When Politics and Grammar Collide

And The New Yorker responds:

The reasoning for the punctuation of “Jr.,’s” is pretty straightforward. It’s a collision of conventions. The first convention is The New Yorker’s—we place a comma before “Jr.” Doing so leads to another of our conventions: when something like “Jr.” occurs in the middle of a phrase, clause, or sentence, it is set off by its preceding comma and a following comma.

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Bag of Randomness for Wednesday, July 12, 2017

  • I didn’t make one purchase on Amazon.com for the Prime Day. I couldn’t find any great deals and I already have enough junk around the house.
  • If you only put water in your tea kettle and use it basically every day, does it ever need to be cleaned? Since water is boiling inside of it almost every day, isn’t that a self-clean with all germs being killed?
  • I had no idea Marlee Matlin has a reoccurring guest role on ‘The Family Guy’. Since 2012, she’s voiced “Stella” five times.
  • The second season of Netflix’s ‘Stranger Things’ starts on October 27. There’s no way it lives up to the second season. The kids were so young, the storyline and homages to past films weren’t forced, that chemistry just can’t be duplicated. But, I’ll be tuning in hoping they prove me wrong.
  • I don’t think there’s a ceiling fan which can light a room well.
  • After browsing their web page, I think Mercedes Benz Stadium, the new home of the Atlanta Falcons, will put AT&T Stadium to shame. And their food prices are extremely reasonable. A hotdog and a Coke will only cost you four bucks.
  • Former NASA engineer builds world’s largest Super Soaker, firing water at 272 mph
  • I enjoyed watching this video about the technology used in the new professional flag football league.
  • I love my Aunt Bonnie and she’s not even my aunt. She visited us for five days last week.
    • You may recall my father had me very late in life. He was 52 when I was born. His sister had children, and Bonnie is one of those kids, so she’s really my cousin. But when I was a kid, it didn’t make sense that I had a cousin so much older than me, so I called her my aunt despite being corrected plenty of times, but she went with it and eventually so did everyone else in the family.
    • She grew up in Mineral Wells and has great stories about the Baker Hotel and Fort Wolters. When she was in the sixth grade, her father died in a well-pump explosion. The culprit was a faulty pressure valve. In some ways, my father (who she called, “Uncle Walt”) filled the void left by her father. So she had a lot of great stories of my father in his younger years. As a matter of fact, she recently told me about an old program Mineral Wells High School had with Fort Wolters. She was in the program and just happened to intern or serve in an office adjacent to my father’s. I never had the opportunity to see my father in uniform until he was in a coffin, so it was great listening to her tell stories of my father. In her words, he didn’t take shit from anyone but also knew his place, didn’t mince words, and had a certain stature about him which commanded respect, so much so a lot of folks just preferred to call him “Mr. Geeding”. I can back that up with this old police report (second column), everyone else is referenced with a first and last name. She remembers him being so tall he had to duck walking through doorways and always having that loving but fearful or reverent respect of him.
    • She married an Airman and they had a daughter. Sadly, Bonnie’s husband died from cancer. Part of the blame is playfully put on the “cursed wedding dress”. Our grandmother made the dress for her daughter, who died in that well-pump explosion. Bonnie wore the same dress and also became a widow. However, Bonnie made sure her daughter never looked at the dress.
    • Bonnie eventually moved to the San Diego area. After her daughter graduated high school she met a sailor and finally remarried. I think they have now been married 20 years.
    • I’ve expressed how I sometimes become jealous that my kids only experience family from WifeGeeding’s side of the family and how I wish my parents could have become grandparents when they were alive. Well, Bonnie and her husband are the closest thing I have to that, so when they visit, it’s a big deal for me. I finally get a chance to share our kids with my family. Also, I get a chance to relive a lot of memories through family stories Bonnie will bring up.
    • This year Bonnie and her husband started to draw Social Security and decided to sell their house. They now travel the country in a fifth wheel RV. After they visited us, they’ve spent time in Little Rock, Memphis, and are now in her birth city of Cinncinatti. It turns out the house where our great grandparents lived is still around but not the one in which her mother and my father lived. However, she and her husband did eat at the ice cream parlor our parents used to visit back in the 1930’s.
    • Thanks to her, I know our grandmother had a sister named Tootsi. So that would make her Great Aunt Tootsi.
    • She also told me our grandfather had a brother named Clarence, who was a Cincinnati police officer. He often accompanied Bonnie’s mother home late at night.
    • Bonnie’s mother was named Eyelene. I’ve shared this before, but she had a leg removed due to cancer. So Aunt Eyelene was actually “Aunt I Lean”.
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