Earlier today, I posted about my telephone conversation last night with Nate Noy, and the whole Jean Schmidt marathon photo controversy. I did not mention a certain side issue which arose, because it was quite tangential to the topic of that post. This side issue is “sock puppetry,” and I must mention it here, because it reflects on the honesty and reliability of Nate Noy, and to withhold this part of the story would be less than forthright on my part.

Many persons on the Internet write anonymously, or under a nom-de-plume, but a “sock puppet” is an assumed identity used duplicitously, to act as a shill for its maker. For instance: if I were to write about poker under the name “Wyatt Q. Earp,” it would simply be a pseudonym. But if I made “Wyatt” write, “I have met Sean Gleeson, and can testify to his scrupulous character,” this would be sock puppetry.
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Last night, from about 9:20 to 10:00 p.m. Oklahoma time, I spoke with Nathan “Nate” Noy, independent write-in candidate for United States Representative in Ohio’s Second Congressional District, the seat currently held by Republican Jean Schmidt.

Noy, you will recall from my Aug. 24 post, accused Schmidt of faking this photograph and posting it to her website.

Noy is still pressing ahead with this charge, but now seems less convinced that he’s right. “I learned a lot of things on your blog,” he said. I got the sense that whether he is right or not, he wants the world to know he had perfectly legitimate reasons to doubt this photo when he filed the complaint. In my previous post, I referred to Noy as “seemingly crazy,” but after seeing the evidence he had at the time, he doesn’t seem crazy to me.

The Associated Press story I read at the time explained Noy’s reasons for doubting the photo’s authenticity this way: “[A] newspaper list of the top runners does not include Schmidt,” and “In the photo, Schmidt doesn’t cast a shadow while other runners do.”

I demolished the “doesn’t cast a shadow” argument by proving that Schmidt’s shadow would have been down by her feet, which were obscured by other persons in the foreground. And the “newspaper list” didn’t strike me as all that important, since Schmidt was not one of “the top runners”; she came in fifth in her class of 40- to 44-year old women.

But Noy explained that the 1993 Columbus Dispatch article was much more damning than the A.P. story suggested. It’s not so much that the article “does not include Schmidt,” as that it does list a different woman as winning the award Schmidt claims to have won!
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