Ntuple Indemnity

As possible as it remains that I will be eating some fresh-plucked import crow from the Village of Fowl Devotees two months from now, I’m going to place some chips on the table: I can say with almost total conviction that Book the Twelfth will be entitled The Nameless Novel.

Those of you who haven’t read the Lemony Snicket series should do so immediately. Those of you who have know by now that at the end of every volume is a teaser for the next, which always hints at some of the objects and locations to appear and includes the alliterative title for the volume to come; all except the piecemeal fragments at the end of The Grim Grotto, which revealed no succeeding title at all. It would be very much in keeping with the self-referential nature of the books, and the fictitious scenario that the author is an elusive man on the run who sends his editor the manuscripts telling of the Baudelaire children’s misfortunes by a host of unconventional means (coupled with his failure to send the editor a new title), if the absence of a title was played upon.

Last month, HarperCollins unveiled an activity website, The Nameless Novel, designed to market the book by presenting a day-by-day calendar of puzzles that fall into the theme of discovering the title of the twelfth book. The assembled solutions so far have revealed a full page from the book and a handful of new Helquist illustrations; the latter “investigation” is, at the time of this writing, still ongoing. That leaves time for a third set of clues beginning in mid-September, with the book’s publication due 18 October.

That seems like an awfully short lead time to announce the title to the general public, and The Nameless Novel is such a perfect fit that – given the little we know – it’s hard to imagine that it is only the moniker for a promotional website that only a fraction of all readers will actually visit. (Yes, J.K. Rowling revealed the title of The Half-Blood Prince via a website puzzle as well, but that’s quite a different scenario – and besides, it was well before the book went to press.)

The lack of a new title to follow The Grim Grotto can’t simply be leveraged towards this limited a purpose; I see it as significant enough that its resolution will be projected at the readership in its entirety. What I’m saying is that the launch of this website was itself the title announcement, albeit one that fell right into the meta-fiction of the Snicketverse. Keen observers will also note that each title alliterates a different letter, and ‘N’ is not yet taken.

In the end, this isn’t that substantive a matter to be speculating about. It is nonetheless exciting enough that such a phenomenal series – largely an exercise in style, but with a progressively meatier plot – is pulling up to its conclusion.

And now, for something completely different: you might have noticed that my finding the time to post this is probably a good indicator that I’m not fatigued out of my mind in the middle of Nevada right now, which would be the case if I were playing in this year’s National Scrabble Championship in Reno.

Call me a vicarious spectator, and an elated one. It’s two days and fourteen rounds into the premier Scrabble competition in North America, and Calgary’s very own Paul Sidorsky – former club co-director and developer of LAMPWords – is in fifth place of eighty-seven in Division 1. Not bad for the eighty-fifth seed. His 10-4, +458 record makes him the top-ranked Canadian halfway into the event, and puts him sandwiched right between Wiegand and Cappelletto.

This is, to don my verbal scuba gear and dive into the vernacular, freakin’ awesome. I’ve hardly played at the Calgary club for the past year for geographical reasons, the result being that my word knowledge is declining faster than your run-of-the-mill British sea power, but back when it was a weekly stop for me, Paul was always a challenging and humbling opponent – that is, whenever I earned a spot on the ladder high enough to face him. The first time I played him, he landed five bingos to my one and racked up 594 points, the most anybody has scored against me to date as the tile gods have mercifully spared me from the thunderous bludgeoning inflicted by the Mjollnir that is the 600-point Scrabble game.

I’ve since won a few games against Paul, but it’s been an uphill battle every time. This is a game where you come to appreciate the uphill battles, because they teach you a thing or two by way of glorious negative reinforcement. Downhill tumbles are not so fun. What you come to realize, though, is that even the toughest opponents are mortal when you draw all the blanks, though mortality makes little difference when not knowing how to deploy decent tiles is about as effective as clubbing someone with the blunt end of a very sharp pencil. And deification is one of many things called into question when you see one of your mentors ranked among and above the gods of the game, the characters you hear about in books and documentaries.

This is my way of sending a remote congratulations and wishing Paul the best of luck in the second half of the tournament – where, after all, anything is mutable. May he cleaneth the proverbial house.

Currently in first place with a 13-1, +653 record is 2003 World Champion Panupol Sujjayakorn from Thailand, who bears an age equivalent to mine and a vocabulary greater by several orders of magnitude. I have a clipping of a prominent newsprint congratulations offered him by the Bangkok papers months after his victory. If he stays on track, this will be his best performance yet under the North American dictionary, though he was already one of the undisputed luminaries of the game to begin with.

