There was a time when I trolled for website hits by placing a webcam under my desk and broadcasting live footage of my bare feet online. In its heyday, this brought about a hundred visitors a day to the site. To say that this number amazed me would be something of an understatement. Clearly the human capacity for fetishization or boredom was beyond what I had imagined.

After a while, the novelty of this attention-seeking behavior wore off, and it also grew too cold to work barefoot. The intervals between my Feet TV showings stretched from days to weeks. Hits to the footcam dropped off.

Shortly before Christmas, I thought What I need is a meme. It seemed like every time I switched on my computer, another friend was sending me the web's latest psychological virus -- Jesusdance, George W Dance, Tourette Syndrome Barbi, and so forth. With modest inventiveness, I might be able to craft something amusing that would go viral and be waiting in everyone else's email box within a few days.

But what? While reading the Washington Post the next day, I noticed an odd similarity between two different pictures of President-elect George W Bush. So I posted the simple George W: Animatronic Robot? page. I sent the URL off to my friend Doug de Maine, who works in the technology industry and thus, to my mind, must have the best connections with the kind of people who really get memes going.

At Susan's suggestion, I also sent a tantalizing email with the page's URL to Gene Weingarten, a columnist at the Post. Gene, if I can call him Gene, ranks up there with the Uptown Theater in my book of oft-appreciated DC fixtures. Just as I would watch almost any movie in the Uptown's gracious, cavernous interior, I'll read just about anything under Gene Weingarten's name. I hold the humorist in such esteem that I considered the possibility of his responding to my email as roughly equal to the likelihood that my family would give me a chainsaw for Christmas.

Which they did. I do love my family.

We returned to DC on the day after Christmas to spend Boxing Day with Susan's mom. We stopped off at the house long enough to change, and because I am geekboy I also did a quick email check. There, shining in my in-box were three messages from Gene Weingarten. The first, at 12:35 PM, scarcely an hour earlier:

wow. this is a shocking thing. i may write about it!

Then, three minutes later:

where are you from, adam?

Then at 12:59 PM:

the seven deadly sins website is yours, right? i am giving you credit for it. please respond asap.

You can only imagine my delight. I flung off a fast response that I was, more or less, responsible for the website, and told him I'd entrusted the news tip to him as my favorite journalist in town. I added my phone number as well, just in case, then I jumped in the shower with little time remaining before we were due to leave for Susan's mom's house.

The phone rang as I was getting dressed. "Is that Gene Weingarten?" I called down to Susan.

"Yes it is," she responded, with a note of perplexity in her voice.

It turned out that Gene, if I can call him that, was writing a whole story about the bizarre consistency of George W Bush's on-camera poses. He said he'd pulled up at least six or seven photos in which the incoming President looked exactly the same, like a cardboard cutout. He just wanted to get some info to credit me with the theory.

In fairness, I explained that I had posted Animatronic Robot primarily because I thought it would bring some traffic to the page. I briefly outlined the concept of memes. He seemed unfazed. I suppose that when you work in the media, the idea of someone doing something just to get attention is a familiar concept.

"I might have to call you back in the next hour," Gene Weingarten said. I told him that I'd be away but gave him the phone number at Susan's mom's house.

During the drive, Susan was quite animated at the prospect of having made contact with our revered humor columnist. I was feeling decidedly more circumspect. Writing from behind the presumed veil of anonymity on the Web (a fiction, but a convenient one) seemed a far cry from having my name in the paper. What if the admired humorist made me look like some kind of a nut? I am coming to realize that I am happier with a fame of an anonymous variety, even if it's of the 15-minute type. If I was a real author and not a mere online chronaclier, I would be publishing under a pseudonym. I would like to be read but not recognized.

About an hour later, as we sat around with Jane and Blair opening our Boxing Day presents, the phone rang again. It was Gene. He wanted to discuss some alternate explanations for Animatronic Robot's behavior and see what I thought. Something about being called back put me more at ease, and I sat down at the kitchen table for a while to do some expository conspiracy-theorizing. He favored an extraterrestrial model, but I continue to feel that George W's foibles suggest a more human origin.

I rejoined Susan and folks in the living room. "He says it will be in the paper tomorrow," I told them. And I wondered if, like a kid on Christmas eve, I would sleep particularly well that night.