Once upon a time, in a mystical long-ago land called the dot-com bubble, I had a design client flush with angel-invested cash and a dream: to make his millions on Teh Internets! Just like those geniuses at pets.com! Only smarter!

His dream was not named “CranioGolf Profile,” because I’ve changed it slightly to protect the guilty, but it was pretty darn close.

Just like it sounds, it was a website designed to take a highly detailed assay of your personality and emotional traits, using a “scientifically designed, artificially intelligent expert system database” — which was neither an expert system, nor artificially intelligent, nor, frankly, scientifically designed, nor if it comes right down to it was it even a database, strictly speaking. It was a handful of multiple-choice questions that would be scored by running them through a couple of macros inside an excel spreadsheet, which had been hacked together by the company’s founder during time which he probably should have been spending focused on his day job.

Anyway, at the end of this process, the spreadsheet would kick out the user’s “craniogolf profile,” which if you haven’t guessed already was designed to tell the user what type of golfer they were, and offer some helpful tips on improving their game. For the low, low price of $75 per customer. And that wasn’t even the stupidest part of the business plan. It didn’t even place fifth on the list of stupid ideas which were involved in this stupid, stupid business. (That would be their late-in-the-game decision to remove the color green from the design, because they had an amateur color theorist on staff who had decided that green represented “greed” and “envy” rather than, say, golf.)

Anyway. The reason I bring it up is, that site had a “links” page, which was of course decorated with lots of pictures of golf courses. Because, get it? Links?