.	Under normal circumstances I’d be worried if my wife woke at 3 AM and said “I just can’t take it anymore.” But now I know what she means. Now I know what to do. I rise from the bed, go down the hall, gather a pillow and blanket from the spare room, and sleep on Gnat’s trundle bed. Obviously my wife had been up with the tot for a while; my turn. “Go to sleep,” I said, going to sleep. Pause. “Daddee?” “What.” Silence. I drifted off to sleep and dreamed that I was bidding for the Olympics. Held at my house. The dream was suffused with disgust; what did I think I was doing? This was a colossally stupid idea. Then i was awakened when Gnat climbed down from her bed and put her jammie-clad foot in my eye. “Don’t step on my eye. Go back to sleep. Pause. “Daaadee?” “WHAT.” Silence. Now I dreamed that I’d sold Jasperwood, for reasons I didn’t completely understand. It seemed like another bad idea, particularly since I’d bought a crappy house with a yard the size of a dishtowel, and wretched interior appointments - the hallways, for example, were decorated with bedsheets glued to the wall. What was I thinking? Now no one would know where we lived. It would take forever to get this new place in shape. Woe. Wonder where that one came from? Simple. Last night I banged out a bleat in 40 minutes, cleared the decks for a night of televised entertainment, logged on, whoa: my home page was talking to me. I have Instapundit as my home page; it’s certainly more interesting than a news site, does not contain 4,573 graphic elements, or a survey (Do you believe that Laci Peterson would have approved of the Dixie Chick’s comments?) or ten subcategories about things I am not likely to read. My news-flow looks like this: Cable news crawl > websites > radio > newspapers > covers of newsweekies at the grocery store > lip-reading Ted Koppel as I pass the TV on my way to get a beer Anyway, there’s a message on Instapundit telling me my site cannot be found. This is a bit like picking up the New York Times and reading a headline that says JAMES, YOU LEFT YOUR KEYS AT STARBUCKS. Since I’d just renewed the domain, I thought this might be some curious hiccup in Landru’s inscrutable plumbing, but when other sites starting putting out APBs I began to get very, very nervous. I read one webpage that seemed to prove my domain had been hijacked by professional spammers, and at that point I realized the fragility of a brand, any brand, no matter how puny. CNN can damage its credibility with one editorial; Coke could squander 80 years of customer goodwill by revealing that formula 7X contains a tincture of virgin’s blood, and I could lose everything by sitting around on my arse for all of April and not renewing my domain until the day it expired. Does this make me vow to have someone jab a cattle prod into my buttocks five years from yesterday so I don’t forget? No! It makes me clamor for federal legislation to punish domain hijackers. Save me Uncle Jeebus! Save me! It’s all fixed now, I hope. I think. I won’t know until tomorrow, so I’m loath to spend a lot of time on something tonight. I’d link to some new additions I’ve put up here and there - incremental details, nothing vital - but I was 15 gig over my bandwidth allotment last month, so I think I’ll lay low for a while. One final note: Yesterday I spent a few electrons on the “Sorcerer's Apprentice,” and I neglected to mention the Simpsons parody “Scratchtasia.” In Fantasia, we see a shadow of Mickey taking an axe to the magic broom; in Scratchtasia, the same thing. (If memory serves.) But the DVD for Fantasia had a deleted scene; in the original conception, we see Mickey hacking the broom to death as it runs around, panicked, attempting to escape. Mickey Mouse was more violent than Itchy and Scratchy, which we all know is the violentest cartoon ever. File that away for future bar bets. And please write if this actually comes up in a saloon wager; I’d love to know the circumstances. One additional note: today at the grocery store a fellow ahead of me in line pointed to Gnat and said, well, “Gnat!” He also recognized her as Toddler (TM), the name she has in my newspaper column. (All hopes of integrating the two concepts have long been abandoned.) We had a quick conversation about the joys of toddlerhood, and he noted that he was moving back to this neighborhood after a year in the burbs. He had that same whee-HA! glee I felt when I moved back, too. Returning home on a warm spring day - nothing beats that. Walked down the block to the movie store. A guy running into the store looked at us and gave this half-laugh: ha. It’s the sort of reaction that makes you check your fly, or wonder whether your child has discovered that she can make her middle finger stick up all by itself. By the time we’d reached the front door he’d already dropped off his tape and headed out. As he passed he said: Toddler! That’s two people in four minutes on one block. I live in the epicenter of my demographic, apparently. This concludes today’s remarks. We now pause for a message from the part of our brain responsible for troubleshooting the video editing shuttle I bought two weeks ago for $150, which has decided that it will arbitrarily assign different functions to the jog wheel as it sees fit, thereby requiring a call to technical assistance, and perhaps sending it back to the factory for repairs. I quote: (Unbelievable amount of profanity. An exfoliating amount of profanity. Desire for the maker of this device to drown in a hot colonic broth delivered from the leprous haunches of Baal, screaming.) Have a nice weekend!