Latest spam subject lines
My favorite spam subject lines of the day: First: the social networking site no one else knows about Now I want to generalize that to a sort of a game:...
Archive for Games
Months and movies
I stopped by Netflix today, and the system recommended two movies that had titles with month names in them. So here's today's challenge: come up with a set of twelve...
Online Encore
Are y'all familiar with the game "Encore"? There's a boardgame version of it, but I first encountered it as a parlor game (not sure which version came first), in which...
platypus beatkeeper
I'm sure y'all know about hinky-pinkies. Here's a sort of quasi-variant: one person gives a clue, others try to find an answer that consists of two adjoining words (or phrases)...
nnn: More Names, More Games
I know of at least three entirely different games called The Name Game. One of them is used for introductions and theatre warmups: everyone stands in a circle, and one person says their name paired with an adjective that starts with the same letter—"Frantic Fran," for instance. As they say this, they make a gesture […]
AA: We Do ’Grams, Word Games
Okay, is there anyone here who doesn't know that an anagram is a rearrangement of letters from a word or phrase, ideally resulting in another word or phrase that has some bearing on the original? Didn't think so. The Net is full of anagrams; they're so common that I'm surprised it's taken me a year […]
aa: Love Letters
It's been a full year since I started doing these columns.... Time flies. To accompany you into the new year, here are a couple of miscellaneous alphabetic amusements. What comes next in the following series of names? Partial credit for getting the initial letter right. Wawona Vicente Ulloa Taraval Santiago Rivera Quintara Pacheco Ortega Noriega […]
N: Crotchety Old Crocheters
Various memory-related games involve reciting a list of items; each time you recite the list, you add a new item to it. The act of reciting the full list each time makes it much easier to remember the entire list as it grows. Some years back, Ed Cook taught us a list of eleven items […]
A: Now I Know My (Reader Comments and Addenda)
Thida Cornes, Sarah Liberman, and I went tripping, and we took acid, beanies, coke, downers, ecstasy (and ethanol), flying ointment, ganja (and glue), Haldol (and horse, and heroin), incense, junk, lithium (and LSD), marijuana, nicotine, opium, PCP, quaaludes, rum, sinsemilla (and smack), tea, uppers, Vivarin (and Valium), willow bark, X, and yerba buena. zowie! (I'm […]
A: Now I Know My
When airplane pilots and military personnel need to refer to letters of the alphabet, they use the NATO phonetic alphabet. In this system there's a word for each letter, to avoid confusion among letters whose names sound similar (especially over a noisy radio): Alpha Bravo Charlie Delta Echo Foxtrot Golf Hotel India Juliet Kilo Lima […]