Ignoring the news has gotten to be a full-time occupation, and if you’re going to do it successfully and still spend way too much time online, you need to play a lot of games. I play a lot of games.
I play one of the scrabble games with my friend Devon. We have three going at once. I begged her to play it twice a day so it would last longer. There’s a lot of news to ignore out there.
But then came Wordle, and Quordle, and—God Bless America and the New York Times—the Spelling Bee! The NYT daily Spelling Bee is my kind of game. Make as many words as you can with a set of seven letters, one of which must be in every word. Oh, come to Mama! Our family played a version of this almost every day of our childhood. We were all insanely good at it. Well, maybe we were. It’s not like we played it with anyone else. Back in the fossil times, you could play a game without crowing about your victories to anyone not in the room. Let alone everyone not in the room.
As you find more and more words, the Spelling Bee helpfully tells you how you’re ranking. It starts out at Beginner and goes through Louie Gohmert, Short Bus, Postal Supervisor, Parking Lot Pigeon, and Golden Retriever before fetching up at the Genius Level, at which point you can sit back and enjoy a little display of digital applause from the Times, but it doesn’t mean you’ve found all the words. If you keep plugging away and get them all, you achieve Queen Bee. The third time I played, I drew a blank momentarily and stopped short of Genius, because I didn’t yet realize I can always get to Genius. (You just have to step on Louie Gohmert’s head.)
Which, of course, means now I can’t stop until I get to Genius, no matter what else I need to do that day. And often the rest of the words will occur to me while I’m on the toilet, uh, thinking. It’s my Queen Bee throne.
After a few weeks of this it becomes an obsession.
They say that your brain can solve problems for you when you’re asleep. Generally the only problem I tackle when asleep is how to run to a gate on the far side of a huge airport in thirty seconds. It’s always a life-or-death connection. I haven’t solved it yet after all these years. But apparently it is possible to solve things in your sleep, because the other night I shot awake at 2am and thought: ANONYMY! Which was the word I was missing for my crown.
I’m not saying that’s restful. It’s a pretty short trip between waking up yelling ANONYMY! and staying awake thinking about all the news you were trying to ignore.
Anyway, if you have a degree of propriety and don’t have your own blog, no one will ever know how good you are at these things. Because the thing about the Spelling Bee game is, unlike Wordle, it doesn’t keep track of your glory. You’d have to set up a spreadsheet yourself, and that would be immodest. It would be so much better to just have an official results page online somewhere a friend might trip over it, say, when you’re going to show them a cool video but you kind of accidentally click on the wrong tab. Say.
I wish the Spelling Bee would tell me how many times I was Queen Bee, I found myself thinking. If you’re the kind of person who has recently tried to turn the pages of a paperback by touching the margin, that kind of thing is important.
But then I realized how debilitating a streak can be.
My friend Margo and I went on the week-long Cycle Oregon ride in 1989. It was the second year they had it. We had a great time on Cycle Oregons Two through Eight and that was that. If we’d done the first one also, we’d have been in a diminishing number of people who’d done them all. We’d have a streak. We’d still be doing them whether we wanted to or not. We’d have pedaled straight through menopause and beyond. Our knees would fly off like hubcaps in a sharp turn. Our arm skin would flap like dog lips in a car window. We’d be terrifying people in the shower.
A streak turns fun into obligation.
Screw that Spelling Bee anyway. They think EXPELLEE is a word but they don’t take ANHINGA.
Durn it–when I saw your title in my blog-feed, I thought this was going to be about you running naked thru your town in ’75 (or better yet, this week). Well Murr, your extensive vocabulary is quite impressive–I’ve never heard of anonymy until 10 minutes ago–and all this brain flexing is probably going to spare you from dementia. All of us over-60s should endeavor to blah blah blah. PS Got a chuckle, you tappin’ the margin in your paperback to turn the page!! I do love my e-reader!
I wasn’t bluffin’ about that. Also I picked up my cell phone and waited to hear a dial tone for years. And years.
“Our arm skin would flap like dog lips in a car window.”
As a woman at the far reach of her 60s, I completely cracked up at that one. Too true!
“Our arm skin would flap like dog lips in a car window.” Oh ARGGGHHHH!
I resemble that remark! I wear a lot of long sleeves and hoped no one had noticed! (Fat chance!) I may have to take up drinking a second cup of cawfees in the morning! (sob)
I have not actually caught my bingo wings flapping but it’s only because I haven’t looked and I can’t see them over my boobs when they slide sideways.
