It would be comical if it weren't... well... Comic.
You may or may not have been following the legal battle currently being fought over the next America's Cup. Rule 69 Blog is one of the best sources, if you're really interested.
One of the crucial points in the argument is whether CNEV, the club accepted as Challenger of Record by Alinghi, is a real yacht club at all or just a sham front invented for the purpose of making a challenge for the Cup. And one of the issues in deciding whether CNEV qualifies as a yacht club under the terms of the Deed of Gift is whether they run an annual regatta on an arm of the sea as required by the Deed.
I'm sure Carol Anne, the sailing bloggers' English language expert, would have something to say on the matter. Especially as she corrected me last year when I tried to claim that the first running of our club's Sock Burning Ceremony qualified as a "first annual" occasion. Carol Anne pointed out that "something can't be annual until it has happened a second time a year later." Yet CNEV is trying to claim that a regatta yet to be run, one that will be held in November this year, is the necessary "annual" regatta.
Scuttlebutt has news on the issue today with some legalistic arguments based on how the rules of the Royal Spanish Yachting Federation apply to the recently published Notice of Race for this future "annual" regatta.
But look at the Notice of Race. Do you see what I see? Come on guys. You can't be serious. The NOR for this regatta whose validity may determine the outcome of the current lawsuits about the America's Cup, and that will in turn influence the timing, format, competitors, boats and much else about the next America's Cup regatta... the NOR is written in that joke of a typeface, Comic Sans!
Nobody in their right mind uses Comic Sans for a serious document. Even the creator of this jokeface, Vincent Connare, will tell you that it was never meant to be a real typeface, just something you used in applications for children or in comic book style talk bubbles. There's even a website dedicated to the battle to ban comic sans.
So for me the question of whether CNEV is a real yacht club is over. They shot themselves in the foot. It would be comical if it weren't Comic.
2 comments:
In other words, both the New Mexico Sailing Club and the Rio Grande Sailing Club are far better qualified to sponsor an America's Cup team. Both clubs have events that are truly annual, both have really good NORs and SIs, and, most important of all, both publish said documents in appropriately dignified fonts.
Silly, very Silly! Too silly for words. So silly in fact that it should just be a cartoon, a very silly cartoon with silly people in it saying silly things with all the speach bubbles using a silly font; Times new Roman should do it.
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