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SPIRIT EDITOR NEARLY FIRED OVER "HIS OWN" BLOG

Yesterday, a good friend of mine, Eric Celeste, a former D and Observer staffer who now edits the in-flight mag Spirit, was called into his boss's office and asked to explain his personal blog. His boss had found the blog late last week and was shocked by some of its content. Propriety prevents a detailed description of what Eric had been writing about, but let's just say it was a very personal blog that sometimes used language a bit stronger than PG-13. As an example, Eric regularly posted on his month-old blog about his post-prandial trips to the men's room at work. And this was probably the most harmless of the content. As I say, it was pretty shocking stuff.

The problem was that the blog didn't belong to Eric. A few months back, another of Eric's friends, the Ticket's Gordon Keith, had noticed that Eric didn't own the rights to ericceleste.com. So Gordon bought the URL and set up the bogus blog. Gordon and I, along with some others who won't be named, then spent about a month posting to the blog and arguing with each other about which posts did and did not "cross the line." But we never told Eric what we were doing, figuring that the prank would be funnier if Eric found out on his own that the blog existed, after we'd been working on it for God knows how long (is there an antonym for "serendipity"?). Eric, of course, knew about the blog almost from the beginning. He'd stumbled across it but hadn't said anything to us, figuring that was the best way to rob of us satisfaction and, ultimately, make the thing go away.

Imagine Eric trying to explain all this to his boss. She wanted to know: what sort of "friends" would do this? His boss, I think, was a little incredulous. Well, I've assured her directly that Eric had nothing to do with the blog. And this post, made at Eric's behest, is to assure anyone else who might have seen the blog of the same thing: Eric might not choose his friends wisely, but he's not dumb enough to have put up such a blog.

Tim Rogers · November 3, 2005 02:01 PM