Hal's ad-industry research paper; seventh-grade prodigy "only up to R in the Condensed O.E.D."

timeline_event

texture · May YPW (2005)

When: May of YPW (2005); Hal a seventh-grader, ~13
What: One of only two academic things Hal has ever written on anything filmic: a "mammoth research paper on the tangled fates of broadcast television and the American ad industry" (the NoCoat/LipoVac/InterLace history), which Mr. Ogilvie found written "with a compassion... surprising in a seventh-grader." The passage fixes a core lexical-prodigy fact — at this age Hal was "only up to R in the Condensed O.E.D.," i.e. systematically memorizing the dictionary.