Honolulu Lite

by Charles Memminger

Friday, December 24, 1999

All the good
ones are taken

TWAS the day or so before Christmas, a time that leaves columnists grasping at straws in the idea department. You'd think there would be a lot of stuff to write about just before Christmas, but there are only three: 1) the yearly shopping is a bummer column; 2) the yearly traffic is a bummer column and 3) the yearly parking at malls while trying to shop after being stuck in traffic is a bummer column.

Younger columnists tend to get sentimental about the holidays, leading them to write about the RELIGIOUS SIGNIFICANCE of Christmas. But they wise up pretty soon. It's never a good idea to drag religion into a column, especially one about a religious holiday.

It just gets non-believers upset and starts arguments about why do Christians get their own national holidays and other religions, like the United Church of the Cosmic and Omnipresent Gerbil, don't. The standard rule is that you can't write a good column about religion or a bad one about pets. (I'm not sure if that includes Cosmic Omnipresent Gerbils.)

SO, on this day before Christmas, here's something completely non-religious to think about: Just about all possible Internet domain names have been claimed. I know, you're shocked.

I bet a friend I could pick words at random from the dictionary and most of them would be a registered web site. (I suspected that most of those also would involve naked women.) Here are the results:

Gripe.com. Strange. Whats their gripe? There is a web site for this address but you have to have a secret password to get to it. Who knows what this one's about?

Cranium.com. This site belongs to something called IX Labs. Its mission is to make Internet Business Commerce a trusted, regular aspect of everyone's daily life, to improve the way we live and to improve the impact human beings have on our planet. I couldn't figure out exactly how this company goes about doing this. Apparently, cranium.com is over my head.

Atomic.com. You knew this one had to be taken. But this site has nothing to do with science, or, more surprisingly, pornography. It is the site for a computer battle game. "Welcome to Atomic Games!," you are greeted. "Since 1991, we've been handcrafting quality games that are, chock full of nuclear goodness!" Not enough firms are handcrafting nuclear goodness into their products.

Takeoff.com. Now come on, THIS one has got to have naked women, right? Wrong. Turns out that Take Off is a vacation store offering packages on resorts, cruises and trips.

Diethylstilbestrol.com. This is a saucy little web site featuring dancing nymphs and rampant sex. Not. You'll be amazed to know that no one has registered a web site using the word diethylstilbestrol, which turns out to be some kind of synthetic estrogen. Grab this one while you can.

Coccyx.com. There are lot of scientific sounding words in the dictionary. This one essentially means butt bone. And surprisingly, no one has registered it as a web site. So get off your coccyx and snag this domain.

Out of six randomly chosen words, only two have not become Internet web sites. That may sound good, but remember, most of the words in the dictionary are of the diethylstilbestrol variety. And just in case you are wondering, both Christmas.com and gerbil.com are taken. CosmicOmnipresentGerbil is still available.

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Charles Memminger, winner of
National Society of Newspaper Columnists
awards in 1994 and 1992, writes "Honolulu Lite"
Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Write to him at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin,
P.O. Box 3080, Honolulu, 96802
or send E-mail to charley@nomayo.com or
71224.113@compuserve.com.

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