Author: Dan Dickinson

The big news story yesterday was hard to miss, even if you try your best to act like a shut-in and never turn on the news channels: Grand Jury Indicts Martha Stewart. This, unsurprisingly, made a number of people happy, as there’s nothing the world seems to want more than to see Martha get some comeuppance.
Then this morning, as I was checking Technorati (is there a verb for this? Technorating?) and bloghopping, I found a link on Jason Kottke’s site for MarthaTalks.com, a very Martha-ish site (look at the clean design and use of the same shade of green everywhere!) where Martha and her lawyer try and explain that while she may be able to make a perfect strawberry soup, she’s just not the sort of person to commit stock fraud.

And yet something struck me oddly about this site, the way it does when you hear slightly minor chords in the movies and you just know that the protagonist is going to uncover something crucial. Instinctively, I fired up the Terminal and did what I had to do…
[iMac:~] remy% whois -h whois.networksolutions.com marthatalks.com
And there it was right in front of me.

Martha was indicted on June 4th. The domain name was registered two days before that.
Did Martha have inside information that she was going to get indicted?

Back in 1995, when I first got online, I started out on telnet BBSes. On one of them, I met a girl who went by the name of CrOW. What began as simple chatroom chicanery turned into a bizarre friendship that involved proms and people confusing us for one another. It might be cliche to say this, but she’s the kind of person you can only describe by saying she’s indescribable.
Around 1999, we lost a little contact – school kept us busy – but by 2001 we were talking again. Now she pesters me every day from her office, throwing random links at me over and over again on AIM.
I kept telling her that she needed a blog. Then I remembered that I’m running MovableType and the solution is simple.
So I present to the world, The Boredom Of Hannah – to which I lay no claim of responsibility or involvement. It’s her own brand of dementia – I’m just providing server space.