The Am I Hoot-er-not Parody and the Forget-me-not Column

Background and Inspiration

• In late 2000 and early 2001, the viral rating website Am I Hot or Not? was a massive internet sensation. At the same time, the hanging-chad drama of the 2000 US Presidential Election put the concept of "voting" at the top of everyone's minds.
• Inspired by these trends, I decided to demonstrate how straightforward it is to build a simple, robust voting application in Perl using DBI, MySQL, and CGI under mod_perl.
• The only remaining question was: what should the users vote on?

Bill Harp and the Hooters Connection

• I am a big fan of the Hooters restaurant chain, and my best friend and marketing creative Bill Harp was actively dreaming of opening a Hooters franchise in our hometown area of Portland, which was entirely Hooter-less at the time.
• Whenever Bill accompanied me on business trips, we would seek out the local Hooters to enjoy their hospitality, chicken wings, and the company of the beautiful waitresses.
• To plan these excursions, I frequented the Hooters corporate website (http://www.originalhooters.com/). I noticed a link to their "picture of the day" calendar image and decided to examine the URL structure.

Reverse-Engineering and the Parody Site

• By writing a few probing Perl programs to test potential paths, I discovered that the calendar images were stored in a highly predictable path and naming scheme. I successfully reverse-engineered and mapped out all 500 image paths (spanning 5 "disks" with 100 images each, categorized into 5 scaled sizes).
• Using this mapped database of deep links, I wrote a parody rating website called "Am I Hoot-er-not?".
• To prevent any ruffling of corporate feathers or intellectual property issues, I consulted a lawyer. Because my script only generated deep links to their server for image fulfillment rather than copying or hosting the media locally, and because it was clearly presented as a parody, the lawyer confirmed it was a legally protected, non-infringing use.
• The ratings scale was set from 5 to 11—a cheeky nod to the famous "these go to eleven" line from This Is Spinal Tap. I hosted the script at http://www.stonehenge.com/perl/amihooternot and shared it on my homepage and IRC, quickly accumulating thousands of votes.

Editorial Censorship and the Forget-me-not Rewrite

• I prepared the technical details and writeup of the program for Web Techniques Column 59 (March 2001). However, the magazine publishers got cold feet. Alarmed by the Hooters reference and fearing trademark backlash, they refused to publish the original "Am I Hoot-er-not?" article.
• Rather than scrap the column, I performed a hilariously creative rewrite under constraint. I replaced the Hooters branding with a fictional flower-rating site, "Am I a Forget-me-not?" at www.forgetmenots.comm (with double-m).
• I modified the ratings scale from 5-11 to a standard 1-10 and adjusted the text to reference voting on flower images while keeping the underlying Perl codebase virtually identical.
• The original parody writeup (wtcolumns/col59.pod) and the flower-themed published article (wtcolumns/col59wt.pod) survive in the column archives as twin monuments to editorial censorship and programmer adaptability.