I was as amused as any by Bjorn Staerk’s little April Foolery, and unlike certain clueless Globe columnists, wasn’t fooled for a nanosecond (but only because the top of the post had the date displayed prominently). But if it had occurred on some other day, I might have (seriously) asked the same question that Charles Johnson did.

“What has happened to Bjorn”?

Because weblogs are a much more personal medium than Op Ed pieces, we tend to develop opinions about the blogger’s general attitudes, state of mind, and general mental health much more than we would for a newspaper columnist, and when these things change, it’s often apparent to regular readers, even if the blogger says nothing explicit. Bjorn’s post was disturbing (or would have been if it hadn’t been an obvious prank to those of us who’ve been reading his stuff for months) because it seemed as though he’d overnight repudiated everything he believed. Such a thing could only be caused by some traumatic personal event, or some sudden change in brain chemistry.

On one of the Usenet groups that I frequent, there’s one individual who sometimes posts there who seems to be bipolar (I am only surmising this, because he’s never discussed it). He will be making posts that are reasonably lucid (with which I often disagree, but no more so than many other posters), and they will start to get weirder and weirder, often to the point of total incoherence. At that point, he posts no more for a while, often weeks or months.

So, it just made me wonder. If one of our fellow bloggers actually does go around the bend, will we know?