Scrabbled

In a stunning turn of events, I totally kicked this guy's ass at Scrabble this afternoon. We were entering the final round and I was down by 50 points. "Okay," I thought. "I just need to use all my letters to get that50 point bonus." At the time, the letters on my tray were I-R-A-N-O-U-T, a fine political commentary, but not especially useful. On the board, the word LINE was hovering over to the left, spelled out horizontally. In a brilliant (for me) move, I positioned RAINOUT vertically, using the A to convert LINE to ALINE (like the skirt), scooping up a triple word bonus at the same time for both words. It was possibly the most brilliant move of my Scrabble career.

It's not really a pure victory -- we'd all been sorta cheating throughout the game, looking at each other's letters, suggesting good plays. The scores for each round proved quite conclusively that my friend (Arcomay, we'll call him, to preserve his anonymity) was by far the most skilled player of the three of us, and I contribute my win more to my unflagging good luck than to any particular skill on my part. There's no doubt that the next time we play, he'll have less pity on me and I will be creamed, hard.

For the moment, though, I am totally basking in a sweet, sweet move.