This site is...yep....you guessed it!

September 13, 2009 11:27 AM

Badass of the Week. Feeling uninspired? Certain that the world is utterly bereft of all things baddass? Well, go get your weekly dose of inspiration!

Examples of bad-assitude abound. If you're into rocking chicks, check out Juliane Koepcke, Amelia Earhart, or Harriet Tubman. Like your bad-asses a little more "meaty?" Check out Liver-Eating Johnson or the Viking at Stamford Bridge. Updated more or less weekly for the past 5 years, there's something or someone badass for everyone. The complete list.

posted by The Light Fantastic (27 comments total)

I would have expected a bad-ass website to have a bad-ass design.
posted by jeffamaphone at 11:31 AM on September 13, 2009 [1 favorite]

Tom Wanyandie seriously deserves that title.
posted by idiopath at 11:41 AM on September 13, 2009 [8 favorites]

I like hearing stories about people exceeding their limits, doing things that most of us would back away from, going above and beyond the call of duty for the sake of others. I also thought the idea of 'Badass of the week' was appealing, to the kid in me, and could be a lark.

But when it's glorified by bloggers who also mock-glorify "commanders who completely flipped out and slaughtered tens of thousands of enemy combatants using nothing more than a claw hammer, a loaf of incredibly-stale French bread, and their own uncontrollable blood rage,", and "punching fugitives' faces off," etc., it kinda diminishes the tale by the telling. The site is obviously tongue-in-cheek; it's just too over-the-top for its own good.
posted by Hardcore Poser at 11:51 AM on September 13, 2009 [1 favorite]

The "disarm mines with a pocket knife" guy from the other post seemed like enough badass for the rest of the year if you ask me.
posted by qvantamon at 12:17 PM on September 13, 2009 [5 favorites]

I have to say I kind of like the over the top nature of the writing. He's trying to be entertaining and it works for me anyway.
posted by vito90 at 12:38 PM on September 13, 2009 [1 favorite]

to fight in the Boer Wars. Things were going pretty well for a while, until one day Churchill decided to be completely awesome and start riding around in an armor-plated Death Train

I LOL'd -- he was on a normal goods train when captured.

it's just too over-the-top for its own good.

yeah, if you're going for humor you can embellish but not confuse. Eg. in the Churchill piece the part about France falling before Churchill taking over, or Germany launching rockets in the 1940/41 timeperiod.
posted by Palamedes at 12:39 PM on September 13, 2009

yeah, if you're going for humor you can embellish but not confuse.

One embellished moment was the description of the off-duty firefighter not "going to be slowed down by a little thing like burning jet fuel" when the crashed plane in question that had started the fire was a twin-engine propeller driven Cessna, not a jet. But I was willing to let that pass, given the context.

Plus, I'll see if I can convince the priest at my church in his next sermon about St. Moses the Black to describe him as "the Jules Winnfield of the Orthodox Church. "
posted by deanc at 12:53 PM on September 13, 2009 [3 favorites]

I was amused to see Buzz Aldrin punch that doofus conspiracy theorist nutbag in the chops.
posted by pracowity at 1:06 PM on September 13, 2009

Metafilter: the closest instrument of brain-smashing kill-sanity that he could find.
posted by blue_beetle at 1:11 PM on September 13, 2009

Reminds me of Professor Badass.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 1:39 PM on September 13, 2009 [1 favorite]

Some of this is over-the-top, but I have to admit that I found

But Ben Nyaumbe wasn't going to just keel over and asphyxiate like some kind of chump.  He was going to punch this thing in the fuck till it shit.

endearing in a breathless, gushing kinda way. Nice find. Bookmarked.
posted by BitterOldPunk at 1:41 PM on September 13, 2009

I LOL'd -- he was on a normal goods train when captured.

? Brainfart. Churchill was in fact captured on an armored train.
posted by Palamedes at 1:52 PM on September 13, 2009

The BFG 9000 was pretty badass in its day.
posted by futureisunwritten at 2:28 PM on September 13, 2009

I for one cannot think of a website design more badass than straight up html pages including font tags and tables.

The last 10-15 years of web design is pretty much for pussies.
posted by shownomercy at 2:39 PM on September 13, 2009 [3 favorites]

I for one cannot think of a website design more badass than straight up html pages including font tags and tables.

Everyone knows bad-assness comes from within.
posted by The Light Fantastic at 2:42 PM on September 13, 2009

I remember reading this site a while ago about Vassilis Paleokostas. It reminded me too much of a bad summer blockbuster movie and I hadn't been to the site again. Too much testosterone for my taste maybe, but maybe it was just that one entry.
posted by dealing away at 3:11 PM on September 13, 2009

Great post.

We were talking about the Old Grey Whistle Test in Civil_Disobedient's wonderful post the other day and poking through YouTube the other day, and I discovered one of my absolute favorite live recordings there: The Pogues' OGWT performance of "Sally MacLennane" from 1985. It's perfect vintage Shane: he sings standing there, hands in pockets, with a wry grin on his face and a haphazard swagger. Great song, and the band's spot-on, too.

What a great group.
posted by koeselitz at 3:34 PM on September 13, 2009

the bfg9000 one is not only lol-worthy but also true - has any gun since come close to being as awesome?
posted by R_Nebblesworth at 3:35 PM on September 13, 2009

Psst, koeselitz, you're in the wrong thread.

(though MacGowan is pretty badass, even with new teeth.)
posted by ocherdraco at 6:04 PM on September 13, 2009

Agreed that Aki Ra deserves an entry with a star next to it on that list.

I did feel the need to confirm that Simo Häyhä was on the list too. That's the scariest human being I've ever heard of.
posted by CaseyB at 6:07 PM on September 13, 2009

I would have expected a bad-ass website to have a bad-ass design.

Tough guys don't dance.

That's actually a well designed site. It takes a badass to not need the trendy frippery of the day, and go with the basics. This is the Johnny "Man in Black" Cash of websites.
posted by billyfleetwood at 6:46 PM on September 13, 2009

Agreed that Aki Ra deserves an entry with a star next to it on that list.

The author takes suggestions...I'll drop him a line. Maybe next week?
posted by The Light Fantastic at 10:53 PM on September 13, 2009

I thought this was impressive until I saw that he had John Wayne in there. I mean, what did he ever do that was genuinely tough? He was an actor. Those were roles he was playing. The fictional characters are bad enough, but this is way worse.
posted by atrazine at 7:17 AM on September 14, 2009

To refer to Buzz Aldrin as a "kickasstronaut" is to be badass. Thumbs up.
posted by grubi at 7:50 AM on September 14, 2009

The "disarm mines with a pocket knife" guy from the other post

For a split second I thought this read "disarm MIMES with a pocket knife," and I got a very entertaining mental image.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:57 AM on September 14, 2009

ocherdraco: Psst, koeselitz, you're in the wrong thread.

Garr. Wondered where that comment disappeared to.

For anybody who'd like to know, a propos of nothing, this goddamned AutoPager extension for Firefox—you know, the one that automatically loads the next page of a web site at the bottom?—turns out to be absolute shit for reading Metafilter with.
posted by koeselitz at 6:43 PM on September 14, 2009

"coming soon: Badass The Book"

No.
posted by mippy at 10:22 AM on September 15, 2009