Ntuple Indemnity

First off, a word of thanks to whoever tipped Cartoon Brew about my previous post, and a warm welcome to all the Real Animators who have come to pay a visit. You guys inspire me. Moreover, it’s nice to get some heavy traffic, for a change, for a post not related to Harry Potter.

I don’t have much else to say about animation this week, though, because I am quite busy playing Scrabble at the luxurious Arizona Biltmore. I came expecting to stay in a hotel, and what I got instead was a monument of sorts to Frank Lloyd Wright. The gardens are decorated with Wright sprites, and the architecture is all Wright (pun very intended). There’s a soup and sandwich place called the Café Wright, a little shop called The Wright Stuff, and a fancy restaurant named – you guessed it – Wright’s. Unlike the National Scrabble Championship in New Orleans two years ago, I’m not taking time to see the surrounding area, or doing much of anything that doesn’t involve letters with points on them, but that’s okay. Like the Fairmont Banff Springs, the resort itself suffices as a tourist attraction.

So let’s talk Scrabble.

First, some links: you can follow my round-by-round progress at the tournament website, and I’m photographing every game I play and storing the snaps in this Facebook album. You’ll notice that the tournament is called the U.S. Scrabble Open now, but it’s really just the National Scrabble Championship under a different (and more accurate) moniker.

Prognosis after Day One: much better than New Orleans. I’m ranked 32nd out of 116 players in Division 4 thanks to a 4-3, +408 record, the second-highest spread in the four-win bracket. Let’s see how I got there. Again, check out the photo album to follow along with the commentary.

Round 1: What a great start. Two natural bingos (ENRICHER, AEROSAT) secured me a 120-point lead by the midgame, and then it was just a matter of shutting down the open lanes and still managing to average about 25 points per turn. I didn’t have a particular advantage in tiles, either; among the power tiles, I drew ?JQSS, and my opponent drew ?SSXZ. And I didn’t really use my blank, since I picked it up near the end. I won a challenge when my opponent tried PARFAIS* down the A-column, too. 433-272, and it’s full steam ahead.

Round 2: I had to fight against the tiles on an incredibly tight board, skipping a turn and exchanging on four separate occasions where I drew to too many vowels or too many consonants through little fault of my own. Thankfully, my opponent lost three challenges, since I wasn’t about to let her get away with INTACTS*, hooking GIAOURS onto BIG to make BIGG*, or OVE*. Word knowledge saved my hide – almost. I technically lost this one 301-312, but my opponent went two minutes over for a 20-point penalty, and I was only 14 seconds away from going over myself. 301-292. Way too close, and I’m evidently a lot more comfortable playing in the open.

Round 3: It’s not like I drew everything. I had ??QSX to my opponent’s JSSZ (and an unplayed S), but good positional playing overcame my letting two phonies go by without a challenge (VEIGH* and PERC*). After the triple-header of WARMEsT for 80, PLOY for 39 and NEXT for 40 near the beginning of the game, I maintained a commanding lead the whole way. It’s always a bit frustrating when you’re way ahead, you shut down the board, and then draw to a bingo rack. Luckily, it turned out that when I held DEELNR? as the game was winding down, there remained a lane that hardly looked open at all. I played LENDERs on a triple, parallel to AIMED to make AN, ID, ME, ER and EDs – and with another 97 points to my name, that sealed the deal. A huge win, 464-243.

Round 4: Among the power tiles, I only drew QSS this game, but I kept pace for most of the game until my opponent finally got rid of both blanks at once with BaNNeRS for a relatively meagre, but game-winning 66 points. Actually, I was still in it, but then she played NU to make PEND, and block off the bottom-centre TWS, right before I’d planned to play OCULI there for 33 points. It was basically an unwinnable game from that point on, and holding EIILU at the end, I was lucky to have the M open for MILIEU. A close and fighting loss, 355-363.

Round 5: I was already playing catchup before my opponent played EXPLAIN for 85 points to take a 90-point lead that I never managed to recover from. I couldn’t really open up without giving away some opportune spots, so she kept on scoring. My one bingo, INSTaTE, gave away the TWS in the top right corner, and a much safer play would have been LINTiEST off the L in PLOVER. I was almost back in the game when she found VARIoLES, and given what was left in the bag, I had no real way of catching her. My biggest loss of the day, 337-413. At least it wasn’t a blowout.

