Event notifications in a distributed system require dealing with a number of failure modes and identification problems not present in non-distributed systems. However, the scaling requirements of large distributed systems (like the internet) also require interfaces for event notification that are as simple as possible. I will describe a simple distributed event notification system developed as part of the work done by the Java(tm) distributed computing group. Some of the more interesting features, such as transparent interposition of third-party entities in the delivery chain and the use of portable object code, will be discussed. Finally, wild speculation will take place as to the relevance of this work to internet-scale applications.