Ladies and gentlemen. Plutarch or Much Ado About Nothing...
a tragedie in nyne parts. Gasp at the commitment! WONDER at the grotesqueries...

Yeah.

I went to check in on an old haunt of mine t'other day. If you're a massive word geek you might know AWAD, the original A Word A Day site. Since about 2000 Anu has had a little bulletin board running on the servers. It's a very gentle board, a lot less intensely academic than many: a place for prescriptivists and descriptivists to come together in the shared joy of bad puns and crossword puzzles. I used to hang out there a lot, and for a long time it was totally unmodded. And then there was the great Kieva (kievacarpal, keeva, aphonicrants, angel, RumShotGiles, MrSoHugeList, GimletsHours, Egotism_Hurls, MisterGhouls, GizmoHustler, HumorlessGit) schism of '02, which resulted in a mod being appointed, and two new boards being set up. (You can read about that ball of insanity here, here, and here, if you want.)

But Keiva (the belly of the beast) is old news. It's just his penchant for sockpuppetry that Moss has learnt so very much from.

Moss (grapho/plutarch/tang/themgmnt/wordcrazy/wordminstrel). I knew him as moss, and *man* was he crazy. No really. I'm not talking your flash in the pan fangirl whose show's been cancelled. I'm talking your 'I'm gonna create nine screen -names and talk to myself on a message board for three freaking years' mad with a side order of 'AWADtalk is a global conspiracy of ruthless megalomaniacs known only as the Olicarpy' tinhat and a generous sprinkling of 'private message essays are my special crack' loopy. Anyway, he's still at it.

Wow.

A long long time ago/ He could still remember/ How the wordboard used to make him smile.

And he knew if he had his chance/ He could make those puppets dance.

And maybe, they'd pay attention for a while.

Peripheral reading:

1. declaration of the intent to petition

2. jackie's experiment

3. milum vs. plutarch

4. because you suck