Round 6: I controlled the whole game. Sure, I played a phony without even considering that it might be unacceptable (momentarily confusing VACU* with the valid VATU). But armed with both blanks, drawing great tiles and playing both bingos on the board, my only complaint about this game was that I saw a valid and beautiful bingo (BIOMETEr on a triple) but didn’t play it, since I wasn’t sure it was good. Given that I was leading 311-152 at the time, I really could have afforded to take the risk, and make a serious stab at the 500 mark. Another big win, 417-253. It should have been bigger.

Round 7: Ouch. I challenged the double-blank bingo ROIlIeST and lost, falling behind by a 96-point deficit early on, and just couldn’t get my act together. Exchanging three times didn’t help either, except for temporary alleviating some serious vowel trouble. My opponent lost a turn for challenging JOWAR, but all it did was give me a chance to dump the Q and hope for a bingo-prone rack, which didn’t come. I got stuck with the V for the rest of the game, and lost 322-385.

It wasn’t a bad day, overall, and with 21 rounds to go, I’m still in contention the way I’ve been playing. The interesting thing about this division, which spans the 1200-1399 ratings bracket, is that word knowledge is really all over the map. There are players with strong vocabularies who are merely recovering from a slump, and there are those who simply aren’t comfortable enough with the fours and fives to fill the space between bingos with strong plays and keep the rack balanced.

I’m somewhere in between. Today I played one successful phony and got duped by two, but I also challenged six plays and was right about five of them. I’m playing my way out of bad tiles well enough to get out of trouble, if not always retake the lead. That’s really an essential skill in this game: making high-scoring plays and staying in the picture in the face of horrible misfortune. Most of the time, the frustration of bad luck and the elation of its goodly counterpart are direct consequences of strategy.

And there’s more where that came from. Onward!

What mean I by unrecognitis? I believe it’s a Stu Goldman coinage, and it describes a curious but common phenomenon that afflicted me tonight, when Bill Payne bingoed out with RESTATES in an improbable location I had neglected to block. “Restate?” I thought, “What’s a restate? Sounds like some kind of residual chemical compound… it looks familiar, so I think it’s good, unless I’m thinking of TESTATE.” But hey – the game was over, so I challenged the darned thing anyway (which is always a good idea on the last turn, since you have nothing to lose).

Naturally, it was acceptable, and Bill scraped so many points from the play that I ended up winning by a narrow margin (423-406) in spite of dominating the game until the last few turns. To keep things in perspective, that’s one whopper of an aggregate score between the two of us. One doesn’t often lose with a score over 400.

Ten minutes later: “Oh! Re-state!”

I haven’t posted here lately, but if I had, it would have been about sport. However, I’ve been reading about it instead (hockey and footy, anyhow), and that’s my alibi.

Enough excuses and distractions, though. Here’s a treat for your patience: a live jazz trio playing the Super Mario Bros. theme. That’s the wine-bearing Darryl Meyer on drums, the lovely Aleks Argals on bass, and yours truly on the crazy eighty-eights. Share and enjoy.

I now have a degree. Well, that was easy. In fact, it was easy to the point that I’m not sure it qualifies me for anything.

Note that I’m not making any claims about doing well… that’s a separate challenge entirely, and one that is caught in a balance of pride and shame (as opposed to accomplishment and failure, which run along a very different axis).

Not long ago, I lamented that my knowledge of the U of A Cheer Song was limited to its recitation by tone-deaf student politicians, but after hearing it played by a wind band, I have to say that I’m quite taken with its splendiferous bombast. As readers have no doubt discerned from the foci of this here gonzo-guest’s maverick wedding journalism, ceremonial music programmes are something I like to see done right. In this case, what did the trick was a dash of Gershwin and a slice of Williams (The Phantom Menace, but with “Duel of the Fates” taken a bit under tempo).

Convocation was otherwise a nonevent, far overshadowed by the opening of the first new Pixar feature in a year and a half. Cars is wonderful, Pixar is a perfect seven-for-seven, you should stay for the credits, and I’ll go into detail some other time… maybe. First, I’ll see it again.

