INDYCAR BLOG: Requiem for the Silent Pagoda

What the hell am I going to do with these boxes of Burkina Fasan psychotropic lava-wandering stoats?

The only reason I bought them is because Roy Hobbson occasionally used them for his own (nefarious) personal purposes, and let's be frank here - anything you can do to stay on Hobbson's good side is worth doing, because you never know when he'll slip you a cocktail laced with Ipecac, and you want the odds of that happening to stay low.

At any rate, the news we've all been dreading for months was confirmed today when it was announced by Mr. Hobbson that the Silent Pagoda - the arbiter of all that is snarky and (bluntly) batshit crazy in the IndyCar blogosphere - has carjacked its last Eurasian diplomat.

This news means that the rest of us will be futilely scrambling to get Lindy Thackston to switch allegiances to our own blogs, knowing full well that it was only Hobbson's HORMONE-DRENCHED MACHISMO that got the Thack to descend into our bridge-dwelling trollworld of blogging in the first place.

It also means that the IndyCar world will be less fun to be around. Tacked onto the retirement of My Name is IRL in June, that's two gigantic losses for the IndyCar community in the past six months - not just the fans, who loved reading the blogs, but for the series for whom the blogs served as occasionally perplexing, moderately insulting, but overwhelmingly entertaining gateway drugs to the sport.

A serious vacuum now exists in the blogosphere, and while we'll all try to fill it there's no way we will succeed. For my part, I lack the erudition, the insight, and the sheer "What the **** is he talking about???" genius that made the Pagoda a must-read for anyone who cares at all about IndyCar.

Knowing that you can't replace a Hobbson or his forever-erect Golden Spatula, we'll all shed a tear as we witness the end of another era. I know Hobbson would have wanted us to go out and drink a toast to his honor and then cut out all the girlish weeping, but since I'm not keen on sipping lighter fluid I'll just have to settle for a Kleenex.

I do know that he'll appreciate this sentiment, though:

"There goes Roy Hobbson... the best there ever was at this game."