Whilst Yak Shaving I found out that the insult server at insulthost.colorado.edu:1695 and the BOFH excuse server at bofh.engr.wisc.edu:666 were both down. I have local mirrors running but I think the best thing is to reimplement them as Perl modules, probably as Acme::Scurvy::Whoreson::BilgeRat backends.
What's that you say - you have a large bovine mammal in need of a haircut?