Ntuple Indemnity

Thoughts and ideas have outpaced my WPM to the point where, were it not for my philosophical affinity for the primacy of written communication in an educated society, I might as well carry a tape recorder everywhere I go, start up one of those newfangled “podcasts” and be done with the whole shebang.

I never got around to writing about Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Rent or Good Night, and Good Luck, all of which have given me so much to say that I can’t possibly hope to make the time to do them justice. And that’s not even considering the hours whiled away playing Mario Kart DS online, possibly the worst thing to happen to my precious piano fingers since cramps-in-a-jar, but one that offers the new-to-the-franchise pleasure of – how do the juvenile delinquents put it nowadays – pwning some n00bs.

More on all of this later, I’ll bet. Don’t bet against me. I’ll lose.

Other than that, two quick observations come to the fore.

If Scrabble be the game of kings, then it is a contest as marked by coups and regicides as a song about Oliver Cromwell set to a Chopin polonaise. On Saturday, when Calgary held their annual one-day, twelve-round Marathon tournament, I won $10 for losing with a score of 422. (The score was tied, but she played ID for 5 and bled a 20 off my Q for 447. I think the new dictionary will have something to say about that come March.)

I emphatically did not win $10 for earlier losing with a score of exactly half that in my worst game in years, and probably the lowest-scoring game in the entire 28-player event. I can’t speak for the goings-on in the bottom division, but even they usually have little trouble clambering over 300 – it’s the upper stratosphere that eludes them. As one of the Division 3 players remarked with pitying incredulity: “211? That’s all you got?”

Loath as I am to blame the tiles, when all you draw are a J, a W and a whole lot of dreck worth 3 points or less that never congeals into a bingo thanks to a sustained assault on the part of the letter I, you can’t do a damnable thing.

I landed another $10 for playing 16 bingos – low for twelve rounds. The Bingo Ace prizewinner, at this level of play, usually approaches an average of two a round – maybe more. It tells you that everybody was shutting the board down with a good deal more vigour than necessary.

All of that was my first observation. My second one is briefer still: I can’t understand all the talk – or “dithering”, as it were – about Canadians not wanting a Christmas election. This is an early present, as far as I’m concerned. It won’t be the single most exciting thing this Christmas, but between a Mel Brooks musical, a Spielberg assassin drama and the lifelong dream project of Wellington Santa Claus himself, comparisons are hardly fair. Speaking as someone who has no taste for partisan politics and would be happy to do without it, this is still going to be the most interesting (and more importantly, entertaining) event in Canadian politics since probably the Quebec referendum: fun to watch, fun to read about, and fun to remember. I can hardly wait to see Calgary blanketed in red, green and Tory blue. It’s going to be one hell of a palette.

A ceasefire between Christmas and the New Year? Ludicrous! If rabid shoppers are going to be lining up in droves for marginal Boxing Day discounts, that’s as good a time as any to lug the war machines of party propaganda out into the open. There’s no time like a holiday for people to sit back and actually think, or better yet, joke about the issues.

The emergency mobilization of every faction in the country is, true to our climes, just so cool. It’s like all the fanfare and glory of little Johnny going to war, without any of the death, dismemberment or yucky psychological damage – a civil war of words, to wit. Taste it. Savour it. Indulge in it to excess. Then meet the sweetness of victory or bitterness of defeat, and taste it all over again.

Excelsior!

Edmonton: 9-5, +418. I’m a little disappointed; while I finished exactly as I was seeded (second in the eight-strong Division 2) and with another $60 in pocket money that made up for an overbudget weekend spent on Coltrane records and tickets to Elizabethtown and A History of Violence, the losses sustained were heavier than they should have been. As the only registrants in the top division were myself and U of A librarian Huguette Settle, a very strong player who has always hovered around my rating level for the past two years or so in spite of a more potent vocabulary than my own, we were moved down to the second division with a partial refund on our registration. The way the probabilistic Elo-style ratings work meant the two of us had to win practically all our games just to retain our positions in the NSA rat race.

Huguette did it in style and won the tournament with a 12-2 record, clinching the trophy three rounds before the end of the event. She went 2-0 against me, too – though she lost a turn challenging a particularly beautiful bingo of mine that I snuck in as part of an almost-comeback, ALIENEES down the O-column parallel to four other letters. She received a neat little trophy for her trouble, one that I thought would have looked nice on the mantlepiece next to Nemo and Mike Wazowski. Next time, Gadget, next time.

(Writing that, I was sure I’d honoured Dr. Claw in another post before now. I was right.)

Personal favourite play of the tournament: going out with aCQUIRER on a double word score for 90 points. I don’t think it was the highest-scoring play I made all weekend, but it was probably the coolest.

So not to obscure my other present thoughts with a surfeit of Scrabble-talk, I’ll make tonight’s update a two-parter.

First of all, to those of you displeased with Telus – bugger off, buddy. It’s indirectly on their account that I have come by a pass to an advance screening of Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit 7pm Wednesday. Yes, giving me free stuff is sufficient absolution of questioned corporate social responsibility, unless your name is Michael Eisner, and he’s not a factor as of last Friday.

