Vanishing American

A reader reports that the blogger Vanishing American has “vanished suddenly, stopped responded to any correspondence, and her blog dropped off at a strange point in the news. We believe she may have died suddenly of a stroke or a heart attack.”

Does anyone know any personal details about her that might help her concerned readers locate her and find out what has happened?

- end of initial entry -

The reader writes:

Looks like Vanishing American has contacted someone and is all right, so no need to proceed with the search. Thanks for helping.

Gintas writes:

A new comment at her site:

BREAKING NEWS!

VA has emailed me. She is fine, but says she has some person issues going on right now. Stayed tuned, I’ll post more later.

LA replies:

So, she stopped blogging, disappeared for three months, and gave no notice to her readers that she was doing so, and as a result they thought she was dead and, as the original commenter told me, were scrambling to get some personal information on her, mainly her name, so that they could search for her obituary. She’s an unstable, self-centered person, as she also showed a few years ago when she started a blog war with me over nothing, over a minor misunderstanding that could have easily been cleared up with an e-mail.

Gintas replies:

Yup. How hard is it to post a single comment saying, “I’m OK, but very busy. I’ll be back in three months.” One minute? She has no concern for her readers, it’s a big disconnect from the things she says. She would probably say, “It’s just electronic, not real, not serious, you don’t even know my name.” But do people not understand that we feel a bit sad even throwing out a junky old piece of furniture? It’s become a part of the family. So even an anonymous blog is missed, if it’s part of our routine, we’ll miss it. Who was it who characterized other people on the Internet as just fingers pressing keys on a keyboard? Hesperado?

LA replies:

Yes.

November 12

Timothy A. writes:

Soon after confirmation that “Vanishing American” was indeed still alive appeared in a comment thread at the Vanishing American blog and at VFR, comments at the VA blog were disabled and comments from all posts were removed (and no new posts have been added.) So Vanishing American’s followers who are relying on her blog to determine whether she is dead or alive are completely in the dark. Classy.

LA replies:

Do you mean that’s she removed all the comments from all the entries at her blog?

Timothy A. writes:

Exactly.

LA replies:

That’s insane. She’s had the blog for some years, with, presumably many (to her) significant discussions, and she’s just destroyed them all? Maybe it was a mistake. Or maybe she’s just living up to her name: she keeps vanishing, and re-vanishing.

Timothy replies:

It looks as if she didn’t like the speculation on her identity in the comments thread on her last post (the one where commenters were checking for obituaries, etc.) and used a quick and dirty method to get rid of those comments, as a side-effect removing all of the other comments on the blog as well. Perhaps (one would hope) the “Blogger” software has an option to hide comments which was used to do this, and after VA has had time to go through and remove the “offensive” comments she will display the historical comments again.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 09, 2012 08:00 PM | Send