I have to be honest — the DCist staff was about 95 percent sure that the Craigslist ad for a 16-cat Dupont sublet which we featured yesterday afternoon was a fake. And that was well before I received an email from one “Fred Decatt” (get it?) last night, claiming to be the poster and asking me to be “more receptive and tolerant of cat enthusiasts such as myself” in future posts. Of course, by the time another reader forwarded us an email exchange in which the photo to the right was proffered as a photo of Bitnum, one of the cats listed in the ad, well, the inauthenticity of the ad was pretty much a foregone conclusion.

It was no big surprise, then, to see Mr. Decatt’s blog officially unmask the whole thing as an exercise in tomfoolery:

So I recently completed a horrid search for a DC summer sublet. In an effort to understand why it was so hard to find a place, I decided to place an ad for an apartment of my own. $900 in Dupont is a good deal, but I figured the 16 cats would be quite the deterrent. Apparently I was wrong.

The blog post then shares some of the more interesting responses Mr. Decatt received, including people interested in renting the apartment and bringing in their own cats to live in the commune, another who said they were “deathly allergic to cats” and, our personal favorite, someone who was very concerned precisely how “off” Bananana actually was.

Well done, internet. Let’s do this again real soon, okay?