Tuesday 26 August 2008
History of "The QuFF".
The Quindley-Fluff Frontiersman is a publication with centuries of history behind it. Founded in 1624 as a means for the two estranged inhabitants of Quindley & Fluff to communicate without risk of sodomy, it grew in tandem with the respective populations of the two villages until by 1832 it had a total readership of over 14,000 people. However, after the great sodomy epidemic of 1833 the readership was again rendered to two, threatening the very existence of the by now iconic publication. Fortunately Horatio Wellington, the Archbishop of Trafalgar, took the paper under his wing, and so saving it from total oblivion.
By 1880 the paper, for the second time in it’s history, sold over ten thousand copies and drew the attention of the then Prime Minister and Papist ‘Benjamin the Israeli’, thusly named due to the international fame of his anti-semitic rants and acts. He bought ‘The QuFF’, as it had then become known, and changed the paper size and typeset to the hyper-quadro-broadsheet format as a solution to the housing problem. However, printing of the paper had to be stopped for a fortnight after it was discovered that Gladstone had eaten much of the printing machinery. The precedent set rocked the world as the luddites set about trying to ease their own unemployment problems by eating the machinery that had usurped their positions in the labour market. Thousands died of Chronic Bottom Evacuation Syndrome, yet again leaving the Quindley-Fluff Frontiersman with an available readership of only two. This act of mass sabotage and chronic indigestion brought Gladstone’s Liberals to their knees as D’Israeli (as he had become known on a recent trip to the Dodogne) described it as “G.O.M”, or “Gladstones’ Over-enthusiastic Mouth-eatings.”
By 1918 The QuFF was in jeopardy. Some historians claim that the readership at this time had shrunk to just the editor himself, although this fact is disputed due to his having been fatally wounded at the Somme. However, none other than Winston Churchill revived it in 1919 as an alternative to “Rum, Sodomy and the Lash”, although he stated his personal preference was for the latter. The shot in the arm he provided led the paper to become an essential depression-era read for many families, partially due to the fact that the paper it was printed on contained an average of 1800 calories and the ink 42, although the then editor, Fred Astaire, did insist upon covering one in every thousand copies with arsenic “for a laugh”.
In 1945 the front page of The QuFF was said to have won the war in the Far East with the famous headline:
“Emperor Hirohito Princess Margaret?”
Indeed, the role that The QuFF played in World War Two was acknowledged by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, who recently played a commemorative four hour concert in the paper’s honour using only the note of E. This was due to it being the letter most often used in the paper’s reportage during the global conflict.
In modern times the paper consolidated it’s position as a niche publication by carrying eyewitness accounts of less famous historical events, such as all the days that Jack Ruby didn’t shoot Lee Harvey Oswald and Ted Heath’s birthday.
However, controversy was just around the corner. Some blamed The QuFF’s conversion to a normal broadsheet format as the primary cause of the LA riots, although generally this point is considered:
A) In Bad Taste and
B) Mad, due to the change happening in 2002.
In 2008, due to reasons divulged elsewhere, the Quindley-Fluff Frontiersman made the leap into the world of the internet. If there is hope for it’s future, it can be found in it’s past. Salvation is always around the corner.
Blither By: KPD, QuFF Society Historian.
By 1880 the paper, for the second time in it’s history, sold over ten thousand copies and drew the attention of the then Prime Minister and Papist ‘Benjamin the Israeli’, thusly named due to the international fame of his anti-semitic rants and acts. He bought ‘The QuFF’, as it had then become known, and changed the paper size and typeset to the hyper-quadro-broadsheet format as a solution to the housing problem. However, printing of the paper had to be stopped for a fortnight after it was discovered that Gladstone had eaten much of the printing machinery. The precedent set rocked the world as the luddites set about trying to ease their own unemployment problems by eating the machinery that had usurped their positions in the labour market. Thousands died of Chronic Bottom Evacuation Syndrome, yet again leaving the Quindley-Fluff Frontiersman with an available readership of only two. This act of mass sabotage and chronic indigestion brought Gladstone’s Liberals to their knees as D’Israeli (as he had become known on a recent trip to the Dodogne) described it as “G.O.M”, or “Gladstones’ Over-enthusiastic Mouth-eatings.”
