This is the Yahoo homepage of dimpled spider outrageous designs.   Welcome.

This site got started because I needed someplace to put my WebTechU homework, an edited specimen of which I left up in case you want to see what their initial HTML course is about. But soon I started making pages to show what I was doing with Paint Shop Pro, to say "Here's a funny image" and "How do I fix the background on this?" So this site is all bits and pieces, and the list to the left has links to most of them.

About the name of this site: before I retired I was an American-literature professor. I pay attention to what I read. Worse, I've let it affect me personally (this may be "unprofessional," but an unyielding emotional distance from literature insulates one from its chief value). So, "dimpled spider" and "designs" come from this poem by Robert Frost. Re-read it at least a few times.

                    Design

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth—
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth—
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?—
If design govern in a thing so small.

                                    (A Further Range, 1939)

It's a marvelous sonnet with the tightest possible rhyme scheme, a masterpiece of design; still, sonnets are traditionally love poems, and the emotional tone Frost projects is anything but affectionate —and anything but what you feel when you know somebody loves you. But suppose the universe is run according to laws—or by an entity—that makes no distinction between (for instance) a beautifully performed ballet and the detonation of a roadside bomb: then, a finely-crafted sonnet about "characters of death and blight" is a perfect summation —or prayer. Frost made something beautiful, included a wryly humorous reference to breakfast-cereal advertising ("begin the morning right"), and then dismissed it all as trivial ("a thing so small"). Because the poem exists, it's a counterstatement to the uncaring universe: or, at least, it may be (you can't be sure of anything in a by-these-rules cosmos), and "may be" will have to do. Beauty will have to do, truth will have to do, and they're certainly less harmful than ugliness and deceit.

And "outrageous"? That's the word Arnold Schwarzennager used, back in the 70s, to describe the muscular definition he maintained for competition. "Yes!" I thought, "what a poetic, don't-take-oneself-seriously description." Twenty years later, I put "dimpled spider outrageous designs" on the back of a birthday card I had made, on the back where "Hallmark" (or something) and the price go. It all fit: homemade greeting card, my habit of painstakingly fixing tiny, harmless punctuation errors (and not-quite-right colors, and even JPG artifacts), computer graphics, the web, Frost's poem, weird sense of humor. One other thing, implicit in what I've written here, originating in my life-long fascination with what other sentients (dogs, cats, horses, others) tell us and my career-long rejection of interpreting  literature as if it were a secret code: I'm still asking "What does it mean?" still rejecting simplistic answers, and still receptive to—or suggesting—strange, sometimes funny ones.