Well folks, I tried innovation, I tried sprucing the place up and making it look spiffy...but apparently netscape, explorer, and every other two-bit navigator decides to load the whole pic before display WITHOUT TEXT!
Suffice it to say, I'm sticking with the red for now until I can find either a background pic that is much more reasonable to load or...something.
And now netscape isn't loading the page fully. Technology...bah.