DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

There’s a shop at the Oakland airport called “www.news.gifts.oakland”.

Is that just about the dumbest thing you’ve ever seen? I mean, beyond the fact that URLs ceased being trendy and cool and became utilitarian and generally uninteresting in 1999 is the fact that that URL doesn’t work. Go ahead, try it out: http://www.news.gifts.oakland

Why doesn’t it work? Specifically, because ‘oakland’ is not one of the handful of approved Top Level Domains. But more generally, because the marketing-class flunkie who decided to name his newsstand after a website wasn’t attempting to create a real or useful web address — he or she was simply trying to be cool by association. But it’s dumb. It’s like naming a salon “The 2004 Mitsubishi Haircut GXE”. It sort of means something in a wholly different context, but on the other hand it’s just stupid. The car doesn’t exist; the website doesn’t exist.

The shop doesn’t even sell computer or networking gear. It’s just another seen-one, seen-‘em-all airport media-and-kitch market, memorable for no other reason than the dim-bulb appellation.

I’d bet that the person who picked the name “www.news.gifts.oakland” had a previous job designing book jackets, but got fired for putting ‘@’ signs in place of the letter ‘a’ in the titles. “Well, the author mentioned the Internet in chapter 6, so I figured…”