The mystery of "Himmmm": Solved to my satisfaction
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 compare with. There were a lot of things about the "Himmmm" comments that were consistent with what I know of RDJ, but -- as I and a lot of other people pointed out -- also consistent with a whole slew of other people on the face of the Earth.
I said I wouldn't be surprised to hear him 'fess up to it years from now, because what I'd read to that point wasn't glaringly at odds with what I've seen of him, but that's pretty much all I could say. There's no 100% in forensic anything. There's just "the evidence is consistent with...."
And the evidence, unfortunately, often says disappointing things once it all rolls in. Aside from the denial that's working it's way around the web right now, a commenter helpfully directed me to a couple of things that I'd missed in my reading: An email address, and a blog to which it was connected. [redacted]
Reading that was not fun. Jesus. The first thing you will observe when you take a look at it is that that blog encompasses both the more- and less-coherent not-nice-essays voice that "Himmmm" used in the CDAN comments. It's not inconceivable that "Himmmm" and the blogger are different people, but I would put the odds rather on the low side of the odds that both the commenter and blogger are secretly, unbeknownst to his reps, RDJ.
The second thing you will notice about that blog is that the author is kind of... nuts. Or at least unbalanced and kind of obsessive. The "Himmmm" comments were voluminous but at had a focus to them. He got to tell a bunch of short stories attached to one central theme. The blog is more head-hurty for me, because he's got one thing he's attacking from a bunch of different directions, and christ almighty he is all over the damn place.
(Side note: A lot of the CDAN people were arguing that the comments and RDJ were similarly "manic". The comments are borderline, and the blog is probably just on the other side of the borderline, but RDJ is decidedly not. I wasn't paying attention the last time he was high in public, but I looked at an interview or two that he did on the press junket for Iron Man and I know what they're talking about -- if you hit a button with him you tend to get a sudden flood of words, usually clever ones and often profane, and almost always very opinionated. That is not actually manic. That is "I have a bunch of stuff to say and I've figured out that if I don't stop for breath nobody will interrupt me". Go tangle with a bipolar who refuses to take their meds and you will see the difference.)
The commenter on my blog also links the email address and the possible-madman blog to the [someone] person. If the evidence holds up, then I am satisfied that [someone] is the one writing all of the frantic outing of Nasty People on Crazy Days and Nights. Other people can check that, because I don't have any real idea who [someone] is, and unless someone provides me with some evidence that he's really brilliant or secretly an alien or produces the most heavenly music imaginable or something, I don't really care enough to keep chasing him down.
And now, as I'm sure you've all been expecting for days now, I'm going to go binge on YouTube videos featuring Robert Downey, Jr., because he sounds like he has a brain, and that usually gets interesting in a hurry. Stay tuned for the usual short-lived obsession written up as a psychological case study, with sarcasm and humor for extra added value.
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 compare with. There were a lot of things about the "Himmmm" comments that were consistent with what I know of RDJ, but -- as I and a lot of other people pointed out -- also consistent with a whole slew of other people on the face of the Earth.
I said I wouldn't be surprised to hear him 'fess up to it years from now, because what I'd read to that point wasn't glaringly at odds with what I've seen of him, but that's pretty much all I could say. There's no 100% in forensic anything. There's just "the evidence is consistent with...."
And the evidence, unfortunately, often says disappointing things once it all rolls in. Aside from the denial that's working it's way around the web right now, a commenter helpfully directed me to a couple of things that I'd missed in my reading: An email address, and a blog to which it was connected. [redacted]
Reading that was not fun. Jesus. The first thing you will observe when you take a look at it is that that blog encompasses both the more- and less-coherent not-nice-essays voice that "Himmmm" used in the CDAN comments. It's not inconceivable that "Himmmm" and the blogger are different people, but I would put the odds rather on the low side of the odds that both the commenter and blogger are secretly, unbeknownst to his reps, RDJ.
The second thing you will notice about that blog is that the author is kind of... nuts. Or at least unbalanced and kind of obsessive. The "Himmmm" comments were voluminous but at had a focus to them. He got to tell a bunch of short stories attached to one central theme. The blog is more head-hurty for me, because he's got one thing he's attacking from a bunch of different directions, and christ almighty he is all over the damn place.
(Side note: A lot of the CDAN people were arguing that the comments and RDJ were similarly "manic". The comments are borderline, and the blog is probably just on the other side of the borderline, but RDJ is decidedly not. I wasn't paying attention the last time he was high in public, but I looked at an interview or two that he did on the press junket for Iron Man and I know what they're talking about -- if you hit a button with him you tend to get a sudden flood of words, usually clever ones and often profane, and almost always very opinionated. That is not actually manic. That is "I have a bunch of stuff to say and I've figured out that if I don't stop for breath nobody will interrupt me". Go tangle with a bipolar who refuses to take their meds and you will see the difference.)
The commenter on my blog also links the email address and the possible-madman blog to the [someone] person. If the evidence holds up, then I am satisfied that [someone] is the one writing all of the frantic outing of Nasty People on Crazy Days and Nights. Other people can check that, because I don't have any real idea who [someone] is, and unless someone provides me with some evidence that he's really brilliant or secretly an alien or produces the most heavenly music imaginable or something, I don't really care enough to keep chasing him down.
And now, as I'm sure you've all been expecting for days now, I'm going to go binge on YouTube videos featuring Robert Downey, Jr., because he sounds like he has a brain, and that usually gets interesting in a hurry. Stay tuned for the usual short-lived obsession written up as a psychological case study, with sarcasm and humor for extra added value.
Comments
Post a Comment