Yesterday, Sunday, something happened, and I was asked about its impact upon the nomination and voting for the Top Ten DUmmies of 2011, which caused me to check the rules.
The official nominating thread will be posted on Sunday, November 20, but “locked†to nominations and comments until Thanksgiving Eve, Wednesday, November 23. It’s done that way so members have the leisure just to read, and not to bother with thinking of nominations and comments until later.
As most might recall, the description of the rules is pretty long, and I don’t want to make it even longer with this clarification of the rules. So this clarification of the rules will not be in the official nominating thread, although this is intended to be considered part of that.
The rules state that any primitive who has been afoot Skins’s island any time during the past year is eligible for nomination and selection.
It doesn’t make any difference if the primitive was just there a short time, or was subsequently mausoleumed. Just so the primitive showed up on Skins’s island during the past year, nothing more than that.
But that wasn’t exactly the question, and so I had to read things more thoroughly to get the answer to the real question.
The rules say nothing about the state of existence of a primitive at the time of nomination and selection.
And so the answer is, even if a primitive has left this vale of tears, if the primitive was hanging around Skins’s island during the past year, the primitive is eligible for nomination and selection.
Such would of course involve a certain, uh, complication in writing the award, but that’s my problem, not anybody else’s. It’s a matter that requires gentleness, sensitivity, delicacy, and good taste.
It would demand the talents to write something that a grieving widow, for example, upon reading it in the newspapers, would be so comforted and solaced by it, that she’d take the scissors, cut it out, have it laminated, and use it as a book-mark in her well-thumbed and oft-read Bible.
If I had to, I could do that, write something like that.
Another question was asked; what if a primitive not in our current mutual state of existence actually won first place in the selection, how would that make the other primitives feel, especially those who appear to be leading in general sentiment at the moment?
I have no idea how living primitives would react to being displaced by a primitive in another time and place, but one is compelled to acquiesce to the popular will of the people, letting the chips fall where they may.
