Francestinks.com sinks.com

Well well, what a surprise...

We considered sharing francestinks.com and germanystinks.com with you last week, but took the view that you could live without information on puerile exercises in xenophobia that seemed to have the (perhaps not entirely) subsidiary goal of selling related merchandise. We thought we'd leave off writing about it until vengeful hackers downed it, and although when we looked the French version had had a lot more visitors than the German, our money was on the Germans.

Correct. Post strike, the temporary home at www.bigboots.us tells visitors: "If you came here directly from a francestinks.com, germanystinks.com or bigboots.us link, it's because our main sites are down due to anti-US hackers in Germany." Presumably this is intended as a general-purpose announcement to be seen on whichever of the sites happen to be up at any given moment.

The "patriotic" anti French and German jokes seem not to be available right now, but the merchandise seems to have survived, along with a definition of cowboy. "Cowboys are brave. Cowboys are honest. Cowboys are true. And Cowboys live by a code those other folks ought to remember in these troubled times: A True American Cowboy walks softly...but wears BIG BOOTS!" Cowboys do not, apparently, make a big mess of your plumbing; this is a British English definition.

"We will not give up!" says the anonymous proprietor. "God bless America!" But we expect they'll give up just as soon as they've sold all the t-shirts, really. ®

See also:
Fox News wastes more time on this story than we did