We don’t have enough righteously angry people here on the internets. Oh, sure, we’ve got a surplus of screaming ravers and foaming polemicists, but real Swiftian anger is a bridge too far for most of us, most of the time. It’s damned hard work, and you wouldn’t believe the pay.
I’ve been trying and failing to adequately explain why Bats Left, Throws Right was one of the first blogs I checked every morning, so I’ll outsource to Roy Edroso:
As Lance Mannion said today, “Weird this internet world we’ve built. Didn’t know Doghouse but feel like we’ve lost a old colleague with an office just down the hall.” After I got over the shock of hearing Doghouse Riley, aka Douglas Case of Indiana, was dead, I suffered an aftershock to realize that I’d not only never met him, but had only read his blog and corresponded with him a few times; his last email was an appeal to help some other blogger who was down on his luck. Yet I felt as if I knew him, because his presence as a writer was so vivid.
It helped that he wrote long. He could be quick and slashing, as he often was in the comments section here. But usually when he got into a subject, he’d stretch out comfortable and give, along with needed details and logical abutments, a sense that he was talking to you, rather than composing some polemic that would wow the wide world. And even if his talk led, as often, to some scorched earth, his was in the main a friendly voice, one you could listen to awhile….
Scott, at World O’Crap:
He was a master of the mot juste, able to poleaxe either a national brand punditaster* or a comment thread troll with a single deft blow, as though he’d spent his entire career working on a particularly urbane kill floor. He was a sly purveyor of praeteritio and a puncturer of apodictic certainty. And above all else, he was a gentleman, who didn’t assume that history began when he was born, who always referred to s.z. as “our hostess,” and who never walked past a question-beggar without dropping a fistful of whoop-ass in his or her tin cup.
Ave atque vale, Mr. Case. I imagine you in the afterlife, exchanging rude hand signals with General Stuck, while Tunch sits in your lap purring loudly.
A selection of some of my favorite Doghouse clips, finishing with the deeply-incorrect-under-the-circumstances one-liner that I want on my tombstone, if only I believed in tombstones: