Rants & Raves

Randos and Jobbers*

*Jobber derives it origin from wrestling, referring to the guy who always loses to make the more popular wrestlers look better.    

The jobber who waits for the elevator by standing directly in front of the doors:  As the they slide open, this simple minded simpleton acts shocked that the elevator actually contains people.  PEEEEEEEEOPLE!!!!!!!  Sorry my presence is an inconvenience for you.  Now get out of the way and let me out!

The same genius who does this in front of Metro Car doors:  The doors are clear - you can actually see the people whose exit you’re blocking.

Rando Asian lady with umbrella… when it’s clear and sunny outside:  Just saying, if a white guy did this, you’d freak out and activate the Bat Signal.

Questionably blind persons:  I know that there are varying degrees of visual impairments, but I definitely saw a guy with a white “blind cane” standing on a corner checking his iPhone.  Got any good e-brailles there?

Super sweaty guy:  Often this is me.  Suit + temperatures above 70 + any physical exertion = splotchy-town.  Undershirts are powerless and often exacerbate the situation. 

Non-sweating hipster:  My polar opposite and sworn nemesis.  100 degree day, 200% humidity - This non-conforming non-conformist rides around on his fixie, sporting super skinny jeans, ironic beard, and a flannel shirt, yet mysteriously remains drier than British humour.

Blelvis:  Black Elvis.  DC semi-celebrity who knows the words to every song ever sung by Elvis Presley.  Can be spotted in the late night hours, typically on the U-Street or 14^th Street corridors.  Give him any letter, and he’ll sing you an Elvis song that begins with it.  Amazing!

Blelvis

Blelvis Impersonator:  Do not be fooled.  He sticks to the obvious Elvis songs. Throw him a request for “Queenie Wahine's Papaya” and watch him back down faster than a Frenchman in a fistfight.   

Not Blelvis

MRGB (aka Mr. GB):  Man riding girl’s bike.  “Hey dude, nice pink basket and handlebar streamers.”  I’m sure there’s a perfectly legal explanation for this.

Jumbo Slice Drunk Girl:  After a handful of drinks, this pint sized wonder wolfs pieces of pizza larger than her mini skirt.  47% chance they stay down.        

Jukebox Jokester:  This character takes a certain sick pleasure in playing songs that have no place in a bar, often looping them several times in a row.  The fourth run of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” is sure to empty even the trendiest bar on a Saturday night.
Trend alert:  "Ni**as In Paris-ing" a bar.  10 times in a row is appropriate.  

The Foot Racers:  Perched eagerly 2 feet off the curb, eyes fixed on the perpendicular traffic light, they are ready to leap across the street at the first hint of yellow.  Their unwarranted haste makes life hell for city drivers, especially those trying to turn right without bloodying up the front bumper. 

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FEAR

 

    Everyone has a fear.  Something that speeds up the heart, sends shivers down the spine, and causes one to cower like aaaaaaaa, like aaaaaaaa, like aaaaaaaa... coward.  For Howie Mandel, it's germs.  For Matthew McConaughey, it's revolving doors.  For Nick Carter, it's success (lucky for him).  For me, it's this:

     Television static.  Just looking at this puts me in a state of great unease; I can hear that horrible hissing sound that exists in the void between TV stations.  It's overwhelming.  It's paralyzing. It's fingernails running down a chalkboard.  

     This all goes back to childhood.  For one haunted week in grade school, the family room TV had a poltergeist.  At randoms times during the dead of night it would turn itself on.  STATIC.  FULL VOLUME.  Yanked violently from my slumber, I descended the dark stairs, the TV growling louder and louder as I drew nearer.  I struggled and staggered against the crackling current.  With one final lunge, I hit the power button, ending the nightmare.  Before an electrician or paranormal detective could properly diagnose the problem, the TV was gone.  We had opted for a larger (less possessed) screen.

