Absolutely Scrabulous

Just as Kevin A. is about to make his very first Scrabulous win against me, Facebook crashes the game.

It’s true that floods and famines and diseases and captured war criminals are saturating today’s newspapers, and that’s rough, man, rough. But I WANT MY SCRABULOUS!

In the beginning was the word, and the word was God, and we all know the Lord works in mysterious ways. Enter the new millennium, and if you’re like most of us, you’ve got friends all across the globe. Once I could boohoo about it while reluctantly letting my grip slip. Or I could drift away. Now I play Scrabble with Tim P. over in England or Ireland, depending what day, just like we used to play on the front porch when he lived down the street. Now I play with Laura S. and Kat in Vancouver, my friends in Japan, and my BFF who isn’t that far away but has two kids and can’t make it out that often. But for a few minutes here and there, a cheerful exchange transpires, a chirpy message from afar, and a turn played, a new word learned- what’s a mile or two between friends?

Dave F. and I were close during high school, some 20 years ago (gulp). Separated into oblivion, we walked the same fruity stretches on Toronto without ever laying eyes on one another. Year after year, we lived parallel lives, writing and wining and dining and flipping the pages of celebrity rags. So close and yet so far. And then one day,  we found each other on Facebook. If the worst thing about Facebook is finding people you don’t like- awkward exes, condescending rivals, or Mom- the best, of course, is finding the people you loved and lost. I’m thrilled that Dave F. skipped the gutter years of my life and never saw me laying in that proverbial ditch. He’s glad I skipped the shiny velour pantsuit years that may forever have cemented him and George Costanza as wonder twins in my psyche. Now we can keep up our scathing running commentaries like we used to on the school bus, and sharpen our wordy wit at the same time.

Well, we could. Now Scrabulous is gone….forever? It’s unthinkable. Whom will I slaughter with a well-placed H, one of my secret weapons in the overtly obvious world of Z-strategies…? How will I play the poet Zach, whom I have never met, but who constantly gets 500 or more points and mine in half of that? Sucks to burn all the time, but it keeps me on top of my game to slaughter the minions below me. How will I have coffee with my east coast sisters? Where’s my sunny blonde Irish moment this morning?

There are those bitter detractors who think we  should all be out jogging or paying more attention to our work.  I say the five minute mental breaks for a few turns of the puzzle keep my wits sharp. I’ve gotten a lot smarter. I’d rather play an hour of Scrabulous than watch another reality show on a Saturday night, and then head out to Kevin A’s for an in-person game so I can watch him writhe while he tries to ply me with gin.

I’m not alone in saying that Scrabulous made my life just a wee bit better. What will become of us?  Who will I impress with my words?

Lorette C. Luzajic

www.thegirlcanwrite.net

My Scrabulous Life

It’s 5.30 on a Saturday morning and I’m tossing and turning under a tangled heap of sweaty blankets. People who are more fun than I am might be awake because they just got home from an after hours club. They may be forced into an early start because their job begins at seven. Not me. I would like to pass out for another couple hours before rising to meet my scheduled obligations. But I can’t help wondering if this might be the morning that I finally beat the Scrabulous robot.

Remember when you were an ardent teenager, and War and Peace or Gone with the Wind were weekend reads? Like everyone else of the ADHD generation, my propensity for anything over 11 pages has become meager. I’m only half kidding when I say that the articles in Vanity Fair are too long- “Who Wore it Best” with glossy photos is a better way to keep my reading skills sharp and my abilities to contrast and compare in working order. Considering that up until age 28, I refused to have a television, and a few years and about forty pounds later, I’m engaged to Cosmo Kramer and schedule my winter social life around American Idol.

How I loved to play Scrabble, wiling away the daylight hours on the porch, sipping gin and stunning the universe with bold bingos. For awhile, a bunch of us instigated ‘sober Saturdays’ and whoever wanted to avoid the imbibing nightlife and still have a jolly old time could hook up at Future’s Bakery or some other twilight patio for hours of fun filled word championships. That was an admittedly short-lived idea:  I played better with a mojito in one hand.

Those were the good ol’ days- but the Porch Scrabble Team dissipated into all corners of the world, and the idea of a solid hour for a game was a distant dream. I’d made a halfhearted attempt to pack the Travel Scrabble for the bus ride to the casino, but it took too long just to set up the board before I got bored. Yeah, once I could get away with pretending to be an intellectual, but these days, not so much. These are the days when going to a movie is a mental challenge, because there are no commercial breaks during the film. If I could ever sit through getting a tattoo again, perhaps it will simply say “Sad but True.”

