Scrabbilicious

I love Scrabble. And this is becoming a distraction, primarily because of a new, fantastic feature of Facebook called Scrabulous ... I always liked scrabble, but ever since I read the book Word Freak, about high level scrabble players, I have been really, really hooked. The book is by Stephen Fatsis, a sports reporter who essentially went to ground with the neurotic, word obsessed crazy folk who make up the world of competitive scrabble in order to write a book about something most of the world regards as a harmless meaningless pastime. These people are nuts, and the things they do to be good at Scrabble are nuts and the words that they know are beyond crazy ... one guy got a job at a toll booth so he could spend more time every day looking at thousands of flash cards containing insanely obscure words. The people were so entertaining that they actually made the book into a fairly good documentary, called Word Wars .. but I digress. You see, the problem with playing Scrabble across the country or around the world is that it is a time and board dependent game, so you generally cannot play with other people who are not in the same place as you. The internet had solved this problem, but the on-line scrabble site was not accessible by Macs, so I was safe from my own obsessions ... until recently, when Facebook has solved this problem by creating an untimed scrabble-type game you can play online, which has rapidly become my time-wasting method of choice ... its bad, because even though I could take lots of time, days even, in between plays, I get so excited about the next great word I am going to put down that I am constantly checking the board. And when you can play a large number of games at once, as I tend to do, you really always have some play to make ... and its my turn, so I have to go ...