The starter is dead! Long live the starter!

I came home a couple of nights ago to give my budding sourdough starter a quick feed of flour and water. When I looked up at the jar, my heart sank. Where there once had been a beautiful, frothy, bubbling living liquid, now there was a slimy dark mess with tufts of hairy mold sprouting out of it. My starter is dead, and there's no fixing it.

I think I know what went wrong. A couple of days before I had been overzealous in scraping down the sides of the jar while feeding the starter. I noticed that some of the things I was scraping down were a little dark-looking, as if they'd gone bad, but I didn't think much of it. There must have been some contaminant, the tiny spores of what is now a huge fungus colony, lurking in the jar, just waiting to be scraped into the tasty dough.

Oh well, no big deal. I did what anyone would do in my shoes: throw out the starter, put the jar in the dishwasher, and get ready to try again. This time, I'll be more careful with my scraping, and maybe I'll transfer the starter to a fresh jar after the first few days.