By 1918 The QuFF was in jeopardy. Some historians claim that the readership at this time had shrunk to just the editor himself, although this fact is disputed due to his having been fatally wounded at the Somme. However, none other than Winston Churchill revived it in 1919 as an alternative to “Rum, Sodomy and the Lash”, although he stated his personal preference was for the latter. The shot in the arm he provided led the paper to become an essential depression-era read for many families, partially due to the fact that the paper it was printed on contained an average of 1800 calories and the ink 42, although the then editor, Fred Astaire, did insist upon covering one in every thousand copies with arsenic “for a laugh”.
In 1945 the front page of The QuFF was said to have won the war in the Far East with the famous headline:
“Emperor Hirohito Princess Margaret?”
Indeed, the role that The QuFF played in World War Two was acknowledged by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, who recently played a commemorative four hour concert in the paper’s honour using only the note of E. This was due to it being the letter most often used in the paper’s reportage during the global conflict.
In modern times the paper consolidated it’s position as a niche publication by carrying eyewitness accounts of less famous historical events, such as all the days that Jack Ruby didn’t shoot Lee Harvey Oswald and Ted Heath’s birthday.
However, controversy was just around the corner. Some blamed The QuFF’s conversion to a normal broadsheet format as the primary cause of the LA riots, although generally this point is considered:
A) In Bad Taste and
B) Mad, due to the change happening in 2002.
In 2008, due to reasons divulged elsewhere, the Quindley-Fluff Frontiersman made the leap into the world of the internet. If there is hope for it’s future, it can be found in it’s past. Salvation is always around the corner.
Blither By: KPD, QuFF Society Historian.
Introducing The Quindley-Fluff Frontiersman on Blogger
The Quindley-Fluff Frontiersman launched today as an online publication to very little fanfare. After 384 years of being a print-only publication with a consistent circulation of 4 the paper has moved into the technological age. The editor, known to the world only as ‘Fluff, The QuFFer-In-Chief’, made the following brief statement at 1am:
“After 384 years of being a print-only publication with a consistent circulation of 4, the paper has moved into the technological age. As chief charlies I and my associates have voted unanimously, by a majority of 1, that now was the time to make the move. We understand that some of our readers may be put off by this. Indeed, I still remember the violence that marred our move from a hyper-quadro-broadsheet into the more recent regular broadsheet format. The -admittedly catchy- chant “72 square feet of paper is better suited to one 6 foot by 6 foot double sided sheet than to 24 24 by 18 inch pages!” still haunts me to this day. But we shall not be held to ransom by the extreme fringe of our readership. We are prepared to accept the worst if needs be to make this essential move. We live in an age where literacy is being outsourced to Asia and people cannot readily identify the obvious aesthetic differences between the carrot and the radish and we have to change with the times. It is with this in mind that we have taken this step, this leap into the unknown, and we now throw ourselves at the callous feet of the Free Market God.”
However consumer reaction was instantaneous and laced with menace. One reader wrote on the online forum www.howtoreadilyidentifythedifferencebetweencarrotsandradishesparticularlyinstressfulcircumstances.tk:
“I will not take this lying down. Therefore I have righted myself and have adopted a more vertical posture”.
A later, less grounded person wrote:
“The main problem that I have with this decision is that I cannot read my computer in the shower!!!! I mean!”
Facebook groups were also alive with INTRIGUE. Indeed, a recently formed Facebook group called itself: “If one billion people join this group, The Quindley-Fluff Frontiersman will catch fire and everything and that and then we can all sweep the ashes into jam jars and use them for cat litter and then watch as our cats defecate on the remains of The Quindley-Fluff Frontiersman BAXTARDS!!!!! I mean!”
However there is a more positive spin to these developments. For example Lord Tebbit described the move as “Good for The Co-op and Good for Britain”. Foreign Secretary David Miliband praised the entrepreneurial spirit of the decision in a speech to the House of Commons, describing it as “…balls out furniture action”. He later used hyperbolic adverbs such as “Pluckley’s Comb”, “Shed-banger” and “Knee-Skiddy” to describe his expectations for the project- rousing language that, in the words of Tory front bencher Grant Shapps MP, left the opposition “…completely and utterly beefed”.
