work-in-progress: jeffh-editorial-cleanups

while working through the open issues early last week (I didn't finish,
have been on pto, will try to do so on this coming Mon/Tue), I queued up
some commits resolving a few of said issues.  these changes are queued in
the branch jeffh-editorial-cleanups, just fyi. I'll open a pull request
anon.

hth, 

=JeffH