Jackson West’s Obsessive Compulsion

So the weirdest thing just happenned to me — and no, it wasn’t a surprise invitation from Min Jung to come over and sample her first attempt at pot roast (delicious — thanks, MJ!). It was afterwards, when I borrowed her laptop to add the “MJ wuz here,” since I wanted to jump on board the little meme whereby anyone tagged with a kiss by MJ at South By Southwest makes a note of that on their site. It made me feel special.

But see, then I scroll down to check what sites have recently referred folks to me (sign up — it’s awesome if you’re vain like I am). Well, one of the referrers was listed as Frut: Frutales ONLINE. So of course I click through, since it’s usually just the SFist staff page or Courtney P.’s SF Bay Bloggers site responsible for sending folks my way. And what do I find? My site!

Being the geek that I am, I had to try to puzzle out exactly what the hell was going on. First, the base URL is come.to, which means that it’s a site hosted by V3 — a free domain name service which I once used ages ago (like, way back in 199 and is now a subsidiary of Fortunecity. That being said, there’s no way for me to whois come.to/frut and find out who registered that particular site. So I checked out the HTML source, and found that it was actually a frameset, and the only visible frame pointed right at my site via my IP address (instead of my domain name). It also included this tiny little hint in the description meta tag and noframes tag as to what the hell was going on:

“Todod sobre riego de frutales”

Which seems to be a slightly mis-spelled spanish phrase meaning “Everything you wanted to know about irrigating fruit trees.” Googling a bunch of combinations of that resulted in absolutely nothing. So what the fuck is going on here? These are the best ideas I could come up with:

-Somebody mis-typed the IP address when they built the page, which would make sense, since they don’t seem to have a firm grasp spanish spelling, either. Sill, wouldn’t they have noticed when they looked at the site?

-This is some pagerank hack by spammers. Since SFist has a really high pagerank thanks to Gothamist, and I have a really high pagerank thanks to SFist, maybe somebody wanted some of my Google juice. But, um, wouldn’t they want to point to something besides me? Could they be seeding it for another site?

-My own meager understanding of spanish (and paranoid self-obsession) leaves open the prospect that this is some sort of joke or slur about me — is someone calling me a fruit? If so, they don’t know the half. Alternately, maybe someone loves this site soooo much, they just had to mirror it to another domain for the hell of it.

I invite suggestions in the comments, and intend to forward this around to people smarter than me in the hopes that the mystery can be revealed. In the meantime, how weird is that?

Just some final notes and thoughts from Austin. Definitely had a super-great time.

• Meeting Eddie Codel at the Oakland airport because he recognized my SFist tee.
• Thanking the good lord that I’d had the sense to start forwarding all my mail to Gmail a few weeks ago, as my laptop died enroute.
• Bringing my shit-kickin’ cowboy boots with me — and then making the mistake of wearing those boots to the SixApart kickball game.
• Sitting at said game with Jason Toney and Jake Dobkin as a procession of my cute homegirls from EssEff introduced themselves.
• Buying Lockhart Steele and Andrew Krucoff a drink at the Velvet Spade.
• Hanging out with Ben Brown at his swank house after-hours, and meeting his friends Reed and Courtney.
• Sitting around the campfire with locals Topaz, Brie, Bob, Sarah and Sarah and eating delicious links.
• Realizing early on that I knew a lot of cool folks from San Francisco and running into them all over Austin.
• Me and Kevin Smokler getting all excited about republishing the Happy Mutant Handbook after talking to Scott Beale at the Iron Cactus.
• Stubbs BBQ, Las Casuelas, Las Manitas, Gene’s Deli, Castlerock Inn.
• Chillin’ on the East Side, where far too many SXSW folks fear to tread.
• Riding the Capitol Metro 4 Montopolis downtown for fifty cents.
• Overhearing Ana Marie Cox talk about writing her book at the Gawker party. “I’ve found I really love writing dialog,” and “I’m about eighty pages into it.”
• Meeting John d’Addario and finding out that he didn’t get my email with the link to Susie Bright’s interview. Which is good, because otherwise I would have been mad.
• Having a photo pass, which let me into all the events — Interactive, Film and Music (hott — thanks Amy!).
• Discovering how awesome Flickr truly is.
• Feeling socially ept, charming, and otherwise networking like a pro.
• Related: The point at which I had more business cards from other people than I had left of my own. Thanks to Eve for printing those for me!
• Having people laugh at how old ‘Lil SFist.
• Being a member of the awesome ‘ist editorial staff.
• My first Mission burrito upon arriving home. Home.
• Meeting up with the locals for a last hurrah at the Zeitgeist, and Dogster Ted offering to be the SFist weatherman.

Thanks to Gothamist for the tix, SXSW for the press pass, Topaz for puttin’ me up, and everyone I met for being awesome. See y’all next year!

Hot tubbin’ in Austin. Check Jason Toney dippin’ his toes and rockin’ his Sidekick. Hott.

Found on San Francisco’s Ocean Beach. Didn’t have a good excuse to use this for SFist yet, but I felt that I would be remiss if I didn’t let the innerweb know about it.

The title isn’t a reference to the kids who work crappy minimum-wage jobs and shack up two to a bed in order to ski all winter — it’s to my broke ass on unemployment who, thanks to the generosity of friends, managed to make up to Diamond Peak in Tahoe for a day on the slopes. I used to ski all the time growing up in Seattle, and by my senior year in high school was teaching kids to do the same. It’s basically one of the few things that I am marginally talented at, especially in the physical world.

The view of Lake Tahoe from atop the peak was absolutely stunning. Skiing in your shirtsleeves on a sunny day, with the thermometer in the fifties, is a hell of a lot better than the conditions I was used to in Washington State!

Hank really impressed me — he was actually a pretty competent skiier for someone who can count the number of times they’ve skiied on one hand. We’re working on and “Integration Staff” t-shirt for him to wear to the slopes next time.

I swear I took the picture while Rybo was catching air — no one would have ever known how he biffed the landing. My karmic retribution was an even nastier fall I had on the next jump that knocked the wind out of me is making me walk funny.

After a long, hard day, I did the other thing I’m relatively talented at — cooking. I spent two hours drinking tecate and turning stuff on the grill to come up with Hank’s birthday feast. Thanks again to Gabriella for hosting all of us — sorry I took so long soaking my bruise in the shower, Brie!