A History of Boasting: From Ancient Cave Paintings to Future Trends

Since modern man has walked on the earth he has made sure to show others his catch.  So, for about the last 80,000 years, depending on your scientific point of view, people catching fish have been adding a few inches.  Here is a brief history of how it has been done.  At the end, I will show you how it is going to be done.


Here is the first brag, courtesy of
http://library.thinkquest.org.  It is a Aborigine cave-painting of barramundi fish.  Surely, the wives were looking at the painting rolling their eyes, shaking their head and making gestures to themselves showing the true size.







Skip forward a few thousand years and a group of guys decided they wanted to feed a whole lot of people.  They decided that quantity in the creel was important.  And they sure went all out.  They had baskets full of fish!  Good for them. 

Fast forward a few more thousands of years and we have our grandparents.  The greatest generation.  Only a few of these pictures actually exist for good reason.  It was expensive to take pictures back then.  If you notice, grandpa has not quite figured out how to stiff arm a fish yet.  Generally speaking, they are holding a stringer with a few fish on it by their side, with a smile ear to ear.  Nothing too fancy.  They were the greatest generation for good reason.


Skip forward to dad's era.  Polaroids ruled the bait shop walls.  Dad had a few more pictures to mess around with.  Thus, the stiff arm started to evolve into what it is today.  One problem still existed with Polaroids, you could not reproduce your brag! 













Then, in the mid 1990's, the digital evolution began.  You could reproduce your brag on an alarming scale, provided that your 1.1 megapixel camera was fully charged, you had plenty of floppy disks, and mom did not pick up the telephone when you were shooting off an email with your AOL trial disk.  35mm ruled the bait shop walls.  Bragging was getting easier and more reproducible.





And now, our generation of hyper-threaded bragging.  Truly, we should just be lucky that some of us are pulling ourselves away from a computer to take a whiff of fresh air.  I can text you my brag from the middle of a lake.  If my connection is bad, I can go to the bait store and hook up to their WiFi and brag all over the internet. 

For some, high definition is now in.  People get to show off every scale that they catch.  A few people can even go underwater with their HD to brag!

And now the future of bragging.  It is sitting under my bed right now.  I have gotten all of the equipment; ordered from every corner of the globe.  I have enough computing power to send Apollo 12 to the moon and back.  I will brag in 3D High Definition.  I hope you stay tuned.