Dear World     Thursday, September 28, 2000
More Office Assistant satire. I'm going to start a new weblog that is 100% paperclip jokes. Unless someone has already done one.

Retro video game video     Wednesday, September 27, 2000
Music video done in the style of old Atari games. The hero moves from game and game, while the band plays in full 8x8 graphic glory.

Hanson.nu postcards     Tuesday, September 26, 2000
A series of dumb internet postcards, which I'm including mostly for the last one in the series which begins "Please stop sending me junk email and dumb postcards..."

I want to be able to write letters like this     Friday, September 22, 2000
"Will & Grace" did an episode about a ministry helping poor lost homosexuals find their way back to hetrosexuality. It sparked this exchange of letters between the real-life model of the ministry and the show's story editor.

Fighting Gray Goo     Friday, September 22, 2000
The gray goo problem is the fear that self-replicating nanobots could eat up the world, leaving copies of themselves in their wake. This academic paper suggests that the eating would be limited by a number of factors, slowing the spread long enough to drop atom bombs on it. Oh atom bombs. Are there any problems you can't solve?
        [The paper doesn't actually mention bombs. That idea comes from whump.com.]

Euphemism Generator     Friday, September 22, 2000
I swear that text generators are the least-predictable genre of web publications. They're a form of satire in a way, a claim that your jargon is so predictable and meaningless that it could be churned out by a computer. But I suppose that misses the fun of these toys. Name generators and such represent about 15% of my search engine hits, up there with the I Am Canadian rant and Napster shirts. Okay, okay, Tim. Enough commentary. Will you stop kissing the purple pumpkin, already?

GirlHero is looking for a boyfriend     Friday, September 22, 2000
One of the requirements: "At no time should the boy ever make fun of my love of Bruce Willis." (Read her workday description too, a bit down the page.)

Errata     Thursday, September 21, 2000
The classes I teach have started up again, much calmer than previous terms. For their Back to School week, McSweeney's has this fictional errata for a student paper. One of them has a particular resonance for me: "The final section, headed "Conclusions," should be attributed entirely to Berdan, 1975. It is, in fact, a direct quote."

File-sharing and Culture     Thursday, September 21, 2000
The power of the New York Times brings together the wildly different voices of the president of the RIAA, Napster's attorney, Senator Orrin Hatch, filmmaker Kevin Smith, a Gnutella software developer, kibbitzer Esther Dyson, and Craig Newell, who they describe oddly as "a 17-year-old consumer."

New World     Wednesday, September 20, 2000
A cute post-it note from an Alberta weblogger's eight year old daughter.

Photoshopping Diversity     Wednesday, September 20, 2000
In an effort to show how diverse their campus is, some University of Wisconsin publications folks digitally added a black student to an all-white football crowd. They couldn't find any real photos that showed diversity. Hey, it's the thought that counts, right? Right?

First Church of Cold Fusion     Friday, September 15, 2000
A US man has convinced the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that he shouldn't be fired from the patent office because his faith in cold fusion represents a religious belief. Hee hee. Silly country. Big, scary, silly country.

Oingo     Thursday, September 14, 2000
A "meaning-based" search engine. If you search for an ambiguous word it will give you the chance to narrow the search based on possible meanings, such as "wind as in weather" or "to wind a watch" or a "wind instrument." I imagine it's just adding search terms for you, but it's an intriguing concept. Doesn't find Mooselessness though.

In Passing     Wednesday, September 13, 2000
A diary of overheard conversations. This one's not typical, but I like the superhero feel: "Can I tell you how much you DON'T want to spend $3.89 on this? Go, find something else, consider yourself lucky I was here." --Video store clerk, to a customer attempting to rent the movie "The Avengers." Oh oh oh! Good one in the guestbook too: "I'm SO aerodynamic!" --my boyfriend talking in his sleep

Note from film producer     Wednesday, September 13, 2000
A film producer I know sent me an e-mail to see how my writing has been coming along.

Samsung means "to come"     Saturday, September 9, 2000
Sex, jazz, poetry, and Macromedia Flash. Thanks to Memepool for finding this one. And just imagine what having sex and the Backstreet Boys on the same page, inches apart, is going to do to my search engine hits.

The Backstreet Project     Saturday, September 9, 2000
Omigod. So, the Backstreet Boys? They found these ancient amulets that give them, like, superhuman powers? One of them's a ninja and one of them's really strong. And they have this girl who's their friend? And she stole the amulets for them? She warns them when there's trouble, like when this giant robot attacks. It's so cool. And they ride motorcycles too. Even if you're not a huge Backstreet Boys fan, like my friend Graham Hudson of London, Ontario? Even if you're not, you'll like this. Because it's from Stan Lee. Blaaaam! (Flash most definitely required.)
        [Update: I just watched Part Two. It's like the Backstreet Boys versus the Iron Giant. Those fuckers. Is it not enough that they talk entirely in Spiderman-esque puns? P.S. I have been waiting since my undergraduate degree to use the term Spidermanesque.]

