In our afternoon game of Scrabble the other day, for once in a while, we broke through the combined score barrier of 600. We probably do 500 around half the time, but 600 is usual, with the last time turned up this morning being that noticed at reference 1. A BH win as it happens.
We were getting towards the end of the game, and I had thought that BH was cruising towards a comfortable win, being in the lead by around 30 points, a lot to make up when the big letters had all been deployed. I thought to myself that it is going to take pulling some rabbit out of the hat to win this game, and then, lo and behold, the rabbit appeared. I was able to hang 'strides' off 'mother', which with the 50 point bonus for using all my tiles, made 79, enough to take the game.
I went on to go out, leaving BH with four tiles in her hand, low scoring tiles, but enough of them to give me eight penalty points, which propelled the combined score to 602.
The Longmans dictionary continues to provide support, with the rule being that the word, or its stem, has to rate a bold entry and not be marked as informal, archaic, foreign or obsolete. Poetic is allowed. In detail, this is all a bit arbitrary, but a rule is a rule.
I have been noticing the 'market' bins near the trolley stack in the M&S food hall, They had been majoring on beans from Morocco, as previously noticed, but they have now moved onto giant onions, which they call cannonballs, and for which they charge a pound a pop.
I wondered what proportion of the crop makes the cut, with the balance finding its way into bags of lesser onions? Bing not terribly helpful so far, but it does turn up a few titbits.
A cheaper cannonball. Not the format of our M&S food hall here at Epsom, but maybe the the format of a metropolitan food hall. However, I didn't get as find out where or when.
The usually helpful Google Images was sulking for some reason.
A not very helpful gardening website, with the advertisement serving picking up yesterday's foray into autism.
But I was reminded of a gardener in Hambledon (the Hampshire one) who used to grow giant onions for the village show. He told me that they were good for show, but not for keeping, as the tip did not seal off properly. These onions are not as big as his, but the tips do look to have sealed off well enough.
PS 1: roast potatoes is another rare event, with our generally preferring to take mashed potato with the full gravy performance, although I do sometimes get as far about thinking about them. I notice this morning that reference 1 is both a Scrabble event and a roast potato event, one which I had completely forgotten about.
PS 2: I enjoyed this photograph of a screech owl in Guelf, in Ontario in Saturday's Guardian. I often have trouble finding these pictures online, but on this occasion Bing turned it up fast enough at reference 3. A copy is included above. Not sitting on his breakfast toast, as might at first appear, rather a shelf fungus on the tree itself.
Google Images provides some background on the owl as well as turning up the image in the Guardian.
And on adding the clue 'guelf', he turns up a posting in Facebook which he claims was the source of the image, and while those shown do not include the one in question, scrolling down the Facebook post does confirm the connection. All down to one Brad Morley of the Guelph Nature Community.
References
Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/05/easter-lamb.html.
Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/10/hammond.html. The arrival of Longmans, via RPPL. We make far less use of the Collins French-English dictionary, about the same size, which came to us via Oxfam of Tunbridge Wells.
Reference 3: https://britbrief.co.uk/entertainment/arts/guardian-readers-best-photography-collection-unveiled.html.
No comments:
Post a Comment