Priya D'Souza (Priloza here), a personal friend, no longer posts on Multiply. However, she regularly maintains her page on blogspot, with writing of an extremely high standard.

Back in my first days on Orkut I met Debby Vorstenbosch. I think I have mentioned her before on Multiply as well. Among her other accomplishments was the fact that she was the one who suggested I call myself Bill the Butcher, a name that's so ME I never even thought of it.

After years of being out of contact, I decided enough was enough and googled her. I found her.

And with her permission I'm posting this link to her website. Happy visiting...

I guess most of us went through the phase where we were addicted to chat rooms - am I mistaken in thinking it's a phase most new internet users go through? In my case, the addiction lasted about a year and a half, from December 2003 to mid-2005, and was mostly focussed on a website called www.indianfriendfinder.com (known to its users simply as IFF). I mention this because it was this chatroom that is responsible for me being on Multiply now.

You see, on IFF (where I was, and am, known as rainbow_rising) I met a Brazilian woman who called herself Alicia Mancini (I know her real name but I won't be disclosing it here). She introduced me to Orkut, which at the time could only be joined by invitation. It was on Orkut that I acquired the Bill the Butcher sobriquet (bestowed on me by Debby Vorstenbosch, also a onetime Multiplier); and it was on Orkut that I met my mom, also known as Kande Trefil (felonissalt here, for those who don't know her). And Kande introduced me to Multiply. 'Nuff said.

I've, as I said before, abandoned Orkut, though my account still exists and for all I know my communities (including a relationship community known as Suicide Bombers) still exist. I hadn't visited IFF for years either. But tonight, just on a whim, I flipped over there...

It's odd, but some people still haven't gone beyond the chatting stage. Most of the people I used to know have vanished, of course, even as I have. But I found at least three individuals whom I used to know well.

I wonder if I can call it immaturity that they haven't abandoned chatting, or is it just that they care more for their online friends than I do about mine? After all, real time responses are so much faster than personal messages or blog posts, don't you think?

What the hell, I love Multiply and I love you all and I'm sticking here. Chatting's served its purpose where I'm concerned.

Eric Blumrich's www.bushflash.com, source of so much good anti-Bush material over the years, has vanished from the web. Eric hadn't posted for over a month, and when I mailed him to ask if he was OK (he suffers from chronic depression, among other things) I didn't - this is unusual - get any reply. And today I find bushflash gone.

If anyone has any information what happened, please do let me know.          

I was going through some of my saved e-mails from a year or more ago and it's sad and depressing to realise the number of people I was once close to who have dropped out of my life completely. Most of them seem to have vanished without a by-your-leave. I'd have appreciated at least a goodbye so I knew why they wanted to vanish and so I wouldn't have to worry that they'd died or something.   

And this is also a request to any of you who may be planning to drop me from your contacts or quit Multiply or whatever: if you aren't going to share my online existence and be part of what I consider to be my real circle of friends and intimates, by all means do so; but drop a line to let me know that you're doing so, and also why.

And, yes, I am missing a few people I used to know back on Orkut. Not all of them, just a few. But I'm sure I'd miss people here a hell of a lot more.

Back in the days when I was active on Orkut, I had a friend - a New Zealander of French extraction (those of my contacts who were active along with me on Orkut at the time will know who I am talking about). She was in her late thirties, beautiful, articulate, with a tart sense of humour, extremely intelligent, and an out and out career woman.

She was also, she admitted, a virgin. Since there was nothing wrong with her looks or her personality, I thought, you know, it was just "one of those things". There was something wrong with her, though, that we didn't know of at the time.

Back when she was a teenager, this woman had fallen into a river, been drowned and revived twice from clinical death in the space of an hour, and afterwards her life had been punctuated by blackouts and health breakdowns. She wore  an emergency locket which, in theory, would summon an ambulance when she hit it. Well, in late 2005, she finally had a stroke which killed her so quickly she didn't ever have a chance to hit it.

It was traumatic, of course, for those of us who had known her, but not until I had an exchange of e-mails with her uncle did I know exactly how tragic that whole thing had been.

You see, this lady hadn't been frigid or something. Nor did her health problems come in the way of her libido. The problem was much more simple and from her viewpoint terrible.

She was a lesbian.

So what? I can hear you asking. Isn't that so common nowadays that it no longer signifies?

Not quite, because our friend was also a Catholic from her childhood. She had been conditioned to believe (and her revival from clinical death must have reinforced her belief) in the doctrines of the Catholic Church, among which one is, of course, that homosexuality is unnatural and evil. This is something the Catholic Church avers to this day.

So our friend had gone through life unable to find any outlet for her sexuality, having no desire for heterosexual intercourse and unable because of her conditioning to surrender to her needs with other women. It might not have been so bad if she had been a stupid person; but of course she wasn't. She was extremely intelligent and I'm quite sure that she must have suffered even more because she must have known, intellectually, that there was nothing wrong in consensual sex with another woman but have been unable to get through her own early indoctrination. I think that's what made her such a driven career woman, and it may well have hastened her death.

Can you imagine what this poor, beautiful, clever, humorous woman must have gone through, having to remain without any form of sexual release all through her life - and all because of the pronouncements of a bunch of old men so hypocritical that they made no effort to stop paedophiles from filling their own ranks?

It's just another personal tragedy that the church will never have to answer for.

You may find it funny. I did. Then again, you may not.

To those who are worried about our friend Malcolm Mills' (extrascentsory) sudden disappearance from Multiply:

I've found him via Google, and he hangs out here. That is his personal website.

His e-mail address, if anyone is interested, is there on that page.

As to why he disappeared from Multiply, let me clarify that my first idea, that he had been "censored" by Multiply, was erroneous. He deleted his account himself, sad as it is to say.

And to explain why he deleted it, let me paste his letter to me: