Drunken, Disgruntled Plastic Surgeon Picks On Reporters

A supporter or two of Brian West--the plastic surgeon whose ups and (mostly) downs, involving his drinking problem and former patients, I've covered in these pages--has now taken to trying to sully mine and Sacramento CBS television reporter Kurtis Ming's names with a comical new blog experiment. Ming has covered the story involving West since it began to unfold in Sacramento several years ago, and before West moved down south and began practicing in Long Beach, Huntington Beach and LA.

The new blog has a "mediaconspiracy.wordpress" URL and is pleasantly and concisely called: "Daffodil J. Altan of OC Weekly And Kurtis Ming's Malicious And Relentless Campaign Of Libel Against A GOOD DOCTOR!"

Someone now has the burdensome task of clicking and clicking again (and again) on the blog's home page so that the site can rise to the top of the Google search machine popularity contest--and presumably ruin our credibility as reporters forever.

The mystery bloggers have done their best to find whatever internet "dirt" they can on me and Kurtis. They've had to work even harder with what little they've found to create the kinds of sensational headlines that would make someone cringe if they weren't so funny. So far they've been able to pull out a grand total of three sordid, dark-secret posts to rival the reported stories Kurtis and I have done about West--and the failed internal workings of the California Medical Board--in the past.

Following my blog post a week ago about the ruling of the state attorney general's case against West involving four former patients (he was found guilty of two charges, not guilty of two others), the mystery bloggers really dug deep. It seems they found their smoking gun and enough incriminating evidence against me for this juicy headline: "Daffodil Altan Arrested -- Alcohol Related Offence!!!" (exclamation points and British spelling theirs).


The post--pulled from my college newspaper's electronic archives (and now a cached page) --tells the riveting, police-blotter details of my former life of crime: As a freshman in college, I got caught by a police officer at a party holding a can of beer and was given a Minor In Possession ticket.
 
Additional headlines on the blog, all breathlessly related to this one incident (and linking back to the same disabled cached page), include: "Daffodil Altan's history with ALCOHOL and BREAKING THE LAW" (caps theirs--what, no exclamation points?); and "The State of Arizona vs. Daffodil Altan."

Even better, and to give things the kind of immediacy that, say, a breaking news item might carry, our blogger friends conveniently left out the date and only told of these events as having unfolded on a cryptic "Saturday" sometime in (recent?) history. The date was January 1996. It's been 13 years. My past has finally caught up with me. I feel a little relieved. Nice work mystery bloggers. thanks to you, I no longer have to hide my dark secret.