A friend I knew pledged an MIT frat in the 80's. The upperclassmen realized that you could get goat heads for like 50 cents a pound at one of the local stores. For one of their hazing pranks, they gave each pledge a goat head and instructions to hide the goat head on campus, which whichever head was hidden the "best" would get a prize.
The resulting kerfuffle and news articles on the incident (including allegations of satanism on the MIT campus) is definitely something that frat will be proud of forever.
Unlike the other two, "frat" has no alternative denotation and is a common alternative to fraternity. By your logic we wouldn't be using "app" or "admin" or "limo" or "memo."
i notice a lot of fraternity members make the "you wouldn't call your country a ...", guess it's just the common chant (amongst others), though i don't understand why they consider 'frat' a derogatory statement
That is not what we were taught when we were pledges. They must have gotten soft. You guys have it so easy now.
I am going to go out on a limb and say the number of people at Hacker News who pledged is probably small.
Someone else posted "You wouldn't call your sorority ..." but that's just not how the joke goes. Sorry. Gotta do it. I'm telling the joke. Braced for downvotes.
"You wouldn't call your country a..."
And then I realized, that's the first or second half of the joke that got flagkilled :)
How unoriginal. I was in Brooklyn long before the goat heads showed up, and I can tell you the whole "ritual sacrifice" thing has been kind of done for a while now. I hear all the real cutting edge indie mutilations are in Ridgewood, Queens anyways.
Well maybe they are just fans of a certain Football(as in "Soccer") club. Here in Germany, they often lay goat heads infront of the stadium of their rivals before matches, cause the rival's mascot is a goat, and they even have a living goat in their ttadium.
Could it just be that there is a Halal butcher in the area who doesn't want to pay disposal costs for older goats whose heads are not as prized as the young ones for culinary usage?
When I was a teenager I was trying to impress some girls so I showed them the head of this goat I had shot hunting, it had an impressive rack. I was storing it in the fridge wrapped up in a trash bag because I wanted to show it to my dad who was away on a trip.
Anyway they were kind of impressed cause they never saw that kind of thing before being sheltered city girls. Then I had the inspiration to take the goat head and sneak into the public pool and leave it in the life guard tower, the girls were super excited like it was the funnest thing they ever did. It was a great night. Don't know what ever happened with the lifeguard that found it.
The whole thing didn't have anything to do with satanism or ill will, just a teenager trying to impress some girls and it worked.
When I lived in Miami in the late 80s/early 90s there was a story about how the main courthouse in Dade County had to clean up various parts of chickens, goats, etc. most mornings from around the property. Allegedly, these were sacrifices from practitioners of various Afro-Caribbean religions (just like the article says) seeking to influence ongoing court cases.
It sounds a bit crazy, but at that time there were fairly frequent stories in the news about Santeria, etc. followers being arrested for sacrificing goats in their backyard and so on.
I stepped into an elevator in an office building once and there was a (live) rooster in it...
The resulting kerfuffle and news articles on the incident (including allegations of satanism on the MIT campus) is definitely something that frat will be proud of forever.