The death of Ruddy Ruddy

Dedicated to Kitty, a wonderful friend whom Ruddy Ruddy brought to me three years ago this month.

It's been nearly two years now, and it's time to tell the story. In March of 2005, I was confronted with a devastating truth about Ruddy Ruddy, one that rendered me more or less incapable of going on with the blog. Oh, I thought maybe I'd be able to move on someday as though nothing had happened, and that's why I put the blog on hiatus. But now it's clearly time to bring closure to the story.

I'd just gotten home from a trip out of town. This had been an eventful trip in that my long-lost and recently separated ex-girlfriend had invited me to visit her in Waterloo that Saturday night for a date, and an uneventful one in that she'd then chickened out and decided that it wasn't a date after all, so I spent the night on the couch, staring at the ceiling and grumbling. As you can imagine, I was already in something of a state of confusion, which wasn't lessened any when I got home, checked, my e-mail and found a message from Jay expressing his condolences over what Scott had said in the forum.

I was a couple of days behind on the Jay Pinkerton forum, having been out of town getting screwed over (rather than screwed), so I popped over to see what he was talking about. There, in a thread used for forum posters to introduce themselves to each other, was a post from Scott "Stocc" Feenstra that included the following bombshell:

My dirty little secret? I am the perpetrator of a longstanding practical joke. The victim of the joke is Peter. I, you see, am responsible for the Ruddy Ruddy phenomenon. For almost 2 years now I've been signing up for free stuff under the name Ruddy Ruddy and having it sent to Peter's address. I didn't originally envision it as such an elaborate hoax but the more things I had sent, the more Peter rationalized in his head about why it must be. He assumed he'd signed up for something once with the name Ruddy Ruddy. He assumed he must have created an email address for Ruddy Ruddy at one time or another. He assumed that junk mailers must've been trading his name like mad. All me. And it snowballed. At first he started posting about it on Man vs. Clown which I enjoyed. Then Ruddy Ruddy got his own website which pleased me to no end. It seemed to please Peter a lot too so I kept on going. Seeing as how it's actually gotten coverage in the National Lampoon at this point I figure it can't be getting much bigger and so I'm bring it all to an end. I've spent hours and hours and hours on research for this thing and I'm a little burnt out by it all. Plus, I needed a dirty little secret to post here and I couldn't think of anything else. I guess I'll be getting a phone call from Pete sometime soon. That's good since I've been meaning to chat with him.

One of the really cool things about the reveal (I'm like a producer now) is that other people can enjoy the gag on the same level that I have. Even if you've read every single Ruddy Ruddy post you can go back and experience it all again knowing the secret. I'm pretty sure it makes the ordeal that much more hilarious, especially seeing how Peter rationalizes everything. Do yourself a favour... Go back not only to the beginning of Ruddy Inc. but wade through its archives and even check out the original Ruddy Ruddy post and more in the Man vs. Clown archives. You won't regret it.

My mind was boggled.

"It really is a great reveal (and I hope Pete takes it well)," said Ian, another forum regular. "It's funny with the whole Man vs. Clown thing too. I assumed it was called "Man vs. Clown" because it was a combined weblog for you and Pete. Peter with his witty and informed commentary was Man, and you with your absurd hilarity were Clown. Since it quickly became Pete's weblog, I assumed Man won. Now I find out that Clown is a Keyser Soze-like mastermind pulling strings from behind the scenes. Best weblog movie ever. Two thumbs up."

I was completely stunned.

At that time, my ex, her best friend Janet, a few other friends, and I, all being alumni of Queen's University, constituted what we called the Queen's Loser's Club. We'd meet monthly, and whoever had had the worst run of luck that month would be declared the winner, receiving a small trophy and a Jos. Louis snack cake as prizes and having a photo taken of himself or herself with raisins stuck to his or her teeth to black them out so they appeared to be missing. Now, not only had I just arrived home from what had turned out to have been a debacle of a non-date, but I had just been revealed to have been the victim of an elaborate two-year-long practical joke. The next meeting was at the end of the month. I could already taste the raisins on my teeth.

I have to admit, though, it was a great joke. Scott certainly put a lot of work into it. And in the end, the joke was sort of on him, as he didn't make a dime off it, but I actually made a tidy few bucks off writing an article about the Ruddy Ruddy thing to the National Lampoon, of which Jay was editor at the time. Of course, because Scott picked the moment that he did to pull back the curtain, I missed out on writing the follow-up Ruddy Ruddy articles that Jay and I had planned as part of an ongoing series, but I can hardly blame him. It sounds like the whole thing was a lot of work for him.

And it's still paying dividends. I still get the odd piece of mail for Ruddy Ruddy, even though Scott has long since quit signing me up for things. From where I sit, for instance, I can see a 2006/07 NFL Yearbook sent to Ruddy Ruddy by Sportsbook.com. And other stuff continues to trickle in. I can't bear to give it the same treatment that I used to, though, now that I know it was all a big sham. (By "big sham", I of course mean "big sham that I wasn't actually part of.") The magic's gone.

But it was fun while it lasted.