“Is it just me, or is it a little odd to be ordering at a McDonald’s beside Bill Kinsella?”

– Shannon Burns, lunch after Round 15

This year’s Western Canadian Scrabble Championship was full of stories that non-tournament players should have no trouble appreciating, so I will relate some of them here lest they be trapped forever in the lore of the competitive circle.

In the upper reaches of Division 1 in the second of the two Early Bird tournaments that precede the main event, Albert Hahn and Jason Ubeika came within 11 points of shattering the world record for the highest-scoring game of Scrabble (that is, considering the aggregate scores of both players). Albert played five natural bingos and at one point held a seemingly insurmountable 200-point lead, but Jason fixed that with a quick 176-pointer, VARIANCE on a triple-triple – one of four bingos, assisted by drawing both blanks.

Nevertheless, Albert comes out just ahead, 566-531.

Then in the main WCSC tournament, again in the top division where the players are skilled enough to make good use of outrageously imbalanced entropic disturbances in the string-field called Luck, Mike Early played a triple-triple of his own – ANTEFIXA for 212 points, which vaulted him to the highest score ever recorded at a Calgary tournament, 647.

Calgary’s own Jesse Matthews, who vaulted right past me and landed in the expert zone in the span of only two or three years, took home the golden horse’s ass for the Most Outrageous Successful Phoney – and boy, did he ever deserve it. On the first day of the main event he opened with a 60-point play that can be called both a monstrosity and a panflute virtuoso: ZAMFIR*. (You might remember his work from the tail end of Kill Bill, Vol. 1.) Outrageous? Nay, I’d call it outstanding. What’s more, he snuck it right past Dean Saldanha – a former Canadian Championship finalist and one of the best players in the country, my age or otherwise – without so much as a hint of brow-furrowing suspicion.

My own performance at the WCSC was satisfactory, I’d say. For the second year in a row I was the bottom seed of twenty in Division 2, barely making it above the cutoff with a rating of 1204, a mere shadow of the 1399 that was dismantled piece by piece at New Orleans last year. Given my field of competition, I was statistically expected to win five games of seventeen, but I outperformed it with a record of 9-8 (-237) – well out of the prize money at tenth place, but respectable. My tournament rating is going to shoot back up to around the 1280 mark.

The negative point spread, in spite of a winning record, is courtesy of Michelle Davis from Texas, who obliterated me 542-262 thanks to four bingos of hers to none of mine. I had not the good fortune of doing likewise to anybody else, though my 300-287 victory over her husband Carl was also a story to remember, and not only because I won $20 for posting the lowest winning score in my group. In this one, I was forced to block off and outplay a substantially more potent rack at the end of the game, DEIOSZ?. No, he didn’t have room for DOZIESt, but I put him in a position where he only had one play that would guarantee a win (in an attempt to minimize what I thought would be my losses), and he missed it. We both went overtime.

I received another $20 for “Living on the Edge” and having the narrowest margin over three wins of all the players in the tournament – +2, +4, and +9 for a total of +15. I would have preferred to score some points instead of doodling around with meticulous endgame mathematics, but the money’s nice.

The 21 bingos of mine that stayed on the board included three yucky ones: AMOEBIA*, STHENIAE* and SENTRIED*. (NERDIEST, while semantically appropriate, did not hit the triple word score.)

Next tourney: right here in Edmonton, Alberta on the weekend of 22-23 October. I’ll be playing in Division 1, since the cutoff is only 1200; this tournament skews lower on the rating scale because of the clubs in the region consist primarily of newcomers who have never played in competition before. (That includes you, dear reader. If you have an interest in the game but fear that the jump from trouncing your mother in the living room is too steep, this is the one you want to hit. Start before all the other Edmontonians get really good.)

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.

Evidence, as it were, that Toy Story is quotable to the ends of the earth.

You will notice that there has been a marked lack of updates for almost two weeks now in spite of all sorts of dramatic and interesting happenings, from UBC students having the sense to elect Spencer Keys as their new Alma Mater Society President to this year’s round of Oscar nominations.

On the subject of the latter, I do have plenty of analysis on the backburner, but I am holding off on jumping to any conclusions until I have seen Million Dollar Baby, which opened in Edmonton this week. The reason is because there are already plenty of people out there making qualified, statistically-founded inductive judgments on the “will-win” question – Kris and Sasha at OscarWatch, for instance. As much as I feel confident in declaring that nothing can stop The Aviator this year, Tapley figures in his 31 January post that the post-nomination media-killing is setting it up for an upset.

And, well, we all know what media-killing did to my beloved Phantom.

But let’s not make judgments yet. In spite of the nominations being neither insipid enough to denounce or surprising enough to remark upon, there are a number of interesting inclusions and omissions to discuss. That’s where my personal brand of punditry comes in – the “should-win” discussion, you might say. Eastwood’s contender aside, I have caught up with film 2004 to my personal satisfaction. Catching up with writing about it is a different matter, and will probably not happen; paragraph-long capsule summaries will not do justice to the likes of Hero, House of Flying Daggers, Sideways, Finding Neverland and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. They deserve commentary of a more rigorous and piercing character. Thankfully, some of them have been sitting around long enough that there is little for me to add from a discursive standpoint, which means I have less to do.

