Why Eat Pigeon?

# Ghost Page Hello, Octothorpes Protocol user. Not sure how you got to this page, but unfortunately, due to complete lack of interest from everyone else I have contacted about it, I'm no longer attempting to participate in the Octothorpes Protocol project, and have turned off all integrations with it, other than this message.

I do have an improved version of the official Octothorpes WordPress plugin, but unfortunately the original authors have refused to open-source it, and without an open source license attached to the original files I built on, I can't share it.

Frustrated rant about it here, click to read...

<rant>I have to express some frustration. I'm extremely disappointed that Octothorpes do not seem to work at all. The whole project is a brilliant idea—I went for it hook, line, and sinker. In fact, I liked it so much that I immediately started working on improving things, such as their extremely lacking WordPress integration plugin... so eagerly, in fact, that I put in a lot of work before testing whether Octothorpes actually work at all.

And it appears that they don't.

At least, I couldn't ever get them to, despite sinking several long nights into it. Disappointingly, I had to add a lot of unneeded extra structure to my site code to even try and get Octothorpes working—contrary to what the documentation suggested—and even after doing everything right, as confirmed by their debugging tool, my Octothorpes never appeared on their server.

Given that I never got it to work and couldn't find anyone who was able to assist me, all the complexity I had to add to my site in the effort—such as serving Octothorpe-specific page versions, like the one you are looking at right now—became needless cruft. So after a few very long nights of fruitlessly spinning my wheels, I've given up, and removed it all again.

I have to add that I'm disappointed. I'm not used to showing up enthusiastic to contribute to an open-source project and so quickly winding up walking away with absolutely nothing, no involvement, no ability to use or run it, no interest in my desire to contribute (even code I've already finished!), nothing. Maybe I've been lucky before now.

Octothorpes are a brilliant idea, in concept. I hope they work someday, and become a project that might see wide adoption and contribution by enthusiastic developers. (And that the main devs see the value in WordPress plugin developers expressing an interest in authoring OP integrations with WordPress... 43% of the world's websites can't be wrong...)

Sorry to rant, but, my site, my several nights of work lost, my prerogative to express it.</rant>

Seeing as how this Octothorpe-compliant low-bandwidth page version serves no purpose anymore (and doesn't contain any code related to the Octothorpe service anymore, except for noticing visitors using URLs referencing it, in order to show this message), you probably want to view the original page in its complete technicolor glory at https://michaelkupietz.com/why-eat-pigeon/.

Why Eat Pigeon?

Way back in the heady days of the dotcom boom, as a newbie in San Francisco, I fell in with a group of kids trying to revivify the Cacophony Society via the SF-Caco email list, which, for a while, consisted mostly of a bunch of underemployed young adults kidding around with each other and trying to come up with funny ideas. Finally, one day, a young woman who went by the on-list moniker "Drunken Consumptive Panda" threw out a sentence that was to change a lot of lives: "We should have a pigeon roast in Union Square".

The Union Square Pigeon Roast, as it happens, deserves a much longer reminiscence, is it was the start of a remarkable, brief but fun period of activity that lasted a few years. The event itself was ludicrous: we posed as a group called "Bay Area Rotisserie Friends" (that was my idea; check the acronym) advocating for harvesting SF's pigeon population as a food source. My old ex-friend Rick Abruzzo printed up t-shirts of a pigeon in a chef's hat and the slogan "Pigeon, the other other white meat", and several large signs were made. Unbeknownst to us, another group of people, in on the joke, organized a faux protest to show up and oppose us as the "Pigeon Eating Temperance Association". On the day, we fired up hibachis in Union Square, complete with little roast squabs we'd purchased pre-cooked in Chinatown.

The whole thing sounds rather mortifying in summary 25 years later, but you have to understand the tenor of the times. San Francisco at the time was home to a lot of these kinds of street pranks, people trying to see just how ludicrous they could be in public without people realizing it was a put on, this became a larger event that we expected, and we made a pretty entertaining afternoon of it. There's still some media coverage from the SF Bay Guardian, who somehow caught wind of it, archived in the Wayback Machine at https://web.archive.org/web/20001121171500/http://www.sfbg.com/SFLife/shocked/75.html (and if that ever goes away I have it archived locally here.) Really, the event deserves the whole background story being written down at some point, there was a lot to it. The city got involved, before even the day of the event there was an amusing interaction with some folks we'd apparently caused some consternation for at the Dept. of Health, and eventually the police confiscated everything, including our signs.

Anyway, as part of the event, I made up these flyers to hand out, "Why Eat Pigeon?" Scattered among actual recipes (mostly actually duck recipies, IIRC), a false history of pigeon-eating's supposed popularity, and an intentionally much-too-graphic description of how to "field dress" a pigeon, were ludicrous "facts" such as "Pigeons are among nature's most hygienic creatures. A pigeon's bill is as clean as stainless steel".

I was pretty proud of them, even moreso when, years later, I saw Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, interviewed in a newspaper, and in the photograph he had a "Why Eat Pigeon?" leaflet tacked up on the wall behind his desk.