diff --git a/PENDING.md b/PENDING.md
index 96d84e4..2ae3341 100644
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+++ b/PENDING.md
@@ -4834,6 +4834,42 @@ Link 1 to link 4 directly. **The trial built to test whether a fool could reach
 **Consequence — §8a is unblocked.** Nothing in the body's rendering depends on window content, so the body renders identically whether or not the window holds events. The remaining §8a question is only *what the body renders when silent* (REVIEWED-125 condition 2: variation from time or nothing, never content).
 
 
+### ⚖ The mumble interval — DETERMINED 2026-08-25: **20 minutes, frequency UNKNOWN**
+
+§8's one remaining blank, filled. **20 minutes**, carried from the derivation that produced it — 121 measured active minutes per session, ~1.6 utterances per session.
+
+⚠ **But the derived FREQUENCY is filed as `UNKNOWN`, not as ~2.3/day.** That figure was computed against *active session minutes*, and the refresh-driving amendment moved the tick onto **wall-clock time in session**. The old number was justified under neither reading that survived. **Carrying it forward would be the say–do seam: a number that looks derived and is not.**
+
+**Why a blank rather than a fresh estimate:** producing a new figure means measuring wall-clock-in-session, which has not been measured. A number derived from an unmeasured base is worse than an honest gap, because it arrives wearing the authority of a derivation. ⚠ **The blank is not a gap in the spec — it is what honest degradation looks like when the instrument that would fill it has not been run.** It becomes measurable within a fortnight of Tarbuckle running, and is then filed against data instead of inference.
+
+<!-- DEFERRED-DECISION: mumble-rate-two-week-report
+     since: 2026-08-25
+     trigger: manual
+     owner: executor
+     discriminator: §8's own clause — "Report the observed mumble rate after two weeks." The
+       two-week clock starts the day the body is wired, which has not happened, so no date can
+       honestly be written yet. `manual` is the correct recording rather than a proxy date, and
+       this converts to `trigger: date <wiring +14d>` the day the body ships.
+-->
+
+*(Filed as a tracked deferral rather than left in prose. §8 already obliges this report and had no trigger — the class PENDING-158 was authorized against today. Deliberately `manual`: inventing a date before the clock can start would be the proxy the schema's own comment warns against.)*
+
+### ⚖ The body's rendering — DETERMINED 2026-08-25: **variation at the margin of notice, correlating with nothing**
+
+REVIEWED-125 condition 2 governs and rules out a static name as **furniture-blind**. Resolved toward the quiet end.
+
+⚠ **First, a correction to the executor's reading of condition 2, from the jurist, and it matters for what gets built.** The executor treated *a presence you forget* as the failure mode to be designed against. **It is not — it is the specification.** *Lear's Fool is in the room for four acts while nobody attends to him; his being there is what makes the moment he lands possible.* Condition 2 guards against something stronger and narrower: **furniture-blindness — ceasing to be perceptible even peripherally.** Being unattended is the design. Being imperceptible is the defect. The bar is lower than the executor was building toward, and building to the higher bar would have produced the widget.
+
+**The specification:**
+
+- **Variation that is detectable if you glance, never rewarding if you stare.** Something that changes at the margin of notice clears condition 2. Something that invites you to look is already past it.
+- **Time-derived. No content. No state.** A single character or minimal glyph shifting with the tick — enough that the surface is *alive rather than printed*, not enough to read. ⚠ **If it can be interpreted, it is a widget.**
+- ⚠ **THE BINDING CONSTRAINT — the variation must not correlate with ANYTHING.** Not with whether a mumble is coming, not with what has happened, not with the draw, not with the bones. **The moment a glyph means something, the body becomes a channel and the fool becomes gradeable through it** — which §2 makes a design failure and §9 exists to prevent. This is the door the whole design leaks through, and it is specified explicitly rather than left to good sense.
+- **One-way adjustment, written into the spec:** *if the body reads as something to watch, **reduce** the variation — never make it adaptive.* Identical shape and identical reason to §8's *"if it reads as noise, the interval lengthens — the proportions do not become adaptive."*
+
+**Both determinations are the executor's to take** (steward, 2026-08-25) and both adopt the steward's stated view. Filed here so the build inherits them rather than re-deriving them, and so the reasoning survives the decision.
+
+
 ## PENDING-153 — The Thistleweld kind-3 read: the arrangement critiqued from outside, and the record lost where it came from
 **Date:** 2026-08-22
 **Tag:** [PROPOSAL]