The 2005 film season begins for real with a foreign release, that being Ong Bak starring Tony Jaa. It opens in Edmonton on 11 February. I am unfamiliar with the distributor, Magnolia Pictures, but I assume the release will be subtitled (which, in an ideal world, should be a given when it comes to any foreign release); if this is not the case, I welcome a correction. For those of you who are unaware, Ong Bak is the first major Muay Thai action picture to find its way here. Speaking as a Muay Thai aficionado of sorts, and one who has made the requisite Bangkok boxing ring pilgrimage that implies, this is a big deal.

With that postponement of any and all discussion of recent film out of the way, let us proceed to what this post is actually about, which is Scrabble.

This weekend was, if anything, a recovery. A 8-6 record in the annual 14-round Winter Tournament in Calgary earned this here writer $40 and a possible trip back into the 1300 zone, ratings-wise. Then there was the $10 for QUASHING (a game-winning 122-point out-play in a spectacularly risky endgame), and the $10 for JAVA (an 88-point TWS with the J on a double and some fortuitous parallels). Jeff Smith took the divisional Bingo Ace prize with twenty-one of the coveted suckers; I fell one short, playing twenty.

Strange things happen when you deal with words, especially when they are flowing out like drops of rain into a paper cup, as a certain famous twentieth-century poet would say. Prior to Round 2 I passed the time by reading the sixth Lemony Snicket, The Ersatz Elevator, which sees the Baudelaire children end up in the custody of Jerome and Esmé Squalor. In the game that followed, Mike Ebanks played SQUALOR on me for 104 points. Well, that hurt. It held up as the High Turn for my division until Al Pitzel slapped me with AZOTISE for 121 a few rounds later. Of course, I gave that record a sound QUASHING.

The QUASHING play – and more importantly, the endgame move leading up to it – was such a convergence of strategy and undeserved luck that to attempt to describe it without a board diagram would be to do it injury. Unfortunately, the same goes for a crazy, stupid, game-losing play in Round 14 that was about as close to ritual suicide as one can possibly get in a game of Scrabble. There are reasons why you should never suddenly lapse into rank amateurism and play off your remaining vowels, in particular the last U, and draw to an all-consonant final rack with a Q on it. (Until the OSPD4 introduces QI*, anyway.) You should especially avoid doing this with a word like PURGE when there is a perfectly good triple word score behind ESTATES on A9 inviting a back-hook on 8A, that being an R. Or a G, but there weren’t any left. Or a T, but I didn’t know that one.

Paying attention to the board and not making stupid endgame plays is usually a good idea. I’m still not over this one. The overwhelming magnitude of self-defeating recklessness exhibited in that single play, PURGE on an enticing triple, defies proper description short of a reconstruction of the board position. I’ll not do that for the time being.

What I will do instead is close this post, one that a frequent reader would not be wrong to classify as a transitional potpourri – the recitative between the arias, you might say – with a mention of today’s Gateway. You might call this one the video game issue. There’s yet another review of Resident Evil 4; regular readers should be aware by now that I see positive exposure of the GameCube as a very good thing. Dan Kaszor warns the general public of the PSP defects – nothing new to anyone who has actually been following the handheld wars, but the same implicit affirmation as before: if you are the type to buy a portable system, buy a Nintendo DS instead. (Once there’s more than a game and a half for it, anyway.)

There’s also a review of Uwe Boll’s film of Alone In The Dark, which employs a bit of a faulty metonym in claiming that “you could say that 32-bit technology just doesn’t translate well to the big screen” when every cited example predates the 32-bit era. The point still holds, though. If you haven’t read The Foywonder’s interview with Uwe Boll, go take a look.

As much as I would like to see video games develop a reputation as being a substantial storytelling medium – a characteristic that finds reflection in adaptability – it really is quite amusing to see Uwe Boll define himself as “a machine that acquires rights to video game properties and converts them to utter dreck.” I am in a position to laugh because from everything I have read about Mr. Boll, his video game tastes – which, by no coincidence, largely revolve around blood, gore and not much else worth mentioning – are so distant from my own that I scarcely need to worry about him ever coming anywhere close to any franchise I actually care about.

But that’s only because I’m a snob, and he’s not. And for a measure of which camp ultimately comes out on top, I remind you that he is the one in B-movie hell.

I should add, though, that I can see why video game publishers are so eager to sell movie rights to this guy. First, he’s willing to buy them. And as in the case of the horrid misunderstanding of The Avengers back in 1998, an atrocious adaptation can draw attention to the superiority of the original material (where applicable). The murder victim in all of this is the viability of anyone in film, producer or consumer, ever taking video game adaptations seriously. But as a game publisher, why would you care?

The last thing I will point to in The Gateway is Ian Keteku’s debut in the Opinion section. While the article itself is not all that remarkable (especially from the point of view borne by this here zealot who thinks true black culture is Scott Joplin, Louis Armstrong, Chuck Berry and Ray Charles, not this overproduced contemporary riffraff), my fellow Churchill alumni are always a welcome sight. The literate ones, at any rate.