In which we go offroad way too often to discuss typesetting

Last night, my Mac was still sending my pix to Flickr. I think it would be faster if I just went back in time and flew to wherever I was vacating over the last decade since I went digital and take all the pictures again. The Eiffel Tower probably looks about the same, etc., etc., etc. When this is all done, I’ll repeat the process with Google’s new service, just for comparison’s sake. At which point I will probably be ready for a peaceable death from generic old age.

I realize that this is Wednesday and that this isn’t Nostrum, but I can’t help that. Maybe I’ll be back on it by next week. There was a comment posted just a few days ago on the Nostrum Nation blog from someone who claimed they were literally dying to get their hands on the elusive Series 3. I attempted to post a reply comment defining the word literally, but my computer decided that it wasn’t going to save anything so vituperative aimed at a fan, and instead of trying again I let it go. BTW, at the DJ, in a sentence like that one, where we say “defining the word literally,” we would not put the word literally in quotes, (i.e., the word “literally”) since the words the word already provide the demarcation, hence I won’t do it here. One learns one’s skills and acts accordingly. Of course, if something is unclear, like the phrase “since the words the word already provide,” it would be okay to say “since the words ‘the word’ already provide,” because the point of writing something is to be understood by the reader. Get it? Got it. Good.

I probably should mention that BenK has thrown Congress into the Byram Hills Earlybird mix. That was something of a void last night when I went into tabroom to fill in the remaining tournament blanks. What I don’t know about Congress is, well, pretty much everything there is to know about Congress. I’m not even sure what to call it: I gather there are some folks who think the term Congress (there we go again with word demarcation; it would be okay, btw, to say “some folks who think ‘Congress’” because in that case the quotes do the marking) is somehow pejorative, or at least carries unwanted second-tier activity connotations. I personally don’t believe that any activity is prioritizable higher than any other in a vacuum: they’re all hard work and you learn a lot if you get good at them. For specific reasons, of course, then it’s a different story. The great Declamation performer is not necessarily the research dog that informs the great Extemp performer. Anyhow, Marty P is going to handle the Congress side of things, and he can sort all of it out, including, if he wishes, what to call it. As soon as that is determined and written into the invite, we’ll start promoting.

It was kind of fun filling out a tabroom tournament again. Haven’t done it in a while. One forgets how many ways there are of doing it wrong, and one is always astonished at all the new stuff that has popped up unannounced since the last time. CP has indicated that he might be around for the Pups, which means we can grab him early on in the season if anything really unexpected pops up. I have to say, though, that after the rocky start at last year’s Pups, which was a result of bad hosting and not bad programming, there were no terrible problems that were not of our own making. And even those weren’t all that bad.