Tom Tomorrow writes:

The Palestinians are a brutally oppressed people–and Israel is a nation under siege. The deaths of 400 Israeli civilians since the start of this latest intifada are senseless and tragic and maddening–as are the deaths of 1500 Palestinians during that same time.

And if you read that last bit and vehemently disagreed with half of it, and are already composing a response in your head to explain why the side with which you are aligned is morally superior to the side with which you disagree–well, that’s kind of the problem at this point, isn’t it?


As promised, some pictures, including some from Saturday night’s Python Society show. They’re not that great — I was backstage and otherwise busy for most of our three performances — but they’re what I’ve got. There’s posters, me in a silly hat, a list of the sketches we performed, a riveted audience, and a few other shots of this and that. The shopping cart wasn’t ours and was there when we arrived, but that’s past president Brad Blinkhorn’s popular skit, “The Last Temptation of Gary” taped to the microphone in front of it. I played the part of God. Naked pirates, penis songs, Scottish accents, and impersonating a diety… Is it any wonder I don’t discuss the details of these shows with my parents?

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.