maryscott jumping the gun. (Horvo had no time for Kerry, but he wasn't a troll. I am also suspicious of Maryscott's risotto recipe, but that's another story.) The tradition was quickly established, as you can see from the opening exchange in another of torch's diaries, this one from August 2, and in a diary slinkerwink put up on August 10 called Since It's a Quiet Day, how about a Kos Recipe Thread?.
Two things make me confident that kid o's post really was the first. First, I searched the comments from July for words such as "tbsp," "teaspoon," "salt," and "butter," and could find no relevant post that was any earlier. (It turns out that kossers are fond of taking things "with a grain of salt." Thank goodness Scoop won't let you search for words under four letters long, because the next thing I was going to check was "oil.") Obviously I might have missed something, especially if it were earlier, but I doubt it.
Second, notice that kid o writes, "consider participating in a tradition we have here on dKos: responding to trolls with random discussions about food." He does not say, "responding to trolls with recipes." Instead, he refers back to a much older tradition of taking over troll diaries with various discussions about food. (I think it started with this comment from a gilas girl in anybodybutdean's rabidly homophobic diary.) He is proposing that people talk about recipes as a way to carry on the tradition of talking about food, and this implies that there was not already a tradition of posting recipes -- but as we have seen, 14 hours later posting recipes is definitely on the way to becoming an established tradition. Also, kid o suggests posting spinach recipes in particular, which is not really in keeping with the subsequent tradition (people don't say what sort of recipes you should post), and this again implies that the tradition was not yet established.
So apparently the credit goes to kid oakland.
Update [2004-12-14 12:5:36 by gong]: I've gone back and searched all comments from November 17, 2003 to the end of June 2004 for the word "salt," and did not find any anti-troll recipes (I had previously checked July 2004). Either kid oakland's comment really was the start of it all, or I missed every anti-troll recipe. I could have missed a troll recipe only if either it did not include salt, it did not reveal that it was a recipe in its subject line, or my eyes were busy glazing over. I do not believe that I could have missed all anti-troll recipes if there really was a recipe tradition during this time. (I stopped at November 17, because folkbum and I had already worked out it must stop after that, in this thread.)
Update [2004-12-14 23:39:46 by gong]: In coments, Jane Knowles points out that the same tradition arose earlier on other sites, but we agree that it probably arose independently on Daily Kos. And freelixir has filled in some of the backstory from July.