of sine waves, rearing heads and dictionary wars

... so today, I'm at the computer, playing scramble on facebook (an online version of boggle) when I hear the cat pawing at the floor. You know, pawing/scratching on the floor, like what you'd expect her to do if she were covering up her "business" with kitty litter. Except that she was pawing at the floor. NOT a good sign!

So I peeked around the corner and whaddaya know, there was a piece of turd, along with what I call "sine waves" : sinusoidal marks on the floor left by butt-dragging. Do YOUR cats have this problem? Once in a while our crazy kitty can't quite completely squeeze one out, so she'll clamber out of the litter box with a turd tangling out her butt, which she then removes by dragging her butt across the floor.

*sigh*

... if nothing else, at least it was a relatively easy and hassle-free clean-up.


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and what I expected to happen has finally started! I was in French class and found myself wanting to add "también" to the end of my sentence to indicate "also", LoL! I'm still having the stray Italian word / number / rhythm emerging during Spanish class, it was just a matter of time before Spanish started rearing its head in French! I'm not complaining at all, though, don't get me wrong! I'd love to be able to just switch from one language to another without hardly any hesitation or conscious effort... long time to go before I can do that tho :p

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... so recently I've been online playing Scrabulous (a Scrabble rip-off), Scramble (a Boggle rip-off) and Text Twister on Facebook as well as playing Scrabble on the PC itself. And I've been getting more and more irritated by the different dictionaries used by different games and applications. The worst offender is Text Twirl - after training myself to spot words what would otherwise look like nonsense (aas, ais, dee, cee, ...), it's like running into a brick wall when these words are rejected.

Then there's my PC game, an official Scrabble product, that doesn't accept "qi" yet it's fine in Scrabulous which uses the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary as reference.

... and if you look at all the possible words from one Boggle/Scramble game, well, lets just say I question the validity of SO MANY of them!!

but at the end of the day, I suppose one just needs to keep track of which words are accepted by which games and play accordingly, or, be like me and don't get too hung up about it: at least Boggle/Scramble/Text Twirl don't penalize you for guesses/wrong words. So type away in those games, and just play it safe in Scrabble.

Ciao!