No announcement about the OWL2 yet, but I expect it will drop in very, very soon.

Now, excuse me while I go back to two-stepping through the playable live coverage on the tournament website. My board vision is rustier than the Tin Woodman; if it only had a heart.

From page 62 in the paperback:

BLOG n pl. -S a website containing a personal journal

BLOGGER n pl. -S one who maintains a blog

BLOGGING n pl. -S the act or practice of maintaining a blog

Yep – BLOGGING is going on the magic -INGS list, one of the biggest sources of phoney confusion in the lower divisions (along with the many creative prefixations of RE- and UN-). WEBLOG sits on page 652 along with WEBCAM, WEBCAST (which takes -ED and -ING as well as the expected -S), WEBPAGE, WEBRING (which goes on the magic “can’t drop the -ING” list) and WEBSITE. INTRANET is in, INTERNET* is not; it seems generic internets, which were once playable in SOWPODS but subsequently deleted, weren’t in any of the dictionaries consulted. And let’s not forget this gem of a prospective bingo: CYBERSEX.

Crazy stuff is going on in the Z section. ZYZZYVAS has lost its claim to fame as the last word in the hypothetical pseudo-English of the Scrabble Crossword Game, dethroned by the interjection ZZZ. ZUZ (pl. ZUZ), I’m told, is yet another piece of foreign currency – a silver coin of ancient Hebrew origin. And who actually uses ZA as slang for “a pizza”? I gather it must have been part of this whole Ninja Turtles revival that’s been taking place over the past few years.

Then there’s the Qs not followed by Us, whose ranks are joined by the likes of QABALA, QABALAH and QADI. The newly-added BURQA looks familiar, thanks to the popular media and the unpopular French. And then there’s QI, which – like ZA – opens to North American players the possibility of scoring over 62 points with only two tiles should the opponent be imprudent about vowel placement. It is defined on page 456 as “the vital force that in Chinese thought is inherent in all things.” It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together.

I actually thought it would be defined as a variant of chess, as in xiang qi, or Chinese Chess – an elegant board game for a more civilized age. I’ve never been very good at it myself, primarily due to a sparsity of English-speaking opponents to practice against. An uncle of mine, who was a distinguished ivory carver before the trade was banned, was a master of the game’s many strategic nuances, but all I ever managed to pick up was some rudimentary tactics like lining up the two cannons on the same file.

DOOWOP is in, and it takes an S. See, this kind of lexical overhaul only happens once in a Blue Moon.

That’s enough of the new OSPD for one night, methinks. Amusement aside, it’s not a book that will serve much purpose in the immediate future; I received confirmation yesterday that it will not have any effect on what I thought would be my next rated tournament, the Western Canadian Championship in Calgary (9/28-10/2), and certainly no effect at all until the corresponding OWL is published with all the juicy new dirty words we don’t know about yet. The word is that the hard deadline for incorporating the new word list in tournament play will not be until January 2006, so at this point it is better far to live than die and study the existing list. Then once the OWL2 is out, it is just a matter of putting the two editions into plain-jane text files and running diff.

I said I thought the WCSC would be my next rated tournament, but that is no longer the case. Ken Middleton, who directs the Sherwood Park club, is running Edmonton’s first-ever rated Scrabble tournament on the weekend of 17-18 September. Ken hosted an eight-round mini in the Park back in April 2004, but this time it’s a full fourteen rounds over two days in Edmonton proper.

Needless to say, this is a big deal and is exactly the kind of thing that will hopefully get Scrabble off the ground in this municipality that fashions itself a cosmopolis of champions. Aside from the admittedly huge kink of a dictionary transition happening directly afterwards, this is also a great opportunity for those of you who like the game but are hesitant to try it competitively to get your feet wet.

Over the past few weeks I’ve played against some local Scrabblers already on the club scene, some of whom have never left the city for a tournament or played under time constraints, and they are reachable – they won’t clobber and intimidate the recreational newcomer, though they will be a welcome challenge. The Division 3 roof is a rating of 800, and if you’ve never played a tournament before, that’s where you’ll go.

Seriously – if you are tired of beating your friends and have an interest in taking your game to the next level, that’s almost all you need to walk in and do well. I would recommend this much preparation: memorize the 96 two-letter words, know the Qs-without-Us, at least look at all the three-letter words, and play two or three practice games with the clock to get a sense of how long you should spend per turn and how the hold/challenge procedure works. Three months is plenty of time to get ready; last year, Dan Lazin hit the WCSC after just a month of doing the same, and this time the field is easier.

