I found a simple solution to the lack of loopback.
I installed
DNS Enabler Snow Leopard and setup my own name server.
"Another Scenario : This happens quite often - you may have set up a web or mail server behind a router, broadband modem, or wireless base station when you noticed that machines on the local network cannot "see" the server via its domain name, while machines outside the network can (e.g., you've used dyndns.org or some such service to obtain your own domain name).
In this case, you can use DNS Enabler to broadcast the domain name to all the local machines (using the simple configuration outlined above) and help them find their way to your server."