mshomphe's Journal: Is this for real?

So the Onion has an article up about "Barry Ploegel". It's an old one, and I just noticed it against whilst flipping through "Dispatches From the Tenth Circle". It's still archived and available. "Ha, ha," I think, "they really nailed us geeks!". But then I did a google search, and not only does his website come up, but a whole bunch of other stuff as well. Like he's on kuro5hin, and active.

What are we to believe? Does he exisit?

Only one way to find out

detective work

[SirSlud]

Domain Name: BARRYPLOEGEL.COM
whois barryploegel.com

Registrar: COMPUTER SERVICES LANGENBACH GMBH DBA JOKER.COM
Whois Server: whois.joker.com
Referral URL: http://www.joker.com
Name Server: MEOW.RAYE.COM
Name Server: KOFFING.RAYE.COM
Status: ACTIVE
Updated Date: 06-may-2002
Creation Date: 09-may-2000
Expiration Date: 09-may-2003

The onion article was published May 11 2002. Too co-incidental, so I'mma say its not a real person, but rather an online persona, probably created by somebody that works at theonion.com?

Re:detective work

[mshomphe]

Art imitating life? Or vice-versa?

Thanks for the detective work. You rock!

oh and

[SirSlud]

the kuro5hin nick is probably somebody else, they started to post around october 2002 it seems.

Re:oh and

[mshomphe]

Life imitating art imitating life? It's getting too wacky. ;)

Maybe we should write to him...