Forrest Rutherford has been making sure his doors are locked for the past week. You never know when ISIS, Mexican gangsters, or worse, angry Blues Traveler fans, will try to take you out.

Rutherford, of Versailles, Kentucky, has watched incredulously as a minor Twitter feud with John Popper, patriarch of soccer mom icon Blues Traveler, has led to death threats. Or at least poorly Photoshopped facsimiles of the same.

After Popper got angry that Rutherford commented on his public Facebook page, he doxed Rutherford on social media last week by posting his address and a photo of his house. That's a violation of Twitter's user agreement.

In the social media age, doxing someone is roughly equivalent to yelling, "I'm going to tell the teacher!"

Angry Blues Traveler fans threatened to send members of the Zetas, a Mexican drug cartel, to Rutherford's home and have posted images of him beheaded and lynched. Rutherford reported the threats to the Versailles police department, although he's counting on the fans to lose interest once their Dominoes arrives.

"It's been an interesting past couple of days," said Rutherford, 35, who has so far retained his sense of humor.

He has not, however, gotten Twitter to act on Popper's violations of its privacy rules, which specifically state that private information such as addresses cannot be publicly shared.

Popper's management has declined to comment and his only response has been via a curious article published at TheFutureHeart.com, a music blog written by fans.

In the lengthy and oddly enthusiastic story, which has no byline, Popper mostly deflects blame although he does allow that both men should have shut down the beef long ago. Rutherford has responded on Twitter by systematically detailing the post's inaccuracies.

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How did this all begin? With an even worse example of Popper's Twitter habits, which include searching for people with whom to fight (he told TheFutureheart.com that it relieves boredom when touring).

In 2014, BuzzFeed writer Katie Notopoulos tweeted about a story Popper had shared on a 2001 episode of VH1's "Behind the Music." He said that he had gotten too fat to masturbate without getting chest pains.

She didn't tweet at Popper, or make fun of him, but simply wondered why there was so little information available about such an unusual story. But Popper, who apparently searches obsessively for any mentions of his name, joined the conversation and quickly turned it into a bacchanal of misogyny, rape jokes and name-calling.

At some point, Rutherford chimed in and made a lifelong enemy of Popper, a man-baby swathed in a bandolier filled with delusions of relevance.

"Female writers take such a ridiculous amount of abuse online, to begin with, and that is one of the things that bothers me about Twitter," Rutherford said. "Some of the things that he said were absolutely horrendous."

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To be fair, Rutherford continued to use Popper as a punchline to incongruous jokes for the following three years, trolling him for the comic value. That's not the greatest use of one's spare time, although Twitter's character limit does beg the invention of shortcuts for referencing sadness and decline.

Rutherford could have let it go, and admits as much, while Popper should really stop searching for his name.

"It's like the movie 'Candyman.' If you tweeted John Popper's name three times you'd wake up with your mentions filled with Blues Traveler tweets," Rutherford said. "The way he operates on Twitter invites people to interact with him."

Things escalated when Rutherford posted a comment on Popper's public Facebook page, which has 15,000 followers. Popper keeps referring to this as his private Facebook page despite the fact that anyone can read and comment on his posts.

Rutherford said he negotiated a truce because he was worried that one of Popper's Twitter or Facebook followers would actually do something stupid. They agreed to ignore each other but that fell apart when Rutherford's other Twitter account, an automated bot which randomly generates nonsense tweets, pulled up Popper's name.

And that's how we got to this point, which is both the apex and nadir of social media, pseudo-celebrity and beefs.

"It's probably pretty low" on the list of history's beefs, Rutherford admitted. "A random Central Kentucky guy versus the harmonica man from Blues Traveler. But it does have a strange sense of weirdness to it. A lot of people would probably look at it and at least do a double-take."

Reporter Jeffrey Lee Puckett can be reached at 502-582-4160 and jpuckett@courier-journal.com.