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December 24, 2004. A Day in the Life of Santa.
Wake up at 5am to the smell of sugar plums, candy canes and chocolate
chip cookies baking. Have a cold shower with peppermint soap and don't
shave. Apply pine-scented deodorant. Put on red furry pants, More.
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December 17, 2004. Tales of Christmas Past.
I have so many fond memories of Christmas that I thought I would share
my thoughts and memories of the season to help you get into the festive
feeling. I believed in Santa for quite a while. I think I was about 12
when I found out that he really didn't exist. More.
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December 7, 2004. Gifts for Geeks (USB Ready).
Not long ago, a man with the ability to fix things was always in demand.
There was always something that had to be repaired or adjusted, and if
you had skill with a drill or a wrench, everyone wanted you to help them
out with projects. More. . .
November 25, 2004. The Dontmindme.com Nasty or
Nice Gift Guide. I love Christmas. I love trying to think of the perfect
gift for someone and hunting down the best deal, as long as I can do it
early and I'm not stuck in crowded line-ups. Some people, however, put
a little less effort into their gift-buying. If one of them is buying
a gift for you, well you may end up with some sort of battery operated
sock folder that you'll never use. So here's a handy list of Christmas
gifts that are either nasty or nice. More. . .
November 20, 2004. More Confusing Song Titles.
Some time ago we ran a Good/Bad/Ugly article called Confusing
Song Titles, which naturally rated songs that have titles that don't
make sense, songs like "Bohemian Rhapsody" and"Rainy Day
Women #12 and 35." As it happens only seven such songs were rated
in that article. That's more items than the typical G/B/U rating includes,
but in this case, it's not nearly enough. More.
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November 8, 2004. The Flu Shot Two Step. It's
that time of year again in Canada. The air is getting colder, the wind
harsher, and the coming of snow is once again inevitable. Time to rake
your leaves and mulch the garden, if you're into that sort of thing. And
if the sorts of things you happen to be into include hypochondria, then
it's time to roll up your sleeve and get a flu shot. More.
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October 29, 2004. I Moonlight as Daisy. My
life has been full of interesting times, and this was certainly one of
them. In my first year of University I had a particularly long Christmas
break as my exams had ended quite early. I was enjoying my little vacation
when one day my Dad, a teacher, came home from school and told me he had
got me a job. More. . .
October 23, 2004. Featured
Stuff. Every so often a show comes along that grabs the attention
of the television watching public and refuses to let it go. Lost
is such a show. Forty eight people have survived a plane crash on an island
somewhere in the South Pacific. They were driven far off course by bad
weather, and so if anyone is looking for them, they're looking in the
wrong place. More. . .
October 15, 2004. Taking the Plunge. Washrooms
are one of the most private places to have an embarrassing moment. I mean,
when you think about it, there isn't much you want to be doing in there
with a crowd of people watching. My embarrassing moment also occurred
in the washroom. It wasn't a public washroom as in Nancy's
tale but the bathroom at a friend's house. More.
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October 7, 2004. How to Mess With People, Volume
I. If you're a regular reader of this site, you know that I like pranks.
Not that I pull all that many pranks, mind you (although last year on
April Fool's Day I had my boss briefly convinced that I was quarantined
due to SARS), but even the plotting of a brilliant practical joke can
be highly entertaining. Sometimes, though, a prank isn't exactly what
the situation calls for. Sometimes you just want to mess with people.
More. . .
September 30. Rodeo Events. I've been working
with horses from the time I was eight. I have been bucked, kicked, bitten
and had a bad fall requiring stitches. Oh, and I love it. To me, there
is nothing quite comparable to riding horseback at full speed across an
open field. More. . .
September 23. Hunting For Horsepower. I remember
when I first got interested in cars. It was a little more than a decade
ago, a few years before I was old enough to get my driver's licence. Back
then, I was into sports cars. Not the good old American muscle cars like
the Mustang and the Camaro so typically the desire of high school students,
More. . .
September 16. Bathroom Embarrassment. In life,
embarrassing moments are just part of that wonderful character-building
process that goes into making us who we are. I don't get embarrassed too
easily and I try not to let things bother me. I do have a few bona fide
embarrassing moments though. More. . .
September 9. Featured  Stuff.
