Let me state this more clearly: there was no humor meant in the posting.
It was strictly malicious character assassination, and libleous, and
potentially damaging. This person quoted a fake article in the trades
designed to sound authentic. Maybe someone might think this is funny...how
funny would it be if you signed on one day to find messages about how your
mother had just died overnight, or you had been fired from your job, or your
wife was having an affair. And none of it was true, it was posted only to do
you harm. This is evidence of a sick mind.

There is nothing funny about it. This is one of the problems in fandom,
finding excuses for this kind of behavior. I'm not yelling at you, Leviathan,
but rather the context. A certain group of obnoxious fans have a tendency to
do brutal, rude, or malicious things, and other fans, with the best of
intentions, say, "Well, it's not a big deal," and thus become enablers,
allowing the behavior to continue. When one SF writer had warm vomit thrown
in his face by a "fan," half of those who saw the incident tried to find some
excuse for it, to play it down. This is a recurrent problem in the fan
community, and speaking *as* a fan, if the fan community never takes any
action or tries to just dismiss the problem, it will *never* be dealt with.

Which is why I don't ask the fan community to do anything when this sort
of thing (or the other little nasties that have been visited upon us by rabid
Trek fans) happens. Hands-on is good enough for me.

Not that it doesn't take time away from the work, either; do you know how
MANY W. Harpers there ARE in Arizona? I do. One by one by one....

jms