In the spirit of keeping Gopherdrool relevant and informative, Ms Hull agreed to share with us her thoughts on the web site and the contest.

SH: Few people realize that "Sandra Hull" is an abbreviated version of my birth name: Sandra Lee Hull. You can see why I had to shorten it; otherwise signing traveler's checks would play hell with my carpal tunnel.

TWW: Probably the most obvious question for you is this: why bother running a web page for a bunch of ungrateful slobs with whom you have nothing in common except a talent for poop-fart-vomit jokes?

SH: Call me a masochist. Go on, I'll wait.

TWW: You're a masochist.

SH: Thank you. That and being the web dominatrix is the only way I have to distinguish myself, as I am but a run-of-the-mill Loser, performancewise. Let's face it, you wouldn't be interviewing me at all if lifetime career points were your sole criterion.

My futile quest for Loser fame and glory aside, another reason I hang in there with running gopherdrool.com is that part of my day job is teaching HTML, so the web page is a place for me to practice what I preach. I sometimes use gopherdrool.com in class to illustrate various web-authoring techniques. Problem is that if I keep it on the screen for too long the students stop listening to me and start laughing at the page's content.

TWW: How much time does Web Mistressing take?

SH: Too much, which is why I'm tickled pink to announce that I have recently recruited a Sniveling Web Lackey (Greg Pearson) who is taking over some of the weekly updating chores (weekly winners, The Weak Week, this interview).

TWW: It's not uncommon for your web site to get fifty to a hundred visits on a good day. Who are all these people? Do you have any idea what they are up to?

SH: First of all, it's our web site. Ok, I do spend the most time with it, sit up with it at night when it has an earache, bought it its first bra, etc., but it is a site for all the Losers. But to answer your question about the web traffic: beats the heck out of me. Most of the hits come from the link on washingtonpost.com, and none so far from Worst of the Web so I'm happy, but for all the traffic we get, no one has signed our guest book since last December. Then again, no one admits to having bought Billy Ray Cyrus's #1 record, either. To quote Sheriff Bart, we're fast becoming an underground success in this town.

TWW: You seem to have a lot of other humor-related irons in various humor-related fires. Globe contest, Levey's contest, Top-5, NY Magazine (in the old days)? How do you keep track of it all? Are you worried that you spread yourself too thin?

SH: I've never been one of those Losers who is a fanatic about only the Invitational. (I call them the "Obscene for Gene" crowd.) I regularly entered and even won Bob Levey's Neologism contest several years before the Invitational was born, for example. Any contest that offers me an outlet for my twisted sense of humor or simply gives me something to do while languishing in an airport departure lounge, doctor's waiting room, or holding cell is fair game. Having said that, these days my entry efforts are limited to the Style Invitational and the Top Five List. Part of that is indeed due to burnout, but also because I am a regular guest moderator for the latter (I gave Chuck Smith a #1 once, but did he thank me?) and I moderate the weekly Top5 Pets mini-list. My creativity gets pretty much used up with that stuff so I've only entered about one-third of all the Invitationals since the Restoration.

[TWW notes that even entering only about one-third of the contests, she is 12th in terms of Total Restoration Points. This puts MS Hull somewhat above the "run-of-the-mill" status she claimed earlier in the interview.]

TWW: You're from, where, Ohio? How did you end up in the DC area doing...what is it you actually do anyway?

SH: Like my birthday buddy Steve Miller, I went from Phoenix, Arizona all the way to Tacoma before ending up in Cleveland at the age of 8. Then I realized I wasn't a rock star so it took me a good 17 years to get out of Ohio again.

I no longer do what I came to DC to do. Once upon a time I arrived in town clutching my Master's Degree in French and found gainful employment with two different French companies inside the Beltway for 7 years before succumbing, like so many of my fellow Liberal Arts majors, to the call of that wanton siren known as Technical Support. I now spend my days helping Ph.D.s find their Any keys.

TWW: You've won the Invite a few times, and suggested some contests, what sort of contest do you like? Are there any you avoid, or just plain hate?

SH: I like the word-smithy ones, like Hyphen The Terrible and the ones where you re-arrange and/or re-define words, and cartoon captioning contests. I generally avoid anything poetry-related and those where you have to imitate the style of a famous writer. I also don't do well with the ones where you have to make up jokes or riddles from scratch; I prefer to riff.

TWW: Of all your printed entries, the one that sticks out to us was the caption for the woman holding a sauce pan with stuff coming out (or going in) her nose. You had a caption something like: The secret of Flemish cooking. What's your favorite?

SH: Well, I like most cooking, unless there's cabbage or beans involved or it's too spicy, so it's really hard for me to name a favorite.

TWW: Given these are your electrons we're using here, I'll let you have the final word:

SH: GET OFF MY LAWN!!!