Today is Marathon Monday, and by all reports, it is a splendorous day in Boston: the sun shining down, the breeze lilting lightly, the male nipples bleeding, and the Mark Wahlberg dressed as a hardscrabble cop with a heart of gold. But let us not forget a great shame that hangs over the city like the malodorous stench of seafood served at the Top of the Hub. That’s right: I’m talking about Mr. Spaghetti.

When the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority Transit Police Department announced earlier this month that it would be taking suggestions for the name of its newest police dog, Bostonians across the internet rallied around the name Mr. Spaghetti. It was first put forward by Dicky Stock, a local comedian whose medium is Facebook. For seven years, Stock has been posting as Kimberly Strubell, a surreal, oversexed caricature of a Masshole mom.

Strubell has an elaborate backstory, but if you don’t want to sift through hundreds of Facebook status updates, you can get a pretty good grasp of her sensibility from the fliers Stock and other Kimberly fans started posting around Boston after the cops turned down Mr. Spaghetti in favor of the name “Hunter.”

Previously, Boston’s Metro newspaper claimed, and Gawker repeated, that Mr. Spaghetti was passed over despite having received nearly double the votes of any other competitor on Twitter. That’s true, but we (and Metro) neglected to mention that the MBTA also solicited votes for the dog’s via text message. (Gawker regrets the omission.)

It’s hard for me to imagine that dozens of people texted the cops, all urging them to choose the same boring, fascistic name for their cop dog, but that is the line the MBTA transit police are taking. On Friday, a tipster who described himself as a “concerned citizen” told Gawker that after he tweeted about Mr. Spaghetti’s clear majority in Twitter votes, he received the above salty DM from the department’s official account. It reads:

Hi, we also received suggestions via text message(most received this way) and DM. Which you would have no way of counting. Thank you.

That same day, @MBTATransitPD got extremely mad at @Gawker and other accounts such as @ohholybutt over our Mr. Spaghetti support.

For now, there’s really no way to tell whether the MBTA police’s wild claims about privately communicated dog name votes are truthful, but hopefully that will soon change. After publishing our first exposé, I filed a request with the authority for all public records regarding Mr. Spaghetti. If there was a coverup, Gawker readers can rest easy knowing that we will blow it wide open, right here.