Some songs just compel you to nod your head in time to the music. Pink
Floyd's "One of These Days" is one of these songs.
It's almost entirely instrumental, and it has a constant, driving beat
that just works its way into your brain and stays there. The song never
was a radio hit, but let's face it, nothing instrumental ever is. When
you do hear it, and I highly recommend that you do seek it out and find
it, More. . .
September 2. Mind Your Manners.
I'm not sure what's going on with the world, but it seems I encounter
more and more people with bad manners. Maybe it's the American tourists
— no offence. I was raised on a strict diet of good manners and
it is sometimes astonishing how some people do not put any of them into
practice.
August 26. It's Good to be the King.
So there I was at Burger King, waiting in line for my Double Whopper with
cheese and bacon and poutine on top Super Value Meal when the little
retarded boy who took my order asks me "Would 'ou wike to be
da kig ob da wuld for de day?" More. . .
August 19. Who Needs Normal?
The other day I was thinking of article ideas for the site and started
to reminisce about funny/weird/stupid things that have happened to me
over the years. There's been a lot of them and I'm not entirely sure if
that's normal or not, but that's my life; here for your reading enjoyment.
More. . .
August 12. A Thousand Words, Part
XIII. Everyone loves funny photos. Well, maybe not blind people, since
they cannot truly appreciate photos, funny or otherwise. And maybe not
those who have no sense of humour, since they cannot truly appreciate
funny things, photos or otherwise. More. . .
July 22. Bored Much? Nancy Thomas hates being
bored, so for your anti-boredom pleasure, she has created a helpful list
of things to do to relieve your couch-potato-ness. (Editor's note:
We're not sure if couch-potato-ness is an actual term or not, but we're
fairly certain that it describes an actual state of being.) More.
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July 15. They say that the main objective of sports is to
have fun,  but
really, deep down, we all want to win. After all, what's more fun than
victory? And to the victors go the spoils. The Greeks used to reward champions
with crowns of laurel, but today of course we prefer metallic to arboreal.
We're also more into team sports than individual, hence the rise of the
trophy. In many sports winning the championship trophy is the ultimate
achievement. Some of these trophies are better than others, hence today's
Good/Bad/Ugly rating of Major Sports Trophies.
July 10. Banks — we all use banks or bank-like services
in one form  or
another. Like the telephone or the television, banking is a essential
and necessary part of contemporary life, or at least that is the generally
held consensus. In an effort to secure enough customers, modern banks
offer more services and features than ever before. The quality of these
features, and in particular the actual customer service, however, may
vary. Nancy Thomas has a few choice words on the subject in Bank
Robbery.
July 5. Last week the single biggest movie of the summer
arrived in  theatres
with much fanfare and merchandising and a video game and all that. While
the movie itself was undeniably awesome, the trailers that played in front
of it were somewhat less so. The general concept behind trailers is of
course to encourage people to go and see the movies being promoted. These
did not do that. So while every other website that has anything to say
about media and pop culture will be doing a review of Spiderman 2,
here at Dontmindme.com we're doing a Good/Bad/Ugly
rating of the movie trailers that played with it.
June 24. On the off chance you had not noticed the current
update schedule
or the recently adjusted title for this page, Dontmindme.com is now on
an update schedule of every Thursday. It's a schedule that can be maintained,
and while we'd like to update the site more often, frankly, it's a lot
of new material to produce. If you would like to write for Dontmindme.com,
however, we are always looking for new writers, so contact the Editor
with your idea or completed article. In the mean time, here's a new Featured
Stuff.
June 17. It's not Friday. Tomorrow is, however, and for
millions of  workers,
that means it's casual day. A day when ties can be dispensed with; a day
when denim is not a bad word. Ignoring for a moment the fact that North
American business attire has become far more casual than formal every
day of the week, and that for every worker who enjoys the option of casual
day, there's two more that don't. Those who do, however, are well advised
to read a new article by Nancy Thomas — Casual
Day Attire Speed Rating.
June 10. Road signs are an important, and frankly, ubiquitous
part of  modern
life. You can't go anywhere without seeing scores of them, each one bearing
a message of where to go, where not to go, when to go, and how fast to
go. And then there are the other signs, the ones that don't necessarily
tell you anything about your actual going, but merely give you additional
information to be aware of. It is this final category of signs with which
we are concerned today, specifically a couple signs seen in the Iles de
la Madeleine. If you haven't been there, it's a quaint little place that
might be worth a visit. Come for the charm, stay for the Absurdity
in Signage.
