More FUQs

(Frequently Unasked Questions, started back with this post):

FUQ #7: Why it the site called "uselessdoug" dot com?

It's a tribute to my deep and abiding belief in conservation: it connotes I am the Doug who encourages using less.


FUQ #8: Seriously. Why it the site called "uselessdoug" dot com?

If you insist.

Honestly, I did not choose the name; my fiancée (back when the term of reference for her was girlfriend) set up the site as a surprise gift for our first anniversary (the first anniversary of our first date, that is). And no, what I got her was nowhere near that awesome. Or awesome at all.

Let's move on.

I presume she adopted that from my email address, which has been uselessdoug since I first started it up, back in the late '90s.

So this has turned into a question about my email moniker.

I will assume that the "doug" portion is self-explanatory enough. That's merely what people call me, being a shortened version of my given first name. It seemed prudent to have some indication of who I was in the email, without being obvious.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. Let's move on.

With the name portion parsed out, that leaves us useless. Err, "useless."

In the latter years of my time attending university, I got involved with the student-run weekly newspaper (as opposed to the daily journalism department-run paper) and in my second semester with them I started a roughly bi-weekly piece. What would happen is that the editor needed something in by Friday, so Thursday evening I would drag out whatever thought I could ramble on about for several hundred words, generally throwing in an allusion to the Simpsons whenever possible. (So, to some extent, it was blogging before there were blogs.) That I called "Another Useless Column."*

Was that ironic? Yes and no.

Clearly I was not accomplishing much of anything with it. It was not serving a purpose; it was not, by conventional journalistic standard, useful. So it was vaguely accurate.

It also was intended to invoke "useless" in the sense that Oscar Wilde used it in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray. Which basically suggests that art is not utilitarian, and that is exists for its own sake, closing with the line "All art is quite useless."

What I did definitely existed only for its own sake, and therefore part of me fancied that it approximated art. That, of course, was very much a matter of interpretation, but there was little arguing that it was anything other than useless.

And there was the self-deprecating aspect that also tied the two sides together nicely.

Thus it was both keeping humble perspective on what I do while at the same time touting it. Which is about as close to describing my personality as is ever likely to occur.

And which is more than you needed to know, but now you know it.

Undoubtedly, you could have used less of this.

~

* Those columns are chronicled on the site here.