Afraid I’m not big on games of any kind. I don’t mind Cryptic Byword now and again, but I just can’t sit still for that stuff. I’ve always had to move around. When I was just a kid and trying to figure out what i wanted to do with my life… and couldn’t… my family said “take secretarial courses! You’ll always have a job!” So I did, as I had no real avocation for anything. And I tried it. And fucking HATED it. 8 1/2 hours in a windowless room with florescent lighting… no local restaurants, so I had to bring a bag lunch to eat at my desk for the half-hour lunch break… sitting at a desk ALL THE TIME! It’s no wonder when I fell into waiting tables, I loved it. I could run around all day (a 4-hour day!), chat with strangers, and use my mad skills at organizing. I had so much time back then to recreate, and now that I am “retired”, I have less time and do more at home than I did when I was working. WTF is up with that? I suspect that Time is speeding up. I know… I know… people say that is “seems” that way when you get older. But I theorize that it actually IS speeding up. Is it the infamous black hole? Or is it the expansion of the Universe? Enquiring (and somewhat unsettled) minds want to know!
My explanation for that observation is Cantor’s Law of Time Management in Retirement: “As the number of things I have to do decreases, my time management skills deteriorate at a such a rate as to hold constant my feeling that I can’t ever get enough done.”
But….. but….. I’ve always been so organized…. *Whimpers*
I like that!
Arm skin! I’m going on a cruise in two weeks. Looking for shirts to wear when temps are warm is hard with that skin. Sleeveless? Forget it. Cap sleeve? Nope. Regular short sleeve? Still a bit of that skin peeking out. Quarter length will do, but any longer than that is too hot. Never imagined a summer wardrobe would be so challenging.
Linda, Garnet Hill makes loose fitting, long sleeved t-shirts in pima cotton, which is VERY lightweight. I wear them with jeans when I am gardening, because they are cool, yet cover my skin. Just make sure wherever you get them that it’s PIMA cotton.
Bikini top. No one will be looking at your arms.
Congratulations Queen Bee. We have a similar game in our daily newspaper which is the main reason I buy it every day, but ours is called Target Words and has nine letters. The aim is to find the nine letter word, then as many other words with four or more letters each containing the main letter. We get a score number to aim for , for instance last Saturday was 12-good; 15-very good; 18+ excellent. The given letters are set in a 3×3 grid so it’s easy to see which is the central (main) letter. Saturday’s grid was IEN, FHG, LTI, with H being that letter. I’m always disappointed that I don’t remember as many words as I used to.
Same dang game. Just more letters.
I have, thus far, managed not to ask anyone to tell me what wordle is or how to do it. I foolishly asked someone about soduku.[I’ve just had to Google that spelling! sudoku, apparently…]
As a child, when I was told to “look it up in the dictionary” I learned bucket loads of words, other than the one I wanted. It helped when I was asked to compile crosswords.
Wordle just sounds like something I don’t want to get because, clearly, there’s no vaccine…
Where is the thumbs up icon when you need it? i have a friend who is addicted and keeps plying me with questions about why I haven’t become crazed with the rest of the Wordle aficionados! I waste enough time as is!
The cool thing about Wordle is it only sucks one to five minutes out of your day. Be not afraid!
I would like to be a game player, but really enjoy playing with other people who are also in the room with you, preferably with a cold drink and some crunchy things and what the hey, maybe some soft music in the background (because if it is above a certain decibel, it all sounds like crunching).
Playing by myself seems pointless.
At this point the only communal game playing I do is the NJ Lottery’s crossword puzzle scratch off tickets with the two witches who like to tell me there’s a dead person in the backyard and can I go out and make sure they’re dead and it turns out to be a rabbit…
The holy grail of the crossword scratch off is to get ten words. A player has a given number of vowels and consonants and a crossword puzzle with the words already filled in. One just needs to figure out whether one has the correct letters in the quiver.
We always complain that we don’t have enough vowels (a, u and sometimes y). Last Sunday night, I discovered I had all the vowels, except y and for several blissful minutes I thought I had a $20,000 card. By the time I was done scratching off all the letters, I had a card that was almost complete. Except for l and r, which turned out to be crucial consonants. I got my usual two words and that ain’t worth diddly patoot.
They don’t accept ANHINGA? What is this world coming to.
Speaking of long term commitments, my buddy and I took part in the Atlantic County Fourth of July butterfly count for over twenty five years, even doing it after a supercell flattened the county, knocking out power and leaving trees all over the place. He quit a few years ago while cancer played whack-a-mole with him and that was that.
I would be nervous about doing a butterfly count with you during a supercell because you attract lightning.