June 3. To be, or not to be, that is the question. Whether
'tis nobler  in
the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to
take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing, end them. To die,
to sleep, no more. And by a sleep to say we end the heartache and the
thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to — 'tis a consummation
devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep. . . to sleep, perchance to dream,
aye, there's the rub, for in that sleep of death What
Dreams May Come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil must give
us pause.
May 27. What do out of town trips, holiday weekends, bachelor
 parties,
and unexpected work schedule changes have in common? They all conspired
together to stop the last two scheduled updates. At least, that's the
official story. The conspiracy is now thwarted, however, with today's
fresh new content, 30 Ways Fish Are Better Than
Cats and Dogs. And speaking of bachelor parties, there are supposed
to be incriminating and/or embarrassing photos of a
writer for this site around somewhere, which might show up here if
the person who has them sends them to the Editor.
May 17. Sometimes advertising is meant to be funny. Sometimes
it succeeds. Sometimes it succeeds at being funny when it's not supposed
to be funny. Sometimes that's when it's funniest of all. Yesterday's flyers
provided an example of the latter, which we are calling Absurdity
in Advertising, Part V.
May 13. Roll Up The Rim to Win. Pepsi Points. McDonald's
 Monopoly.
Coors' Winning Can. Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. Every time
you turn around there's another contest to be entered, more prizes to
be won. Why is this? Do people actually buy products because of contests?
Marko Peric asks and attempts to answer these questions in Confused About
Contests.
May 10. As everyone's
favourite Mexican wrestling mask clad fictional character once
said, "Too much of a good thing is an awesome thing." Well,
that is what we have for you reading enjoyment today.  Last
week's My Mother the Ninja was so popular and
so awesome that Nancy Thomas has provided several more stories about her
mother's uncanny ninjitsu abilities. It's called, wait for it, My
Mother the Ninja, Part II. We thought about going with Vol. II, but
that's so Tarantino. Also, Dontmindme.com's band name creator, aka, the
BNC, has been beefed up with a whole bunch of spiffy
new band names. If you haven't experienced the BNC,
this is the perfect time to do so.
May 6. Mother's Day is this weekend, and therefore it only
makes  sense
to post something related to motherhood. How much it actually relates
is another matter. You may find it not really all that related to Mother's
Day, and that is understandable. If, however, you are firmly convinced
that your mother might actually be a ninja, then you really need to read
the latest story from Nancy Thomas, entitled My
Mother the Ninja. Even if your own mom is completely lacking in the
ninjitsu skills department, you'll enjoy it.
May 3. No sooner than we try to maintain a schedule once
again then  we
start falling short of this schedule. That said, this article is on schedule,
although just barely. It's a Good/Bad/Ugly rating of Police
album titles. Yes, that Police, the group with Sting as leader singer,
the one that broke up twenty years ago. As for why now, the only
answer is why not? It's not like this topic is going to get any
more current at any foreseeable time in the future, not unless the Police
get back together and release a new album, which is pretty unlikely at
this point. And on the topic of unlikely, it is unlikely that there won't
be a Thursday update this week. This is because it has already been written.
April 27. As some of you might have noticed, there was no
update  yesterday.
We are very sorry about that, there were a number of reasons, including
some major technical difficulties. The counter which has been at the bottom
of this page since shortly after the site's inception has been misbehaving
lately, and causing site-wide problems. It has been removed. So now on
with the business of new content. The phrase of the day is Exit Strategy.
No, we're not talking about Iraq. You
know when you're at the supermarket and you run into one of those people
you'd prefer to avoid, but you just can't get away from them? Now here's
a new weapon for your weirdness avoidance arsenal. Nancy Thomas has devised
29 Ways to End a Conversation.
April 22. Are you familiar with Occam's Razor? This is
a principle of logic which states loosely that a problem should be stated
in the simplest terms possible. It's good advice for every day life, but
it's one that we often forget. Occam's Electric
Razor is an article by Marko Peric about this principle as applied
to customer service. And it's all entirely too true.
