My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places

Caught on the Web

Last week I was forced to look myself up on the Internet. I was doing a search on Mary Roach websites, to see if the domain names were taken.

I am not one of those folks who delight in Googling themselves. The last time I succumbed to the urge, the mighty search engine turned up an African wire service story stating that author Mary Roach has “gone off her trolley.” I wasn’t certain what this meant, or even if it was a bad thing. I mean, who knows, maybe it was my stop? Curious, I then Googled the phrase “off her trolley.” I did not find a definition, but I learned that Sharon Osbourne, Ann Coulter and Kate Bush are also off their trolleys. An unpromising sign.

A website, as you know, is a resource designed to provide quick and easy access to outdated or useless information. I give you, for instance, the website Maryroach.net. The Mary Roach in this case is an old American Idol contestant whose audition Simon Cowell called one of the worst he’d ever heard. I don’t watch American Idol very often, but I heard about this Mary Roach, because for two weeks afterward, people in my household were walking around gleefully quoting Cowell’s line, “At least we don’t have to listen to that horrible MARY ROACH anymore.”

Most folks logging onto websites are looking for nothing more than a phone number. But company websites rarely give you one. Why? Because they long ago laid off their phone-answerers in order to hire designers of useless, outdated websites.

In keeping with the general goal of irritating as broadly and efficiently as possible, many websites require passwords. In order to get a password, you must undergo a half hour of tedious, unpaid data entry known as registering. If you’ve already registered, you can proceed directly to not being able to remember your password, followed by remembering passwords for seven other websites, followed by, as they say in the Good Book, a wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Moving on to www.maryroach.org, I was surprised to find myself redirected to the website of a business called Nature’s Drugstore. Here you can buy Eczema Kits, All-Purpose Ointment, and seven different Libido Enhancers, including the eyebrow-elevating “Men’s Package.” I e-mailed Nature’s Drugstore to ask what Mary Roach has to do with all this, but got no reply. There was—Lo!—no phone number, just an address in Greeley, Colorado. Greeley has a website, but there was nothing on it about Nature’s Drugstore. There was, however, a mention of Greeley as the home of “the oldest symphony west of the Mississippi,” which may explain all the libido enhancing that’s going on there.

You are no doubt wondering why I did not choose www.maryroach.com. The answer is that my online identity has been kidnapped by BuyDomains.com. The ransom has been set, I kid you not, at upwards of $5,000. This is what it would cost to buy back the rights to my name for use with a website ending in dot-com. Simon Cowell did not refer to BuyDomains.com as “the most obnoxious, parasitic, greed-oozing company he’d ever heard of,” but who knows, one day he may. If you do a Google search on “irritant,” the website of BuyDomains.com pops up. I’m lying. It doesn’t. What pops up—true story—is a link to the marketplace eBay: “Great deals on irritant!”

So, for the near future anyway, no one will be able to visit a website belonging to the Mary Roach who does not aspire to a singing career or a cure for eczema.