Dedicated party boy and known cat lover Alex Pareene is leaving us today to go work at a hair salon. So let's take a look back at some of his best work.

Alex has been here for a long time, so in need of some help sifting through to find the real gems, we solicited some of Alex's current and former colleagues for suggestions, and amazingly a few responded! They gave us this:

• Sheila McClear fondly remembered Alex's How to Not Storm Off the Internet in a Huff
• Nick Denton ominously said "Look at the obits." He and Brian Moylan must share a mind, because Brian suggested Alex's lovely and smart posthumous Ted Kennedy assessment.
• Grizzled recluse/charming Wonkette editor Ken Layne enjoyed one of Alex's Goodbye Wonkette! posts, in which he told a funny story about Tucker Carlson.
• Grizzled recluse Choire Sicha was fond of Harold Ford's Shadowy Associates: Everyone We Hate.
• Alex's American Idol pal, former Idolator Maura Johnston, enjoyed Alex's multimedia disection of Sarah Palin's incoherency.
• Shameless Newsweek monkey Gabriel Snyder cited many wonderful posts. Alex loves lists, so here, a list:
        - Happy First Post-9/11 9/11!
        - Gawker Endorsement: Don't Vote for Bloomberg
        - The Birthers: Who Are They and What Do They Want?
        - Let Us Consider the NYU Twerps
  (Pareene is, in general, a great champion of twerp-considering.)
• Alex's girlfriend remembers the day that he gave that nice kitty away. She also points us to Alex's lovely editorial about Tom Brady.
• Richard Lawson really likes when Alex gets mad about Maureen Dowd. And that Alex Chilton remembrance was pretty great too.
• Hamilton Nolan enjoys when Alex tells Apple fanboys to grow up.

Basically everyone here and elsewhere likes what Alex does, because he's just a brilliant kid. (He is, amazingly, still young enough to be called a kid.) His writing is hysterical, his voice is unique, and his political mind is finely tuned into the idiocies and hypocrisies of our crumbling democracy. We'll have a new politics person eventually, but no one will be able to replace him. He's simply one of a kind.

Gawker's loss is the War Room's gain, starting next Wednesday. We wish him luck and many, many appletinis.