Delightful, mysterious encounter

I’ll play along with the author of the four-word comment to yesterday's post about David Cay Johnston, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times.

The comment's author purports to be Johnston himself.

Maybe, maybe not.

The comment seems slightly off, as seemed the original “Johnson” e-mail I wrote about yesterday.

The comment reads:

Delightfully hilarious and whimsical. —David Cay Johnston

So what’s the "off" part?

For one thing the words read like one of those snippets in ads for Broadway plays.

The RED ELECTRIC

"Delightfully Hilarious! Whimsical!"

For another, when isn’t “hilarious” delightful?

For that matter, when isn’t “whimsical” delightful?

Then again, if you are at your New York Times desk with a full day of investigative reporting ahead of you, maybe you don’t take the time to trim one liners dashed off to skeptical bloggers in the hinterland.

One other scrap of evidence: When someone posts a comment on this site, I get an e-mail copy. The return address for this comment led me to a vacant blogger profile site titled “DavidCay.”

Go figure.

So it comes down to this: David, if you are the comment's author, all is forgiven — I promise to check out your new book and share my trenchant observations with Red Electric readers and any wayward search robots that drop by.

In the meantime, we are counting on you, David, so get back to work!