53rd Biggest Loser on the Planet

As of this afternoon, I am now the 53rd biggest loser alive. I owe it all to online Boggle for the iPhone.

My brother's great friend Dave showed me a fun app on his iTouch called Wurdle, but after a few weeks, I got tired of it. The funny thing is, it's a much better application than the one I play these days. Wurdle's interface is huge, it uses the up-to-date Scrabble dictionary that I'm familiar with, and it has other niceties that make the game more fun, including better sound effects. Most of all, it doesn't always give you great sets of letters, so sometimes you have to struggle to score a few points.

Shake & Spell, on the other hand, has a tiny interface (I try to come up for air now and then so that I don't damage my surgically enhanced eyes). It uses the most-recent-but-one dictionary, so there are plenty of 'words' that I know from the new Scrabble update, like ZAS, that aren't allowed. But worst of all, it constantly creates blocks of the same common letters: E A T. This means that in about 8 games out of 10, you have to type the same tiny, annoying words. How many times have made these words? ETA EAT TAE TEA ATE ....


The only thing in S&S's favor, really, is that it hooks you up with other live players. Games generally take place with people playing the same board a few minutes apart (if not a few hours or days apart). If you keep enough games going at once, you can almost always turn on your machine to see a few games waiting for you. And with the most recent update, you can add friends and request games with a small group of people that you've come to trust.

Cheating abounds. Until they fix a few things, the game makes it easy for people to generate high scores using online Boggle solvers. But it's easy to recognize the cheaters and to avoid them.

When I first joined S&S, I noticed that there are thousands of players. You immediately get a ranking based on the points you score, and you mainly score by accruing points gained over opponents. If you win 200-199, you get a point. So after a few days, I found that I was ranked about 2500th overall. A few weeks later, I broke into the top 1000. I began to wonder about those people with really high scores. Do they have a life? Since most games are 3 rounds, if they have a win-loss total of 600-400, their winning percentage isn't too high (60%), but they've played 1000 games averaging about 3 minutes; they've spent 50 hours playing Boggle! That's over two full days!

At some point, you cross a line. It's one thing to play a few games now and then. It's another to play really well. But it's entirely different if you play all the time. And it's not like you can do a lot of other things while playing Boggle on a two inch interface. I think I'd rather see a drunk driver than encounter someone driving under the influence of Boggle. You can't brush your teeth while boggling. You can't read. You can't chat on the phone. You can't really do anything except ignore your favorite TV shows.

When I broke into the top 100, I started paying close attention to the time I'd spent on the game. It's getting out of control. And now I'm rated number 53 and gaining fast. My winning percentage is 82.4%. And I'm the 53rd biggest loser on the planet.

Crunching Sane Hash: Church Shenanigans

How could a person resist?

Before .................................................................................................. After

Church Anagrams

I couldn't resist. As an inveterate wordsmith and someone who's played Scrabble in tournaments for the past 15 years, I couldn't resist the chance to put a twist on the huge sign outside the mega-church.

Each week, the church changes its sign, always proclaiming something uplifting in 2-foot-tall letters. But two weeks ago, the church came up with something that I instantly anagrammed to something hilarious, and I just had to make the change.





But then, being the nice guy that I am, I put the letters back.

T-W-O D-W-I

Last night was busy for New Paltz police, EMTs, and firefighters. Roads were wet or iced over in places, and so were some of the drivers.

At 11, a fire call came in from SUNY campus. It was just a false alarm, and I was back by 11:30. No sooner had I stepped into the house than another call came in, this one for a car accident with downed power lines not far from home. I drove there and parked far enough away from the crash that my car didn't get in the way. A young man driving his truck had spun off the road, smashing into a power line before coming to rest in some trees, perpendicular to the road. According to the cop on the scene, a friend of mine, the guy claimed the accident was due to ice, but all of us could tell that this was not true: There was no ice on the road. My pal, Fireman Fred, had this great response: "Oh, his accident was caused by ice, all right -- Molson Ice!"

We closed off the road in one direction while waiting for Central Hudson to arrive. One of the power lines was on the ground but was not 'live,' so the CH man rolled it up and put it out of the way so that the tow truck operator could get at the truck. Meanwhile the driver was taken off to the police station. His totalled truck was impounded. Apparently CH charges $2000 per hour for their time and $2000 for the new utility pole, so the driver is going to have a lot of bills to worry about in addition to his DWI charge. It turns out that while we were taking care of this call, another driver was getting booked for a DWI accident a few miles away.

