Cathy Seipp, R.I.P.

Los Angeles-based journalist Cathy Seipp—best known in the blogosphere for her excellent Cathy's World blog and her National Review Online columns–died yesterday of cancer.

She was an occasional Reason contributer and a full-time Friend of Reason–she helped organize a wonderful L.A. Press Club event for Nick Gillespie's Choice: The Best of Reason anthology and my own This is Burning Man .

Most importantly, especially for those of us in L.A. lucky enough to know her, she was every bit as funny, lively, and unpredictable in person as she was in her writing. Her wit and enormous capacity for friendship drew around her the most interesting swirling nexus of L.A. writers, politicos, and characters one could ever hope to meet.

I was only ever a peripheral member of her circle, but I enjoyed every moment, and the opportunity to be part of a world, strange and vast and bound together pretty much only by Cathy, including porn industry reporter and Jewish world chronicler the inexplicable Luke Ford ; the fiery defender of common decency and courtesy, advice columnist Amy Alkon; superpolitical journalist Mickey Kaus; leading lawblogger Eugene Volokh; French journalist (and wife of our old colleague Matt Welch) Emmanuelle Richard; and almost everyone who was interesting and fun and smart in the many worlds of L.A. journalism, most of which would not have intersected but for her.

I'll always treasure particularly the memory of an afternoon learning gun safety, loading and aiming techniques with her and Professor Volokh and a pack of her wonderful friends. Los Angeles, and the world of journalism, will be duller and sadder without her. For people wishing to honor her memory, she has requested donations to the Humane Society in her name.