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Student hack bites back!

If there’s one thing this blog is fond of doing, it’s recycling old material. And the hardiest of hardy perennials in that respect is this wildly inaccurate perhaps-not-entirely-definitive profile of me written, in 2005, by a young student journalist from DCU. No matter how many times I post it, it never fails to raise a chuckle. But now the hapless anonymous author has stepped forward to answer his critics. Well, sorta. This email arrived Sunday evening:

from [anon]
to Eoin Butler
date 28 March 2010 20:22

Dear Eoin,

Recently enough, I had a flashback of the time i interviewed you for a college assignment and decided to key your name into google to see what i could find. I was kind of proud to discover that you had posted up this article i wrote on your blog despite the fact that i am being taken the piss out of. As far as i remember, i passed the assignment you will be glad to hear.

I feel kind of sorry for myself reading it. it really is cringable.

By the way, [says kind things about something else I wrote].

Anyway, i hope things are well,

[anon]

It was, in the circumstances, an incredibly generous email and I felt pretty guilty when I thought about it later. Anon and I exchanged a few more mails. The upshot is that I’ve offered him a right of reply. A chance to answer all of the jokes and sneers made on here by myself and others at his expense. And I’m pleased to say that he has accepted. So far, all he’s offered me is a vague assurance that he’ll “try and get [me] something by the end of this week.” Which only confirms my suspicion that Anon truly is a Natural Born Journalist Journalist by Nature!