In MySpace No-one Can Hear You Scream

There was a power-cut in L.A. (or 'outage' as they say over there, I can't decide which word I prefer) two days ago and the database for MySpace was affected, causing the site to be down for some time in the wee small hours local time, which of course meant that it, erm, went down at a more decent hour on the European landmass and its surrounding archipelagos. Middle-management types all over the continent therefore presumably noticed a sudden, mystifying rise in work-rate among their minions at that time. Or maybe an even more mystifying manifestation of panic and fear, the sort you see in disaster movies or on Sven-Göran Eriksson's countenance come the quarter-finals of a major tournament.

Anyway, the site was soon back up again, though the information on my page, and that of quite a few of my 'friends' had mostly vanished, or reverted to default settings, thereby perpetrating the lie that we are all Pacific Island bodybuilders that don't want kids. Being a relatively restrained MySpace user (only 54 friends at the moment, and, needless to say, I have been neglecting nearly all of them) I managed not to lose any sleep on it, and upon getting out of bed this morning, all the vital information was back on screen. Maybe it was all a bad dream...

One of my friends is one Rupert Murdoch, who is known to some as the 'Dirty Digger' and to others as the new Big Kahuna of the MySpace; imagine my horror when I discovered that Rupert on MySpace is actually an impostor, one of those anti-globalisation guerrilla-counter-marketing culture-jammers. Do they have no shame? And this other Rupert claims that his namesake is taking MySpace down the tubes, folowing the disappearance (and subsequent reinstatement) of a MySpace page satirising the gormless Republican Senator Ted Stevens' worryingly shaky grasp of Internet technology (he is the Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee and a key decision-maker on 'net neutrality', whatever that is). We have been warned.