Requiescat In Pace: Kathy Schaidle

Kathy Schaidle has passed away, much too young.  She was one of the pioneering writers on Saint Blogs and I will miss her.  For a while she wrote a column for Our Sunday Visitor which was akin to Mark Twain writing blurbs for a sardine company.  When Our Sunday Visitor in 2007 refused to publish a column she wrote criticizing Earth Day she advised them as to what they could do with her job.   In classic Kathy style she wrote her obituary:

Following a tedious rendezvous with ovarian cancer, Kathy Shaidle has died, wishing she’d spent more time at the office.

Her tombstone reads: GET OFF MY LAWN!

She is relieved she won’t have to update her LinkedIn profile, shave her legs, or hear “Creep” by Radiohead ever again. Some may even be jealous that she’s getting out of enduring a Biden presidency.

Kathy was a writer, author, columnist and blogging pioneer, as proud of her first book’s Governor General’s Award nomination as of her stint as “Ed Anger” for the Weekly World News. A target for “cancel” culture before the term was coined, she was denounced by all the best people, sometimes for contradictory reasons.

Kathy did not lead a particularly “full life,” her existence having been comprised mostly of a series of unpleasant surprises. Her favourite corporeal pleasure was saying, “I told you so,” which she was able to utter with justification multiple times a day.

Go here to read the rest.  May you now be composing blog posts Kathy about the Beatific Vision.

Update:  Mark Steyn remembers Kathy:

There will be time to discuss all that in the days ahead. But on Saturday evenings, for the past several years, Kathy was here every week to talk about movies. A decade or so back, I had suggested to the fellows who run Maclean’s that they snap her up to do a column on pop culture, because nobody wrote better on Joan Crawford, punk and a zillion other subjects. They were a little nervous of that, and somewhere along the way Maclean’s ceased to be a thing, and so at some point I just thought, “Aw, nuts! We should snap her up ourselves.”

What I particularly loved about Kathy’s film essays was the occasional glimpses she gave us of her own life. One should not take it all as gospel: She had a carefully constructed persona as an agoraphobic misanthrope who never left the flat. Whereas, as Mark Steyn cruisers who had the good fortune to be at her dinner table will attest, in real life she was gregarious and occasionally (as I told her a couple of weeks back somewhat to her horror) verging on bubbly. I had the pleasure a few years ago of introducing her to half the Canadian cabinet over pizza at the Prime Minister’s house. Reading about it afterwards, the highly-strung leftie bloggers were horrified at the thought of the hated Shaidle piercing the holy sanctum of 24 Sussex Drive like a one-woman trial run for the mob’s storming of the US Capitol. But the various ministers of the Crown seemed to enjoy the opportunity to shoot the breeze with her – as we all did.

Go here to read the rest.