You young folk with your iPODs and iPADs and MTV and broadband internet on command don't know the real... thing at the end. Seriously what is that bit at the end actually called? I know what it's supposed to stand for the phrase "praise be unto her". No, the original and actual phrase was "bbhh" which stood for "blessed be her hooves".

I should know. I created it.

Stop laughing because it's true. Back in the inky backwaters of the internet, before everybody had broadband, we used to connect to the internet through dial up. Maybe some of you still do, but most have moved on to being on all the time. During that time, literally at the turn of the century, I was still a University student with access to the internet and a discovery of the Usenet. These were newsgroups, a place where people could discuss, post and more often than not start flamewars.

One of the busiest places, and it's still going strong today, was a group called AA or "Alt.Atheism". It was there that the IPU (bbhh) was effectively created. We knew she was both invisible and pink at the same time. Well one day, I made a post talking about the IPU (bbhh) and decided to add that little bit at the end. It was patterned after some mindless bit that people would repeat after a certain word was said. The best example is when Muslims talk of Mohammed they'll say "Peace be unto him". So I took the idea and made "blessed be her hooves". Well some people adopted it, some didn't but it started to gain ground.

Eventually there were splits in the ranks. Some would say, "blessed be her horn", others would say, "blessed be her holy hooves / horn", others would use "praise be unto her" and it just spiraled out of control from there.

But lest ye be doubters, here's the original post preserved for all time: Power of Prayer (the the IPU) dated Jan 15th, 1998.

2034835
This is incredibly cool.

2035098
Yes, it's my one claim to internet immortality.

2037630
That's one more than most of us have.
I was online in those days, and I promise you, no one has any idea who I am...

Wait... I'm getting something...
Yes... it's my prophet-powers.

A new edict, directly from the holy pink (and invisible!) Goddess herself, which could not possibly have come from any other source.

She says: "Actually, BBHH is correct, not PBUH."

Naturally, I expect this to create the normal effect within a religion.
Half will accept the change, and half will reject it.
Then, one of two things will happen:
A- The PBUH faction forms its own demonination of the religion
B- One faction kills off the other faction
Okay... GO!

2040173
Hell, I'll kill anybody. I'm just in it for the fun of the schism.

2034835
Heh, I'm also one of those old dinosaurs who was internetting (we called it 'surfing the web', back then) before the turn of the century.

I remember when gif images were cool. A magical time, when you'd see a website that used many of them and think, 'Wow, what an awesome website.'
...and 'webrings', and virus-laden download sites, and 'multimedia learning', and all kinds of amazing stuff you don't have nowadays.

(Ah, the internet. The place where someone under 30 can come and reminisce like an old geezer about the days when google was a search engine and nothing else.)

2040247
I remember when Yahoo was the search engine of choice, a service called "dogpile" that would search all the available search engines and give you a ranked result, when GIFs were cool, when downloading a song took an hour and forget streaming video. Multimedia was the catchphrase of the day. E-commerce was on everybody's lips and nobody could have foreseen what the internet would become.

I remember BBS's and text only browsers. I remember when Compuserve was one of the biggest places online you could go and I remember when we finally got AOL which opened everything up.

Good times.

2039044
Wasn't it Andy Warhol that said that one day everybody would have their 15 minutes of fame? I guess that was mine in a relatively anonymous way.

2040173

Oh great, another schism. Why am I getting "Life of Brian" flashbacks all of a sudden? Damn splitters!

2040708
Yahoo? Pfft! If I can't find it on Alta Vista, it ain't real to me!

Yeah, I was also around in the BBS days. Times have certainly changed...
(No thanks to the People's Front of the Invisible Magenta Unicorn. Splitters!)