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From BuyClamsOnline.com to billromanowskisucks.com, a stroll through the graveyard of defunct domain names offers a melancholy vision of monumentally stupid hopes that were cruelly dashed.
It's late afternoon, you're thinking about dinner, and you realize it's been a long while since you enjoyed some shellfish. Do you (a) head to the seafood section of your supermarket and ask the clerk how fresh the clams are or (b) sign on to BuyClamsOnline.com?
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you chose Curtain No. 1. Fact is, you'd have to; the Web site BuyClamsOnline.com doesn't exist -- never did, so far as I can tell -- and the domain name expired on April 12. But the very fact that BuyClamsOnline.com has expired means that someone, maybe a year ago, maybe two, registered it. Someone out there, someone living among us, chose to bet that the road to online success would be paved with mollusks.
In the premier issue of Swivel, the Nexus of Women and Wit:
"Shuffling Toward Womanhood in Wedge-heeled Sandals"
When you're a thirteen-year-old girl, you don't want to star in a homespun, family ritual. What you want at that age--what I wanted, at least--is to be rendered invisible whenever the adults in your life converse anywhere near the subject of your "burgeoning womanhood," or anyone's burgeoning anything. When you're a thirteen-year-old girl, your Holy Grail is coolness. You seek admiration by your peer group, and in my case, an eighth grader named Robbie Mitchko. Also, you wouldn't mind breasts.
Let's get something straight: at thirteen, I was not cool. Indeed, the very consumer spending that could sometimes substitute for coolness, tipping the balance for the marginal among us, was boycotted in our house. I had no Oreos, no Coca-Cola to serve after-school friends. I owned neither Barbie nor Ken. Where other kids boasted board games like "Careers" and "Life," I could only offer "Tuf" (think "Scrabble" with mathematical equations). Not remotely cool. Not even on the outskirts.