About Us

The Baboon Furnace is a blog and forum run by a bunch of people who care too much about politics and hockey. Now we try to tell you why we're right.

Preemptively Answered Questions

Why hockey? / Where did you come from? What's all these references to "HF" and "HFPol" I see?

HFBoards - the largest ice hockey message board on the Internet - once had a Politics subforum. It doesn't anymore. You can probably figure it out from there.

"Baboon Furnace"? Isn't that racist?

Nope. Certain assholes out there do use references to primates as racist remarks (mostly because, y'know, they're assholes), but what we're referencing predates the discovery of the New World by several centuries.

What the hell is "Baboon Furnace" supposed to mean, then?

On Christmas Eve 820, Michael the Amorian, right-hand man of the East Roman (Byzantine) Emperor Leo V and commander of the Excubitors (a regiment of the palace guard), was brought before Leo to stand trial on charges of conspiring to assassinate and usurp the Emperor. To Leo V's surprise, Michael confessed his guilt. This betrayal enraged Leo so much that he pronounced a bizarre sentence - Michael was, on the next day, to be tied to an ape and hurled into the furnace that heated the imperial palace.

Ultimately, Michael managed to avoid this fate. As the next day was Christmas Day, Leo was persuaded to reschedule the execution for the day after, and this gave his fellow conspirators time to respond. Disguised as monks, they infiltrated the Christmas mass in the Hagia Sophia (where Leo was present), and attacked and successfully assassinated Leo (although reportedly Leo, with the aid of an iron cross, managed to put up a good fight for quite some time before he finally fell). Subsequently, Michael ascended to the throne as Michael II.

Nonetheless, this novel approach to dealing with political disagreements impressed one of our more historically-inclined members (who, for personal preference reasons, opted to substitute a baboon for the ape) as being potentially helpful in modern contexts, and thus condemnation to the "Baboon Furnace" became a well-known in-joke. It kind of ballooned from there. When it came time for us to forge our own path, "The Baboon Furnace" was the one name everyone could readily agree on.