So I was at today (as I often am) and read this:
“The secret is out. Actually, of course, both ‘Eric Meyer’ and ‘Jeffrey Zeldman’ are aliases of Vicki Wong,”
“The secret” is a link to which says that Eric Meyer () actually created Zeldman.
That made me go back through my “Outbox” and realize that I might have had something to do with the start of the rumor.
On the WD-L list (digest v02.n907 if you are curious) I wrote:
Date: Thu, 13 Jun 2002 21:05:10 -0400 (Eastern Daylight Time) From: “Timothy J. Luoma” Subject: [WD]: Re: Web Standards Project, Phase II Message-ID: <Pine.WNT.4.44.0206132101360.3024-100000@Tim>
On Tue, 11 Jun 2002, Steven Champeon wrote:
> And please, if you can, try to stop confusing “The Web Standards > Project” and “Jeffrey Zeldman”. They’re not equivalent. Never were.
One of the main reasons for that, of course, is that Jeffrey Zeldman doesn’t exist. He never has. He’s a figment of our collective imagination. The world needed him to exist, so we invented him, sorta like the Brad Pitt character in “Fight Club”
> And I should add, though this probably goes against what you were > trying to do here, that the new WaSP site contains no tables for > layout. And yet, it works in all browsers.
Son of a gun, you’re absolutely right. I just fired up NN4.08 and it looks good.
> Of course, as has been said here repeatedly, that’s impossible, so > I’m afraid the universe is going to vanish in a fit of logical > inconsistency :)
Does that mean I don’t have to finish reading my email?
TjL
and not long after that I wrote this email
Date: Fri, 14 Jun 2002 12:10:47 -0400 (Eastern Daylight Time) From: “Timothy J. Luoma” To: “Yaches Tami (tsp3txy)” cc: jeffrey zeldman , eric meyer Subject: RE: [WD]: Re: Web Standards Project, Phase II In-Reply-To: <B1611B1B224FD61185FA0008C75DE6AF019D3EFD@02usnjrarps15f0.win.us.ups.com> Message-ID: <Pine.WNT.4.44.0206141204550.1956-100000@Tim> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
On Fri, 14 Jun 2002, Yaches Tami (tsp3txy) wrote:
[Steve C wrote]
And please, if you can, try to stop confusing “The Web Standards Project” and “Jeffrey Zeldman”. They’re not equivalent. Never were.
[TjL wrote]
One of the main reasons for that, of course, is that Jeffrey Zeldman doesn’t exist. He never has. He’s a figment of our collective imagination. The world needed him to exist, so we invented him, sorta like the Brad Pitt character in “Fight Club”
[Tami Yaches wrote]
I’d be willing to bet money that someone’s already forwarded this to him, if he’s not currently reading the list. Personally, I found this statement really disconcerting, having met him at a WaSP meeting in NYC. I’m wondering if I just really wanted him to be there?
Tami Yaches
What’s even better is that the next message in my inbox was from someone asking “He doesn’t exist? Can you explain that?”
So I told them that “Zeldman” was Eric Meyer’s alter-ego.