Late Friday night, exhausted from a set of LCP shows (one last week to see it! Come join in the laughs!) and having had a nice big orange/coconut margarita at Baby Acapulco's, I come home and check the old referral logs, the thing that lets me see how many people are coming to the site and from where.

And there were a bunch of hits from diarist.net. I bop over there and find (by this time I was whooping out loud) that I'd been nominated for some awards.

Which is fantastic because that's why I started the site in the first place: Awards, money and groupies. That's why all online journals exist. If anybody tells you different, they're lying.

The award nominations are for the David Copperfield entry, a guest entry by my buddy Tracy and for overall Best New Site.

What this means, of course, is that I've arrived.

I mean, you could have denied it before. You could have come to this site and been all, "Yeah, whatever. Who's this guy think he is, anyway? Oh, hey, some porn e-mail!"

But now, those salad-tossing days are over. I've arrived, goddammit. My name is known far and wide. I'm huge, folks. HUGE. Absolutely titanic in measure. I mean, damn, why am I even talking to you? What have you ever done?

Saturday was a busy day for me. I brought on a publicist, Jake Spark, so named, he tells me, because he'll fire some sparks under the ass of every newspaper, magazine and two-bit local broadcast within a 12-state area to get me noticed.

Sucka Web sites better run and hide, beeyatches.

I started selecting a new wardrobe in preparation for the gala Diarist.net awards ceremony, which I haven't heard anything about yet, but it's probably gonna be at the Shrine Auditorium in L.A. or somewhere glitzy like that. When I say "selecting a new wardrobe," I don't mean buying clothes either. That's what people who don't get nominated for awards do when they need clothes. What I did was field calls set up by Jake Spark from fashion designers who want to make sure I'm wearing something they designed to this awards ceremony. I finally got a hold of Georgio Armani (so busy that guy is!) and we talked:

 

 

The other thing you need when you're about to win an award (oh, did I say "win?" I don't really know that I'll win, but, I mean damn. Have you seen me? I'm huge! I got the hook-up with Armani! It's in the bag, right?) is write a compelling acceptance speech. One that sounds humble, but totally acknowledges what an amazing talent you are. I've been studying Julia Roberts' Oscar speech and working with some of her speechwriters, and this is what we've come up with:

 

 

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Intrigue in the Internet world: A couple of weeks ago, I had a huge scare because the owner of the ISP that houses this site posted a bizarre text-only message replacing the main page of their company pages saying basically, "We're being sued, Southwestern Bell is taking us over, I've shut down the billing machine, I will survive, going bankrupt, tomorrow is another day, corporate blah blah, starting a new company, see ya later suckers, blah blah..." That was the gist of it.

I got freaked out and started calling other Web hosting companies to see how easily I could move Terribly Happy over. I got an even bigger scare: Terribly Happy's domain was registered in a way that made it impossible for me to transfer it anywhere else because according to the registration, I wasn't even listed as a contact for my own site. So even if I wanted to move the site somewhere else, I couldn't because I had no authority to have the domain moved around.

(I'm getting a headache just telling this story. Bear with me.) Then, a few day later just as I was about to get things sorted out, the company's Web page went back up, some new owners took over, a cordial e-mail was sent out and everythign was totally up and running smoothly.

Being that I love to avoid work whenever possible, I took this as a good sign and just let things go because I saw no reason to rock the boat.

Then this weekend, just as I was being nominated for these awards and attracting new people to the site, my two Web sites go down completely. For the entire weekend. The company's Web page was down completely, too. I freaked out, thinking I may have lost my domain forever while the former owners went down to Jamaica, smoking joints rolled with the sliced up shreds of my domain registration.

I finally got someone on the phone from the new company and they told me that they were just moving the servers out of the former owner's site and to a new location. But by Sunday night, the sites were still down. Then I found out something even more interesting: The former owner, who had had my business for more than six years, apparently tried to sabotage the servers, renaming files, deleting accounts and just basically going nuts before they came to pick everything up and causing all sorts of problems.

I don't really know who to believe, and if you're reading this on Monday that means everything is back to "normal," but geez! What the fuck?

Be careful when you find out your Web hosting company runs out of some guy's basement.

UPDATE: It's Monday morning and still no site. Insert nasty curse word here, highlight it, make it bold, add some exclamation points, go beat up somebody, and you'll approximate about one-tenth of how I feel right now. Bastards.

UPDATE: Monday night. God, I hate the Internet. Still no site. More sabotage. Angry phone calls. Annoyance.

UPDATE: Late, late Monday night. God, you think this is funny, right? Beign nominated for awards, and then having my site shut down for three days? Yeah, well, mysterious ways my ass.

UPDATE: Tuesday morning. The site is up, because people are getting to it, but I can't get to it myself from my Road Runner account. The Hell...? Have bought voodoo dolls, but don't know what my former ISP owner looks like, so it's doing no good. I think the worst is over. But not for him, BWAH HAHAHAHAHAH!!!!

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Saw The Mummy Returns this weekend, which made something like $70 million in its first three days of release. The movie should have been called "Rachel Weisz's Breasts Versus 150 CGI Effects." Honestly, her breasts were never addressed directly in the movie, but they were in every scene, just hanging out there, as if they were part of the production design.

I'll tell you this: If there had been that much cleavage around in the 1930s, when the movie is supposed to take place, there never would have been a World War II.