SEE YOU IN THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY.

I should mention, now that he's gone ahead and pulled the trigger, that Tbogg has for years been one of my favorite writers -- and I needn't qualify that with "in the blogosphere," which is like calling someone the smartest guy on a National Review cruise. That he is known as a "liberal blogger" is just an accident of history, I think -- he's really a satirist (as his hilarious Filner summer camp chronicles show) who has hunted where, in our low mean time, the ducks pretty consistently wind up: Out on absurdly elevated media perches, defending the indefensible in loud, quacking voices, just begging for his buckshot.

Part of a satirist's racket is wisdom, and Tbogg has supplied enough of that ("no one is going to get a blogging Pulitzer for being the fastest to post what they just saw and heard on the TV"), but I've been most grateful for the laughs -- for the times when he has greeted the sententious argh-blargh of internet hierophants with appropriate seriousness, or got right to the nub on the works of Ayn Rand:

One assumes that it is somewhere around page 600 when Dagny Taggart has sex with Hank Reardon but it ends badly because, while sex is the highest celebration of human values, giving your partner an orgasm because they expect one is just sanctioning your own victimhood.

I speak in the present perfect continuous tense because I can't imagine we've heard the last of him -- though if he slips off like Rimbaud into the quarries and stays silent on this foolish world forever, I can't say I would blame him.