TBogg is back!

[muriel_volestrangler]

If you didn't follow his blog, you were missing something. He had quit blogging in August, thanks to a wish to do more stuff in real life, but it seems he just can't quit the internets. He's quality - here were two of the "it won't be the same without you" posts, both from top-notch people themselves:

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&quot , 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.

http://alicublog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/see-you-in-norton-anthology.html

I'm going to miss TBogg, and not just because I stole from him so shamefully. His surrealist spoofing and damning ridicule was flat-out funny (as opposed to just snarky), sometimes two or three wisecracks detonating in the same sentence, and the sentences gathering momentum until the deceptively offhand powerhouse payoff. A blog post that begins "National vodka repository Peggy Noonan..." restoreth one's faith in comedy, and mankind. But it also wearying for a blogger such as TBogg to know that no matter how devastatingly a Nooner is zinged, there's no getting rid of her, just as there's no getting rid of David Brooks or Newt Gingrich or any other of the media pestilents that have been plaguing us since Ronald Reagan bronzed his hair. After awhile making fun loses some of its fun, and a blogger is danger of becoming bitter, and no one should become a bottler of Bitter Ironies, not when there's life to be led. After I hit "send" on this, I intend to walk barefoot into the backyard garden and inhale all that nature offers, assuming a gnat doesn't go up my nose, but that's a risk I'm willing to take.

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2013/06/the-blog-world-gets-a-whole-lot-blah-er

But he's back! Now at Raw Story:

Initially I received a lot of lovely offers from other blogs, big and small, offering me space if and when the mood struck me. And people said nice things about me in public which was kind of cool, in a Tom Sawyer at his own funeral kind of way. Then, much to my surprise, it turns out that life in the real world is a lot like a Lifetime movie -sad and messy and cliched and poorly acted – and those movies are hard enough to watch much less live in. I’m here to tell you folks, it’s not all moonlit walks on the beach like the brochures say. Who knew? Not me. If there is one thing I learned on the internet it is that you can create your own reality (see anything written by John Nolte at The Breitbart Memorial Unemployable Foundling Home if you think I’m funnin’ you).

But what I really discovered is that the internet with its blogs and twitter-twatting and shouty-facing and whatnots and whosis and urgent reporting of breaking stories – reporting that turns out to be wrong 90% of the time. Yeah, I’m looking at you CNN – is a hard thing to shake. Many was the time when I was pulled away from whatever book I was reading or a movie I was watching and fired up the ole iPad to check in with the rest of the world and see if it was still hellbent for perdition. (Spoiler alert : it is).

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/10/01/beach-blanket-boredom/

[Old and In the Way]

1. Thanks for the post!

Commented aand bookmarked....I knew we hadn't seen the last of the snarkmeister.