None of the local clubs are active in July and August, so if you want to practice, contact me and we’ll set up a game. (Pay no attention to the predatory salivation behind the curtain!)

Or simply, trashed.

You’ll notice that I haven’t posted here about Scrabble lately – not since the beginning of February, as a matter of fact. Until about two weeks ago I was away from the game for a very long time, which turned out to be detrimental to my health, as I quickly learned the hard way.

In the intervening time, the biggest change to the game in ten years fired its first salvo off the bow: The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, Fourth Edition. It hit shelves only two weeks ago, and mining the Internet has yet to turn up any meaningful list of changes besides the well-known ones like the addition of QI* and ZA* and the invalidation of EMF, and I hear a lot of words listed in the Dictionary Committee online beta didn’t make the final cut, but I plan to pick up my copy straightaway.

Like the current edition, getting the OSPD4 is primarily for definitions and getting a head start; as longtime readers should be aware by now, the mass-market dictionary is censored (with famous consequences) and does not reflect changes, if any, to the “offensive” list. The next edition of the Official Tournament and Club Word List, available only by direct purchase from the NSA store, does not arrive until August and will not come into effect until after Reno Nationals that month. The actual transition in terms of competitive play is at this time ambiguous.

So with my next tournament not until the WCSC in late September, and who knows what dictionary it’s using (though I just thought to ask), the OSPD3 and I aren’t exactly parting on good terms. Months of not studying harbinge destructive ramifications. And yes, I know “harbinge” isn’t a word, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

Right now I’m hoping a number of things. One is that the transition comes late enough that I can actually get some mileage out of my most excellent Mike Baron Wordbook before it is rendered outdated, because lord knows I’ve hardly touched it since Christmas; another is that I don’t plummet below the 1200 mark, not just because it would mean a year-to-year ratings drop of 200 points, but because it would drop me a division at the WCSC. While I might get some money out of it, that’s just not fun.

This game is stacked. Incomplete and diminishing lexical knowledge just exacerbates the problem. In six of my fourteen games – just under half – one player or the other scored consecutive bingos. (In five out of six cases, it decided the game; the sixth was a miscalculated endgame on my part that put me under by 19 points when I projected I’d lose by 1.) That’s luck for you – playing off all your tiles, then drawing straight to a second bingo common enough to see with the bag half-empty (or half-full, depending on whether you’re a Marlin or a Dory), and having a spot to play it. For some perspective, the probability of drawing a bingo with a full bag is one in twelve, and that’s when you don’t need to account for your opponent’s rack management.

Granted, one of those sequel-bingos was a (successful) phoney of mine: HARBINGE*. The verb for the action that a harbinger performs is just that – harbinger. Now I know.

Speaking of successful phoneys, this tournament – while a disaster for me – produced a great story. As I believe I’ve mentioned in the past, Calgary tournaments award a trophy of a horse’s ass to the player who gets away with the one deemed most outrageous by vote. One game in my division began with Jefficus playing IN to open – and it sure looked innocent enough. Then his opponent, Saskatoon club director Al Pitzel, responds with a bingo: JAILERS, with the A hooked in front of Jeff’s play to make ANI.

Read that again carefully.

Jeff makes no complaint, and only after he is no longer able to challenge does he realize that Al had inverted the board and hooked his seven tiles in front of NI* to form… SRELIAJ*.

Final notes: Canada has its first two-time national champion, mathematics professor Adam Logan, who now teaches at Oxford. The tournament took place over the weekend and the online coverage is stellar; as with last year’s NSC, you can play through key games and see how your appraisal of the board positions match up with the experts.

I also finally made my way to Edmonton’s two local Scrabble groups in late May. The NSA-sanctioned and more competitive one in Sherwood Park is on holiday until after Labour Day, but ordinarily meets Mondays at 6:30pm in the Strathcona County Library at Sherwood Park Mall. There’s a more casual one just northwest of downtown, a games night that meets 6:45pm Thursdays at Queen Mary Park Community Hall, and they are switching on and off this summer in an erratic, flickering sort of way. Both offer good people and a welcome place to start, but are not so good in terms of tournament preparation.