Gosh, that was a fun sentence to write.
I get annoyed at “gotta” and “gonna.” And “gimme.” I mean, really, aren’t there enough real words? But I still play ever day along with Wordle, Quordle, 7 Letters, the NYT Crossword (both mini and maxi) and the Jumble. There is a lot of news to avoid. . .
Really? They accept those colloquialisms? Even I don’t do that! They’re just setting a bar too low to limbo under….
I wonder if they leave out certain words on purpose just to get people riled up and interested. After all, the social media have proved that nothing gets people clicking like dudgeon.
And they don’t take caracara either. Sam Ezersky, the future Will Shorts who prepares the Spelling Bee every day, must not get excited by birds, unless they are crow or robin or coot. I’ve written to the NYT five or six times to complain about a word they omitted, generally getting some form letter in response telling me that the common word (at least more common than many I see when I check out “yesterday “ the next day) is not something they are interested in adding to their list. But once they actually thanked me and indicated that the word I identified likely would be added to the list. Bingo! Made my day. But we persevere, often at 1 AM when I cannot sleep, and usually get to genius and maybe once every 8 or 9 months, Queen Bee. Right now I’m 12 points short of genius. Will revisit when I visit the throne.
I do know they don’t take caracara, in fact. But now I simply must know what word they thanked you for! I didn’t really suspect anyone got anything but the form letter.
If they don’t take anhinga they clearly have not been to the Everglades National park where there are signs warning that windshield and side window rubber edgings are likely to be attacked by the anhingas……..
I have never heard of them, but this impelled me to google them. OMG! It’s like the Keas in New Zealand! They also attack windshield wipers and such. If the NYT won’t accept this bird, I think we should all march on their building or write angry letters saying that we are appalled… nay! Incensed! That they are denying the very existence of this bird! An outrage!
As soon as I saw that comment I thought “KEAS!” I did not know Anhingas did the same thing. I mostly think of them standing on a rock hanging their wings out to dry.
Spelling Bee has been pissing me off for years! They don’t take 99% of French words, but then “adieu” gets the nod. Meanwhile, lots of Yiddish words are acceptable, but I don’t recall anything Spanish but “taco” and “salsa” getting approval. About half of the medical terms I try make it through, and lots of chemicals, but the decision to include a word doesn’t seem to be based on common usage. On the Help link, upper right, there’s an option to email the Bee Dudes, which I do regularly, but they always send me back the same form letter amounting to, “Nanner-nanner, this is our game and we’ll make the rules.” Well, except for that one time where it got personal. So, to get even, I never give them the satisfaction of entering one single word beyond Genius. I have my own game: I make up words with their letters and give them definitions. My favorite recently was “feebile.” Nance is too feebile to do much more than play lame word games and argue with Bee Dudes.
But did you see Mark G, up there, actually got them to accept a word? Yeah, I make up words all the time because sometimes they slip through. Not HENTEETH though.
Murr, you will always be the Queen Bee in our hive!
And long may our hive live! Of course, I googled it, and worker bees live a few weeks (If I were working most of the hours in my life, I’d probably be only too glad to die that soon, too.) Queens can live for TWO YEARS. Enjoy your tenure, Murr…. (I seem to remember that drones just impregnate the Queen and are thrown out, as they do no work outside of impregnating the Queen. So they have an even shorter life span.)
This queen is in no danger of any of that.
But do they recognize ‘flang’? That’s what I want to know.
I accept it.
I used to think I was intelligent and quite literate until I started playing Scrabble with you, Murr. By comparison, I am a dim-witted cocker spaniel, with my lips flapping in the wind.
Well I’m a fat spreading pug on a rug.
to Bruce Mohn; y is not a vowel. Vowels are a,e,i,o,u
And I quote, River. ” and sometimes y.” Maybe it’s a ‘merican thing but it’s drilled in from our first year at school.
Now. Just try to find an example….
Y is sometimes a vowel indeed, and W sometimes is also.
LYMPH.
CWM.
Lynch, glyph, myrrh, myth, rhythm…
fly, why, try, by, my, ply, spy, spry, sly, sty
I learned English English not American English and y will never be a vowel to me. It has a vowel sound, I’ll agree to that.
My wife and I play Spelling Bee independently every day and often text each other “QB” or “kewbie” or “cue be” or some such when either of us gets the last word. We do use a “crutch” (we play for our enjoyment and this adds to our enjoyment): William Shunn has a web page that can tell you word lengths and counts of words with initial pairs of letters. You may call it cheating, but you’re not the boss of me.