Enter some bright young things who have it all figured out. Scrabble, but one turn at a time. Scrabble, with the opponents of the past, who are in all the far corners of the globe teaching English as a Second Language. Enter the Scrabulous life.

How to express the sheer joy of my ongoing tournament with my special friend on the opposite side of the country? Our little trips to Tim Hortons for a coffee and Scrabble game before yoga seem a distant thing of a rare sensible era in my past. Now we can pass chitchat and warm recollections through the Scrabulous messenger as we sharpen our wits back into shape.

I never had the privilege of playing with two of my sisters in British Columbia. I’m alarmed to find out my strategy skills pale before the one sick and savage bitch. It’s not all about the words, you know- you got to make the board impossible to play on while leaving an opening for your own tiles. It’s so nice for the three of us to play together. There’s no hurry to get through a game, though I’m still in the first month of Scrabulous, checking my play list every forty-three seconds to see if it’s my turn with anybody yet.

In the days of yore, I held my own at Scrabble, slaughtering many, but I have to say that Rozz and Tim tightened my game. You couldn’t win against Rozz. It would be a fluke if you did. She never had excuses like “crap, the curse of the i’s. “ Or “Shit, nothing but consonants.” Even if Rozz did have nothing but e i e i o , she could lay it somewhere and turn it into a 63-pointer. The girl laid at least one seven-letter word per game, and one of her favourite techniques was to make sure her z- and it was always her z- chance be damned- on a triple letter, and to lay that word on a triple word score. Her points would be some ridiculous achievement- anything less than 400 was losing for her, and she aimed for 500. Tim, on the other hand, was less flamboyant and vocal about his prowess, but you have to watch for the silent killers. You don’t even notice they are racking scores like 36 points per play. These types use mildly bewildered expressions and a beguiling Australian accent to divert your attention, meanwhile winning even over the Rozzes of this world.

It was a rare game that I won with either, but learned how to use two i’s to full advantage from Rozz and how to play with a blonde look and a brunette word from Tim. Rozz is a Toronto girl so we could still play the old-fashioned way if I felt like an ass-whupping. But Tim’s a jetsetter and I can’t keep track of him- Ireland, London, Australia, New York. It is an amazing dream that we are able to play together again! And since he claims he hasn’t played since the porch, I have a chance in hell.

No new Internet craze is complete without controversy- (it shouldn’t take a genius to figure out that you shouldn’t post your address and phone number and then make friends with every guy who ‘wants to be your facebook friend.”) Just as the ‘dark side of facebook’ lore slows to a dull roar, Scrabulous players are up in arms over a few life-threatening topics like “dictionaries: yes or no” and why “reiki” is okay in SOWPODS but not TWL. (If you don’t know what those words mean, then you definitely have a more interesting social life than I do!)

Personally, I’m all for the dictionary- it’s all about learning new words and what they mean and how they work, not just lumping some letters on the board in hopes they make a word somehow. Our family’s ‘challenge’ was always not about whether the word was real or not, but whether the player was able to define it or use it in a sentence. We didn’t considerusing the dictionary as cheating, because how are you supposed to improve your game and your vocabulary without The Big Book? “Tournament” games were played without dictionaries. Practicing for those meant reading the dictionary on the bus, in the bathtub, in line at the bank.

I also admit I’m team SOWPODS just because I like to fall back on “reiki” when there’s no use for a ‘k’ and the i’s are piling up. But the drawback is there are a whole lot more weird words and they aren’t just for me: my opponent can use them, too. This is particularly trying when you play with Robot. If you play with the SOWPODS dictionary, you will never know the meaning of a single word the Robot plays.

So the moral of the story is this: I think I’m smarter than I was last month, and I’ve cut down on Seinfeld reruns in favour of word wizardry with friends far and wide. I think I’m wittier and I’m sure my friends would agree. I know the robot will use the word ‘ajee’ and that it sort of means ‘beside’ but no one would ever really use it in life. And best of all, the cat cannot scatter the tiles by leaping onto the board, as he is apt to do when the board is the centre of attention and not he!

www.thegirlcanwrite.net