“Baby, when are you gonna blog about how I always beat your ass at Scrabble?”
- Angelface, Circa Sunday night
Although I’m ashamed to admit this for both personal and professional reasons, I’m going to be candid here: I am a loser.
A writer by profession, I realize there are certain things people come to expect of me. I’m supposed to read books (I do), and I’m supposed to be good at spelling (I am), and above all else – because words are my passion, my raison d’etre – I’m supposed to kick all kinds of ass in Scrabble.
I’m having a little trouble with the latter.
You see, not once, but twice now Angelface has proved himself a worthy adversary in wordplay and has beat me – like my name was Rodney effing King – at the most Hänni-friendly board game ever created.
This hurts, mostly because Angelface – throughout the duration of his entire life – has only played Scrabble twice.
In case you are bad at math, this means, that at Scrabble, Angel roolz and Hänni droolz… but I digress.
The first time Angel beat me, it was really bad –like beating me by 100pts or a triple-word-score for “quilts” bad. The second game though, I really thought I had a chance. If only The Face would’ve given me “Zocrates.” But Angel said Zocrates wasn’t a word. “Yes it is,” I retorted, “Zocrates was an Athenian teacher and the founder of the Zocratic Method!”
Unfortunately this argument was not persuasive –Angel is very well informed about Socrates and the Socratic Method, because he took philosophy in college….Plus he’s seen Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure like 50 times.
So yeah, Angel also wouldn’t accept:
- “Le” because it’s French and the French are bastards.
- “Telly” because it’s British and those people talk funny English.
- “Ownly,” because, even though I”m fairly certain it’s in the Redneck Dictionary, Angel couldn’t find it in Webster’s.
Interestingly enough, even though Angel seemed to have a problem with the foreign words mentioned above, he did let me have “yen.” “I can’t believe it,” I said. “You’re going to allow yen?” “Of course I am baby,” Angel replied, “it’s the Chinese dollar.”
I started to tell Angel he was wrong –the yen is actually Japanese, but I stopped myself. Unless I was able to pull a “boner” on triple-word-score I was going to lose, and I needed those six-effing-points.
At the end of our game, after 14 grueling rounds, Angelface calculated our totals.
At the bottom of his column he wrote 181.
At the bottom of mine, he recorded a score of “dumbass.”
It’s so totally easy to venture a guess, and look, the book is useful even if you don’t intend to read it.
Paula asks “What happened to Randy’s ‘dawg?’”
but I digress.
