I saw this in The Stranger’s Slog this morning that kingsolver.com currently has a rather rude message for those looking for Barbara Kingsolver’s website.

It turns out that the man who is being forced to give up the domain http://www.kingsolver.com is a man in China, and lost the doman to Barbara Kingsolver in arbitration. The website claims that his domain is being stolen from him, and that he’s just a good, hardworking father in China. However, the details in the arbitration say otherwise. The long and short of it being that Barbara Kingsolver’s people accidentally let the domain registration lapse, then the domain was promptly squatted on, and once purchased by the guy in question, had hyperlinks to sites about Ms. Kingsolver, making money from those links.

Yup. Ms. Kingsolver has destroyed his “PC problems solving company.”

And who in the world, with a small, local business in China (poor grammar and spelling as well, for a person claiming to be a European English-speaker), pays over $1,000 for a domain for their “PC problems solving company”? I can’t believe that King Solver is such a hot name for such a company in China. I also can’t believe such a company is worth enough to spend over $10 for the domain name.

I could be wrong, but seriously.