Life's lessons #1145: Payback is a bitch

Cathy Seipp was a 49-year-old newspaper columnist and conservative blogger, who had come from Manitoba, Canada, to become the sharp-tongued doyenne of the Los Angeles media scene, was only hours away from losing her years-long fight with cancer, leaving behind a 17-year-old daughter, a lifetime of work as a plucky and plain-speaking wordsmith, and the respect of colleagues from both sides of the political spectrum.

Cathy had a nemesis and as she lie on her deathbed last week he struck with his last desperate and vain attempt at griefing her.

Just hours before her death, "Cathy Seipp" suddenly seemed to undo decades of hard work with an oddly written letter posted on the Web site, www.cathyseipp.com. In what came off as more of a bizarre rant than heartfelt apology, her supposed "very last blog entry" called her years of journalism a "shoddy," "despicable" and "irresponsible" career as a “fourth-rate hack.” Her political stance? All a mistake.

The interesting thing that Cathy's friends found, after a while, was that Cathy's real blog was www.cathyseipp.NET

This had to raise the B.S. flag right off the bat anyway. Who calls themselves out on their death bed like that? Cath's friends found out that the author of the fake website was 'Troll Dolls' and eventually found out that this was the poseudonym of

Eliot Stein, a 54-year-old former online talk-show host and stand-up comedian who hadd taught Maia in a journalism class for a brief period in 2004, and who blamed Maia and Seipp for his departure from the school after only five weeks. Seipp's friends marshaled their resources, creating an impromptu Internet chat room to make their plans, fingering Stein as the culprit, enlisting the help of a lawyer to serve him a cease-and-desist letter, and successfully lobbying Stein's Internet host to take the Web site down permanently.

Luckily, if you want to look at it that way, Chaty died the next day and never saw the things that this jackass said. When asked why he stooped to such a low, the ass hat replied, "I've got an incredible sense of humor."

Lame.

But the story doesn't end here. As the title of this post implies, Stien is getting his. Eliot Stein's Diary is a hilarious and brillliant account of Stein's day-to-day activities.