e-culpa aftermath

In the world of newsgroups and mailing lists there are cardinal sins that everyone inevitably commits out of ignorance, sheer lack of cogitative capabilities or plain old-fashioned bad luck: posting personal responses group-wide, replying to posts with nothing to add, quoting entire long messages in your reply ... After having cursed numerous such examples on newsgroups and mailing lists that I monitor and post to, I finally fell face flat (obtuse etymology below) by inadvertantly posting responses to a quiz group-wide on a mailing list... What made it really bad was that this was on the day the quiz was put out, making it impossible for the quiz to continue. Of course, I could blame it on the interface offered by the Yahoo! Groups web-based front end where a single "reply" button defaults to a post to the group instead two buttons ("reply to sender", "reply to group"). Every mail client I used so far seemed to support the two-option approach instead of Yahoo!'s convenient[sic] single button avenue. But it's all mourning over spilt milk ... the cats are in, lapping it all up. Best forgotten.

obtuse etymology for face flat: I've been reading Barry Kernfeld's wonderful What to Listen for in Jazz, in small helpings, of course. A page in the chapter on form included a discussion on the choice of chords accompanying a tune and one of the descriptions took on a completely different (and interesting meaning): The chord was F A C E^b: aka F⁷. And a good way to read it would be FACE FLAT. Useful.