Originally published on Forbes.com on May 29th, 2012
Blogging about your own blog represents the height of self-absorption. That is why I have resolved to only do it at century marks. So this one makes 300. Not a huge number, but it was enough to save Greece from the Persians.
I Love To Hear From You Even If You Don’t Like Me
In particular I would like to thank my guest posters and commenters and I mean all the commenters including charliemurf who wrote:
Are there any editors working the day shift? If so, why in the world was this allowed to go to print in a magazine of your stature?
One thing you apparently fail to mention is that the income tax is, per statute, VOLUNTARY. Never mind that the government is entirely illegitimate in the first place and enforces their “authority” at the point of a gun. Never mind that the monetary system is a stupid rigged game nobody can win unless they’re making the rules. Never mind that all your blogs are pointless and masturbatory because of the two above mentioned facts.
Plautus never got back to me with statutory citations but his characterization of my posts did inspire a piece that I had some fun with mourning the Disneyfication of the raunchiest block in America.
But Even More If You Do
Of course not all the comments are negative. I was really gratified to hear from Mike Johnson, Scout Executive of the Quivira Council (Boy Scouts of America) when I wrote about the Council’s property tax case:
Thank you for your article, I appreciate your coverage (the links to the website and camp promotion video were great!) and your personal insight as a Scout in your youth.
You are truly the Dave Barry of tax blogging. I really enjoy your posts. Funny, clear, interesting.
I actually passed that comment on to Dave Barry through his assistant. He responded that he is often referred to as the “Peter Reilly” of humor columnists. I’m not kidding, but I think he was.
The Tom Sawyer of Blogging Thanks The Other Painters
My most prolific commenter has been Robert Baty, who fell into the trap that I lay for all coherent commenters, conversion into a guest poster. Mr. Baty had a career with the IRS and has carried his concern with the travesty of “basketball ministers” into retirement. Alan Collinge and Tim Smith have brought the concerns of a younger generation into the blog, most notably the student debt issue. The Driscoll case on the parsonage exclusion turned the blog into a first amendment forum for a while with guests posts from Mr. Baty, Andrew Seidel of the Freedom From Religion Foundation and the Reverend William Thornton, who has modestly benefited from the parsonage exclusion, but is unsympathetic to the likes of Driscoll.
Why I Love Jennifer Aniston Even When She Is Not Naked
If you look elsewhere on the page you can see what my most popular posts have been. Seem like Forbes.com readers like billionaires. Go figure. Four out of five of the top posts concern a billionaire – either Warren Buffett or that Facebook kid whose name I have trouble spelling. Of course for really good numbers, by my standards anyway, you combine a billionaire with a picture of Jennifer Aniston. Jennifer Aniston is not naked in the picture. That would be great to have Jennifer Aniston naked. I mean putting in references to naked pictures of Jennifer Aniston or Jennifer Aniston in the nude is the type of cynical manipulation people do for search engine optimization. I don’t approve of that type of thing. If you must have it, though, here is a link. Sorry, embedding for it is disabled.
They Are Just Not Biting My Flame Bait
Frankly those are not the posts most beloved by me. I actually like them all or I would not have hit the publish button. I won’t say what my favorite is but I will mention a couple that I had larger hopes for because of the “flame bait” that I inserted. In “From The Halls of Montezuma to The Jail of Concord“, I suggested that the Marine Corps Hymn should be revised. I thought the title “Would Obama Force Jesus To Hand Out Birth Control Pills ?” would have attracted more attention. It did attract a few commenters who don’t get satire. Jonathan Swift had the same problem. In a further piece on the same topic I pointed out the eerie similarity in the views of Pope Paul VI and contemporary radical feminists on pornography and chemical birth control. I had attracted radical feminist attention by accident with a guest post from my friend Tom Cahill.
Some Actual Practical Tips Being Ignored
Getting to the practical aspect of the blog I think my posts on the investment interest election – one on missing it and another on overdoing it – deserve more attention. The errors that show up in the private letter rulings I cite strike me as the type of errors that if they happened once will happen many times. I give specific instructions on what to look for on returns to identify them.
On The Video
Leonidas’s line “We will fight in the shade” was not topped for over 2,000 years when Joshua Chamberlain, with his understrength regiment out of ammunition and unable to retreat gave the order to fix bayonets observing that “We will have the advantage of moving down the hill.”
By the way you can’t watch the movie Gettysburg too many times, but for the story of the 300 you are better off listening to Professor’s Elizabeth Vandiver’s Herodotus – The Father of History from the Teaching Company.
You can follow me on twitter @peterreillycpa.