Dean's World

Heather Bare, known to many in the blogosphere as "Momma Bear," has passed away.

There are those who say that someone you know online can never be a real friend, but that's a lie. We exchanged barbs and jokes in comments many times, and chatted many many times through instant messaging, often joking, sometimes arguing, always friendly.

In the early days of the blogosphere, Momma Bear was one of the original crew dubbed as part of the "League of Bellicose Women," along with her co-blogger Kathy Kinsley. They were women who eschewed the stereotype that women were soft and cuddly "anti-war" and men macho "pro-war." During the early days of the war I made sure to read her and Kathy's site almost daily to get a cure from the sexist drivel about women's supposed dainty sensibilities and fluttery tendency to get the vapors at the idea that people might actually, y'know, get hurt or something in a war.

She was an American through and through, but was proud of her Scottish heritage and loved helping our mutual friend Andrew Ian Dodge with his writing and his terrific cross-atlantic blog, Dodgeblogium. She was also a maverick, a woman well into her 70s who'd been using computers since a time when women were almost never found in the field, becoming an expert on them when many of us were children who hadn't even seen our first computer yet.

Kathy has a tribute to Momma Bear here. Andrew has a tribute to Heather here.