Ragnar's Hat
From EVE History
Ragnar's Hat as posted by j0sephine on eve-online orginally [linky]
"What's Ragnar's hat?"
Ragnar Tørnquist, a former CEO of industrial mega-corporation Taggart Transdimensional [TTI], has made what some might call controversial - and to others highly hilarious - decisions during his career.
One of these decisions concerned a vote held by the Venal Alliance of old. The VA was involved in a war with the Fountain Alliance and it didn't go very well for them. Eventually an offer was made by FA to end the war, on condition TTI and few pirate corporations which were part of VA would be expelled from Venal. The VA council held a vote and the outcome was the Venal Alliance would rather go down fighting together - to which Ragnar's response was a withdrawal from the alliance along with the aforementioned pirate corporations. They formed the Northern Alliance (NA) to declare war on his former allies which renamed themselves as the New Venal Alliance (NVA).
This new war was going somewhat better for the NVA than for the NA, and during that time Femme Fatal (of Going Limp corporation) created a short movie clip - as it happened it was a brief period when many people were subtitling odd Fanta Shokata commercials - in which a delusional Ragnar sporting a fez rambles about it not being over yet for he still has his superweapon, to which his irritated advisor responds with something similar to "Oh stfu nub, your magic hat isn't really magic".
The phrase quickly transformed into reference to any of Ragnar's impressive blunders, and eventually into a general term for any dubious decision, typically if made by high-profile people like alliance leaders or industrial tycoons.
External Links
A couple of old threads describing these events with more details:
