my friend is being overrun

My friend Jeff has been diligently counting and reporting the number of times the word “fuck” has been used on the HBO show Deadwood for the past year or so. (If you’re familiar with the show, you know what a Herculean task that is.) I think I mentioned this project of his here once before in the context of my being mad at Jeff because he made me learn how to transfer programs from Tivo to videotape just so that I could send him an episode that he’d missed while “camping.” (He calls it camping, but I suspect there’s a better word for parking next to a tree and roughing it with smaller, battery and gas-powered versions of the same things you have at home. In this particular instance, I can remember that Jeff called me on his cell phone, mad that the cable provided by the campground for his little TV didn’t get HBO. I might be exaggerating slightly, but, as I recall it, he was livid that he’d have to “camp” without premium channels.) Anyway, it would seem as though the rest of the world has finally found out what Jeff’s been up to.

First it was mentioned in Variety, then the Drudge Report picked it up this morning, and now he tells me that the UK Guardian is linking to him from their site… At the rate it’s going, by tomorrow he’ll be on the the Tonight Show.

He’s being overrun with traffic right now, and I’m praying that he comes through it alright. It seems like every time something like this happens to him, he ends up suffering somehow. A few years ago, when he posted a scan of a famous baseball player’s paycheck, he got tons of traffic, but ended up being threatened and harassed (both to take the image down, and to turn in the person who sent it to him), and then, a few months ago, when an instructional video on how to clean your sinuses with something called a Neti pot that he had on his site got linked to by a famous humorist, he got hit with a huge bill for the increased traffic. By the time he figured out what was going on and pulled the plug, his Earthlink bill was over $600. (The cool thing is, his readers have been chipping in and helping him pay it.)

So, right now, my prayers are with Jeff and his family, and I’m hoping that there isn’t a downside to this particular brush with fame. Hopefully, it’ll lead to a book deal, and not bankruptcy, divorce, and death.