I got home at 1 and should have gone right to bed, but I was a bit wound up, but first I played a few games of online Scrabble, winning most of them (a sign that I still had my wits about me). Finally I went to bed at around 2am. 40 minutes later, another call came in, this time for a truck that had crashed due to icy conditions. The dispatcher warned that the tarmack near the accident was extremely slick, so I drove there about half as fast as the speed limits for the road. Again I parked out of the way, and as soon as I stepped out of my car, I could tell what caused the mishap: I nearly fell on the icy pavement. It turns out that one of the chiefs did fall down, hurting his back and gashing a finger, but he stayed on the scene. The driver of this truck was drunk, too, but the accident was definitely caused more by the road than by his inebriation; unfortunately for him, he still got charged with DWI. As was the case with the earlier accident, his truck looked fine until the tow truck removed it from the trees, and again, this car was undriveable and would be considered 'totalled.' The difference was that this driver was hurt, possibly more by the airbag than by the crash, or maybe his head injuries were from hitting the driver's side window. He left in an ambulance. We cleared the road of some ice and debris and headed home at about 3:45 am. As I left the accident, I passed a New Paltz sanding truck on its way to making that road safer.

I didn't expect to get much sleep, and just before 8 this morning, I got a wakeup shout from Maeve. We went downstairs for brekky, but before I'd even started my tea, a call came in for a possible fire. Since I have yet to see a fire, I was intrigued by the possibility of a structure fire, and since the address given was on 32N, I drove right there. It was, happily, a false alarm called in by a neighbor who was concerned about the steam coming off a house across the road from hers; the steam did look like smoke, but it was only a case on condensation. Back at the fire house, we the assembled firefighters washed off all of the trucks, and I was back home by 9 with some Starbucks treats for the family.

Scrabble #2

I won a "club tournament" today in North Salem, the same place where I particpated in the tourney last month. This time the field wasn't quite as strong as it was in January, the result of it not being a regular tourament, but nonetheless the competition was pretty solid. The fact that I won was even more satisfying given that I was feeling a bit under the weather.


I finished 5-1 with a huge spread. In fact, I averaged 455 pts per game, by far my highest average in a tourney. In the only game I lost, I scored 390, and in the first game, I scored 550, garnering a cute little "High Game" trophy. This is the first trophy I've won since I bowled a 1 (yes, 1 point!) but was lucky enough to be on the winning team in a bowling competition back when I was in single digits.

Here is a list of cool words I played:
"Bingos" (using all of my tiles), by game:
TRIACID, LOATHES, DEVALUE, RETCHING
MEIOSIS
INATELY (phony), SIRLOIN
AUREOLAR
OUTRIDES, UNLACING
REFRIED

Weird non-bingos, total
KIVA, MIGG, WITED, ZAYIN, COOLY, STOOK, and CACHING (I turned CHIN into ACHING and then added the other C)

What's interesting to me is that many expert players average about 2 bingos per game. I was just below that, with 11 in 6 games. But much of my scoring came from smaller words where I managed to get a lot of points (ZAYIN, 54, for example). To me, that's the key to Scrabble. You don't have to know a lot of 7- and 8-letter words in order to win lots of games. Another important trick is to play off letters that aren't conducive to scoring well on the next turn, so you have to look ahead a turn or two. For example, in one game I opened with AIOLI (10 pts) thru my opponent's L, getting rid of 4 vowels, and then on the next turn, I played AUREOLAR for 68.

I can't make the tournament next month, so I'm glad I went today.

Scrabble in North Salem

I finally made it back to a scrabble tournament after a nearly two-year hiatus. Unforch, my rating slipped as I ran into a bit of bad luck and a tiny bit of rust. I was happy with how I played, tho the results didn't match my efforts. I ended the day with 3 wins against 4 losses, but because all of my losses were by less than 35 points and two of my wins were blow-outs, I finished with a big "spread" (positive or negative total points). The spread only shows that I was playing well but doesn't figure into national ratings or rankings.

The venue was new to me: North Salem, NY, about an hour's drive from New Paltz. Cornelia Guest puts on a very nice tourney there, attended by 32 ardent Scrabblers -- she even had a 10-person waiting list for today's games. I was the second-highest rated player, and the way our ratings work, I was expected to win about 5 of the 7 games. As a result of my poor showing, my rating falls into the 1750 range, but still, that puts me within the top 150 nationwide.

Here were some of my more unusual words from the tournament:
TENUTI (pl. of TENUTO, a musical term)
SATYR (a wood nymph) ... this is the only one I could define without the dictionary!
JOWAR (type of cereal grain grown in India)
COFFS (to buy)
AUXINS (substance used in plant growth)
BEZEL (a slanted surface)
QUERN (a hand-turned grain mill)
JEON (S. Korean monetary unit)
CURF (an incision)

Bingos (using all 7 tiles for a 50-pt bonus):
Note: Letters in () were blanks
SALTIER (R)
ENCASED (S)
ANTIQUES
FELLOES (def: wheel rims)
ULULATES (U)
INANEST
NEATEST
INQUIRES (R)

I managed to win my penultimate game by over 200 points, scoring 552 (and the "high game" prize, good for $5). In the 7 games, I scored 351, 359, 361, 431, 402, 552, and 349, averaging just under 400 per game. Sadly, average score doesn't figure into ratings, either, tho some have advocated for this.

I look forward to returning there in two months. Meanwhile, I'll keep reading the Scrabble dictionary (me=nerd) and playing online as much as possible.