A Flower Quickly Fading...

"Saying what we think gives us a wider conversational range than saying what we know."

So the new Pope was chosen yesterday. Pretty cool stuff considering it's been so long since the last time it happened. I wasn't even born. I'm pretty sure though that I'll still be around for a second go at this. Did you see how old this guy is? He's 78. That's almost as old as Pope John Paul was when he died. I guess he's probably in better health though, so maybe he'll be around for a while. According to various news reports and blogs I've read, he's supposed to be extremely conservative, so we'll see if he cleans things up any.

Okay, so there actually is a point to this post. In reading up about the new pope, I found something pretty funny/interesting. This guy (Rogers Cadenhead) in Florida bought up six domain names two weeks ago that were potential pope names. So the day the new name "Benedict XVI" was announced, the world apparently tried to hit www.benedictxvi.com, only to be redirected to www.cadenhead.org! Pretty funny. His blog's been getting something like 150 hits per minute ever since. And if you check out his site, the comments before the pope announcement are like 4 or 5, and now it's up to 140. He's also been receiving a fair amount of ad revenue ever since. He hasn't decided yet what he's going to do with the domain, but he has promised not to do anything dirty or unethical, although some people think he hit that point when he bought it in the first place.

Too weird. The article in Wired where I originally found this is here.

One other interesting note. I learned this by reading Cadenhead's post about the pope.

"The last choice [referring to domain name] would lend itself to rapturous excitement among end-times believers -- there's a long belief that the last pope will call himself Peter II."

Never heard that before.

Posted by Brandy at 8:23 AM