In the grand American tradition of breaking balls, what better way to celebrate the passing of a cultural icon than by ripping the piss out of him in front of his family and friends?
Fortunately, no cultural icons have died since the Summer of Death™ thrashed a bald Patrick Swayze to an early grave; so instead, let me present you with my ten least favorite things about working for my best friend, Robert Dobbs jr. — creator of the infamous Blognigger.com.
10. Bob is a money-hungry bastard.
I wouldn’t go so far as to call Bob a cheap Jew — but he is certainly one of the most scheming Jews I’ve ever met.
In April of ‘08, as soon as BN got an ounce of traffic, Bob immediately became convinced that the site was going to become his ticket to financial independence. He was excited as hell and got his Google AdSense bullshit all tweaked and optimized so that when lightning struck, he’d be ready to collect the big payoff.
He was like a barely-black Wile E. Coyote, getting all his Acme shit into place and then writing an extremely targeted post to try and attract the sharks at Gawker. He crafted it painstakingly, writing exactly what he thought they’d want to hear. It worked, and Gawker ate it the fuck up. It’s still the biggest day of traffic BN ever had.
He had taken the day off from work and had breakfast with me — when he saw the comments start flooding in on his phone, he started skipping down the street like a kid whose school had been blown up. He went back to his house and descended on his laptop like a monocle-wearing Shylock.
Analysis? With his Google AdSense locked and loaded, his 10,000 visits made him just under three (US $3) dollars.
These days, it’s well known that with the exception of Perez Hilton, no ONE person can actually make a living blogging. Today we know that even blogs with 20 writers can barely break even; but in the heady Spring of 2008, Bob had to find out the hard way.
9. The T-Shirt Episode
After he discovered that Google AdSense would make him less than a thousandth of a cent per visit, Bob was crushed. He decided to turn to making T-shirts, initially envisioning a “DESTROY, DON’T DEVELOP” shirt that Park Slope hipsters would wear around the neighborhood. He fantasized about how it wouldn’t say “Blognigger,” but how when people wearing it bumped into other guys “in the know,” they’d all secretly wink, knowing that it was a “Blognigger” joint.
What a queer.
I don’t wanna say that Bob is an arrogant guy, but let’s just say that Bob once considered joining the Navy to have the world see HIM.
Ironically, this is the one shirt that might have actually sold, if he hadn’t been so much of a pussy that he literally thought the DEVELOP DON’T DESTROY ‘tards would sue him for copyright infringement. He pulled it off the Cafe Press website, and instead aimed for the following bafflingly unsellable trash:
(I swear on my fucking balls that these are real comps — Bob had them made by a local graphic artist in June of 2008.)
He started with this:
When he sent it to me with the subject “THE DOPEST” (just looked in my yahoo inbox) I was in disbelief — I asked him what fucking universe was he in that he thought any non-suicidal human would wear something like that onto the streets of NYC. As if taking the word “nigger” off of the shirt made it wearable. Fucking jackass.
Amazingly, Bob remained steadfast, replying that, well, his black readers could still wear them.
I said, “Dude, you don’t have any black readers.”
He knew that I was right, but it was astounding to watch him keep floundering, trying to make the shirts less offensive while retaining their cool, completely missing the fucking point like a polish Laserdisc salesman.
He kept going, finally having the ingenious idea to use an anagram generator to come up with the ludicrous names toward the bottom:
Looking at these fuckin’ things still blows me away.
It’s like creating an “I’m gonna rape children” shirt and wearing it to PS 321. No, fuck that — it doesn’t need an analogy: He wanted people to wear a shirt with a big-lipped blackface “coon” minstrel on it through the streets of Brooklyn.
I’ve rarely met anyone smarter than Bob — he was just led astray by his scheming Jewry, blinded by his frustration that the gold ring was just out of his reach.
To this day, he has never sold a single T-shirt.
8. Bob is a cheap jew.
The idea of paying me for anything I did for him, whether it was submitting him to a zillion jerkoff digg / reddit / stumbleupon shitholes in the beginning, or writing his fucking posts for him at the end, would never in a billion years have crossed Bob’s mind.
He is proud of being a cheap Jew — at the end, he would let whole posts go by without reading the entire final product, but would INSIST on certain little tidbits being there and then checking them himself to make sure I had put them in.
The most recent one that comes to mind was in our final post, where he demanded that I include that completely irrelevant tip on how to avoid Chinese food delivery charges.
