Hot Abercrombie Chick is a Man! [ Post 3 - comments ]
1.
When
Yet after she did claim her pspsyudonymity, and confirmed she, the writer, was the philosophy major in the photograph, there were two events that set me off onto my first major investigation.
First, Wizbang posted a
After taking a closer look into
Also, Wizbang's writing style seemed somehow
A second event occurred. Wizbang added a comment to
Cameron's blog which was the first true sign of stress for anyone involved
in this whole ordeal. I believe everyone involved must have felt some form
of excitement and believed this would be a great laugh and an interesting
situation no matter what happened - a riddle or a puzzle to be solved -
but Wizbang seemed to be aligning against everyone else. He
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If you're going to complain about my blog ranking at Google you could at least spell it correctly - it's Wizbang.
If you're trying to figure out why I have the top spot, just check Technorati. Comment by Kevin at April 22, 2004 11:39 PM
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Why was Kevin "Wizbang" Alyward so upset? Was Kevin Amanda? It would be easy
to imagine, based on the content and subject matter of his writings, that
his interest in her was no different then that of, say
Finally there was a link, or at least, a possible explaination for why Wizbang would create Amanda: Personal Advertisements. And there they were. Dozens and dozens
of ads are splattered all over Wizbang's site. Goggle Ads, Blog Ads, other ads,
tip jars, donations, wish lists, hit counters, track-backs, pay-pal (until
Next Kevin
Other examples of the true depth behind Wizbang's interest in blogging
were uncovered throughout his archives. Wizbang was quick to notice, a score with
an
I quickly learned that Wizbang was one of the few bloggers sexist enough to
Perhpas Wizbang merely enjoyed Amanda as a pontiff or perhaps Wizbang and/or Amanda was an advertising ploy for Abercrombie and Fitch, the miltibillion dolar clothing store, I thought.
For years now Abercrombie & Fitch have been engaging in extremely offensive activity,
similar to the kinds of activity of interst to, you guessed it, Wizbang.
Aftre a few more minutes of looking into the connections between Wizbang, Amanda and A&F, the theory that Wizbang was working for A&F was quickly dropped due to the level of complexity that was inconsistent with the rest of Wizbang and Amanda's less complex activity.
2.
Returning to the source of Wizbangs stress, another factor arose which was brought on by
This opened up a whole investigation into all of the connections between
Wizbang and Sayanything Rob. Intrestingly enough, the content of Rob's site, Sayanythingblog
(where the name suggests the reality) was very similar to that of
Wizbangs:
Also, for some reason, instead of the expected behavior from Wizbang, like a post that read "Hey everybody, I will be hosting Amanda's new site name, look at me", Sayanything had never said anything about his involvement with Amanda.
Instead he became quite stressed and upset about the accusation.
Here is
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So, is Amanda real? I think so. I've been reading her site for a while now and have always enjoyed her posts. Honestly, I haven't noticed anything out of the ordinary but perhaps others have.
I do have something of an interest in this thing. Amanda is getting ready to move her site over to my server for hosting. I've emailed back and forth with her a couple times regarding her move and the responses I've gotten have always seemed to be on the straight and narrow.
When I first ran across the Hot Abercrombie Chick website I wondered about the amount of traffic and comments she was getting. I thought about writing a post comparing the amount of traffic Amanda got for her posts compared to the amount a male with a similar blog got. I had the feeling that Amanda's traffic may have been elevated because she's, well, a hot chick to use her terms.
I didn't do this because I didn't want to offend Amanda. I do find her posts insightful and well-written and I didn't want to take anything away from that.
If the Julia Set post turns out to be true (and I'm guessing it won't be) then I'm going to feel kind of dumb. Its not like I'm going to be out anything except a little time, but still...
Who does something like this? You have to be one desperate blogger to resort to something like this just to gain some traffic.
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Yet Robbie of Sayanything, is not only a budding webster, he's a
Soon after Rob was getting going with his blogging, he bagan running ads
and answering the same questions his friend Wizbang was answering: "
Could Wizbang be Amanda AND Commissar, in cahoots with Sayanything? Perhaps partly, but definitely not wholly. Putting
the
Since both Wizbang and Sayanything were becoming so savvy with the
Internet, in terms of what to do to increase their popularity, in order to
sell ads, finally each receiving
They both claim that there is no incentive for her. Yet she
3.
Back to Amanda. While it's true that Amanda has been obtaining a lot of
ground on her site, evidenced by the high density of comments and her
technorati profile, a further look into those comments reveals that she is
appealing mostly to young, opinionated yet uneducated people who are also
full of foul language and also older, conservative male bloggers who think she
is attractive looking. In the last year, through the entire Presidential
elections, the word 'troll' has really come into a new definition.
