May 25, 2005

• WEDNESDAY MOVIE
  

  Word Wars
  

  This is kind of a Spellbound for grown-ups – well, diabolically obsessed, emotionally freaked-out grown-ups. If anyone has a serious Scrabble player in the family, they’ll know the type – kind of a rainman-gone-wild personality. If your Scrabble player is a kid, pray they go to college and become a brain surgeon or something else useful. In any case, they have an elite, these word warriors who grow up and enter contests like the Nationals where they can win $25,000 as a grand prize. For this film and this contest, the elite are four delightful men – defending champ, Joe Edley (on right in photo) who does tai chi to prepare and memorizes the dictionary while driving his car; Matt Graham (separate photo), a stand-up comic who uses “natural drugs” for concentration; Marlon Hill (photo center), who swears a lot and feels the English language has stripped him of his African identity; and G.I. Joel Sherman (photo left) who is so named because he imbibes so much Maalox for his alarming case of gastrointestinal reflux. I won’t EVEN give away who finally wins. It’s a very trekkie kind of world, the Scrabble-for-prizes-world, and it’s pointed out that there are purists who just play in the park and disdain the hunt for the big bucks. So break out the popcorn and your pencil and paper, you just might learn a word or two if you can stop that hysterical laughing. I’d love to see a film where these four guys get locked in a room with Bobby Fischer for a week – oops, different game.
  

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  Deep Thought: “As the evening sky faded from a salmon color to a sort of flint gray, I thought back to the salmon I caught that morning, and how gray he was, and how I named him Flint.”
  Today I am grateful for: Standing ovations
  Guess the Movie: “ A-B-C. A-Always, B-Be, C-Closing. Always be closing, always be closing.” Answer: Glengarry Glen Ross, 1992. Winner: tearsign.
  Bad Deal on Judges
  by John Nichols
  As the showdown on the so-called “nuclear option” approached, polls showed that the American people opposed scheming on the part of Senate GOP leaders to eliminate judicial filibusters by an overwhelming 2-to-1 margin.
  Even among grassroots Republicans, there was broad discomfort with the idea of creating a tyranny-of-the-majority scenario in which the minority party in the Senate would no longer be consulted regarding lifetime appointments to the federal courts. (Rest of article here.)
  End of Day: 8:59 pm
  + = They’re skateboarding on my street again.
  - = It’s going to pass 90F tomorrow here in PDX.
  

  • 6:43 pm
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