7. Bob looks at my wife’s tits.
Bob has his own white wife whose tits he could look at, but instead he constantly looks at my white wife’s tits.
It’s not that I’m threatened, it’s just that I can’t stand having to listen to her bitch to me about what a douche he is.
Here’s a pro-tip for gentlemen everywhere: (I learned this from a girl I dated in college) Girls have fucking EYES, and they can see YOUR eyes. If YOUR eyes are pointed at their TITS, they can tell you’re looking at their TITS. That is all.
6. Bob can be a “close-talker” and his breath is not always what I would call “aqua-fresh”.
Sometimes, especially when he smokes hemps, Bob will rant and wave his arms but not understand how close he’s standing to you. It is fucking hard to concentrate on what he’s saying while you do that polite little cheek-turn dance to continually try to avoid the brunt of his blasts.
One time at a diner on the Upper West Side in the late 90s, a college-age waitress involuntarily recoiled from him as he breathed his order onto her face. You could tell she felt terrible about reacting — it was just a completely involuntary fight-or-flight response — we had been smoking hash all weekend and his breath probably triggered her brain’s danger sensors because it smelled like a rotting corpse.
5. Bob is racist.
Technically, it’s hard to understand why Bob should be able to use the n-word at all: Bob is BARELY black — his skin tone is lighter than the small of my Sephardic wife’s back. (His dad is an actual black man, but he also sounds like Bryant Gumbel, thus making it a “push”.)
Bob looks almost exactly like a 1980’s style bottle of Yoo-hoo. For Halloween he should get a little bottle cap Kangol and a Potassium butt plug. Yoo-hoo!
I guess Bob has serious issues because of how he was treated by black people growing up. He relates to his white Jewish mother because she sucked his balls like all my people’s mothers do. He should be in therapy, but instead, he got an internet.
4. Bob listens to 50% of what you say and looks around a lot when you talk to him.
I fucking hate people who do this, and he’s the biggest offender ever.
It’s like he’s looking around to see if someone cooler is coming. One time we bumped into Black Thought a block from the Knitting Factory downtown — we were both fucking starstruck, and yet Bob was still looking around while we were kissing the guy’s ass.
Who the fuck are you looking for now, Jimi Hendrix?
3. The Thelonious Monk post
He took the site down so here it is:
When Bob posted this, I told him that I would stop reading his blog if he ever did something like that again.
2. Bob stole my work like the black Elvis.
It wasn’t just that I would spend hours doing his homework like George McFly, it was his thankless attitude like I was the privileged one to be writing shit for him.
In the beginning we’d at least get high and walk around the park talking about ideas — the guy is a genius and those times kicked serious ass.
By the end though, he was so pompous that he would leave me these directional voicemails like I was a secretary. This August after we did the Dash Snow piece (my personal favorite) there was this one voicemail he left me while he was driving — it kept cutting out but I listened to the whole thing anyway, taking notes on my laptop and trying to piece shit together.
First I was missing words, then whole sentences, and with my ear pressed to the phone and straining to hear if he had cut out for good, I had The Moment. I sort of looked up, and feeling like that broad in the Devil Wears Prada, I just thought, “What the fuck am I doing?”
1. Bob used the “Blognigger” brand to systematically exploit white people, suckering them in and saying the things that he knew white people wished black people would say.
Oh wait — that last one is actually something that I loved.
“Robert Dobbs Jr.” — I raise my glass to you. Way to pick an original pseudonym, you complete and total fucking hack.
You always wanted to be the Dave Chappelle of blogging, and you finally did it: You broke your contract, quit your job, and hired a white writer funnier than you.
A lotta people love ya — on behalf of the fans, thank you for everything. You were right — “Blognigger” was an ingenious name. It’s been one hell of a ride ya prick — unlike the GI Joes you kept from me in Ms. Hiller’s fourth grade class, thanks for this time letting me play.
Leave a Reply
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
once again…….SBTC shows how lame it is by explaining itself way too much. how about just continuing to write good articles? This is seriously the most pussified shit.
11.11.09 at 12:20 pm
it’s pretty good. so FUCK YOU
11.11.09 at 12:21 pm
I didnt read a word of that, you suck.
11.11.09 at 12:21 pm
yet another self-masturbatory post. at this point, if he attempts to come back in yet another incarnation for a third go-round, he’s going to be run out of dodge with pitchforks.
11.11.09 at 12:23 pm
Congrats. This is the best
11.11.09 at 12:24 pm
I’m waiting for the Blognigger documentary.
