The Vote Is In

2017 is in the books. Time to gather the postings and make a single book, a book to join the others, which started in 2009. Thus, I've been at this nine years, and 2017 was a watershed year.

I created the most postings in 2017: 153. This brings my year-to-date total to 1,125 postings. A formidable number that shows continuity of effort. For some reason, I don't seem to suffer any writer's block.

My section of the county seems to have celebrated the end of 2017 and the start of 2018 with fireworks. For 10 minutes or so, it was like July 4th at midnight. This year it seemed a little more excessive than other years. I don't know if it had anything to do with President Trump. Registered Democrats are said to outnumber Republicans in the county, but who knows.

Hard to believe the residents can be happy about President Trump and his new tax bill. Being in a very highly taxed state, county and township, there can't be many, if any, whose taxes won't exceed the $10,000 threshold, therefore exposing more money to the adjusted gross income, thereby creating a higher tax obligation. Perhaps my celebrating neighbors are just bad and math and think they're going to still come out ahead.

The county residents who created lines at the Tax Receiver's office aren't bad at math. They wanted to prepay their real estate 2018 taxes and claim the deduction for 2017. So many people showed up to do this the story made the front page of the NYT. Alas and alack, the party-pooping IRS seems to have put the kibosh on this tactic. No soup for you. No loophole. Again.

All my yearly blog compilations have started with a dedication: to my muse, my family, my buddies at the racetrack. I've pretty much run out of family and close friends to make a dedication to. So, Time magazine makes a big deal out of its annual person, or entity-of-the-year cover, so why can't I make a big deal out of my announcement?

Lynne Truss dedicated 'Eats, Shoots and Leaves, The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation'...

To the memory of the striking Bolshevik printers of St. Petersburg who, in 1905, demanded to be paid the same rate for punctuation marks as for letters, and thereby directly precipitated the first Russian Revolution. 

Therefore, I'm dedicating my 2017 collection to something even harder to understand than President Trump. I'm dedicating the collection...

For The Incomprehensible Apostrophe. Long May I  Remember How to Use It.

There are five postings in the 2017 that concern the apostrophe.  I even wrote to my very sometime pen pal Russell Baker asking him what his opinion was on apostrophes. I only get an answer sometimes to my correspondence with Mr Baker. He is a nonagenarian now, and in 2015 he answered one of my missives with a handwritten scrawl on a personalized piece of The New York Times Observer notepaper with his name in the lower right corner that went, "Now that I have attained senility I am exercising the old man's right to stop answering the mail. Best, Russell Baker."

(Notice, that even at 90, Mr. Baker uses the apostrophe correctly when writing ...old man's right...My goal in life: to continue to know how to use it.)

That acknowledgement and non-response was to a birthday card I sent him celebrating his turning 90. In December 2017 I sent him my latest blog entry concerning the apostrophe that was set off by the WSJ A-Hed piece on apostrophes, and their disappearance, basically due to texting. The symbol is beneath the top virtual keyboard, so it goes pretty much unused. It is a pain to get to, and that's if the texter even knows how to use it.

I am pretty sure Mr. Baker will continue to make good on his promise to now not answer his mail. I'm sure he has an opinion on apostrophes—I've already written about his response to my 2001 query on hyphens—he's just not going to share it with me.

I once read that after he left office, former president Ulysses.S. Grant commented he got way less mail once he stopped answering it.

Therefore, the 2017 collection is dedicated to the apostrophe. It leaves a good many of us speechless.

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