Jomama is totally a word

May 23, 2012 5:34 PM

Scrabble, as played by Eddie Guerrero's rules
posted by frimble (20 comments total)

Wow. Mostly, this just makes me miss Eddie.

.

(Funny, nonetheless. Thank you for sharing.)
posted by scaryblackdeath at 5:40 PM on May 23, 2012 [3 favorites]

As Maria Bamford said to her Scrabble-cheating boyfriend, " 'Kickinit' is NOT a word. "
posted by anothermug at 5:47 PM on May 23, 2012

I lie, I cheat, I steal.

Eddie would approve of this Scrabble tournament.
posted by mightygodking at 5:47 PM on May 23, 2012 [1 favorite]

Mehal Shah's Ignite presentation, linked in the article, gives tips on dirty Scrabble that, while legal, are likely to kill friendships with anyone who can bear a grudge after playing Diplomacy.
posted by frimble at 5:53 PM on May 23, 2012 [3 favorites]

Eddie!

This is excellent!
posted by deezil at 5:56 PM on May 23, 2012

Is Peter Dinklage just going to be involved with everything cool for the next few years?
posted by Etrigan at 6:01 PM on May 23, 2012 [1 favorite]

Metafilter's own John Hodgman may be on to something with that shirtless flexing. I bet people would donate money to never see it again.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 6:15 PM on May 23, 2012

Needs a "latinoheat" tag.
posted by Trurl at 6:22 PM on May 23, 2012 [1 favorite]

If y'all aren't familiar with 826 National, it's really one of the great philanthropic stories of recent times. The story goes something like this:

Dave Eggers ran McSweeney's out of the second floor of 826 Valencia in the SF Mission neighborhood. One day he realized that the bottom floor of the building was empty and decided to start tutoring kids in the neighborhood. They put a sandwich board out on the sidewalk and all the McSweeney's editors went downstairs at 2:30 to help. It took off.

Weeks, maybe months, later, the city comes to him and says "you guys can't do this." Dave is understandably "what?!?". The city says "this space is zoned for retail; sorry". So Dave says "so if we were selling something...?"

He then proceeds to build a false back to the place, like five feet from the door. And opens a pirate shop. Like, hooks and eye patches and spy glasses. And there's a hidden door in the back where all the kids go through and get tutored. And it starts making money for the program. Then 826 expanded to NYC (The Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company) and a half dozen other city selling spy goods and time travel equipment and unicorn meat.

I'm so happy they exist and the way they started is just the icing on the cake.
posted by bpm140 at 6:29 PM on May 23, 2012 [13 favorites]

I love this. Thanks for sharing.
posted by .kobayashi. at 7:04 PM on May 23, 2012

Cheating at Scrabble? Isn't that kind of like cheating at chess? Unless you're palming tiles or brailling letters in the bag, you plays your tiles and you takes your chances.

I'm well aware that this attitude has not won me any Scrabble buddies. One of my techniques is playing words that look like phoneys but aren't at the start of the game. Then when they get challenged and I prevail, I can play actual phoneys if they're at all plausible.

Hideous, I know.
posted by Infinity_8 at 7:22 PM on May 23, 2012 [1 favorite]

...a technique described by Mehal Shah in the video linked above. Oh well. I've done everything in that video and when somebody does it to me, I say, "Good play, old bean."
posted by Infinity_8 at 7:39 PM on May 23, 2012

It's worthy of note that the Pirate Store at 826 Valencia is everything you would expect from the McSweeney's crowd. Which is to say that it is full of words and puns and draws filled with random objects and is just fantastic. The operating hours are a little confusing though.

I keep meaning to get over to The Greater Boston Bigfoot Research Institute, but it too has odd hours and I haven't gotten around to it yet. Even if you don't have kids that need tutoring, you may want to see if there's a store near you.
posted by maryr at 8:21 PM on May 23, 2012 [1 favorite]

The Pirate Store is absolutely wonderful (and the hours are now noon to six every day); it's full of treasures - literal and otherwise - and it may be my most visited San Francisco landmark. The last time I went, the sign on the street was advertising earplugs for dealing with problem sirens. The shirt I wanted to get (not in my size) had that classic Pirate motto: "Pillage before plunder: What a blunder. Plunder before pillage: Mission fulfillage."
posted by Homeboy Trouble at 9:20 PM on May 23, 2012 [3 favorites]

Infinity_8: I wonder if it would be possible to make a computer game like that. You can trick your computer opponent/s that way, and it/they can do the same to you.
posted by BiggerJ at 11:35 PM on May 23, 2012

So, if I play Words with Friends, I might inadvertently end up (however statistically improbable it might be) matching wits with Peter Dinklage? Re-installing it now.
posted by itstheclamsname at 4:19 AM on May 24, 2012

IS NOTHING* SACRED** ANYMORE***

* No anagrams for NOTHING, but if you add an R you can get THRONING, NORTHING and THORNING
** SCARED, CEDARS, CADRES
*** No anagrams for anymore, but if you add a Y you can get YEOMANRY.
posted by lalochezia at 6:26 AM on May 24, 2012

On bored nights in high school, some nerdy friends and I used to go to a local Dunkin' Donuts at midnight and play "Anything Goes" Scrabble. Abbreviations, proper nouns, foreign words, anagrams, whatever -- all of these were allowed, so long as the player could justify what the "word" meant. (I remember once playing "UO" with the justification that it was the abbreviation for Urge Overkill in that great band's logo.) It was way more fun than getting hammered with the jocks at whatever house party was going on that night.

If ever a played word seemed too silly, even for these ridiculous rules, there was only one authority: the stringy Asian guy working behind the counter. Whoever issued the challenge had to consult the Counter Guy and ask him, e.g., "Hey, should my friend be allowed to play 'BORGN'? He says it's an abbreviation for Ernest Borgnine." Counter Guy -- who, I recall with a shudder, had a single, eight-inch hair growing from a mole in his neck -- thought we were a bunch of weirdo idiots and did his best to brush us off, but could usually be cajoled into granting at least a Yay or a Nay.

Counter Guy's ruling was law. That man determined the result of many a "Scrabble" game. They should get him as a judge for this Scrabble-cheating tournament. I'll see if I can look him up.
posted by Dr. Wu at 6:37 AM on May 24, 2012 [2 favorites]

My wife and I visited the Pirate Store a few years ago. More precisely, she dragged me to the place--I'd never heard of it. So while she shopped for a T-shirt, I poked around, getting ever more and more bewildered. I mean, most of the place was devoted to (admittedly clever) pirate jokes and the signage out front said nothing about what the store sold. And this was in a pretty pricey neighborhood. How, I wondered, could a store like this make enough money to pay what must be exorbitant rent?

After we left, she took pity on me and explained what was going on.
posted by suetanvil at 7:58 AM on May 24, 2012

Our local house rules included 1) the ability to play your words in any direction, even if it meant they were backwards in relation to other words, 2) short phrases were allowed, if you could justify them as being sensible, and 3) the grid was assumed to continue off of the board (although obviously there were no bonus squares out there).
posted by rifflesby at 9:24 AM on May 24, 2012