That week, Suzanne tweeted constantly, filed two columns, and blogged ten or more items a day: photos, bits of discussion between Lester, Perry and Tjan, a couple videos of the Boogie Woogie Elmos doing improbable things. Turned out that there was quite a cult following for the BWE, and the news that there was a trove of some thousands of them in a Hollywood dump sent a half-dozen pilgrims winging their way across the nation to score some for the collectors' market. Perry wouldn't even take their money: "Fella," he told one persistent dealer, "I got forty *thousand* of these things. I won't miss a couple dozen. Just call it good karma." When Tjan found out about it he pursed his lips for a moment, then said, "Let me know if someone wants to pay us money, please. I think you were right, but I'd like to have a say, all right?" Perry looked at Suzanne, who was videoing this exchange with her keychain. Then he looked back at Tjan, "Yeah, of course. Sorry -- force of habit. No harm done, though, right?" That footage got downloaded a couple hundred times that night, but once it got slashdotted by a couple of high-profile headline aggregators, she found her server hammered with a hundred thousand requests. The Merc had the horsepower to serve them all, but you never knew: every once in a while, the web hit another tipping point and grew by an order of magnitude or so, and then all the server-provisioning -- calculated to survive the old slashdottings -- shredded like wet kleenex. From: kettlewell-l@skunkworks.kodacell.com To: schurch@sjmercury.com Subject: Re: Embedded journalist? This stuff is amazing. Amazing! Christ, I should put you on the payroll. Forget I wrote that. But i should. You've got a fantastic eye. I have never felt as in touch with my own business as I do at this moment. Not to mention proud! Proud -- you've made me so proud of the work these guys are doing, proud to have some role in it. Kettlebelly She read it sitting up in her coffin, just one of several hundred emails from that day's blog-posts and column. She laughed and dropped it in her folder of correspondence to answer. It was nearly midnight, too late to get into it with Kettlewell. Then her computer rang -- the net-phone she forwarded her cellphone to when her computer was live and connected. She'd started doing that a couple years back, when soft-phones really stabilized, and her phone bills had dropped to less than twenty bucks a month, down from several hundred. It wasn't that she spent a lot of time within arm's reach of a live computer, but given that calls routed through the laptop were free, she was perfectly willing to defer her calls until she was. "Hi Jimmy," she said -- her editor, back in San Jose. 9PM Pacific time on a weeknight was still working hours for him. "Suzanne," he said.