Sharply increased Oscar traffic last night caused Hollywood Elsewhere to slow to a crawl and then crash this morning. It was my fault, of course, and I’m apologizing up and down. The staffers at the recently merged Softlayer/Orbit-The Planet, HE’s Texas-based server, failed to cope with the situation to my satisfaction. All they did was speak Martian Klaatu. And when the site crashed early this morning, they did nothing until I called up and hammered and brought hell. They could have simply re-booted the server but it took them forever to do this, and even now it’s loading too slowly.

Finally a senior level person came on the line and, for the first and only time since the troubles began last night, offered a solution, which was to double the memory . Which I immediately agreed to pay for.

But in the meantime please, please avoid doing business with these guys — I’m warning the world. They’re Texas nerds, they operate at a snail’s pace, and their refusal to speak simply and plainly, in the manner of, say, Andy Griffith or Clem Kadiddlehopper jest a sittin’ on the front porch and talkin’ about how to fix these goldurned dadblasted server issues, prolongs the conversation time and again because I always have to stop them in the middle of one of their Martian Obscura sentences and say, “I’m sorry, but could you re-phrase what you just said in plain, front-porch, tattered-overalls English?”

I am going to sever my relationship with these bozos at the first opportunity. Klaatu Barada Seeyalater.