Ally Scrabble
Junie arrived via DIA and promptly began to attack The Atlantic Puzzler.
By the time we had driven down to Walsenberg to spend some time with Ally and
John, we had finished everything except the final message (we had the ID (Muskie),
but not the profession (Senator?)). Ally and John had asked us to bring an
extra Scrabble set and an egg timer. I found a complete Scrabble set at
the Aries Thrift Store for $2.49 and Junie found an egg timer at one of the
stores in the opulent Flatiron Crossings Mall. You know,
Nordstrom's, Restoration Hardware, Williams Sonoma, that kind of thing.
Even their food court had a little joint that sold specialty crepes that you
could eat at your own faux-Parisian cafe table. It turned out that Ally
had Speed Scrabble in mind, a diabolical invention in which you spread two
Scrabble games' worth of letters face down in the middle among four of you at a
dinner table. You don't need a board, you don't need what John called the
Scrabble Pews to hold the letters on. We brought white tiles and Ally had
brown ones, so it looked like an upturned bowl of Moros y Cristianos.
Everybody takes 7 letters as usual, and then you proceed to make your own
intersecting Scrabble layout, also as usual. Whoever uses their letters up
first yells "GO!", and everyone has to take another letter from the pile.
You can change the arrangement of your letters as often as you wish. When
the pool is out of letters, whoever is the first one to use all their letters
wins. We went around the table awarding points a la "Who's Line Is It
Anyway" to the words with the most panache or chutzpah.
I picked up a copy of Wired somewhere on the trip, here's what's doing:
The $100 million Super-Kamiokande subatomic particle observer is back from the
dead, after 5 years of work to replace the zillions of light-bulb-like detectors
that blew when the massive chamber was filled with fluid to facilitate observing
the decay of neutrinos. The newest thing is free-range sushi, premium
yellowtail raised near the Big Island under tethered nets. Among the 10
Most Stupid Engineering Mistakes is the Purity Distilling Company's molasses
tank that was 50 feet tall and 90 feet in diameter, which when it split it
seams, created a15-foot tsunami of molasses that killed 21 Boston residents in
1919. To the survivalists: stockpiling Tamiflu won't help because
you will have to take it so long that its toxic effects will start kicking in.
Another badly disguised plug for Pixar's Cars. You can retrofit a
convertible top for your Hummer H3 for only $1,600. Yeah, I've seen it but
does anyone actually drink Coke Blak? The next fear is payola on
the 'net, as top bloggers get cash for pumping up corporate brands. The
price of Hi-Def TVs and gear are dropping much faster than other new
technologies in the past. World of Warcraft (also called World of Warcrack)
now has 6 million users of the massively multiuser RPG, 12 times what Everquest
achieved at its peak. Daniel Wilson, who has a PhD in Robotics from
Carnegie Mellon, show us 6 ways to survive a robot uprising (carry a crowbar).
Crowdsourcing is the use of large numbers of amateurs to outsource your needs.
Examples include iStockPhoto who have undercut professional photographers badly
with stock images for as little as a dollar. The Five Rules of the New
Labor Pool includes "The crowd produces mostly crap". The rise of crystal
meth and the War on Terror has Feds closing down companies that sell science
experiment kits and supplies.