BTW that 3D Jiggaboo is pretty fucking rad.
11.11.09 at 12:28 pm
the only part of that jewish cousin piece that i remember or cared about was the part about picking up the chinese food. i’m pretty jew though, but with all the money i’m saving buy picking up my food i would totally buy a born giggler shirt. sheeeiiit
11.11.09 at 12:28 pm
Good read, it’s like reality blog-o-vision.
11.11.09 at 12:34 pm
They’re going to milk this shit until the end of time
11.11.09 at 12:34 pm
Hahaha heyo!!
Neil reference FTW
11.11.09 at 12:38 pm
Self-masturbatory? I guess that isn’t technically redundant, but it still sounds pretty stupid.
This was good enough. I like to listen to people talk shit. Benjamin comes off as a fairly lame dude, but at least he’s not calling people “nigga” and “son” all the time.
11.11.09 at 12:45 pm
(anymore)
11.11.09 at 12:45 pm
I knew it. he’s 10 times funnier than blognigger. this is hilarious.
11.11.09 at 12:58 pm
A really solid goodbye – and in the form that he would have wanted (sniff)
I remember the T-shirt days and the “click on my ads” shit. It seems like 10 years ago. The T-shirts turned a lot of people off – it’s amazing to hear what was going on backstage.
Heh – anyone remember “Bitter Kevin?”
11.11.09 at 1:04 pm
You’re back! You are my Blogbrother!
11.11.09 at 1:20 pm
Yeah, I remember Bitter Kevin. Wonder what that losers up to. Shit, now I’d feel bad if I found out he was killed by a gas truck.
@lb what Jewis cousin piece? You’re confused again bertha
11.11.09 at 1:21 pm
good thing those people donated money out of their own pockets to keep the train rolling.
11.11.09 at 1:24 pm
ill start clicking on ad here:)
11.11.09 at 1:47 pm
Who wrote the post about black people in the theater and the one about happy endings? I’ll stick with whoever wrote those. Oh, and the one about not wanting to have sex with black women like Tyra Banks. Too good.
11.11.09 at 2:09 pm
Diaper fund = weed fund.
11.11.09 at 2:16 pm
This actually made me laugh a lot. And isn’t that the point of a pointless blog? If you’re laughing, it’s working, no need to analyze that shit to death. It’s funny.
11.11.09 at 2:18 pm
Shirley MacLaine called, she wants her missing personalities back.
11.11.09 at 2:26 pm
So watcha gonna do now Benyamine????
11.11.09 at 2:29 pm
I got a kick out of it.
11.11.09 at 3:08 pm
and what the HELL happened to the black beatles? all of the posts have been deleted and now its known as the PReck beatles?
11.11.09 at 3:10 pm
Eat the cake.
11.11.09 at 3:13 pm
maybe it’s Jim Goad? weird reference to the Kampf board comments re: the Navy:
“I don’t wanna say that Bob is an arrogant guy, but let’s just say that Bob once considered joining the Navy to have the world see HIM.” or everybody has too much time on their hands, including myself.
11.11.09 at 3:22 pm
Funny shit.
11.11.09 at 3:43 pm
So Gavin knew all along? Was it his idea, when BN wanted to quit?
P.S. I would have bought the destroy don’t develop t-shirt.
11.11.09 at 3:44 pm
So some half black but mostly white dude pretends to be a tough city black in brooklyn and starts a blog. gets some initial buzz. gets bored with the idea in 6 months. gets some jew who may or may not want to have sex with the mostly white dude to write the blog posts. tries to make money with it. fails. fesses up. jew gets mad and writes this post. Everyone involved in this is like those faggots down south who claimed to have caught bigfoot. Went through all that trouble making the body and getting press coverage and then nobody gave a shit. You have not participated in some grand scheme or scam on the squares. You’ve only taken advantage of the anonymity of the internet to occupy our thoughts for less time than it takes me to drop a big deuce.
11.11.09 at 4:41 pm
Yo! Nigga please, son. Represent!
[That made me laugh]
11.11.09 at 4:54 pm
i miss blognigger still…i don’t care who pretends 2 b him
11.11.09 at 5:11 pm
Is it me or is this one of the funniest bits in the history of the site?
11.11.09 at 6:05 pm
it’s just a FUCKIN BLOG! JEEZ!
11.11.09 at 6:17 pm
hah. Penis Largo, DDS you should give news summaries.
11.11.09 at 6:20 pm
wait, so should i sell my anus on the interwebs now?