Despite the controversy the future looks bright for ‘The QuFF’. It is by no means the first paper to make the move from hard to digital copy as it follows in the well trodden footsteps of other notable projects such as “Pens as Darts?”, “Italian Mannerisms and how to adopt them” and “Stewart Granger- Actor or Fanzine?.” Indeed, “Pens as Darts” has seen a five-fold increase in its readership since the move in 2006. However, some attribute this exponential growth more to the increasingly pornographic nature of the magazine rather than to the change in format.
Only time will tell as to whether the move will prove to be a success or a failure. “Fluff, The QuFFer-In-Chief” is confident that the gamble will pay off: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams … glitter in the dark near Tannhauser Gate. All those … moments will be lost … in time, like tears … in the rain*……… But one thousand years from now I am confident that The QuFF will still be there, plugging away for an audience long since dead because we would all have been killed by space rats or something.” This reporter for one is convinced of the fundamental truth of those words.
Report By: “Fluff, The QuFFer-In-Chief
Additional Copyrighted Words By: Rutger Hauer
*With apologies to Warner Brothers Inc., and Rutger Hauer in particular, for the rampant plagiarism.
“After 384 years of being a print-only publication with a consistent circulation of 4, the paper has moved into the technological age. As chief charlies I and my associates have voted unanimously, by a majority of 1, that now was the time to make the move. We understand that some of our readers may be put off by this. Indeed, I still remember the violence that marred our move from a hyper-quadro-broadsheet into the more recent regular broadsheet format. The -admittedly catchy- chant “72 square feet of paper is better suited to one 6 foot by 6 foot double sided sheet than to 24 24 by 18 inch pages!” still haunts me to this day. But we shall not be held to ransom by the extreme fringe of our readership. We are prepared to accept the worst if needs be to make this essential move. We live in an age where literacy is being outsourced to Asia and people cannot readily identify the obvious aesthetic differences between the carrot and the radish and we have to change with the times. It is with this in mind that we have taken this step, this leap into the unknown, and we now throw ourselves at the callous feet of the Free Market God.”
However consumer reaction was instantaneous and laced with menace. One reader wrote on the online forum www.howtoreadilyidentifythedifferencebetweencarrotsandradishesparticularlyinstressfulcircumstances.tk:
“I will not take this lying down. Therefore I have righted myself and have adopted a more vertical posture”.
A later, less grounded person wrote:
“The main problem that I have with this decision is that I cannot read my computer in the shower!!!! I mean!”
Facebook groups were also alive with INTRIGUE. Indeed, a recently formed Facebook group called itself: “If one billion people join this group, The Quindley-Fluff Frontiersman will catch fire and everything and that and then we can all sweep the ashes into jam jars and use them for cat litter and then watch as our cats defecate on the remains of The Quindley-Fluff Frontiersman BAXTARDS!!!!! I mean!”
However there is a more positive spin to these developments. For example Lord Tebbit described the move as “Good for The Co-op and Good for Britain”. Foreign Secretary David Miliband praised the entrepreneurial spirit of the decision in a speech to the House of Commons, describing it as “…balls out furniture action”. He later used hyperbolic adverbs such as “Pluckley’s Comb”, “Shed-banger” and “Knee-Skiddy” to describe his expectations for the project- rousing language that, in the words of Tory front bencher Grant Shapps MP, left the opposition “…completely and utterly beefed”.
Despite the controversy the future looks bright for ‘The QuFF’. It is by no means the first paper to make the move from hard to digital copy as it follows in the well trodden footsteps of other notable projects such as “Pens as Darts?”, “Italian Mannerisms and how to adopt them” and “Stewart Granger- Actor or Fanzine?.” Indeed, “Pens as Darts” has seen a five-fold increase in its readership since the move in 2006. However, some attribute this exponential growth more to the increasingly pornographic nature of the magazine rather than to the change in format.
Only time will tell as to whether the move will prove to be a success or a failure. “Fluff, The QuFFer-In-Chief” is confident that the gamble will pay off: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams … glitter in the dark near Tannhauser Gate. All those … moments will be lost … in time, like tears … in the rain*……… But one thousand years from now I am confident that The QuFF will still be there, plugging away for an audience long since dead because we would all have been killed by space rats or something.” This reporter for one is convinced of the fundamental truth of those words.
Report By: “Fluff, The QuFFer-In-Chief
Additional Copyrighted Words By: Rutger Hauer
*With apologies to Warner Brothers Inc., and Rutger Hauer in particular, for the rampant plagiarism.
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