The mildly naughty-leaning Seattle food blogger Linda Miller Nicholoson of Salty Seattle, who I just stumbled upon a day or two ago, wrote a very smart post about dealing with some kind of animal rights or possibly food-allergy troll who not only heaped the usual loads of invective on her but also threatened to both her and her child.

It's a pretty cool, level-headed post about the impact it had on her, how she located details about the commenter (including the street address associated with the originating computer's IP address) decision to go public with those details, and advice on where and how to report such computer-based threats to the appropriate local and federal authorities including a specific agency website set up for reporting not only online frauds and hacks but internet-based threats such as these.  (The Internet Crime Complaint Center.)

You should read the whole post both for context and specifics but I'd like to highlight what one of her commenters said

I got one of these comments as well (though not as troubling) with the email charles’dot’bollinger at gmail’dot’com. Both names sound similar to Charles, or Chuck.

Methinks this is that same trollish DocChuck that has been harrassing SteamyKitchen and Pioneer Woman for a long time. I know he DOES in fact live in Florida, and seems to search around for mentions of famous bloggers and attack the blogs that do the mentioning — it seems he might be googling the peanut butter pie phenomenon. Think of him as the Westboro Baptist Church of internet trolls :(

Source: Salty Seattle

This is what happens when you go public with your cyber demons -- you not only discover it's not just you, you also inform other targets that it's also not just them!

It's important to realize that no victim is ever obliged report or even publicize his or her troll's behavior.  And in fact most of the time folks deal by just moderating such comments or blocking the sender.  Although sometimes they also take down their blogs.*

But while it's ok to keep such threats quiet, by going public you can often multiply both the pressure on one's tormentor and provide solidarity and relief to other victims.  Who may in turn provide solidarity, relief, and solid suggestions, to you.

Anyway, I should also mention that Nicholoson's more typical fare, Gourmet orSaveur quality posts about food that range from philosophy to comfort to haute cuisine to molecular gastronomy, is pretty good reading.  And as a nominal sex blogger I appreciate her flip attitudes and sometimes very cute salacious analogies.  Definitely worth a look.

Update: I just noticed that Nicholoson is also the sponsor of what looks like an annual fundraiser/photography-contest site, NudieFoodies.  Again, mildly salacious while staying pretty safe for work.  Nicholoson's got the right attitude, incidentally -- for her own entry she made a bikini from marshmallow Peeps!

*For sad but obvious reasons this has been a common response among anonymous sex bloggers.  For even sadder reasons, at one time there was at least one fairly popular sex blogger who decided the best way to rise through the ranks was by smearing, stalking, and even threatening more popular competitors unless or until they dropped out!

So I'm walking home from the (almost) corner grocery store on our walkaround neighborhood mains street and I see this sandwich board in front of one the local art galleries.

Photo by figleaf (hey that's me!) Used under a Creative Commons license.

I didn't see who was inside (I could tell the workshop was in progress and that's about all) but I'm pretty sure Teri Ciacchi of Living Love Revolution was leading it. Who knew?

When my friends first started moving to this neighborhood fifteen or twenty years ago the area was pretty decrepit.  Not trendy decrepit, just kind of dumpy.  Now while the economy's taken its toll a lot of the much older generation (<em>my</em> parents' age) that used to keep lackadasical shops full of antique knicknack and used furniture and second-hand audio gear and pensioner's bars have moved while people basically their grandchildren's age have been taking over.  Who knew?

Photo by Flickr user keithius. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Hey, I'm the Straight Married Guy this week in Em & Lo's Wise Guys column, answering the question "Would most men be cool with a woman proposing marriage to them? (assuming they’re in a serious committed relationship where marriage has become an unspoken expectation for both parties)."

I was pretty cool with it!

We’d been in a serious committed relationship for years, and I’d known almost right away that I wanted to marry her. The expectation had even gone from unspoken to spoken when her fairly conservative mom cornered us coming out of a hotel room together on a family trip and said, “So what’s the deal with you two?” We stammered a bit and my partner blurted out “But we’re going to get married.” And I nodded vigorously. Now, at the moment it wasn’t strictly true. We’d talked about it a lot but never made an actual decision. We talked about it later, a bit surprised that in our mid-thirties we were still making excuses. I think I said we should make it official. She said “Should we do it?” and I said yes. And we stopped being nervous staying in the same hotel room around her mom. But not until we really were married.

Anyway, while there seems to be a resurgence of “tradition” where people sometimes fly to special destinations just to pop the question and where guys are “formally” asking the bride’s fathers for their daughter’s “hand in marriage,” I think it’s also fine for women to pop the question instead. I also think that if a guy can’t handle being proposed to at the very least with grace and good humor, then he’d be kind of a brittle husband anyway.

Source: Em & Lo

Follow the link to check out answers from Gay Engaged Guy Joel Derfner (he's not so sure) and Straight Single Guy Tom Miller (he's fine with it and has a funny "regendered" take including wondering if she should first ask his mom for his hand.)