In Defense of "Living Room Scrabble"

It is depressing that in contemporary American culture every activity, virtually every object becomes assimilated into the capitalist/imperialist framework -- including key features such as fierce competition, goal over process, and reworking the rules to suit the participants (cf. Bush administration on torture). I am one of many excellent Scrabble players who plays for fun; is not especially competitive; finds the type A tournament player mentality antithetical to the recreational essence of the game; and most of all, finds the so-called Official Scrabble Dictionary absurd, with its vast number of words unknown to fluent English speakers. If a letter combination doesn't appear in a standard dictionary, it's not a word -- it's that simple. That's how the game was designed, and that's the way millions of us still play the game. The term "Living Room Scrabble" is presumably meant to be belittling; I find it ennobling, and a far superior alternative to "Bunker Room Scrabble", which is my just-invented epithet for the tournament mentality.

I'd love to find or create a website exclusively for Living Room Scrabblers.

BHL and BHO

This -- the week of Barack (Arabic for blessed [cf. Hebrew baruch], I learned today) Obama's (BHO) inauguration -- is a very exciting time in our sociocultural collective psyche. What's next? Do we (not just he) get a honeymoon period, or do we head straight for boot camp/rehab aka sober reality, essential for recovering from the the disastrous Bush administration?

Who's BHL? Bernard-Henri Lévy, French public intellectual. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard-Henri_Levy

In the beginning...

This is my initial blog posting (ever!! what planet have I been on??)...

Perhaps I could blame this on my son-in-law. At any rate he planted the most recent seed, by suggesting that I begin a blog, with some suggested content...

Okay, let me get to the nub of the problem for me. Isn't there really a virtually bottomless narcissism at the core of a blog? Namely, the assumption that numerous fellow humans will be fascinated with the productions of your grey matter on any and every subject.

Okay, full disclosure. I've read very few blogs, period. A couple here or there, such as an Iraqi guy writing a fascinating portrayal of life in Baghdad a couple of years ago.

So, the bottom line is that I'm a neophyte, running onto the playing field of a sport I don't really understand or trust. Okay, that's an appropriate amount of cynicism to get this off the ground.