11.11.09 at 7:27 pm
delusions of grandeur. you are now (wait for it) forgotten.
11.11.09 at 7:42 pm
@Penis Largo, bolo, Jose
I gotta say, I hear where you guys are coming from, but you really are either in denial or jealous or both.
It’s like going into a Rocky Horror Picture Show movie and being like WHAT THE FUCK IS THE BIG DEAL THIS IS JUST A STUPID MOVIE!
You may think it’s retarded, or overblown, just a blog, forgotten, or any number of other opinionated labels. In the end this guy was a phenomenon. It caught fire and he made a name for himself – love him or hate him, he became known and got a spot writing on StreetCarnage – the place where you leave comments and sit in the audience.
It’s not easy to do what he did – that’s why you can’t do it. If you think you can, prove me wrong.
RIP Blognigger, thanks for making me laugh
11.11.09 at 7:56 pm
you guys are taking the internet way too seriously
11.11.09 at 9:02 pm
Destroy Don’t Develop would actually take off. And it would be good for Develop Don’t Destroy, since it always helps in negotiations to have someone crazier than you to point to.
11.11.09 at 9:07 pm
@EricF
Dude was certainly not a phenom. AIDS and The Beatles are phenoms. BN is/was a phony. In the grand scheme of things it doesn’t matter what he is. His alexa ratings were always shitty. The occasional Gawker shit boosted his profile but never enough to make him any cash. And if this is some sort of gotcha joke and he will say “ha! I was kidding. I really am black and not as faggy as I seem” Nobody will believe him without pictures. IN conclusion, the internet is lousy with homos pretending to be something else.
11.11.09 at 9:50 pm
one of the best posts in a long time.
11.11.09 at 10:07 pm
this is like the coward Robert Ford shooting Jesse James in the back!
11.11.09 at 10:54 pm
@Penis Largo
your use of the phrase “lousy with…” was enjoyable…a nice retro vibe that i haven’t felt in a while.
11.11.09 at 11:34 pm
I got took. It was worth it.
I think the whiteface minstrel MIGHT have played, btw. Nah, who am I kidding. Only a kid with a death wish would have worn that.
11.11.09 at 11:44 pm
I’m sorry. It’s not a blog.
11.12.09 at 2:33 am
taking you guys off my bookmarks. this site has become consistently worse everyday. i cant even bear to read any of the comments anymore. thanks in advance for giving me an extra 15 minutes of my day back again. i’m finished.
11.12.09 at 5:12 am
Bob Dobbs Jr
fuck off with that subgenius shit, you guys are just nerds
11.12.09 at 5:40 am
Both Bob and Benjamin have a lot of talent. For those of you who think this whole effort was a big waste of time like the bigfoot comparison, think again. Benjamin’s right, blogs don’t make money, but they do get writers known.
Benjamin, you’re an excellent, excellent writer. I read a lot of shitty writers with degrees who would give anything to have the spark you’ve got. Do yourself a favor and do something with this talent. A book, a screenplay, whatever it is.
I’ve emailed BN in the past, and would be open to working with you. Even if it’s not me, enough people in the creative industry know about “Blognigger” so that you could get some decent connections out of this.
Don’t waste your time on twitter. Continue to blog, but don’t go crazy. Instead, get out and write something real.
Thanks for the laughs.
11.12.09 at 7:00 am
Before I found “Bob Blog Nigger” I was, to put it bluntly, FUCKED. Now I have quit my job, thrown away my watch, stopped giving a SHIT what THEY think, and have stopped exercising and eating right. I tell people just what I think, and get more and better sex, just by being myself. (I never would have believed it!) I’ve lost all interest in alcohol, sedatives, or stimulants, but attained the mental stability to withstand and enjoy incredibly powerful hallucinogens. Almost all my dreams have come true, and I found True Love to boot! I WON!! SO THERE, FUCKERS!!
11.12.09 at 7:08 am
re:
““Robert Dobbs Jr.” — I raise my glass to you. Way to pick an original pseudonym, you complete and total fucking hack.
You always wanted to be the Dave Chappelle of blogging, and you finally did it: You broke your contract, quit your job, and hired a white writer funnier than you.”
I wish I could write shit this good
11.12.09 at 7:25 am
Excellent! It’s just as I had imagined.
11.12.09 at 11:32 am
the best tv-shirt idea is the simple white couple bank of america header. it sums it all up completely!
11.12.09 at 4:35 pm