Thursday, March 09, 2006

Scrabble

I got a page a day calendar in late January that was all about Scrabble. I thought that this would be perfect in that I love words, and that I every once in a while have the good fortune to play a game of Scrabble with my friend Josh. Unfortunately for me, he has the opportunity to play a little more frequently than I do, and so he usually rocks my world, and sends me away crying.

Well, it's not usually that bad, but I have been beaten severely by this opponent before, and so I thought that the calendar could help teach me how to be better at the game. And it does, usually, but all of its puzzles are ridiculously complex.

When I bought this, I figured that I could have this thing on my desk at work, rip off the front page every morning, think about the answer for a few seconds, get it right, and go on with my day.

Sounds feasible, right? It very much did up until the time that I realized that the devil must have put them together.

For example, let's take a look at one of these puzzles. "Your rack is d e h i m r t, and on the board it _ _ y _ o _ _. Fill in the blanks with five of your tiles to make a common seven-letter word.

Now those of you who have a better command of the English language might get this very quickly, but I, perhaps because I'm distracted by, I don't know, WORKING don't get to give it more than a couple of quick seconds thought before getting to my work. So this ineveitably starts off my day with me feeling like a doof, and a big dummy dumb dumb of a doof at that.

Maybe I'll just throw it away. Mmm...that'd feel good.

4 comments:

:: mandy :: said...

bold. very bold. this makes me feel the same way i felt in costco when i saw that book about everything men know about women.

200 blank pages.

now why didn't i think of that? i could be rich. then i wouldn't need a benefactor. dangit.

Analyst Catalyst said...

Sorry about the blank post at first; I meant to post this, but I didn't get around to it until much later, like right now.

And as soon as I got done with the real post, I saw that I already had a comment, and that confused the snot out of me. :)

That book would be a very clever way to make money; we should get together and come up with some way to make money hand over fist without any real work like that. That'd be awesome.

And the answer to the puzzle is "thyroid". Not the most difficult, I know, but pretty hard when you're thinking about how you're going to get through all of the stuff you don't know about your job today.

thesmallblondeone said...

Hi, Bryan White, an apartment 11 neighbor here.

I must admit, the knowledge that both you and Mandy, two intellectual college graduates, did not quickly get the puzzle, but that I, a lowly senior English/Communications major figured it out in ten seconds... well, it kind of made my day a little.

P.S. I can't think of you as Bryan White. You will forever in my head be Charlie Brown.

Peace out, Charlie.

Analyst Catalyst said...

Well, I'm glad that that calendar makes somebody feel smart. :)