This is Viewpoints for Thursday, January 4, 2018

An accounting

It was way back in the dawn of 2017 when Mike Ganas said he’d try to “blow all the old records away” by writing letters to the editor. I figured that such a claim demanded an impartial record keeper to tally them up. Well, 2017 has come and gone and the results are in. (As the song goes, “Ain’t it funny how time slips away.”)

In an Excel sheet, I recorded 1,625 letters to the editor in 2017 by 599 different people. Jim Costello is the winner of this year’s Golden Pen Award. With 52 letters published in the newspaper, Costello surpassed Frank Gadbois by 11 letters. Arthur Brook and Faye Tanner tied for third at 40 apiece (ignoring Brook’s recent letter that was republished). Rounding out the top 10 were Norris (33), Hubbard (30), Middleton (30), Pecor (25), Norcott (23), and Richard Jones (21). (Topolewski and Lee just missed the top ten at 19 apiece). Ganas tied with Snyder and Gatlyn for 16th place at 15 letters apiece. Yours truly came in with seven, just behind my favorite writer, John Dobson, at eight.

There were 399 one-time letter writers. 73 wrote twice, and 34 were in the company of Sen. David Perdue with three apiece.

My two favorite letters this year were written by Mike Underwood (Feb. 1) and William Hursey (May 18). Other stellar letters were written by Richard Jones, Doug Garbert, Dan Topolewski, Robert Blackshear, Robert Buck and Joe Gunner. Gunner, I’d join CRAP-C any day.

It took a little time to input the records, but I learned a couple functions in Excel that sped things up. Listening to John Conlee, Hank Williams, George Jones or any of the country greats while putting the letters in made it hardly seem like work.

Linguistic police on patrol

Thank you for printing 2017’s List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English (for misuse, overuse and general uselessness) in the Telegraph. As a career linguist and perhaps sometimes overzealous member of our grammar police, I hasten to applaud Lake Superior State University’s leadership in the battle against egregious offenses to good taste. I was particularly pleased to find “impactful” and “tons of” on their list for banishment. May I be permitted to suggest a few additions for the trash bin?

First, in the category of redundancies, to their “hot water heater” let me add “SAT test” and “PIN number.” For overuse, let’s bury some of the expressions in the following sentence, which I’m sure will sound familiar to members of the TV news audience: “Look, at the end of the day, Congress will literally kick the can down the road again.”

Finally, let me add a couple from recent papers I’ve graded. Why do people insist on “relatable” instead of relevant? And where in the world did the expression “based off of” get hatched? That is one of the most illogical but lamentably ubiquitous expressions that has crept somehow into current usage, not to mention that “off of” itself is always redundant.

I’m sure your readers can come up with their own list, so keep vigilant out there, all you punctilious defenders of good usage! Oh, my! Did I just add the most overused punctuation mark in the book.

Comedians of the Year

The winner of the 2017 Comedians of the Year award was an easy choice. The title holder was the most amusing and side splitting of all the candidates. From the ineffective year-long screeching about President Trump and the goofy request to disrupt families at Thanksgiving, the winner was a no-brainer. We will always delight in the merriment supplied by their flailing, amateur efforts to sell fantasy crimes. And the dimwitted Twitter memes will be collector’s items someday.

Oh, I almost forgot the grins and giggles over the Russian skit, Nancy Pelosi press conferences and wacko environmental alarms. Of course, it’s always a hoot when someone is so open minded their brains fall out. But not every performance was funny.

They missed the mark on Al Franken, Matt Lauer and Harvey Weinstein’s Three Amigos tour. We still cringe when viewing Maxine Water videos. The painful “What Gender am I” show bombed. And we didn’t buy tickets to that outlandish Safe Space clambake.

But what put them over the top was the laugh-filled, inspired and crazy-funny Hillary Clinton Blame-A-Thon. No matter how many times we watch that show on YouTube it puts a huge grin on our face. So stand up and cheer the leftists out there for enthralling us with their irrational comedy and pratfalls. Let’s hope they do their best to defend the title in 2018.

Why we need Vogtle

We all have an opinion, but we all don’t understand why we need Plant Vogtle nuclear units 3 and 4? I have been getting my mind right on how to write this. All of my working life has been in a power plant. I am a college graduate. I worked in the testing phase of nuclear construction, and at my last job, I hired on in operation of nuclear Plant Vogtle. I worked for 30 years, and I’m now retired.

This source-solar power/clean coal energy is all well and good. America has shut down and will shut down many of our fossil (coal) generating power plants due to stricter EPA requirements on stack emission gases. Many of our aged coal plants are not cost effective for installing the billion dollar EPA requirement of scrubbers and bag houses. these scrubbers and bag houses will remove additional gases from the effluent coming out of the stack and into the air.

So, “we all” want solar energy? Can we link enough solar panels in solar fields to take the place of the 1,000 megawatt loss of generation coal plants that Southern ompany shut down? No. Will these solar panels be able to maintain grid voltage and frequency for our bigger loads 24 hours a day? No. What do we do after the sun goes down?

The last time I checked, the uranium atom and its isotopes will make nuclear heat after dark. Coal and natural gas will burn a fire for heat after dark. Thus we have the heat/water/steam/turbine generator/electrical load generation needed for the 24 hour a day customer. Maybe solar power will work a few hours a day for a smaller customer?

My point is that Georgia needs base load generation to keep our aging power grid energized. Our power grid needs to be able to handle the amperage swings 24 hours a day. Add up all of the 110 volt panels in our customer’s homes, businesses/paper mills/manufacturing plants that provide jobs and you quickly see why we need Vogtle 3 and 4.

This story was originally published January 3, 2018 at 9:00 PM with the headline "This is Viewpoints for Thursday, January 4, 2018."