Buster

Catherine Skidmore is a daring woman who left a dull, Web-pioneering Associated Press job in April, 1997, to work for Arcus Inc.

She reported that transition in her Web journal, Suck-My-Big.org: A more-than-intimate look at my life.

Visitors were required to fill in a "What is your name" form upon arrival, and then served the personalized greeting, "Bite me, [name you gave]".

By current standards, she was quite modest in her self-revelation, concluding each entry with a piquant -Bite me.

Her choice of domain names rankled the AP executive hierarchy, as did the Webcam pictures of her working studiously and in untraditional garb at home on her Macintosh. AP managers up the chain of command from her had, as she correctly summed it up in a conversation with me after leaving the AP, "an underdeveloped sense of humor."

Because she was deeply involved in the AP's move toward online publication and specifically in putting stock market information online, I had the good fortune to talk with her from time to time while I was still with the Fayetteville Observer.

From the first entry I read from her Web journal I still recall the words, "I've been compared to Dorothy Parker all my life (is it the biting wit? the sassy sarcasm?), and I maintain the Dorothy Parker Poetry Archive online. It's all of her poetry. It kicks ass."

Those words were written more than a decade ago.

She describes herself now as a "nurse," and went back to school to earn that right.

Today the daring of her largely unformatted, almost photograph-free Web journal lies in its recourse to the puristic austerity of text on the screen.

When I read her Web journal now, I still hear in her words the voice of a writer who has penned "a play in 1991 that won the NJ Young Playwrights Award," still reads constantly and loves baseball.

To my nostalgic eye her Web journal still "kicks ass" because it still speaks with a clear, true voice, about her life as she lives it.