New digital camera technology     Friday, September 8, 2000
Makes it possible to capture a much wider range of light and colour information. One of the possible uses is reducing over and unexposed areas in photographs, a problem that I ran into a lot at the many-types-of-light hotel, Sooke Harbour House.

$44,000 traffic fine     Friday, September 8, 2000
Apparently, the Finns have a system that fines you based on income. I'd never thought about scalable fines before, but they make much more sense than fixed fines, despite the added bureaucracy it must involve. Must lead to bribes though. "Here's $20,000 officer. Let's keep this quiet." [The article looks transient. Let me know if it breaks.]

I didn't bike because...     Thursday, September 7, 2000
Reasons the sucky part of your brain will use to convince you not to bike to work. Not a evangelism, just something from the Stuffed Dog that applies to me too. My favourite: "Last time someone looked at me meanly!"

Back to School     Wednesday, September 6, 2000
Not for me or my friends, but for many folks online, including Angela, who is a frosh at Queen's and therefore is learning the Oil Thigh! (September 5th entry.) Nostalgia sent me looking for the online Queen's Journal, but it's either down or kidnapped or drunk. I did find the engineering satire paper Golden Words though. You'd think engineers would be able to assemble a better web page. Finally, I sat down to read a philosophy paper about zombies for old times' sake.

Simple idea for improving election turnouts     Friday, September 1, 2000
I'd vote multiple times to improve my chances.

Anti-aging drug found     Friday, September 1, 2000
What a headline! And the photo shows three beaming retirees by a sunny pool. Hurray! Then you read the part of the BBC article where it says "Microscopic worms given the therapy lived nearly 50% longer than normal." At this point, microscopic worms who read Mooselessness are pretty excited.

What job is right for you?     Thursday, August 31, 2000
Okay, this is not a rigorous analysis -- they use all of six questions -- but I'm mentioning it because my top three jobs were artist (no questions about talent), author, and FBI agent! Right on! Number 10 job was astronaut. Was that because I said I'd like to work outside?

New York's most exclusive restaurant     Thursday, August 31, 2000
From the New York Times: "The restaurant seats 65, and there would be one seating a night. Lunch would be offered twice a week. The restaurant would be closed on weekends." Oh, and there's a $150 reservation deposit. Per person. (You may need to create a free login.) Here's a review from The Philadephia Inquirer. Both links from Looka again.

The AV Club interviews Harlan Ellison     Thursday, August 31, 2000
The Onion's nonfiction side interviews the grumpiest author alive. Ellison is so mean and honourable that everyone seems to love him, me included. If you can't finish the article, at least read the last two sentences. Found on Looka.

Techno Dyke Headquarters     Sunday, August 27, 2000
Being a teenager really is different than it used to be.

Phytoplankton bloom off Newfoundland     Friday, August 25, 2000
It's monstrously huge! This is from NASA's wonderful Visible Earth project.

Five Years of Stating the Obvious     Friday, August 25, 2000
I'm not a regular reader of Sippey's site, but this five year retrospective has some great quotes from people he or his contributors have interviewed.
        I particularly like Carl Steadman's answer to "What do you want for Christmas?" in which he says "I want things to work. Imagine a world in which everything's broken. A world in which the spigot and the drain are on the same end of the tub, so you have to slosh water around to get it clean. A world in which the stoplights turn red at two in the morning, even though no one else is around for miles. A world in which you have to turn the CD player on, even though you should just be able to press play."

The LEGO desk     Friday, August 25, 2000
It's not just the full-sized desk that's amazing. Wait until you hear why a Seattle HR department wanted this piece of nobbly furniture built. Found on Facto.

Work stories from Word.com     Thursday, August 24, 2000
Different people describe their work in short monologues. There's a mayor here, a Taco Bell kid, a teen market writer, a Walmart greeter -- years of these stories.
       You know, when I finished my master's, I was doing the dark side of this web page, cold calling people and asking them questions that focused on the practicality of their job. $50 a pop for a youth employment site. People were made defensive by the practicality angle and I myself hate talking to strangers, so this was dramatically bad work for me, but it was the first time I'd worked from home, and that helped until more substantial work came along.
        Great quote from the paperback novelist about his work: "I've found that the best thing I can do when I'm working is just get words on paper every day, and turn off the critical sense that tells me that what I'm writing is no good. Because writing that I feel good about and that comes easily and is a joy, and writing that I feel terrible about and doesn't come easily and is agony, often wind up being qualitatively indistinguishable."