I’ve been contemplating this since first year, but I do wonder if there is any interest in a Scrabble student group on the U of A campus. It would be a good way to foster some new opponents, as I reckon there are a lot of living-room players out there who are on the cusp – they can beat all their friends, but haven’t had the exposure or opportunity to move beyond that. Campus is also easily accessible without a vehicle, and that’s a big deal. But seeing as how I might be on my way out in a year, it’s not an easy project to get underway. The game, on a serious level, just isn’t for everybody.

As of this morning, it’s official: the formerly biennial National Scrabble Championship will now be held every year, effective immediately. This year, it’s being held in Reno, Nevada on 19-24 August; the main event has been shortened back to 28 games (New Orleans had 30), with a televised Division 1 final presumably subject to all the same ESPN regulations as usual. If I were to enter, I would be facing a similar field of competition as last year due to minimal fluctuation in my rating (albeit a slight recovery), though I wonder what turnout will be like on such relatively short notice.

15 March is going to be a very expensive day. Coming to the Nintendo DS is Yoshi’s Touch & Go, an intriguing side-scroller played entirely with the stylus. Then there’s Donkey Kong Jungle Beat for the GameCube, an even more intriguing side-scroller played entirely with a pair of bongo drums. Coming to DVD are The Incredibles and Series V and VI of Red Dwarf. Although many rightly consider the third and fourth seasons to be the pinnacle of the series, these seasons are not without their classic, must-have episodes; “Gunmen of the Apocalypse” in particular remains one of my favourites. After he left the show, Rob Grant worked a lot of the material in “Gunmen” into Backwards, singularly the best and most readable of the four spinoff novels – and that’s coming from someone on record as, on principle, one who dislikes spinoff novels. When it comes to the likes of Star Wars, “dislike” may even be a tad kind… but that’s a discussion for another day.

In general, all last-ditch campaigns to save cancelled television shows are futile experiments that would get ignored if they were ever noticed in the first place. I must say, though, that Enterprise fans are putting up an admirable fight; when they offer private donations in the million range, you know they’re serious.

I have yet to attend a single election forum, but Chris Samuel harnessed the power of wireless networking to deliver a live report from SUB Stage earlier today. On another note, next year’s candidates already have a hard act to follow: I find it hardly conceivable that someone could possibly run a joke campaign lamer than the pathetic showing put on by Spanky the Wonder Elf.

Finally, while I am reluctant to post endorsements until after the Myer Horowitz, consider me a decided voter. This is going to be a close race in statistics only; as early as it seems, I feel sufficiently informed to make a clear and possibly unwavering choice in every race. Stay tuned for the rationale; in the meantime, rest assured that posters were not the sole consideration.

I would like to amend what I said in this post by announcing that yes indeedy, I have finally won a game against Albert Hahn. By no small margin, either – the final score was 470-340, though had it not been for an impatient oversight on my part, I could have made it 486.

While I did not record the board layout or keep track of either player’s racks (though that information could easily be deduced from my scoresheet, as it always can unless I do not figure out what my opponent exchanged on a given passed turn), I attribute the victory to three key plays. The first was my opening rack of DEIJKO?, which I harnessed for JOKED on 8D for 50 points. The second was a double-blank bingo, eXHaUST for 98 with the X hooking to make JEUX; usually, double-blanks are a curse in that one of the two blanks feels wasted and you can often go clinically insane trying to find the best bingo, but here, everything fell into place. Shortly after, Albert extended it to eXHaUSTED for 36, but I stayed ahead.

I lost a turn due to a phoney – in yet another quirk of the OSPD, GOETH* is no good, but COMETH and DOETH are okay – and I also let Albert get away with a rather spurious one, SILENIC*. I suspected that it was SELENIC gone wrong, but when you play opponents with a vastly superior vocabulary, sometimes you play it safe. But the clincher was my out-play, a lucky draw to ETOILES for 67. I actually could have played it on a triple that Albert had just set up as a last-ditch gamble for 83 points, but I missed it. Patience, young Jedi.

Interestingly, before we cleaned up the board from the previous round, Albert pointed out a valid bingo on a TWS that he mistakenly challenged, GROTTIER. It’s not exactly a rack that you study, he noted. I knew the word with absolute surety, but that was only because I am a practicing Beatlemaniac. “Grotty” has a fascinating etymology, albeit brief: its first appearance was in 1964, in the scene from A Hard Day’s Night where George Harrison is speaking to a marketeer who makes a special note of his using what is apparently slang for “grotesque” amongst Liverpudlian youth. Can you name another rock band that shot a word into the lexicon with a single utterance? I didn’t think so.