So let’s talk Scrabble.

If you want to read an account of last weekend’s Calgary Summer Tournament from a player and division from which you might actually learn something, I recommend the two-part Division 1 account located here and here. If not, then I guess you’re stuck with me. And not only do I make mistakes, I have a photo album to prove it.

As Paul says in his journal, “Bad luck and bad decisions are a lethal mix. You can win playing poor and getting lucky, and you can overcome bad luck with good play.” So when you miss easy bingos, lose an obscene number of challenges, draw racks like LRSSS?? with no open lanes on the board, and throw IIIIO back in the bag only to have to toss IIV later (and still draw four more Is to play off in the endgame), you can pretty much consider yourself screwed.

Take Round 13, for instance, where I was saddled with dreck on a tight board for most of the game when I gave myself an improbable opening with GNU, and held EEIGNS?. Since DOGY was in the way down the centre column and the only letter that goes at the end of GNU is an S, any seven-letter word I found would have to have an S in the fifth position in order for me to play it.

As it happens, there are two. The one I didn’t see was GENESIs. The one I did see was GrEISEN, and I was delighted to see that my opponent courteously left the spot open for me to play it. And then I realized that I didn’t remember if the correct spelling was GRIESEN* or GREISEN. It was an epic battle between the I-before-E-except-after-C dictum that never really works, and the chance that the word might be of German origin.

In Scrabble, you’re so used to seeing everything uppercase that sometimes, what I try to do when figuring out if a word looks right is write it down lowercase and see if it looks familiar. I tried it here, and it only served to confuse, since I’d never seen either one written lowercase before. Since I’m not a geologist who deals with altered granitic rocks, I’ve never had to use the word in a proper, contextual sentence.

Needless to say, I played the wrong one, and since my opponent didn’t know either one (and had a precious lead to protect), she challenged it. At the end of the day I was at 7-7 (-202), which should give you a sense of how bad my losing margins were compared to my winning ones. I also posted my lowest bingo count in any tournament in years. School’s out; time to start studying.

Musicians take note: in one game, I played QUARTAL*, absolutely convinced it was an acceptable word, and it was challenged off the board by an opponent who knew her Qs. At the time I suspected it was a word from mathematics, but I was actually thinking of quartal harmonies, which are chords built on successive fourths. Jazzmen dump them faster than a sack of tea in Boston Harbor on account of their utility in adding flashy sixths and ninths to just about anything.

Three weeks going on four is the typical length of absence when people begin worrying about my health (i.e. exam-season procrastinators complain that I am leaving them nothing to read in place of textbooks).

I am alive and well, in spite of any and all reports to the contrary, including those that might have come from myself. There does exist a much longer post in progress that has not been touched in a week. I make no promises that it will ever appear, but for now it provides an implicit excuse.

So earlier this month I discovered Facebook. Although the words “social” and “networking” are red flags by themselves, never mind compounding them together, this particular message and photograph exchange is elegant, clean and eminently recommendable – thanks to the strongly-suggested, lightly-enforced norm of using real names and the restriction of membership to college-affiliated individuals (aside from some high schools in the States). It has always been my belief that Internet privacy need not be contingent on Internet anonymity, which for some reason inerrantly comes at the cost of a dignified level of discourse.

The immediate benefit of the service? Scrabblogging is back, and this time, you don’t have to wait for a huge page to load all at once like my New Orleans log (see the entirety of the August 2004 archive). At the time of this writing I haven’t added any substantial commentary to the 13 rounds that earned me $90 in Sherwood Park over the weekend, but I’ll make one special note: the best part was in Round 4 when I played BOGARTS, which is one of the new words introduced in the OWL2/OSPD4 lexicon (BOGART v -ED, -ING, -S to use without sharing). As for the twos, I’ll crunch the stats later, but I’m confident that QI has replaced QAT as the most commonly-played word in the game. This should surprise nobody.

I find it problematic that Facebook does not permit line breaks in the captions, presumably so they fit into the little tooltips that pop up as thumbnail gallery mouseovers, but no matter. If that makes annotations too difficult, I’ll write them here instead.