Presidential sites like John Kerry's are hit daily by people who bash away
at the conversation, much like Wizbang and Sayanything do, usually opponants trying to rain on the parade without offering any solutions or real argumentative substance. A closer look at Amanda Doerty's comments reveal that many people were sincere
though most were foul mouthed, sexist, racist and again, full of all of
the same kinds of readers that Wizbang and Sayanything gets, typical
traits of all of their
She claimed herself as being categorized by religion and
philosophy. She was also somehow very well informed about other issues
too: Child Pornography, Music sales, product branding, blogging tricks, to
name just a few - in each case claiming she knew the matters in-depth. For
a 17 year old who is just entering into college, looking for a
4.
Beyond Amanda, Wizbang, or Sayanything coming out and admitting that they were the true epicenter of this hoax, and without anything more than a subjective claim to existence on Amanda's part, there was one more line of evidence that is out there on the Internet that, as a matter of fact, determines the case, as we have already heard: Internet Protocol, or, IP.
There is an easy way to find out if the unique computers that belong to Sayanything and Wizbang are the same computers that Amanda uses. Most bloggers who have big sites, keep logs with ips and time stamps. The time of a comment that was made by Amanda can be matched with the IP. Assuming Amanda is at a college, and not worried about any malicious activity on her part, just like the rest of us, her IP's would probably reveal her location and is certainly indexable by her service provider. Even if she uses a proxy IP, which is unlikely, the proxy IP can also be filtered through her service provide with no less effort. Even the most intelligent and prolific hackers are vulnerable to IP tracing. Hac it turns out though, is also quite the hacker.
5.
Finally, I received my first message regarding the matter from a stressed individual marked with a traceable IP. The bashing message which was shown to myself and Josh was from one "Joe Grouchy" and had an ip address of 64.53.168.62.: Naperville, Illinois, is not usually much help for a proxy, so it may very well indicate, in this case, a true location for someone's IP hosting service. Yet what good is this random location in Illinois without an FBI Warrant?
Well, you can never be too sure, but I didnt have to look far for a rather compelling
connection:
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April 19, 2004 CONFESSION
For some reason which is quite unfathomable to me, certain sections of the blogosphere are all abuzz over the question of whether coed blogger, "Hot Abercrombie Chick," might really be a dude.
I'm not sure why this really matters, but since it apparently does to some people, I feel I owe my readers a confession. I'm not actually a 32-year-old cranky male lawyer in central Illinois. I'm actually a 65-year-old widow and retired plus-size lingerie model from Butte, Montana.
And my supposed wife "Laura" is actually just a raccoon that I sometimes see in my backyard. I think she's trying to steal the birdseed I put out.
I don't think these revelations should really impact anything I've said around here, but I thought you all should know.
After today, I'll continue to pretend that none of this is true.
Add The Spoons Experience to your blogroll by clicking here.
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Could Spoons be Amanda? Was Spoons nervous from the
6.
Amanda, Kevin, Rob and Chris ALL link to eath other and share the same kinds of ad space and banners. Somewhat of a webring for home run click and hit business? Could they all be feeding each other at the expense of their advertisers? Especially with untraceable, dynamic IPs, how would the advertiser know if they werent generating all the hits themselves?
Who is
7.
Here we have several men that are using blogging as a medium to make
money. Nothing wrong with that. They are all becoming more and more
skilled at using the tools of the trade and perhaps even developing their
own new tools. Good for them. They are thinking a lot about how to make it
work. It requires thinking.
Yet none of them are willing to believe for an instant that Hot Abercrombie Chick could simply be another slimey man's escapade into making money on the net. They are all seemingly extreme in their cultural influences as they try to push their opinions onto others. Wizbang is offering proof that she exists by auctioning off a picture (even though its usually illegal to offer products as incentives for donations). Amanda suppodely supports this by handing over the pics which have never surfaced and since been ignored.
They have left comments all over the Internet marked with their IP address for anyone to gather. If someone doesn't come clean soon, either Hot Abercrombie will loose all of it's business, because nobody wants dirty business that poses as warm human compassion, some of these guys will get busted because Amanda's blog will be opened up by the FBI as a child porn site, Advertiserers will catch on, subscriptions will be cancelled, or she will no longer be a mystery for being what she says she is.
Hot Abercrombie Chick, a.k.a. Amanda Doerty via some other name, is asking us to trust in Wizbang and Sayanything to indirectly then trust her. Ya, right. Need more be said? Yes.
It turns out I was wrong. The Hot Abercrombie Chick is in fact a man, but he's not Wizbang. Rob is also not Amanda. Chris is not Amanda either. It turns out that these guys really were clueless or had some invested interest in believeing that she was real.
Who is Amanda?
Dan "the man" Zeigenbein, the musician that Amanda claimed she knew.See
Afterward:
This started out as a fun investigation into the true natue of the Hot Abercrombie Chick blog but quickly took a turn for the worst; a political nightmare with the kinds of Americans that are failing our country, and thus the world, keeping in the company of Bush.