Thursday, April 06, 2006

Ipodding Geeky Bliss

I have to recommend the podcast that I have begun listening to recently. The Word Nerds is an etymology podcast, where three American gents (Howard and Dave Shepherd and Howard Chang) natter about the origin of English/American words. I love this podcast, the guys are intelligent, interesting and amusing and I often learn something, despite that fact having Americans teaching me about a language that they don't bleeding well speak properly rankles a little! Theydo occasionally get it wrong however, there have been a number of references to how us English use words which just are either plain wrong or a little off-center, but that is to be expected as they don't live here.

Anyway, enough whittering on on my part - go listen to it!


Wednesday, April 05, 2006

Firefly RULES!

You scored as Hoban 'Wash' Washburne. The Pilot. You are a leaf on the wind, see how you soar. You have a good job, and a stunning wife who loves you (and can kill people). Life is good, which is why you can't help smiling. Now if you can just get people to actually listen to your opinion things would be perfect.

Hoban 'Wash' Washburne

88%

The Operative

69%

Simon Tam

63%

Capt. Mal Reynolds

63%

Kaylee (Kaywinnet Lee) Frye

63%

Inara Serra

56%

Zoe Alleyne Washburne

50%

Jayne Cobb

50%

River Tam

50%

Shepherd Derrial Book

44%

Which Serenity character are you?
created with QuizFarm.com

Saturday, April 01, 2006

Revenge is a dish best served SCRABBLED!

Well, the first proper entry for a scrabble game and I WON! However, it wasn't smooth sailing...

Firstly, while I made our tea, I foolishly let John set out the scrabble board. He "helpfully" picked out our letters for us so we could just start - as you can hopefully see, the results were a tad biased, mine tiles being on the left. (Click on any picture to enlarge it).


Johns first stage of cheating
After returning the tiles to the bag, we pulled tiles and John was to go first. And it was then that his little plan to fix the tiles backfired.

Justice!
His first go was therefore 0 points, while he swapped his tiles. The game then ran smoothly-(ish) until John tried to put down the word "quipe". I challenged and, while I was checking in the handy dictionary, John took a sneeky peek and saw the word "Quipo". So, cheat that he is, he used it the next go! There is no edd to the man's evil streak. Just look at the cheat's little cheating face.

Cheaty McCheater

Has anyone every looked so evil? Anyway, here is the final board :


SUCESS!!!!!!!!!!

And I feel vindicated, because after all, as my old Mum says, cheats never prosper!

My First Post

OK, so things have been going wrong in our house for some time. In arguments, the slamming of doors and the taunting only point to one thing.... Scrabble envy!

That's right, my other 1/2 and I have been playing scrabble for some time and things have become a bit... heated. The problem is as follows - I have a much better vocabulary but zero patience, no head for strategy and am dyslexic. He, however, is quite happy to spend 20 minutes contemplating his next move and makes moves merely for points. This is an anathema to me - scrabble should be a fast paced game that is about the love of words and life, he makes it about capitalism and boredom. He has started a site to catalogue our game scores and this is my rebuttal cataloguing the strife and the heartbreak that is our competition.