A reader writes:
I recommend that band get while the gettin's good – i.e., about another five minutes. The funny thing about those generic category domain names is that they are all worthless, however much they may have sold for once. All those examples Ostrofsky mentions are garbage, internet detritus. Have you looked at business.com to see what's there? Essentially nothing. Vodka.com has been "under construction" forever. Sex.com isn't in the top 1000 porn sites; neither is poker.com among poker sites. What kind of idiot visits mutualfunds.com instead of Vanguard, Fidelity, etc., or his own brokerage?
In contrast, look at the domain names that ARE valuable: google.com, facebook.com, yahoo.com – even dailybeast.com. These aren't generic categories; they're companies that have put their effort into getting themselves known. There are plenty of active Tea Party websites already, distinguished not by their domain name but by how attractive they are to their readers and commenters. This is no different than the bricks-and-mortar world, where people do not shop for groceries at Grocery Store, or subscribe to Newspaper, or direct-deposit their paychecks into Bank Bank. The people who paid anything at all for these generic domain names are idiots.
A flappy-headed friend of the Dish writes:
Way to bring back traumatic middle-school memories with that post on Canadian alt-rockers The Tea Party. Canadian readers of the Millennial generation will remember the band as the jackasses whose angsty, Soundgarden-meets-Prodigy silliness used to clog up the video countdown on Much Music (Canada's alternative to MTV) with the same obstructionist fury their American counterparts have brought to Congressional politics. You'd be chilling on the couch after a long week of football practice and book learnin', eagerly awaiting the latest video from late-'90s stalwarts like the Foo Fighters or the Wu-Tang Clan, and instead you'd be watching some doofus unload his psychosexual baggage in a flooded, snake-infested warehouse. The video for their hit single "Temptation" (which, among other sins, stole the title of an infinitely superior New Order track) definitely merits consideration for a retroactive Hathos Alert.
The Dish 