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A few months ago, I was doing my bi-weekly check on my not-yet-comandeered UNC email account when I received two or three emails, all within a few hours, asking me for access to http://www.theassbook.com.

A few weeks prior, Oliver and I decided a great spoof site to TheFaceBook would be TheAssBook, which would allow users to list people they hate (or more carnally, focus on the badunkadunkdunk instead of the face).

I snapped up the domain name and promptly forgot about the project.

The emails were from partcipants of a scavenger hunt from the University of Chicago. Looking at the PDF file of the items, one can see on page 10 ... "theassbook.com." Worth 28 points. No wonder people wanted it so badly.

I temporarily pointed the domain to their servers for the duration of the scavenger hunt and promptly forgot about it (recurring theme, I know).

Until yesterday, when I was doing my bi-monthly check on my still-not-yet-comandeered UNC email account when I got a request from a buyer through AfterNic to buy the domain name. Paying only $10 per year for the registration fees, I was astounded to see an offer of $2000 USD, already in an escrow account!

I haven't yet discounted that this is just a big ploy by AfterNic to get me to register as a "seller" ($20/year for them!), to which they have now succeeded. I rejected the $2K offer, only to see what the market price of TheAssBook.com would be. I mean, given how popular TheFaceBook.com is, TheAssBook.com has gotta be worth something, right?!

I've always theorized in the back of my mind that I should be more proactive on registering domain names, because it seems like they are the new real estate ... I guess now that I've had a legitimate offer on one of my throwaway domain names, it's become a reality.

How fascinating.