of panties, monsters, and government hackers

I don’t know what happened last week, but the site was down for a few days. I think there may have been a few variations, but almost everyone that I heard from said that when they hit their mm.com bookmark they were greeted by a warning that said “403 Forbidden.” I got emails from a hundred or so people, which was nice. Most of them were worried that something had happened to me. A few suspected that the Bush administration had eliminated my site under the Patriot Act. And, a couple folks thought that I personally had cut them off, that I’d somehow been able to keep them, and in one case even their family and friends, from seeing the site. Whatever the problem, it seems to be fixed now, and, while I’d like to think that I was the victim of some vast conspiracy inside the Beltway, I suspect that someone somewhere just flipped the wrong switch or pissed in a closet full of servers or something. Anyway, I’m back now.

Of course, I suppose it could have something to do with that dead thing found dangling over our backyard a few days ago… When the rest of us were theorizing that the rotting creature atop our phone pole was either a bear or a wolverine, our friend Steve Cherry suggested that perhaps it was something more sinister, something known as the Nain Rouge… As I’d never heard of the Nain Rouge, I did some searching, and found the following information at Wikipedia:

The Nain Rouge, French for red dwarf or red gnome, is a mythical creature that haunts Detroit, Michigan. Its appearance is said to presage terrible events for the city. The Nain Rouge appears as a small child-like creature with red or black fur. It is also said to have “blazing red eyes and rotten teeth.”

The creature is said to have been attacked in 1701 by the first white settler of Detroit, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, who soon after lost his fortune. The creature is also said to have appeared in 1763 before the Battle of Bloody Run where 59 British soldiers were killed by Chief Pontiac’s Indians.

Famous multiple sighting occurred in the days before the 1805 fire which destroyed most of Detroit. Gen William Hull reported a “dwarf attack” in the fog just before his surrender of Detroit in the War of 1812.

A woman claimed to have been attacked in 1884, and described the creature as resembling, “a baboon with a horned head…brilliant restless eyes and a devilish leer on its face.” Another attack was reported in 1964.

Other sightings include the day before the 12th Street Riot in 1967 and before a huge snow/ice storm of March 1976, when two utility workers are said to have seen what they thought was a child climbing a utility pole which then jumped from the top of the pole and ran away as they approached….

That’s right – it’s been known to climb utility poles!

So, I’m not saying that I believe it, but, if you’re the kind to believe in such things, I suppose it’s possible that the sighting of this thing rotting atop my power lines was a sign that something terrible was about to befall the people of Detroit — that terrible thing, of course, being a three-day outage of mm.com.

(I looked for a drawing of the Nain Rouge to use in this post, but couldn’t find one. An image search on “403 Forbidden,” however, turned up the shot seen above.)

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5 Comments

  1. Posted August 22, 2005 at 11:34 am | Permalink

    Whatever the cause, I’m glad that things seem to be back on track.

  2. Tony Buttons
    Posted August 22, 2005 at 12:04 pm | Permalink

    Judging from that photo, I’d say that you have no penis, Mr. Maynard.

  3. srah
    Posted August 22, 2005 at 6:06 pm | Permalink

    Glad you’re back! I linked to your dead giant beast post and then you disappeared, so I figured the MASSIVE TRAFFIC from my blog had taken up all of your bandwidth and brought down your site.

    But no.

  4. Kevin Dole 2
    Posted August 22, 2005 at 6:19 pm | Permalink

    Spekaing of panties— whatever happened to YPsi-panties?

  5. mark
    Posted August 22, 2005 at 8:36 pm | Permalink

    I haven’t dug through the boxes of Crimewave merchandise in some time, Kevin, but I believe we still have a few pairs of Ypsipanties in stock… I’m also told by Jennifer at Henrietta Fahrenheit that she’s still got some for sale too. She doesn’t keep them out though. You kind of have to wait until no one’s around and then ask her in a whisper. She keeps them under the counter or something.

    And yes, Srah, I suspect the massive amounts of traffic did have something to do with it.

    And, as for you, Tony, good try, but I will not expose my penis on the site just to prove you wrong.

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