April 19. We're going to attempt to get back to a regular
schedule of updating every Monday and Thursday, so here's a new Featured
Stuff. Many other new articles are coming down the pipe, so this Friday
may see a new Thousand Words, or possibly a new Good/Bad/Ugly rating,
or maybe something else entirely. But there will be an update on Thursday.
In the mean time, enjoy the latest Featured Stuff.
April 14. Many people live in large cities. Some people
live in smaller  cities
and towns. And some people live in the middle of proverbial nowhere. It's
not uncommon for people from the aforementioned places to talk in a way
that is perhaps somewhat different from standard English. To help you
communicate when you are faced with this manner of difficulty, staff writer
Nancy Thomas has prepared an article entitled Small
Town Talk.
April 1. Happy April Fool's Day everyone. We hope you didn't
get fooled
too many times. Here at Dontmindme.com we have largely ignored April Fool's
Day in the past, which is a little strange, since this is ostensibly a
humour website. Today, however, we are proud to present a new feature
that has been in the works for months, and one that we hope everyone will
enjoy. This is the long awaited Dontmindme.com Band Name Creator. Yes,
band name generators have been done elsewhere
in the past, but generally they haven't been done well. This one should
change all of that. Behold the BNC in all its glory!
March 30. First, the administrivia. You will see on the
right side of  the
page a block of ads. These are going to appear on most of the pages on
the site, and hopefully will not prove overly intrusive. They are context
sensitive google ads, so on most pages they will have something to do
with the content of the page. Please don't go clicking on all of them
to try and bring in some revenue for this site. That would be unfair to
the advertisers and it would get us in trouble. That said, if you see
an ad that interests you, feel free to check it out. And now the new article.
Guess what? Yup, it's another rant. That's right. This one is by staff
writer Nancy Thomas, and it's about everyone's favourite disembodied head.
No, not Max
Headroom. This disembodied head is slightly more yellow. He's
the Rollback Man.
March 26. The site has been a little rant heavy this month,
so there  was
supposed to be a new Good/Bad/Ugly going up today, but that didn't happen.
Instead, allow us to present another rant. This one is about cordless
telephones, and is entitled The Cordless Conspiracy.
Unrelated, there are several other new items to be aware of, including
a completely updated About This Site page, and
at long last, a FAQ. Also, there are some new sites
on the external link sidebar, and some old ones have been removed. As
usual, Dontmindme.com does not make any guarantees about the context or
appropriateness of other sites.
March 19. Everyone who uses the Internet gets email. Some
of this  email
is welcome, some is not so welcome. We're not talking about spam or viruses
here. We're talking about forwards. Everyone gets them, and way too many
people send them on. Hence the term "forwards." If we called
them "deletes" then they wouldn't be much of a problem, now
would they? Some people get more forwards than others. Laura Peric gets
so many forwards that she wrote a rant entitled Furious
About Forwards (Actual fury may vary).
March 17. Happy St. Patrick's
Day everyone. In the  great
Dontmindme.com tradition of briefly acknowledging holidays and then discarding
them posthaste, here's a new edition of Featured
Stuff, along with a spiffy new featured stuff graphic (including a
version in green, nonetheless). This graphic offers the added benefit
of being available in two distinct sizes, one of which is an 88x31 mini-banner,
so if your site is featured here and you feel like showing off and/or
returning the favour, you can use the little Featured @ Dontmindme.com
banner.
March 11.
Before you go getting spoiled with updates happening on back-to-back days,
note that today's article is very much a current events posting. If you
follow hockey at all, then you've been bombarded by reports of the incident
from the Vancouver-Colorado game the other night in which Todd Bertuzzi
hit Steven Moore and fractured his neck. Dontmindme.com is getting on
that band wagon with an article from guest writer Brian MacDonald entitled
The Bertuzzi Hit — A Different Perspective.
March 10. Dieting is a multibillion dollar industry these
days, with so  many
people into meal replacements, weight loss management systems, and of
course trendy diets. Among the many contenders on the fad diet scene these
days, one has risen to the top and has made itself known, indeed, downright
ubiquitous in the mainstream, to the point that fast food places and breweries
are being forced to take notice. This juggernaut of diets is of course
Atkins, and yes, we're commenting on it today in Beer,
Bread, and Media Circuses.
