Stop the friggin’ presses. You are not gonna believe who wrote to the Design Guru today.

Matt Locke. From HGTV’s Design Star, Season 3!!!

Those of you who caught the show have to remember him for two things…his uber-brilliant concept in the first challenge, and the fact that he appeared to be the epidome of an all-around nice guy. He was also my original pick to take home the title.

Turns out the dude is a fan of my dang blog!

Against the advice of the network executives, I scoured the Internet for blogs about Design Star while I was on the show. Yours stood out. Your writing is crisp, but your sense of things even crisper. You called things by their names. I looked forward to reading your take on (each) episode. Thanks for keeping it real!

Just wanted to let you know I am a fan.

—Matt Locke, 03/03/09

First thoughts: oh my gawd oh my gawd oh my gawd.

Second thoughts: oh crap…what did I say about him?

Lately, I’ve had a bit of comeupance in the online review world. I write a lot of reviews on Yelp and on this blog review a lot of design shows. When I write about these things, I generally am free to sort of hide behind the anonymity of the masses, right? I don’t necessarily take ten seconds to think about the subject of my review reading my piece. And I sho’ don’t think about them calling or emailing me about it either. So imagine my chagrin when the manager I spoke of in this review sent me a written apology, or the car salesman in this review actually called me to thank me for my “kind words,”…and now Matt Locke from HGTV tells me he’s a fan, after I wrote this?

What a class act.

If you’re curious about what Matt’s been up to since Design Star, here are a few pics of his recent work:

He also appeared recently on HGTV’s Showdown.

Photos courtesy of Matt Locke.