OH JOHN RINGO NO

OH JOHN RINGO NO is an exclamation of utter dismay and disbelief at something utterly head-deskingly crushingly boneheaded, clueless, and offensively sexist. It was invented by hradzka, March 22, 2008, in response to a series of books by John Ringo.

The phrase was first used in a review by hradzka, "books to make my flist's heads explode: John Ringo", March 22, 2008. The review began thusly:

Lately, some folks on my f-list have been looking at Lord King Bad profic. ... These books, it should be admitted, are deeply awful, and as portrayals of their authors' ids, they're more than a little alarming. You don't want to look, but you can't look away. The awfulness becomes sublime. So why am I commenting about this? Well, because I feel a little like Richard Dreyfuss in JAWS, during the scar scene: "I got that beat. I got that beat." Permit me to introduce John Ringo.

Ringo is the author of a bajillion books, including fantasy and military SF. The novels (oh, yes, there is more than one) we'll be considering are from the PALADIN OF SHADOWS series. These are modern-day action thrillers in which -- well, let's look at GHOST, the first novel in the series. The story begins with our hero, Mike Harmon, a accidentally witnessing the abduction of a college coed. He witnesses it because he just happens to be lurking in the shadows and watching the coeds himself. This is Mike's recreation. Why? Well:

He knew that at heart, he was a rapist. And that meant he hated rapists more than any "normal" human being. They purely pissed him off. He'd spent his entire sexually adult life fighting the urge to not use his inconsiderable strength to possess and take instead of woo and cajole. He'd fought his demons to a standstill again and again when it would have been so easy to give in. He'd had one truly screwed up bitch get completely naked, with him naked and erect between her legs, and she still couldn't say "yes." And he'd just said: "that's okay" and walked away with an amazing case of blue balls. When men gave in to that dark side, it made him even more angry then listening to leftist bitches scream about "western civilization" and how it was so fucked up.

Ladies and gentlemen, *our hero.*

You think that paragraph alone would make this book awesomely bad, but no. IT GETS MORE SO. Yes, you will be horrified by a lot of this, because Mike Harmon's adventures are by turns awesomely horrific and horrifically awesome; I freely confess that I cannot stop reading these books, because *I have to see what Ringo does next.* I do, however, have a finely-tuned defense mechanism: whenever something trips my circuit breaker, causing me to cringe away from the page, I utter aloud a cry that resets my noggin. You will probably need it yourself, so I provide it here, as a public service: "OH JOHN RINGO NO."

The review goes on to parse the novels in detail, punctuating the various head-deskingly moments with the phrase OH JOHN RINGO NO.

This phrase began to circulate and achieved broader recognition during the Open Source Boob Project debacle.

In a comment in the original post, Hradzka responded to a commenter's note about the likely failure of the Frank Miller test:

I can't decide whether Mike would call Sin City a "light-hearted romp for the family" or if he'd just dismiss it outright as being too much of a chick-flick.

Researchers wanting to view for themselves, without compromising their ethics through subsidy, may access four of the five books for free online at: [| Baen CD of Unto the Breach]