A fake anonymity is the hobgoblin of scared bloggers

The outing and subsequent disappearance of Article III Groupie has spawned a mini-boom in blogging about the impossibility of anonymous blogging.

But enough about other people, let's talk about me! It is extremely obvious that I'm not really anonymous--probably 90% of you know who I am because I told you, I give out personal information like candy to a baby, and until recently any obnoxious self-promotional emailing I did was from my regular email address. (No more, though! T&A Lady has her own email address! Woo hoo!)

Anyhow, the real question is, Why am I fake-anonymous? The answer is that I have some vague fear that I would get fired if I wasn't. Why? I don't know really, but it seems like this has happened to other people for somewhat difficult-to-discern reasons.

Of course I would expect to get booted if I were, say, working for a Republican Senator and blogging on my work computer about prostituting myself to high-ranking Administration officials, a la Jessica Cutler, or dissing my employer by name, like this ex-Google employee.

However, what's up with, for instance, Nadine Haobsh, who tried to console herself for the uneven distrubution of vowels in her last name and the fact that she was working as a beauty editor at Ladies' Home Journal by anonyblogging about celebrity gossip and such as Jolie in NYC? Everything was going swimmingly for her, and she had even been offered another job at Seventeen Magazine, until her identity was revealed, at which point she lost both jobs in one fell swoop. Her mistake, apparently, was revealing such earth-shattering information as the fact that her boss got free stuff from Marc Jacobs. The horror!

Admittedly some bloggers, like Harold Bashman and The Union Lawyer, blog with the full knowledge of their employers. But given that I am neither brave nor my own boss, is it really feasible to ask my boss if there's a policy on blogging? What's a vaguely scared, fake-anonymous blogger to do?