Ol’ Tommy Gray, son of a scrivener, got it right in his 1751 masterpiece. There’s a lot of blushing flowers in Tax Court, legal and practical roses wasting their sweetness amidst the daily dross of orders.

Now there is a way a Judge can rescue these gems of purest ray serene from the dark unfathom’d caves of the Orders link on the Tax Court website.

They can elevate these to designated hitter status, by the simple act of tipping off the hard-laboring clerks at 400 Second Street, N. W., directing the said clerks to ennoble their coruscations above the common herd.

And some Judges do. STJ Lewis (“Love That Spelling”) Carluzzo is a great exponent of the designated hitter, sometimes overdoing it in his zeal to help his homonymical pal here at the blogger’s keyboard. And Judge Gustafson, whose off-the-benchers are often illuminating, will send up a smoke signal when he’s delivered something useful.

But too many Judges are wont to issue orders to fortune and to fame unknown. And I’ve blogged these.

By patient and unremunerated toil, I’ve waded through multitudinous seas, if not exactly incarnadine then murky with the silt stirred up by Judge Holmes’ colleagues, reading volumes of “the Court held a conference call with the parties to the above-docketed cases. During the call, the parties represented that they would be submitting a stipulation of settled issues shortly.” And “ORDERED that, on or before May 22, 2014, petitioner shall file a response to respondent’s motion to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction and to strike as to the taxable year 2006.” Soporific isn’t the word for it.

I’m rather like the pig who hunts out the truffles, rootling round in the underbrush until my snout picks up the sweetness in the desert air, unearths that gem of purest ray serene aforesaid, and deposits same on the Internet, to the delectation of the battle-weary, hard-bitten, in-the-trenches practitioner.

It’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it.

Thanks for reading.