Kyle, thanks. i see. i wondered why the talk was all about agendas.
since, in my (brand new, experimenting) use of =org-babel-map-src-blocks=, i'm calling a function, and that function is trying to de-reference, e.g., =beg-block=, i get an error. it is (or does seem to be) the case that if the macro included all the valueless =defvars=, a function called from it has access to all those. i don't know if this would be a useful modification. cheers, Greg