Tokyo Tales: Let me tell you a quick story

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September 01, 2005

Let me tell you a quick story

Tokyo Tales was essentially inactive from October 2002 to September 2005. Here's the holding text I had up on the front page of the site during that time.

Once upon a time (well, actually it was about six months ago) there was a man who wanted to take a brief break from his weblog.

So he wrote a couple of cryptic posts that hinted at his decision, and just sort of left the site alone for a while. A few people enquired and were reassured that all was well, that there would be more content soon. The site was not dead; it was, in the parlance so beloved of unemployable actors, merely "resting".

Then a very bad thing happened. The hosting company pulled the plug on the site, apparently without any warning whatsoever. What's more, they put up a site suspended message which hinted that the owner of the site might have been involved in credit card fraud, copyright abuse or even unsolicitated bulk mailing! Imagine his surprise!

Well, you can guess how worried he was. He thought people would see the suspension message (2), remember the cryptic posts (+ 2) and think that he had given up completely (= 5). So he knew he had to sort something out quickly.

The man made some enquiries and found out that it was because his hosting plan had expired. The people at the hosting company claimed that their system had e-mailed him a number of times to request payment, but that he had not responded. The man thought this was odd because he had not received any e-mails whatsoever from the hosting company for at least six months - but the company told him that their system had "definitely e-mailed" him, so he "should have received the e-mails". The man was very impressed by this logic, but also a little perturbed that the hosting company hadn't had the initiative or resources to try contacting him in some other way - such as via his other e-mail addresses. Or by postal mail. Or by telephone. Or by hiring small boys to throw rocks at his windows.

So, faced with the opportunity to sign up for another year with this hosting company who, on reflection, didn't appear to be all that good, the man ran away and joined the circus, where he was much happier. He learnt all kinds of things, such as why lion-tamers use chairs in their act (the lions are confused by the chair's four legs and don't know where to look) and how to walk a tightrope successfully (focus off in the distance and when you feel yourself about to fall, think and stretch upwards, not sideways to counterbalance) and lived happily ever after with his new friends.

No, not really. After all, he had a full-time job to hold down and couldn't really go running off to join the circus every time things got a bit hairy. Instead he signed up with a different hosting company, one with an excellent reputation.

Tokyo Tales will be back very shortly. How's that for a happy ending?

NB For those of you who don't like happy endings, a box arrives by parcel service. It is found to contain the head of Detective Mills's wife. The John Doe character (played by Kevin Spacey) tells Mills (Brad Pitt) and Somerset (Morgan Freeman) that he has done this in order to goad Mills into killing him, thereby enacting the seventh sin (wrath) and validating Doe's commentary (as espoused by the previous six murders) on the wickedness of man - which, despite Somerset's desperate exhortations, he does. Mills is arrested and the film ends.

Posted by chris at September 1, 2005 11:12 PM | Permalink

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