     While its days have all but vanished, the emotional damage TV static has caused me cannot be erased.  Changing the TV input from HDMI 1 to Component 2 is a nerve racking experience.  Coat hanger antennas stand like a crucifix to a vampire.  I find myself unable to watch the first 10 seconds of HBO original programming.  Skrillex sends me into fetal position... unless it's the dub-steb remix of Adele's "Someone Like You". Dance-crying is so in right now. 
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Words With Batman

On how this bastardized version of Scrabble has killed the integrity of the game

       With all the incredible features on today’s smartphones (email, GPS, streaming music, barcode scanners, robot assistants), perhaps the most utilized one of all is Words With Friends.  Where its muse, Scrabble, has become a relic of family game nights and church basements, WWF has risen as a great time consumer and excuse for people in the same room to not talk to each other. 

For nearly a year, I held out on WWF, scoffing at friends and family members fixated on their two by four inch screens.  But alas, with an eminent surgery on the way (meaning lots of bedridden time to kill), I gave in (sold out) and started a WWF account.  No stranger to Scrabble, I figured I would easily vanquish my slower and less verbose acquaintances.  But as the accumulated, I was perplexed on how these dunderheads kept lambasting me.  Why weren’t my Scrabble skills working in WWF?  The general game play and goals of the two are the same: use letter tiles to create words and score points.  Bonus spaces multiply letter and word values.  May the best logophile win.  And yet, with all my gaudy SAT words in tow, I ceased to prevail.  Then one fateful afternoon, whilst watching TV land, it hit me: KA!  I’m playing Words with Batman.*

 Examine a recent WWF board and you’ll likely find it littered with KAs, QIs, ZAs, and BAPs.  The vocabulary more closely resembles a 1960’s Adam West fight scene than it does a lexical battle amongst intellectual peers.  Batman words run rampant.  WWF games are a repository of obscure mini words, because these punch/kick sounds win games.  A ‘Q’ placed in just the right spot (on a triple letter space, between two I’s on different axes) can rake in 62 points (by spelling QI twice).  Now can anyone tell me what QI means?**  It’s irrelevant.  One tile, 62 points.  The same goes for the word ZA, apparently an acceptable shortening of ‘pizza’.  With yields that high from single letters, there’s not much incentive in going for big words.  Consider the fact that WWF awards only 30 bonus points, as opposed to 50 in Scrabble, for using all of one’s tiles in a single turn (known in the biz as a bingo) This 40% reward reduction makes a big difference in how players choose to lay their tiles.  A lone Q may end up scoring more points than QUICKENS, even though it’s a bingo.  In Scrabble, a rack liquidating play is the grand slam of moves.  In WWF, it’s more like a ground rule double.

 Bingo bonuses aside, the main flaw with WWF is that it allows endless possible word submissions, with no penalty attempting non-words.  The original Scrabble has a rule hindering players from laying down words that they don’t know.  After the tiles are placed, an opponent may “challenge” that potential word, at which point a dictionary is consulted.  If the “word” in question is not in the dictionary, the offending player loses a turn (and some pride).  If the word is real, the challenger loses a turn.  This is a thing of beauty: a built-in system of checks and balances.  The challenge rule demands a certain confidence in one’s English proficiency, one not present in WWF.

              Without a challenge rule, we end up with a board chock full of KAs, ZAs, and BAPs, as well some longer (and equally unknown) words such as NEUSTON, BLIN, and GROK.  Their meanings unknown to the average player, words like these score big and win games.  Additionally, as more and more 2-3 letter words populate the board, a phenomenon known as the “staircase effect” occurs.  For fear of opening up the board to an opponent, and because of the high point to tile ratio of “Batman” words, players often layer tiles on top of each other, in a staircase pattern of mini-words.  Once a staircase has begun, it’s hard to escape. 

WWF does not need to copy Scrabble’s challenge rule in order to restore integrity to the game.  In fact, a challenge rule won’t even work for WWF, since opponents can only see words after they are accepted and scored.  Instead, I propose a one strike policy.  For each turn, a player gets only one freebie.  One shot at making up a word.  If the second submission is not legit, that player loses a turn.  It’s that simple.  If you don’t know what you are playing, then you don’t deserve points for it.  Batman words and staircases will become less common and gambles on words such as CROZE will be just that, gambles.   Words With Friends may have taken Scrabble viral and put it in the palm or your hand, but it shouldn’t ruin the heart and soul of the game: flexing one’s lexical nuts.  That’s simply flagitious. 

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*This never happened.

**The circulating life force whose existence and properties are the basis of much Chinese philosophy and medicine.