Never throw the letter Q into a privet bush

One of my favorite books in the past few years was Stefan Fatsis's book Word Freak. I learned a lot reading it, mostly that the people playing tournament Scrabble are playing a whole different game than the one I dabble in every once in a while. Their game is one of letter frequency and word memorization, combined with rack management and board positioning. Most of them have spent years memorizing obscure words that mostly just appear in the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary.

Many of the same people from the book show up in the film Word Wars, which is more narrow in focus but does have a theme song about Scrabble written by one of the stars... Word Wars features just four players, with some cameos by familiar faces. It also claims a Scrabble ranking of 1900, which I think is probably pretty bad. Witness the daily routines of serious players, watch them play innumerable games for fun and profit, watch the hustlers in Washington Park talk about a Scrabble circuit.

Other watching for this weekend included the first four episodes of Samurai Champloo, which is by a lot of the same people that gave us the stellar Cowboy Bebop. Two samurai and a teahouse waitress wander around ancient Japan, trying not to kill each other while looking for the "samurai who smells of sunflowers." The soundtrack isn't Yoko Kanno's brilliant jazz from Bebop, but the hip-hop stylings of Minmi and others are pretty funky. It meshes a lot better than it sounds at first. The first episode in particular is worth seeking out—complex, funny, and almost as much blood as Beat Takeshi's remake of Zatoichi. (Which reminds me, I must find a recording of the ending from that film.)

Hopefully this next week will not be as... eventful as last week was.