Nuggets from the Past!
Some of these little “featurettes” haven’t been on my website for a decade or more, so I’m happy to resurrect them here in all their crappy hand-coded HTML glory. (Well, the oldest stuff was done by hand, but later I moved on to Frontpage or something.) It’s a little snapshot of my old web-life, back when I had hours to work on a single page of dumb stuff just for the hell of it. 
Bridget’s Wurld (1995-1999) – Ah, Bridget. We enjoyed you to no end, waving you at people from car windows and sometimes even throwing you at people. Your fame was brief but your fans still linger!
Weekly Absurd Polls (1998-2000) - Just for a little “interactive” fun I started making weekly polls for visitors to the site. Usually the questions were of a ridiculous nature or had loaded answers (sometimes they were downright cruel), and they were a lot of fun to write. Some of this stuff is quite funny, if I do say so myself! But after a while it was a lot of work to come up with 8-10 new answers for a new stupid question every week, so I started doing it bi-weekly, then monthly…soon I wasn’t doing ‘em at all unless I was bored. So I stopped altogether almost exactly two years and 60+ polls after I started. They have remained open until around 2002, though, and people had been able to keep voting on them. Anyway here they are, all in one spot, complete with results. Some of the material is outdated by now (i.e., references to Monica Lewinsky & Kenneth Starr), but they’re still kinda fun.
The Goo Cafe (1998-2000) – This was a pretty popular page. It’s basically a gallery of celebrity and politician photos that I altered with Kai’s Power Goo into funny/disturbing caricatures. At some point I added a JavaScript thingy which allowed people to make their own goo images, though only pre-selected ones (’cause the script wasn’t fancy).
T.V. Highlights of Weeks Past (1999) – One of my favorite little pages ever! I’d like to start doing these again.
Mocking the Mesa Sculptures (1999) – Shortly before I moved to Seattle we spent an evening taking pictures with some silly sculptures in Mesa. It was a blast!
The Ugliest Doll in the World (1999) – Troy found this hideous little doll and brought it by for a photo session.
Daily Haiku (1999-2000) - For some reason I began writing a silly daily haiku for my homepage. It didn’t last long but it was kinda fun. I even got a few reader submissions by email…
Homosexual Conspiracy Official Headquarters (2000) – After the term “homosexual conspiracy” began to be used by actual people with actual (alleged) brains, I thought it was time to devote a little page of mockery to the right wing’s idiotic homo-fear. It’s gleefully supergay…all it’s missing is photos of half-nekkid raver boys flailing around to techno music with glowsticks in their mouths.
9/11 Commentary (2001) – This one’s self-explanatory. My first inclination was to just keep it off the site altogether, but I really felt compelled to say SOMEthing about the event — it’s not exactly something you can just ignore. I haven’t really read it since, but I remember trying to be very rational and feeling a little freaked out by America’s growing bloodlust to just bomb anything or anyone to make it all better.
E-Leash (2001) - This one seems almost quaint today, since back then not everyone had a cellphone but they were becoming overused enough to be mocked. I was especially sensitive to this, because in the late 90?s I dated someone who never turned his phone off and always answered it, no matter what time of day or how inconvenient it was to everyone around him. His work ruled his life (and still does, actually), so I think that probably had a tiny bit of influence here.
Cereal Boxes from Hell (2001) – This short-lived page was supposed to feature lots of amazingly stupid cereal box art, but sadly I only did two before I moved on. I think it was just too overwhelming to photograph/scan as many as I wanted — it would be much easier with today’s cellphone cams.
Airheads: Fun with the SkyMall Catalog (2001) – This was fun to do. I actually got a nastygram from some guy at the company which sells the bizarro fire hood. He basically said “You’re stupid and wrong, it’s actually very effective and doesn’t melt. Thanks for helping advertise our product!” Wow…I didn’t know my site had any consumer sway whatsoever. (It doesn’t — he was just being touchy.)
The Ford Phallus (2002) – One of my favorite pages ever — it’s so very bitchy! I still think of giant trucks as huge penises on wheels.
The Michael Jackson Gallery of Horrors (2003) – Yeah, he was an easy target and this is totally a juvenile cheap shot. I just couldn’t help myself.
Testimonials (2003) – What website is complete without some celebrity testimonials? And here’s something I never mentioned before: the guy in the Spider-Man suit was my boyfriend at the time. He was dressed up for Halloween and I told him to pose before heading off to work. It still cracks me up!