Mount Washington warning signs     Thursday, August 24, 2000
British Columbia has some mighty scary warning signs, but these ones from Mount Washington, New Hampshire, are worthy competitors. From the web site commentary: "An improperly dressed person can die on the mountain within minutes, even in the summer."

Cartoon Network plane     Thursday, August 24, 2000
Now there's a plane I'd want to see in the air. I like how they describe the covered routes as a "patrol."

Sony VP declares war on customers     Wednesday, August 23, 2000
A Sony veep announces the news: "We will develop technology that transcends the individual user. We will firewall Napster at source -- we will block it at your cable company, we will block it at your phone company, we will block it at your ISP. We will firewall it at your PC." Sniff. It's Sony's finest hour.

Survey: Majority of Web Users Are FBI Agents Posing as Teenage Girls     Monday, August 21, 2000
Excellent article from SatireWire, a humour site I'd never seen before. They have some fun Google searches too. "Eminem rules: 582 pages. Emily Bronte rules: 0 pages." Found by GeekPress.

Bees' trick for landing     Friday, August 11, 2000
Another Honeyguide find. Bees have a simple trick for landing that we could use for pilotless planes.

Plasma from the Sun     Friday, August 11, 2000
Oh my god. This is one of the most beautiful, mesmerizing images I've ever seen. It's frightening too, demonic. From the Coronal Explorer, found by Honeyguide.

Mooselessness.com (Part II)     Friday, August 11, 2000
Somehow it seems like the least likely explanation, but someone independently came up with the word "mooselessness" and bought the domain. The owner wrote me back and told me the story of how he and his friends plan to take over the universe and institute a new moral (dis)order, in which all sins are punishable by being sent to bed without supper. The 27 planned sins include Privacy, Imagination, the British, White Pants, Conscience, Friendship, and Mooselessness. Wisely, they plan a lot of afternoon snacks.
        The mooselessness.com owner was kind enough to offer me a subdomain, such as tim.mooselessness.com, but I'll stay here at pitas.com for now. My next site will have a less contestable URL, such as The-Tim-Mitchell-Who-Once-Had-a-Shelf-Full-of-H.P.-Lovecraft-Books-Jump-On-Him-in-Toronto.Com. (Oops, taken.)
        I've also been looking at Canadian domains, such as mooselessness.ca, but the Canadian registry system is (unsurprisingly) in bureaucratic limbo.
        Mooselessnesslessness - the state of being without mooselessness. Ouch. Hurts my head too.

IP injustices     Thursday, August 10, 2000
The article sneers about Dr. Dre and has a flamebait attitude, but some of the evil details it drops astound me. Monsanto blocked a scientific journal from publishing criticism, because the test data they used is Monsanto's intellectual property. The US threatened South Africa with WTO sanctions if they tried to make or import their own low-cost AIDS drugs, but then voted itself the right to do exactly that. This is where the real IP injustices are -- forget Napster.

Mooselessness.com     Wednesday, August 9, 2000
Someone bought the mooselessness.com domain name! I wrote the person listed by the registrar and a day later, the page above appeared. As far as I can tell, there's nothing shady here, although the timing of the new page certainly is curious. Hang on, the same guy lists his corporation as "St. Lucifer's Institute for Moral Studies." Hmm.[Update: the maintainter wrote to say that the page has been up for months and just happened to be down when I peeked.]

The Zompist Phrasebook     Wednesday, August 9, 2000
I saw this link five hundred times before finally following it. If this is your five hundredth time, enjoy! One of the useful phrases translated on this page: "You wouldn't have these ghettos if you people were willing to work." Includes a special Internet section: "Aprende a leer, antropoide." (Learn to read, monkeyboy.)

Castro says Bush and Gore are 'boring'     Saturday, August 5, 2000
Oh, now that's just mean. (The next US president will be number ten for Castro.)

I Know What You Did in Texas.com     Friday, August 4, 2000
Jeez, two US political links in a row. At least the 22 Minutes "Jean Poutine" story makes it onto this Democrat-funded site (in the "lightweight" section). An attack site with pop culture sensibilities.

Return on Investment     Friday, August 4, 2000
Billionaires for Bush (or Gore) adopt a Common Cause article about how investments in lobbyists are returned a thousandfold. Funny and discouraging.

If The Phone Company Ran A Restaurant     Friday, August 4, 2000
Hey, just be thankful I didn't e-mail it to you.

The Wooden Mirror     Friday, August 4, 2000
A camera sends a signal to a display of wooden blocks. The Slashdot people called it steampunk. Visit for the pictures!

Previously on Mooselessness     Friday, August 4, 2000
The last entry was about Fairtunes, two University of Waterloo students who are making it possible to send money to artists directly. You can also visit the full archive.