I was going to post the answer to my April Fool's challenge today, but I would rather wait until a few more people write in and see what their answers might be. Those I have already received provide much illumination of the image I project into the world.

One of the people who responded was Mark, my former college roommate, with whom I have not spoken in ten years and who found everybody's favorite Upside-down Hippopotamus through the blog of one of my dearest friends. That must have been a startling discovery. He himself has a blog, which has linked to mine for months; I did not know it was his when I returned the favor (his is the one titled something about Patsy Stone, whoever that is). Mark was my roommate in Baltimore when I dated Bill and Jim, and I was living with him when I met Erich. He had a melodramatic and inexplicable crush on a frat boy named Jake, whose lack of a chin made his upper body resemble a bowling pin (Jake tried to disguise this by growing a little goatee, a tactic that is almost never successful).

I have the memory of a gnat, but there are some things that stand out in my mind about living with Mark. The first is that he frequently came home and discussed the number of rats' heads he chopped off that day. He was a boy genius who finished Hopkins in three years with both a BA and an MA, and part of his job was to measure chemical changes in the brains of rodents.

(Don't worry, Goblin: Gladys, Louise, and Pashmina are safe and plotting extraordinary revenge.)

The second is that he was a big "Star Trek: The Next Generation" fan, and many was the time I heard him shriek in horror or delight over what was occurring in the current episode. As I recall, his favorite moment was when a woman with an English accent pronounced "tsetse fly." (It had not begun to air then, but everybody now knows that "Voyager" was the best Star Trek series.)

The third is that he was just about the filthiest person I have ever encountered, leaving dishes in the sink until they sprouted new life forms, and leaving me to pick up after him in general if I did not want to live in the Death Star trash compactor. In this capacity, he also pulled the dirtiest trick to which I have ever been subjected. When our apartment lease was up, I found a new place to live, but he made a separate arrangement with our landlady to stay on an extra month. On the day he was to move to North Carolina, I was going to go to the beach with my friends, but I had arranged to go by the apartment in the morning to say goodbye and make sure it was clean enough to pass security deposit muster. (I had cleaned my part when I left, but I suspected he was not to be trusted in this regard.)

To my everlasting horror, I found he had hit the road before I arrived, leaving piles of garbage everywhere, and the kitchen and bathroom and all of the wood floors smeared with unmentionable gook. It took eight hours of intense scrubbing and hauling his accumulated trash outside before the place even approached inhabitability for the next tenants; needless to say, my beach vacation had to be cancelled. My one smidgeon of sweet revenge was that the telephone service was still connected in his name, and I used it to call my friends in Europe for an extended chat at the end of that miserable day.

Yesterday, I mentioned to Mark that I would blog about him this week, and he said that was fine as long as I was "nice." He will have to settle for the variation of "nice" that means "characterized by great accuracy." Now, after a decade of silence, my tale is told!

Bwah-ha-ha-ha!