ScrappleFace

» see scrappleface.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

In January 2003, with France and Germany refusing to back the invasion of Iraq, a former journalist named Scott Ott wrote a joke on his blog about an "Axis of weasels". It was a parody of Bush's "Axis of evil" and it escaped immediately. The Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal picked it up and The Age in Melbourne ran it. By that spring the phrase was on cable news and on tabloid front pages, generally with no idea that it had come from a one-man website.

The one-man website was ScrappleFace, started in July 2002. Ott took the name from his grandmother Jessica McMaster, who had helped raise him from the age of five and who had used it for the family dog. He chose it because he was certain the domain would be free, on the grounds that nobody else knew the word existed.

The format was fake wire copy from a conservative angle, a few hundred words a day, headline first. The byline credited a "vast editorial staff" of correspondents who, the site liked to say, covered the globe like a patina of dental plaque. There was no staff. Ott wrote all of it. By March 2007 he had filed more than 2,500 stories alone, and the site was reporting over ten million visitors.

~ the case file ~

~ axis of weasels ~

The phrase is the reason ScrappleFace deserves a stone, and it is also a decent demonstration of what the early blogosphere could do that nothing before it could. A guy in his spare time wrote a line, no editor saw it, no publication cleared it, and eleven days later it was shaping how a diplomatic crisis got talked about in two hemispheres. In 2003 that pipeline was new, and ScrappleFace was one of the small number of blogs that proved it ran.

It was also entirely American political writing, aimed at American arguments, and it stayed that way for sixteen years. Its influence traveled; its readership did not.

~ the last post ~

The site thinned out the way one-person publications do. Twenty-nine kilobytes of front page in 2008, down to six by the end of 2011. Ott kept going anyway, on and off, for another seven years.

The final story is dated 5 November 2018 and headlined "Election Outcome Uncertain, Expert Says Stay Angry". It quotes an unnamed elections expert, who is not Russian and not a cable news executive, urging Americans not to become complacent or charitable before the next day's midterm votes, on the grounds that maintaining rage sustains civilization. Fill your Facebook wall and your Twitter feed with the rage of the past nine months, the expert says. Loose the hounds of Hell onto that keyboard.

For a satirist who had spent sixteen years writing about American politics, going out on a joke about people being too angry to stop is a better last line than most writers get to plan.

~ the hello world ~

Nothing happened for two years. The server kept serving that November 2018 post as the top story, through 2019 and into February 2020, a front page frozen on an election that had already happened.

Then somebody reinstalled WordPress. By August 2021 scrappleface.com was answering with a clean default blog whose only entry was the stock "Hello world!" post, dated 9 November 2020. Sixteen years of archives, the Axis of weasels piece included, were simply not there. The domain went to 404 in October 2022, and today it does not answer at all.

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