Month: April 2002

In her latest post, Maggie Berry asks: “What will happen when we have thousands of hours worth of tapes to review? It seems like it would take much longer to break out of grief when tangible reminders of a loved one are so plentiful.”

I cannot help but be reminded of this, where one can sign up to have personal e-mail messages sent to friends and family upon one’s death. A voice from beyond the grave, as it were. As a profitable business, I don’t think it really stands a chance, but it does reveal this impulse we all have to leave lasting memories for those we leave behind. Certainly, I don’t think the grieving process is helped by depriving one of all tangible reminders, but she does raise an interesting question: how much is too much? Can you leave loved ones with too many memories, and does that mean we should record less of our lives?

On Saturday, I performed with members of the Penn State Monty Python Society in a night of original sketch comedy and songs. Eventually, there might be pictures. I think it went about as well as we had expected. We had fun and were allowed to act silly, and that’s really all that matters. Nobody forgot their lines, and nobody in the audience booed. They didn’t always laugh — especially during a difficult second of three shows — but they didn’t boo. And somehow, inexplicably, we seem to have developed a small — very small — following. Between performances, a woman asked me quite politely who had changed the lyrics* to the penis song, and when we told the audience at the start of the first show that we would not be performing our “Necrophiliac Sketch” (wherein the University president has sex with a dead body), there was genuine disappointment. There’s just no accounting for taste.

* I have never been comfortable, for hopefully obvious reasons, with the last line of the fifth verse. In the original recording, I — or rather the character I am playing — compare my penis to “a long locomotive” and encourage “kids under twelve [to] ride for free.” I changed this to the less pedophilia-friendly “groups after twelve”, which makes me feel better, and which I think gets a bigger, certainly less hesitant laugh.

Dean Allen of Textism is right when he says, “Un fucking believable.”

Leslie Harpold, a nice person who almost always has something interesting to say, has apparently had her domain, Hoopla.com, stolen out from under her. On the 9th, she wrote:

The name wasn’t set to expire until June. They think (no one is willing to commit to any answer) there may have been a faxed request (faked? forged?) to have the domain transferred to this Sarah person which gave them “my” permission for the transfer (naturally I wrote no such letter, sent no such fax, and I haven’t been in Germany since 1995). So the person swiped it, simply by faxing a forged letter to NetSol as best I can tell. I got no notice via email or land mail, they just did it on the authority of a fax.

I’ve made a bunch of calls, written them another fax with my info and have been told to wait up to 48 hours which is about 10 minutes from now. I called a couple times for progress notes in the interim and was given really clearly scripted answers by customer support. No one who answers the phone is willing to connect me to someone who works on this issue which I find deeply disturbing.

And then, today:

So I finally got a call from NetSol this morning and they said, and this is priceless: that it now will be up to the new person with the domain to decide whether or not they feel like giving it up. It seems NetSol is saying “Well, it probably is our fault” but because of the way the records have been kept, the person has it as a new registration, which violates (according to NetSol) the whole covenant of the contract I had with them for ownership, but since it was entered as a new registration and not a transfer, they have no option. NetSol admits the screw up is their fault, but that doesn’t mean they’re willing to wrest it out of the new registrant’s grimy hands, because they can’t find the domain’s record of release even though NetSol admits it wasn’t due for renewal until June. I might not ever get it back.

Un fucking believable. And now I’m starting to worry: I’m registered through Network Solutions.

Once again, because last week’s answers proved so amusing (gee, thanks, Miranda), here are the Friday Five:

1. What is your favorite restaurant and why?

Even though my apartment has next to no kitchen and I can barely (which is to say not at all) cook, I don’t do an awful lot of eating out at restaurants. When I do, it’s usually fast food or a pizza ordered in. When you start to recognize the pizza delivery people — and, more importantly, when they start to recognize you — it’s time to start considering other options. Locally, my friends are all poor college students, so when we eat together it’s usually just a burger and fries grabbed on campus. I really don’t date (which is a whole different set of questions), so the nicer restaurants are usually reserved for when my parents visit me for birthdays and such. Right now, if I had to choose, I’d probably say my favorite local restaurant is The Gingerbread Man. I’ve never actually been inside, oddly enough, but it’s not pizza and they deliver.

2. What fast food restaurant are you partial to?

They’re all equally awful in their own way, so I try to mix it up. Variety is, after all, the spice of life. Again, if I had to choose, I’d probably pick Taco Bell, if only because there’s usually less of a wait at the drive-through.

3. What are your standards and rules for tipping?

I like to be generous, although not absurdly so, and it depends in large part on the situation, the quality of service (or, more often, the promptness of delivery). I start with fifteen percent and then go from there.

4. Do you usually order an appetizer and/or dessert?

Again, it depends on the situtation, what I’m eating and who I’m with. Depends on the menu, too.

5. What do you usually order to drink at a restaurant?

When I’m with my family, we have, for some reason, all taken to ordering ice tea. More often than not, if I’m by myself, I’ll order a soda. It depends on the meal and my mood. I don’t drink alcohol very often, and only once have I ordered a glass of beer with a meal — I was in Texas, and my hosts told me I should. Maybe if I ate out more often. Maybe if I was more of a drinker. Maybe if fewer of my meals came with an offer for free cheesy bread.

This evening, after much procrastination, I finally mailed my taxes. In the unlikely event that I’m audited, I’d like the IRS to note that I felt vaguely guilty about getting a refund, that said refund isn’t very large, and that I was nearly run off the road by a driver who didn’t look where he was going on my way home from the post office. This had ought to count for something. And if not, perhaps you’ll be distracted by these purty pictures. You are feeling veerrryyy sleeeeppppyyy…