March is usually a busy month for me, and correspondingly, a quiet one. Spring, as the song goes, can really hang you up the most.

So, what news from the secret lab?

One thing I have not been doing is playing Scrabble. Having missed the Calgary Spring Tournament on a last-minute cancellation, I won’t be formally tested against the new word list until the Sherwood Park tournament on the weekend of 22-23 April. Casual bystanders new to (and curious about) competitive Scrabble should note that this is a very good choice of a first tournament, since the expected pool of players is fairly low-rated, and the divisional cutoffs reflect that. Know all your two-letter words and be comfortable with a good chunk of the threes, and you should coast.

I wouldn’t hesitate to say that the choir I play with had a great performance at Choralfest, but it was a unique and unreliable aural experience. On a stage like that, everything is a little out of balance where the piano guy sits, especially if you put him right in front of the kit. But the gig was still a blast.

In fact, it was such a blast that my pages flew off the piano and onto my hands while I was playing, and I had to shake them off. As I would have it, my solo was henceforth wicked as the Witch of the West. There’s nothing like being spontaneously forced to listen; jazz, after all, is a social activity. I’d liken it to the uncoupling braces of the young Forrest Gump breaking into his first exhilarating run, but even I have my analogical limits.

Our next performance is at Convocation Hall on Saturday, 8 April. 8pm, I think, but I’ve been wrong before. In addition to the typical standard-bearing, there will be Paul Simon aplenty – and maybe, just maybe, a smidgen of Koji Kondo.

In the tail end of my lukewarm review of Inside Man, I take a parting sideswipe at acclaimed trumpeter Terence Blanchard for the mishmash that is his score to the film. I nearly forgot to mention it, but it’s an important point. It’s quite literally all over the place. Figuratively, too, in terms of style. While I admire genre-bending versatility, it needs to have some kind of rhyme or reason, and it needs to fit the film. Here, it just distracts.

I didn’t see Letters (Thursday, 23 March 2006) reprinted in the online edition of The Gateway, so I’ll reproduce another response to the Scrabble article I was moaning about last week. It comes from Tony Leah, who unlike me, is one of the best players in Canada, and unlike me, is polite and eloquent about it. I don’t know how he came across our campus paper all the way out in Ontario, but I’m glad he did:

New words doing nothing but improving Scrabble, Fedio

I play Scrabble competitively, and I think you should know that the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary is not an arbitrary collection of words and non-words (Re: “New words ruining game of Scrabble,” 21 March). It was compiled by referencing four major North American Collegiate Dictionaries. Only words that are listed in one of these dictionaries are included in the OSPD. Even so, the OSPD, with about 83 000 entries, is a tiny fraction of the complete Oxford English Dictionary, which lists some 616 500 words.

I am also not sure how you can so confidently set yourself up as arbiter of what is, and what is not, a “real word.” Anyone who has been to Hawaii will have likely seen aa and pahoehoe (different types of lava), and will find the words familiar, not strange. Even my Canadian Oxford lists aa. (By the way, aa is not a new addition to the OSPD. It has been included for years.) My Canadian Oxford also lists qi, and most well-read people will be familiar with this spelling of the word.

Serious Scrabble players would strongly disagree with your contention that the recent update, which added about 3000 words, diminishes the skill involved in playing at a high level. And, to draw comparisons with steroid use is ridiculous. Everyone has access to the new words, if they possess the skill and determination to learn them. In fact, the very best players have the ability to master different lexica for different tournaments – one for play in North America, and a much larger dictionary for the World Scrabble Championship.

I’ve been spending a great deal of time following the discussion on the All About Jazz forums about why jazz is so unpopular, and you should too. It reduces to a crowd of jazz evangelists strategizing about how best to save the heathens, but that’s a cause worth fighting for.

I buy that it comes down to a fundamental gulf in musical cognition between those who know how to listen to the stuff and those who don’t. The running conjecture is that most people who think they are listening to music aren’t actually listening to music.

More on this later. Suffice to say, if you are one of those people who reduces a listening experience to lyrics and “the beat” – and there must be a lot of you out there, because apparently you’re driving the recording industry – I don’t understand you.