Is anyone else seeing this?

Yep, once you point us in that direction.

really *cool* udp trick, or is bcast space now DNS capable? What am I missing?

198.41.0.4 can as far as I can see not be a broadcast address under any left-contiguous netmask, unless it's the 0'th address on some subnet and the router sitting on the net has the really- old-style-and-now-deprecated directed broadcast address forwarding enabled (not likely). A DNS query to 198.41.0.4 does however only elicit a single response, so I doubt this is much to worry about. (My guess: they have 4 machines sharing the load via some form of load- sharing setup.) - Håvard