What WP and WR both need, ...Paging Stanley Bing Options

[Piperdown]

It's about time a WP Admin (what do they call the UberAdmins on WP) of some sort of funnypower status comes on W-R, double sekret anonymously, and becomes the Stanley Bing (WP him if not familiar) of WP, on W-R.

Win-win.

This post has been edited by Piperdown: Tue 12th February 2008, 12:48am

[Amarkov]

Except none of the UberAdmins would ever do that. It needs to be someone that couldn't just be decried as an evil sleeper agent, or it obviously won't help.

[Piperdown]

I kidd you not, this is actually written on the Stanley Bing entry on WP. Holy freaking cow, what a joke. This is the sort of stuff I was shocked to see in March 2007 when L'Affair D'Essjay occurred that spurred me on to WP BLPs.

Publication of identity

In January of 1996, a fatuous, drunken journalist who had happened to work with Bing at Esquire decided to share what had been a closely held secret since 1984 with a mean-spirited reporter from the New York Times. And so it was that on a Monday morning, as a blizzard hit New York, the Times published a breathless article revealing that Bing was actually Schwartz, who worked for a big media company. The Times reporter, who has since been sent to Asia in an unrelated development, attempted to raise issues of propriety about Bing and his alter-ego, but was unsuccessful. Amusing reactions came from John Huey, then editor of FORTUNE, and Michael Jordan, head of CBS who, when asked about Bing, referred the matter to Schwartz. Since that first outing, Bing has repeatedly been dramatically revealed as if it had never been done before each time he emerges to publicize a book. He is possibly the only author who has ever been so aggressively and pervasively denied the anonymity afforded by a pseudonym. Even on Amazon.com, his books are sometimes listed as having been partially written by Schwartz.

If that passage had "odious", "baloney", "lipstick on a pig", or "nervous breakdown" in it, I'd swear the writing style was our very own Mantanmoreland. It reads with the same unbiased, professional reporting prose.

This post has been edited by Piperdown: Tue 12th February 2008, 1:08am