Today, All Respect to Batocchio

Who once again did the yeoman's work of herding us notoriously flinchy bloggers together long enough to create this year's "Jon Swift Memorial Roundup".

Which, as Batocchio (of Vagabond Scholar) reminds us, is a:

...tradition started by the much missed Jon Swift/Al Weisel. He left behind some excellent satire, but was also a nice guy and a strong supporter of small blogs. As Lance Mannion puts it:

Our late and much missed comrade in blogging, journalist and writer Al Weisel, revered and admired across the bandwidth as the “reasonable conservative” blogger Modest Jon Swift, was a champion of the lesser known and little known bloggers working tirelessly in the shadows...

One of his projects was a year-end Blogger Round Up. Al/Jon asked bloggers far and wide, famous and in- and not at all, to submit a link to their favorite post of the past twelve months and then he sorted, compiled, blurbed, hyperlinked and posted them on his popular blog. His round-ups presented readers with a huge banquet table of links to work many of has had missed the first time around and brought those bloggers traffic and, more important, new readers they wouldn’t have otherwise enjoyed.

It may not have been the most heroic endeavor, but it was kind and generous and a lot of us owe our continued presence in the blogging biz to Al.

Excluding blogging, catching up with my long-overdue pile of correspondence and "Thank You" notes is my required writing through the end of the year.

And reading every single one of the posts Batocchio has compiled and offered up for our pleasure is my required reading.

Dive in and begin enjoying this embarrassment of riches here.

And don't forget to mind your manners and say "Thanks".