once more, the eye of suspicion has falsely fallen upon me

Regular JFW readers: Remember when there were people who thought that I was Lonely Donut Man, leaving dozens of poems as comments on my own blog over a period of months? Remember me assuring everyone that I wasn't, and yet there still being people who didn't believe me? Remember when Lonely Donut Man turned out to be Goesh/an otherwise-unknown-to-me civil servant in Kentucky?

A similar situation has arisen over the identity of the mysterious "kep", who has been guest-posting on NinaNet while she has gone on quasi-hiatus. Some people think I am kep, and one even assembled an extensive list of clues that could be read as suggesting that I am kep. Confession: I'm not. Really. Nor do I know who kep is. I have my suspicions; indeed, if kep is somebody I know, there is only one person I can imagine it being. But, no, not me!

It's like if I was playing Clue (or, to my UK readers, Cluedo) and somebody guesses that it was Professor Plum in the Billiard Room with the wrench, and I show them that I have the Professor Plum card in my hand, and they murmur, "You're not fooling anyone. I know it's Plum."

ldm revealed!

So, lo, if you read the comments to my last post, you see a sort of valedictory confessional from Lonely Donut Man (aka a larger number of other names used for writing some of the stranger comments on this blog, as well as "Goesh", who has posted on sociology blogs far and wide). Anyway, as he promised, he did send me an e-mail:

From: name@ky.gov
Sent: Wednesday, April 06, 2005 12:27 PM
To: jfreese@ssc.wisc.edu
Subject: its me, LDM

I guess there has been some speculation on your part that I was a UW
student.  You were on-target when you noted the time discrepancy in posts. I
shall remain a reader of your Blog, which by the way ,  is top-notch and one
of the better ones going. Congrats again on your  upcoming sojourn to
Harvard !   Best Regards, [name]

And thus, it turns out that LDM is not anybody I know personally. Barring some truly spectacular mindgame, he really is, as he says, somebody who just stumbled across my blog last October or so and has been commenting ever since.

I'm not going to reveal his name, out of a strangely awed respect for somebody keeping up such an elaborate practical joke for such a long period of time. Besides, of course, what would it mean to tell you somebody's name when it is not somebody you would know? So you could Google him too, and find out that he went to high school here? Or that he works in one of these offices?

Blogs are a funny thing, you know. So is Google, for that matter.

Incidentally, I've said a couple times that I had a prime suspect for who LDM was. I never actually believed LDM was somebody in Wisconsin Sociology. What I thought was that it was this other person who used to read my blog and e-mail me very regularly who then mysteriously disappeared into the e-ther, not that long before LDM arrived on the scene. Now that I know that LDM isn't her, I wonder what did ever happen to her. I suppose she just got bored. Or maybe she dropped dead one day at her keyboard. I'd really have no way of knowing.

show the love

I know you are busy today showering affection upon your special someone, but, if you get the chance, take the time to vote for Lonely Donut Man in P-Freak's new sidebar poll. Given how professedly lonely he/she/they/it is/are, prevailing in the poll would mean so much to him/her/them/it.

regarding the recurrent idea that i am lonely donut man (after all, have you ever seen us together?)

Commenters are once again speculating that I am actually Lonely Donut Man. I am not. Remember that deal where Bill Gates was going to give you $250 for every person you forwarded that e-mail to? Well, I have a similar deal, only this isn't an urban legend. If it is ever learned, revealed, discovered, found out, proven, etc., that the various comments posted under the name "Lonely Donut Man" or "LDM" have been actually written by me, or that I have had some conspiratorial role in their construction, I will pay every person who has ever read this blog $250, up to whatever point drives me into bankruptcy. Since there are no small numbers of law professors who read this blog at least occasionally, I am sure they can tell me if I need anything further to give this offer the force of a binding contract, so all can be confident that I'm really telling the truth about this or that I will one day be driven into destitution as I write each and every one of you a personal check.

Seriously, everyone, not only I am not Lonely Donut Man, but I have no idea who Lonely Donut Man is. Really, truly. It's been a matter of some curiosity to me whether LDM is someone I know or a complete stranger. I also, for that matter, have no idea who "Helpful in New Hampshire" is, or who that person was who wrote all those weird comments about feral children. Again, maybe these are people I do know personally who are just concealing their identities from me, but I think it is more plausible that I don't know them.

I'm not the Evil Glitter Princess either. I do know who she is. I also know Dorotha and Cabell's real names (hint: not Dorotha, not Cabell). For that matter, I know the true identity of Silent Jay, although I can't figure out why he pays for a typepad subscription month after month if he's really not going to post more than once, ever.

(betrayals) wondering what's happened to lonely donut man?

Apparently, he's moved on to commenting on other blogs. I'm not sure what I did to drive him away. You would have thought that any problems we had could have been resolved, you know, through couples-counseling or through role-playing-with-puppets, but instead, I just come home one day to discover he's moved out of my blog and into someone else's.