A couple months back, the New York Post reported that all 17,576 possible three-letter .com domain names have been registered. This naturally prompts one to consider the rapidly shrinking market of available names, to meditate on the ubiquity of online commerce, to draw connections with information theory and arrive at a paradigm for our current structure of knowledge dispersal.

We spent a couple minutes doing that before our head started to hurt, a sure sign that the ol' aneurysm was acting up again. So we headed to the liquor cabinet for our usual morning fifth of Old Crow, and at that point had the revelation:

"Hey, this would make a kickass drinking game."

So here's how it works. The cocktail button at the bottom of this page will whisk you off to a random three-letter domain. Get your friends (for the sake of the game, we'll pretend you have some) around the monitor and stick something alcoholic in everyone's hand. Then you take turns clicking the button and proceed to get bombed as follows.

He or she who clicks takes a drink if:

• The three-letter domain name really is the company name (NBC, CNN, etc).
• The page contains tastefully airbrushed pictures of suspiciously happy people using the site's products.

• The page contains awful clip art.
• The page has that scrolling JavaScript message thing at the bottom.
• The page forces you to listen to MIDI music.
• The page background makes the text unreadable.
• The page in any other way suggests a retarded monkey on the design team (group opinion will determine this).

• The site mentions Star Trek, N'Sync or Jesus.

• The page is in one of those weird "foreign" languages.
• The site doesn't exist (just because it's registered doesn't mean it's there).
• The site exists, but is "under construction" or "coming soon, really, we promise."
• The site exists, but the three-letter domain name is just a lame alias that whisks you away to hothairyvideogames.com or wherever.

• It's porn.
• It's not porn, but the sleazy design scheme (black backgrounds, big fonts, capital letters and exclamation points) tricks you into hoping that it might be.

• It's www.pee.com or www.poo.com. Hey, we didn't put them there.

Come on, cowboy.