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strangers with Vodkatea
Wednesday, March 10 2004
Gretchen was off in New York City for most of the day while I ran around dealing with a flurry of client needs. There was large gap in my housecalls in the middle of the day, and I took the opportunity to take a powernap and then watch a DVD of Strangers With Candy, a Comedy Central series about a quirky magical-realist high school and one of its students, a 46 year old freshman named Jerri Blank. I use the term "magical-realist" in part because there's a dreamlike quality to this series. And by "dreamlike" I mean those embarrassing dreams where you're back in high school without any pants on, except you're whatever age you are now, yet nobody has noticed either your lack of pants or your advanced age.
If you're anything like me, you'll mostly find this stuff relentlessly hilarious, although there are a few individual episodes that fall unexpectedly flat. Somehow I'd totally missed Strangers With Candy back when it was actually being broadcast on cable.
A day or so ago my father wrote to me complaining that he couldn't check the stats on his Forests of the Appalachians website because of some sort advertising crap was "covering it up." I thought he meant that he had some sort of adware infection, but then the same problem started happening to me whenever I went to check my stats. Such stats, along with many other things, are all hosted on Vodkatea.com. Vodkatea wasn't actually being covered up, it had been replaced by one of those hideous "coming soon" pages that offer spyware-riddled search services and links to topics such as online casinos, herbal tea, and herbal viagra. I thought maybe the DNS record had been deleted from Vodkatea's host, but that wasn't the problem (in fact, I could still get to Vodkatea if I used its DNS server as my own DNS server). Calling Domain Bank, my domain name registry, did no good; the bitchy woman on the phone seemed to think that people are supposed to set their domain name server to whatever machine is hosting their sites, an act, that (if it really were necessary) would take the World Wide out of World Wide Web. It would be akin to having to travel alongside your mail whenever you use the postal service. I still don't know what the screwup is; some web proxies allow me to get to Vodkatea and some do not. Other domains hosted on the same server as Vodkatea (Bathtubgirl.com for example) did not appear to be affected.
My first reaction to things like this is to imagine a conspiracy is being activated against me by the powers that be - the ones who would silence me in a slightly more fascist paradigm. This is usually an irrational overreaction, but you must understand that I actually have been visited by the FBI in the past for exercising my First Amendment rights.
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