25 June | 14:20  |  

i hope this becomes the first success in matchmaking via weblog trackback. totally perfect for you!

26 June | 0:47  |  hutsulka

hiya crabby, ich liebe dich, but i hafta wrire in texsan, squeze me: are ya gonna to try il milino after all all the hullabaloo? ya know, the 3 shrimp for $25?? you rock, in awe, smooches, your hutsulka.xoxoxoxo

26 June | 0:47  |  hutsulka

hiya crabby, ich liebe dich, but i hafta wrire in texsan, squeze me: are ya gonna to try il milino after all all the hullabaloo? ya know, the 3 shrimp for $25?? you rock, in awe, smooches, your hutsulka.xoxoxoxo

26 June | 14:41  |  anastasiav

So, here I was getting caught up on my blog reading on this rainy Saturday, and while I was reading about the whole Plain Layne fiasco/mystery I found myself thinking of your original Liz Penn post and her subsequent "I am Sparticus" comments. And lo! behold! I come to your site to find more about Liz today. Synchronicity is a funny thing.

Liz/Dana herself notes (in the interview) that she has a pseudonym “because the web format afforded this irresistible opportunity of becoming someone else” and I think that sometimes we (that’s the royal ‘we’ I guess… the “all of us in this together” we) think of the boom of web publishing as also being the boom of anonymous publishing. Yet I’m also irresistibly drawn to thoughts of 19th century news articles so frequently signed by initials or strange pseudonyms (“The Tattler” “A Concerned Citizen”), and the implicit question about why this opportunity is “irresistible.” The desire to publish commentary and opinion while also trying to simultaneously hide one’s own identity and prejudices is closely tied to the basic human desire to get others to agree with you – ‘I want you to just like the end product, and not confuse your opinions of me with your opinions about the product’. What it comes down to, I sometimes think, is that we always want to know what people reallythink of us, and some people do, I believe, use pseudonyms or otherwise anonymous publishing techniques (like commenting on other people’s weblogs, says some wag in the back row) to do so.

Then, of course, there is the appeal of actually being someone else (“By that time, Liz was her own persona, with a different biography, a different history, a different voice,”). Another old urge, one that the internet lets some of us indulge more easily than we otherwise would have, but in the end its another story as old as human history itself (think ‘The Prince and The Pauper”). In some ways I think its too bad that Liz/Dana has validated your guesses about the association – sometimes the mystery is better. Or perhaps, as a reporter by trade, you don’t agree.

27 June | 1:44  |  Abby

Yeah, she's totally cute. Call him, Dana!