March 3. Unless you happen to be a bedouin or other sort
of  rural
nomad, you most likely live and/or work in some sort of a building. Most
buildings have more than one level, and therefore some way to get from
one level to another, usually stairs, escalators, or elevators. It is
the latter with which we are concerned today. If you use elevators, you
should familiarize yourself with some simple and straightforward guidelines
for using these wonders of modern technology. Dontmindme.com is happy
to present these guidelines, as written by Nancy Thomas in Going
Up?
 March
1. There is a large slush pile of almost-ready-to-publish articles piling
up, but before we can get any of those ready to go, here's a fresh and
ready less than 12 hours after the show ended 2004
Academy Awards Speed Rating. There's also a new related poll. Anyone
visiting the archives will
find that almost all of the 2001
material has been converted over to the new look. So if you for some inexplicable
reason like the old look, better read the 2002 and 2003 archives before
they get changed as well.
February 16. Back when this site ran Stuff of the Month,
there was a convenient little calendar picture that would be run every
month to add a little colour to the page. All was as it should be. But
then, Stuff of the Month became Featured Stuff, and the calendar graphic
no longer made any sense. So that's why there isn't a picture to accompany
this new edition of Featured Stuff. Incidentally,
if any readers have any ideas for a Featured stuff graphic, hit the message
board and post it.
February 4. Yesterday there were presidential primaries
and  caucuses
in seven different states. And although American politics is basically
a spectator sport to us up here in Canada, it sure can be a lot of fun
to watch and comment, and of course ridicule. Between the preposterousness
of the process and the candidates themselves, there's plenty to mock.
Today it is the musical listening choices of the candidates. Tomorrow,
who knows? Check out The Music of Democracy.
February 2. Last night was the Super Bowl, and this morning
there is  a
new article up. Coincidence? I think not. Is this article about football,
you ask? Well, the football graphic would suggest that it is. And, yes,
it is about football. Only not. To rip off a tagline from Sports
Night, it's about football like Charlie's Angels was about law enforcement.
Without further ado, here is the Super Bowl XXXVIII
Speed Rating. Is the word groin used entirely too many times
in the article?
January 27. This site is about a wide variety of things,
including  rants
and pop culture commentary. Therefore, an angry rant about a current event,
which may or may not be pop culture, seems highly appropriate. The event
in question is the current Mars landers. Guess what? Writer Nancy Thomas
has something to say about Mars. And yes, it's rich in that style of humour
readers have come to appreciate from her. Check out Mission
to Mars.
January 21. It's been a long time coming, but the new look
of  Dontmindme.com
is finally complete. There's a new main banner, which will appear on the
top of every page now, some other new graphics, some new external links
on the sidebar (and some old links are gone) and all manner of things
should happen as your mouse moves about the page. Okay, mostly stuff will
change colour, so really only one thing. Speaking of colour, all the sidebar
links should be nicely visible to everyone now. The old pages will be
changing over to this new look as updates get done, so not everything
will look the same for a little while. There's new content as well, namely
the 12th edition of A Thousand Words.
January 8. The words "something new" have been
tossed around on this site before, but not all that recently. That said,
here's something new. Starting now, certain words that the editor feels
might benefit from a link for further elucidation
or entertainment will have appropriate links. To prevent the text from
looking terribly cluttered with links, however, these links will not show
up unless you run your cursor over the appropriate words. Try it now,
it's used thrice in this very paragraph. If your browser doesn't support
cascading style sheets this most likely won't work, but for anyone using
a vaguely modern browser the result should border on downright nifty.
The concept was actually borrowed from the
Slumbering Lungfish but Lore doesn't seem to be bothering with it
anymore. It's all rather fitting, since this site was largely inspired
by another of Lore's sites, the now defunct Brunching
Shuttlecocks. You can try this out further in the latest edition of
Featured Stuff.
January 6. Happy New Year everyone. At Dontmindme.com, nothing says "Happy
New Year" like  an
angry rant, so today for your edification there is exactly that. This
particular angry rant is about the media and video games, and also about
charitable donations. As angry rants go around here, this is right up
there near the top of the list. If it were any more angry, there would
probably be a disclaimer in front of it. Incidentally, there's also a
new poll, and this one relates to the aforementioned angry rant, which
happens to be called The Games People Play.
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