I have a teaching gig today, so this is a rush-around morning for me. Nevertheless:

1. First things first: Even though the temperature was hovering at frostbite level and two of the team's best players weren't playing, the Harmony Huskies baseball team beat the Dexter Tigers 20 to 4. This is shocking news to those of us who, each season, must once again comfort ourselves with the mantra: "Oh well. I guess it's just a learning year." (I hear it was Dexter's B team they beat, but we celebrators are trying to overlook that fact.)

2. In tomorrow's blog I plan to discuss the word poetaster. So for a taste of what's to come, you might like to ponder the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary definition (a source that Tom and I like to call Little Oed, as in Oedipa: see Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 if you don't get the joke).

poetaster n. & v. L16. [mod.L (Erasmus), f. L poeta POET: see -ASTER.] A n. A paltry or inferior poet; a writer of poor or trashy verse. L16. B v.i. = POETAST. Chiefly as poetastering ppl. a. & vbl. n. L17.

Mystifying typography, ambiguous abbreviations, and unexplained suffixes are not my fault.