Sitejacked!

So BallWonk was trying to upgrade his content-management software when Marion Barry approached him.

"Let me help you carry those FTP file transfers," the former mayor-for-life said. BW didn't really need any help, but it's rude to rub your elders' noses in their declining abilities, so your correspondent gave the councilman a couple of lighter configuration files to carry.

Then, because BW has been around DC long enough to know what Barry is really after, he slipped the former mayor-for-life a couple of bucks and thanked him for helping out. "No problem, young man," Barry said, and BallWonk thought that was the end of things. Hoped, really. The man is just kind of awkward to be around, what with the continuing drug use and the constant "me me me" grandstanding and that old-guy smell.

A few hours later, there was a knock on BallWonk's door, and when BW answered it, Barry rushed in and got the jump on BallWonk, hit him over the head with an empty bottle of Olde English "800," and it was lights out for BW. When a guy helps you carry your cgi scripts, you don't expect him to come back later that night and mug you.

This was, oh, middle of December. Between the Soriano trade and the District Council's non-vote on the stadium lease.

When BallWonk woke up, his head pounding like the pile barges on the new Wilson Bridge, it was all blackness and neon and Jeff Bridges, and it slowly dawned on BW that he had been digitized and was now trapped in a Disneyesque computer deathmatch. Hijinks of the Boxleitnerean kind ensued, and before long BallWonk was face-to-face with the evil Master Control Program.

It seems that instead of just carrying BallWonk's new configuration files to the server, Barry had loaded a digital version of himself onto Ball-Wonk.com, blocking BW's access to the site and halting work on the system upgrade. "I've got an agreement from one of the bidders to pay for the cost overruns on your site upgrade, BallWonk," the evil Master Control Program said.

"Marion? Is that you?"

"Naw, man -- er, I mean, NO! I am the Master Control Program."

"Riiiiight. Look, there won't be any cost overruns as long as the incompetent demagogues who pass for public servants in this town keep their corrupt mitts off this project."

"Never! DC is my town again, and I will ruin the city's bond rating if it's the last thing I do!"

Which did not make much sense, given the context, and so BW turned to Jeff Bridges and shrugged. Bridges threw his glowing combat frisbee into the cone-shaped animation, and we were all rematerialized back at BallWonk party headquarters.

It seemed like only two days had gone by, but the calendar showed that four weeks had passed in real life. New Year's, Hanukah, Christmas, Marion Barry's DC Council hijacking, the Jamey Carroll signing -- BallWonk and Jeff Bridges had missed a lot!

For a while there, BallWonk even believed that Trader Jim was pursuing Sammy Sosa, but surely that was merely a delusion caused by a brain-imbalancing side-effect of the digitization and rematerialization process -- or maybe just the getting-whacked-on-the-head-with-a-forty-ounce-bottle process.

In the meantime, the site upgrade is mostly complete (there is still a database and one bothersome dynamic template to sort out) and Jeff Bridges's glowing frisbee seems to have eliminated the Marion Barry bug from the Ball-Wonk.com servers. The former mayor-for-life may yet be able to derail DC's new ballpark, but he won't derail Ball-Wonk.com any further.