Good journalists that we are, News Hits felt obliged to follow up on a notice from Detroit’s venerable Scarab Club, which wants folks to know that its domain name had fallen into the hands of a triple-X porn site. True enough, when we punched in www.thescarabclub.org we were shocked to find a site that literally sucks.
“I think it’s safe to say that our idea of community service and the new owners of site name’s idea of community service is a little different,” laughed Treena Ericson, a Scarab Club board member.
For those of you more familiar with online fellatio than fine art, the Scarab Club, which has been around for more than 90 years, is a Detroit landmark located near the Detroit Institute of the Arts. The club’s mission is to “encourage the fellowship between artists and those interested in the arts, and to provide a place where artists may create and exhibit their work.”
OK, so maybe there is the occasional nude model at some of the sketch classes offered at the club, but we’d say it’s a safe bet there’s never been anything close to the “fellowship” found on the Internet site Scarabites until recently called home.
Ericson says a “clerical error” on the part of the site’s Web host caused ownership of the domain name to lapse, providing a window of opportunity that the pornsters jumped through.
The good news, says Ericson, is that the club was able to obtain a new domain name www.scarabclub.org. “That’s what we wanted originally anyway,” informs Ericson. Just to be safe, the club nailed down rights to scarabclub.com and scarabclub.net as well.
The downside is that the club must endure the expense of reprinting loads of literature containing the old Web address. On the other hand, says Ericson, “Our membership has gone way up.”
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