Who shot who in the what now?

first baseball club.

Anti-egocasting associations?

Nice guess, boxjam, but nope.

And I'd apologize for the laborious wording of the clue. But did you really expect I'd have changed since last year?

Scott, yours wasn't even a nice guess.

Yoga league.

Chess club?

Nope. And sorry, I didn't mean to leave Scott out. His guess was "super-nice."

By the looks of the wombat's prize this week, I reckon it can only be some sort of man-boy love assotciation. That or a Temperance Society.

I don't even have a funny fake guess, but that was a killer Simpsons reference in the first line of your post.

Thanks, Josh. This year I'm proposing that at work we all make little cardboard mailboxes for our cubicles, so we can leave each other grade-school-style "Bee Mine" notes.

Come to think of it, I'm surprised no enterprising web-monkey hasn't come up with the internet version of just such a thing, complete with scanned-in illustrations from the paper Valentines of our Gen-X youth.

That aside, here are some clues:

*These associations were/are predicated on a group of people all owning a particular thing
*The particular thing in question is quite expensive
*Particular rules of etiquette apply to the members of these clubs, particularly with regard to how they treat certain pieces of cloth

I believe this was a group of mathletes.

Oh, hey. Is it the first branches of what became the AAA? So, like, car owners associations?

But, wait. Pieces of cloth? Now I'm thinking about the Klan. But there's nothing expensive that membership was predicated on owning.

Is it some kinda really hifalutin flag corps?

I think there may be a question of lineage here connected to the flags--maybe something like the DAR or the Knights of Columbus?

Ingenious speculations, but nothing yet.

The particular things around which the associations are formed are, in general, larger than the proverbial breadbox. These associations also generally stage annual competitions, in which these items are employed. Interestingly, they are generally competitions in which it is impossible to see more than a small part of the area over which the entrants are competing.

yacht club.

Balloonists.

it strikes me that the expensive item itself isn't made from the precious cloth--or at least Bill's wording makes it seem so.

thus, we have expensive items adorned or associated with cloth

equestrian society?

(yes, all that text for an anticlimactic guess)

Owners of Civil War re-enacting regiments

("Somebody's going to get ticks.")

The Ancient Order of Hanky-Panky Swankies?

you know, box's answer of yacht club is sticking in my mind--I bet that's right. Where's Bill?

No, wait, now I'm sure that Hanky-Panky Swankies is the right answer.

I'm so confused.

Bill was out a-Christo-ing and other sundry weekend activities.

Boxjam takes it: Detroit's "Boat Club" was first, apparently, a gentleman's rowing association, but predates the always sailing-oriented New York Yacht Club -- which, incidentally, was a Staten Island-based institution before relocating its HQ to Manhattan.

I have actually spent time in the Pass Christian Yacht Club, as various grandees of the church I attended in that curious little town were members of the venerable Yacht Club. We lived one town over, in the distinctly less pretty Long Beach (Pass Christian in my youth was like a town out of some lost Spielbergian America, an oak-tree shaded municipality with an old-fashioned city park down near the water that featured Civil War cannon. Friends of mine lived in a restored farmhouse that dated from the Revolutionary period. Adjacent was an actual commercial district of small shops. The harbor was jointly tenanted by shrimpers and sailboats, and there was an annual regatta and everything. It was a wholly different-feeling place than all of the coastal towns surrounding it, in which the oldest buildings were shacks and houses dating from perhaps the 1920s. If you didn't listen to the southern accents in the recital of the psalms and the Nicene Creed, you might have thought the extremely high-church Episcopal congregation my family drove over to join every Sunday had been transplanted directly from New England.) Although I'm pretty sure the Yacht Club itself was a tiny specimen of its kind, as a boy I found the whole concept immesurably impressive.