Unsolicited Advice

The articles about "Himmmm" have been put back up, in edited form. The reason for this is that one of the people fingered as the poster has supposedly gotten very angry and posted a cease and desist letter to one of the major sites dedicated to investigating the phenomenon. The articles I had written about it, strictly as a sociologist and an amateur forensic linguist, have driven a lot of traffic to my blog, and garnered quite a bit of commentary. I removed them for a while so that I could work out what to do about the C&D. I have not still not received any emails from anyone, particularly lawyers, on the subject. Personally I think that the C&D does not outline a valid case, and that the only reason it would ever get in front of a judge at all is if the judge had written up a really smashing diatribe against frivolous lawsuits and wanted to deliver it in person before throwing the whole thing out. Still, there is always the chance that the suspected person is tell...

[Note: This entry has been edited from its original publication. See here for details.] One of the anonymous commenters has pointed me at a cached copy of the C&D notice, which is evidently quite gone from the active web. I am still not a lawyer, this is not real legal advice, and you should probably assume I have no idea what I'm talking about , but a cursory reading makes me rather dubious. It reads a lot like a gazillion other not-written-by-a-lawyer takedown notices sent by angry people to various parts of the internet. Most of these are unsuccessful in a legal sense, but every so often they provide people with great entertainment. The dude who runs SomethingAwful.com collects them, along with his comedic responses . Where privacy is concerned, "the internet" is usually considered equivalent to "a giant public notice board". To the best of my knowledge, no one has any legal basis upon which to demand takedown of any information about that is part ...

[Edit: This post has been edited from its original publication. See here for details.] I've noticed that a lot of hits on my blog in re: the recent internet gossip scandal are coming from outside the US. While I am deeply puzzled as to why people in Lithuania seem to be passing my posts around, and not interested in debating the identity of the author involved (at least not until things have settled down some -- try me next year), it occurs to me that a lot of people not from the US or Canada have probably learned most of their American law from the television we export. Don't feel too bad about this -- frankly, a lot of people in America have learned most of their American law from television, which the police here find alternately funny and annoying. BIG DISCLAIMER: None of this is to be construed as legal advice. I am not a lawyer. I am not in law school. I have never even been inside a law school, although I walk past the Harvard Law COOP on a pretty regular basis if...

[Note: This post has been edited from its original publication. See here for details.] Apparently someone -- implied to be [someone]? Maybe? the commenter doesn't say -- is sending out cease and desist letters to people who've commented on the "Himmmm" thing online. I have not gotten one, but I would like to make something abundantly clear: Nothing I have posted is anything other than an amateur attempt at forensic document analysis, and a little social psychology. I think the other blogs commenters have shown me are consistent with the writing style of "Himmmm", but as someone who respects the ethics of people who do  conduct professional forensic examinations of this stuff, I cannot say that it definitively is  the same person. Nor do I personally have any evidence that it belongs to the guy other people are pointing at, although I have dutifully reported that other people are saying it without weighing in one way or another. I am not personally interes...

[Note: This entry has been edited from its original publication. See here for details.] A commenter on another entry asks: "Any thoughts on why Himmmm would give some in-depth details on RDJ in a sympathetic way, then pretend to be him, even though it could get RDJ in trouble?" Well, the obvious one is that he's a fan and he didn't think that far. I don't think it's especially suspicious that he defended RDJ first. A lot of people have done, over the years, some of the loudest being people who know him personally. Hell, I would, and all I did was watch some movies and spend like three days going through Google. As far as I can tell, some other commenter guessed that was who was behind "Himmmm" sometime last March, and "Himmmm" responded with a lot of comments that played off of Downey's recent success with the Sherlock Holmes  films. It was slightly later, when he was really involved in the game, that he "confirmed" tha...

I've finally dug myself out of a load of other stuff and looked at Jezebel again, and apparently someone has finally told RDJ what was going on. Hilariously, he does not seem to care that the world thought he was a bored internet gossip. The actual answer was his rep assuring us that, "Robert's a much better writer than that." I have no reason to doubt it, personally; he seems pretty on the ball when he's speaking. But there's no way for me to know without actually having seen something he's written, ideally something fairly long. (If anyone knows of him having written an op-ed for a paper or a blog, or even a lengthy sarcastic letter to the editor that got published, please kick it over so I can have a look at it, because I'm curious now.) The thing about forensic documents examination, which is basically what I was doing here, is that you can get a limited amount of information from the document in question without having some known samples to comp...

[Note: This blog entry has been edited from its original publication. See here for details.] Whee. Whirlwind of gossip this week. One of the more recent posts by "Himmmm" thanks [someone] for basically falling on his sword to 'protect my career/privacy'. Whether this is real or just a couple of frantic guys with a lot of sock puppets, it's kind of hilarious. Seriously, it's just like the infamous Something Awful thread, " Solve the Mystery of the Internet Whore! Win a Fabulous Prize! " Only better, because this one involves me "investigating" by sitting down and watching YouTube videos of Robert Downey, Jr., being a complete smartass to people who are unwisely trying to conduct a serious interview with him. Yannow, he's not the first person I ever would have thought of for Sherlock Holmes, but if you really want an actor who knows what the world looks like from the wrong end of a two-week coke binge, you could do way worse. My se...

[Note: This entry has been edited from its original publication. See here for details.] The whole kerfuffle about "Himmmm" and who he is and whether any of the stuff he says about starlets and their parents and skeezy on-set tutors is true has unfortunately overshadowed a lot of the things "Himmmm" has actually said. First off, as I said the first time, what the current commenting "Himmmm" says sounds legit like someone who has had serious drug/alcohol problems and has, through rehab and support and a hell of a lot of stubbornness, come out the other side of them. And probably even used the experience to make goddamn sure he is a better person now than he was then. There's a lot of detail in his descriptions, a lot of personal investment in his writing, and a sort of black sense of humor peeking around the edges -- all things you get from actual ex-rehabbers. Not saying it can't be faked -- almost anything can be faked on the internet -- but m...

[Note: This entry has been edited from its original publication. See here for explanation.] The gossip blogs are alight today with the breaking news that some dude who leaves a lot of comments at a site called Crazy Days And Nights  under the screen name "Himmmm" is "really" Robert Downey, Jr. Nobody has any proof, of course, and there has been no comment from RDJ -- possibly because the story is too new, possibly because it's true and he'd rather not have to lie, possibly because it's not true and he thinks it's too funny for words. Normally, I just laugh at these things, because really, who the fuck cares beyond the entertainment value? But one of the more interesting things about "Himmmm" is that he seems to have made it a point to go after people who have done Really Bad Things. He's most famous for popping in and letting other commenters play 20 Questions about who's being talked about in the most recent blind item, and  c...