Last Friday, I told you about some unjust things that can happen to writers, including the tale of a MacAdam/Cage summer intern who joked about taking a particularly bad manuscript out of the office as joke fodder to impress "the ladies." Well, apparently young Logan Rapp either took offense or developed a sense of shame at having such statements aired to the broader public, because he's taken the juvenile tactic of replacing that post with a NSFW image of Kathy Bates' hot tub scene from About Schmidt, which is apparently supposed to chastise me for linking to his web site without permission. At least that's what I'm deducing by the message, "Hey Galleycat! Guess what happens when you link someone without permission?" Well, gee, Logan, you sure showed me, putting a nude picture of Kathy Bates on your own blog. (And, since you apparently find it an object of derision, I guess we can add sizeism to your growing list of insensitivities...)

Many of the other entries from that month appear to have been removed as well, but in a new commentary, Rapp attempts to shift the blame onto me for not asking him whether he was joking or not about making sport of other people's manuscripts, then adds that the manuscript in question really did "[belong] to someone who was in serious need of help." Which is rather a bit of a backpedal from his original evaluation: "written by someone who claims to be eighteen, and appears to be written by someone who is nine and has no understanding of human sexuality." So here's what I'm wondering: If Rapp stands by that and other statements, why has he taken them down (even if it proves to be temporary) from his own blog?

UPDATE: Running down the warpath, Rapp reveals that he's privatized his old entries rather than deleting them, then accuses me yet again of linking to his blog without permission. Quick course in Internet 101, kiddo: Your permission is irrelevant; you made a public statement online, and other people found it and told still more people how they could find it, too, even before I found it. That's the way the World Wide Web works. If you didn't want people to find out what a jackass you could be, you should have managed your blog better to eliminate the jackassery from public display. And here's another free tip: The nudie pic probably wasn't the smartest way to go about that. As you say, "you're the one giving me the attention." Are you proud of what you've done with it? Do you think anyone in publishing is impressed?

And then...Those two complaints have also disappeared from public view, along with the entire summer of 2005, and now young Rapp suggests that the entire blog will be deleted, and if only his "friend who runs his own hosting service" had shut the site down back in December like he was supposed to, none of this would ever have happened. As for the private blog that was supposed to be just for him and his friends, well, apparently his friends include the entire readership of "Gamers With Jobs," where Rapp boasted (right around the time he was telling the world about taking manuscripts home for joke fodder), "I've just started my intern's journal at MacAdam/Cage, so if you want a look in the publishing business, there it is." Or, rather, there it was.