ANSTHRLD - Westgate ramblings
Timothy A. McDaniel
tmcd at crl.com
Sun Feb 21 18:59:50 PST 1999
I just got back from Westgate. Good food, fine symposium, time for
dancing AND schmoozing afterwards. 3 1/2 stars, 11 on the Vomit
Meter, Dan'l-Bob ... wait, that's someone else's schtick.
Congratulations to the two recipients of Awards of Arms, Lord Fergus
Stout and Lor^H^H^H Lady AElfwyn aet Gyrwum!
I don't think anyone took formal notes of the plenary chapter meeting
of the College of Heralds. What I remember, in no particular order:
- - There was much discussion of the Board proposal to eliminate
"herald" as a required office below baronial level. Points
that seemed to have general agreement:
* While each kingdom is free to require it themselves, we owe the
Board a good-faith chance to follow suit. (I disagree with this
notion, but es machts nicht ...)
* Most of the shire heralds will vanish, immediately or when their
terms end, and will not be replaced. It looks like many of the
shire heralds are "Corpora heralds" anyway, so this should not
have a lot of practical effect ...
* ... except that at least a local herald has a chance to point a
client at someone. We really ought to be reaching out to
submitters in under-served areas, and this Board proposal provides
a swift kick in the butt to remind us. Ideas discussed:
o Regionals apparently mostly take local reports each month and
collate them into quaterly reports. Give them more duties?
o Get the involvement of Tressure -- head of the education arm.
o Roving gangs of consulting heralds: road trips, heraldic
visitations. (If we do the latter, I wanna deface arms.)
o Consultations tables -- Gwenllian is already organizing one for
Ansteorran 20th Year. Volunteer, all! It'll be in the
*air-conditioned building*. Gwenllian is currently planning to
charge $12 for submissions (the standard $1 skim and the extra
$3 being afundraiser for the College), but the heralds will take
care of filling in the forms, drawing the armory, copying the
forms, coloring them, et cetera. It's the "fire and forget"
idea again. There's apparently a LOT of resistance to filling
out forms: Kathri said that people offered to pay her more if
the heralds would just take care of it.
For AXXY, it was also discussed, and I believe agreed, that
there'd be a special ILoI. Kathri would get interested
commenters in advance who'd commit to doing the commentary in
just one month and without waiting for the standard AG cycle.
They'd also get a special LoI, much like some kingdoms have
special Pennsic LoIs. This would give the submitters an extra
bonus for their extra $3.
o Star suggested that Pursuivants Extraordinary might be usable as
consultants or even accept submissions. Gasps of shock as
people realized that Pursuivants Extraordinary might actually
act as pursuivants extraordinary: that is, as pursuivants not
"in ordinary" (that is, not holding a titled office), instead of
a nice pretty cookie that give you nothing. However, PE titles
would have a time limit, and you'd have to demonstrate to Star
at the end that you've done heraldic stuff and thus deserve to
be renewed. (My notion: don't remind people that they're going
to expire: auto-deadwood removal.)
* Detail to work on: how to accept money. Asterisk, I think, will
talk to the new kingdom treasurer about ways and means.
- - Star says that e-mail doesn't count as an official means of
communication. It's gotta be paper if it's official.
- - Gwenllian was good enough to administratively return the 2/94 and
4/94 "lost children", so that long-term pending pile is going.
However, currently pends are forever. First idea: when something is
pended long-term (because the name was returned at kingdom but the
armory is OK), start the clock for 2-years-3-months. If that runs
out before name resub, the armory is dead. The only difference
between a long-term return and a pend would be that they don't have
to do new forms for the pend. (For the pends before the new forms,
people are willing to draw up new forms for them.) Did I mention
that there's apparently a LOT of resistance from clients for filling
out heraldic submission forms?
Da'ud's clever insight: it's hard to track things long term (in this
volunteer organization especially). Four months maybe, two years
never. Da'ud's cleverer idea: rather than pend the armory, *really*
return it. Keep one B&W and one color in the kingdom files and mail
the rest back to the submitter. In the return letter, tell them
that if they want to resubmit the armory, they should just send in
those forms unchanged and note that it's a resub. (While that's 2
less than the usual number, kingdom still has those two copies and
uses them at need.) This puts the burden of record-keeping on the
submitter's head. If they don't care enough to put them somewhere
handy, they probably don't care about the submission, or they want a
new design anyway. It keeps people from having to fill out new
forms.
- - I briefly noted that Bordure spends almost $8 (counting copying,
postage, and Laurel fees) of the $8 received for each new
submission. I'm going to dig out the detailed figures again and
also the costs for various kingdoms.
Daniel de Lincolia
- --
Tim McDaniel (home); Reply-To: tmcd at crl.com;
if that fail, tmcd at austin.ibm.com is my work address.
============================================================================
Go to http://lists.ansteorra.org/lists.html to perform mailing list tasks.
More information about the Heralds
mailing list