I will note the New York Times games my wife and I play daily at our house. As I’ve mentioned, I play Wordle and have a decent streak; my wife does, too, although not as long as mine. It’s the game we play first; sometimes, I play right after midnight.
In the last report, I thought I could get 100 2s before I could get 100 6s. That didn’t work out. Still, in the previous 100 games, I got zero 1s (and it may always be thus because I start with the same word), eight 2s, 49 3s, 31 4s, 10 5s, and two 6s fairly early on.
The Connections game involves grouping “words that share a common thread.” We play it together after she comes home from work. Our strategy is to figure out all four groups – yellow, green, blue, and purple in increasing difficulty before entering any of them. We’re seeking the reverse rainbow, with the purple first. Sometimes we only know what three of them are. So we try the fourth one blindly; more often than not, it’s purple.
Trying to get them all minimizes the misleading clues—Harp, Chic, Grouch, Marx—which suggested the Marx Brothers but were not.
Spelling Bee
But the thing that takes us the most amount of time is the Spelling Bee. There are seven letters, one of which you must use, and you’re supposed to make words of four letters or longer.
There is always at least one pangram, which is a word that uses all seven letters. A perfect pangram uses only the seven letters. My wife is very good at finding pangrams. The only pangram I remember getting was genealogy, which I saw right away, only because I’ve been doing genealogy recently.
She is generally better at word games than I am, so it’s her game; I’m just the helper. There’s no way I would ever finish it, but she has finished it on her own. We spend way more time on Spelling Bee than Wordle and Connections combined.
I suppose it is a team-building project, and we learned many more words. One of the things about Spelling Bee is that you need to remember the words that popped up a few days ago because they’re likely to reappear. They like Greek letters.
Working on prefixes and suffixes and building them onto existing words is essential. But it’s also helpful to look at possible three-letter words that you can extend, or words that end in E, when it’s not a chosen letter, but the expanded word works. For instance, CHANGE isn’t an option, but CHANGING could be.
Here’s a comment about a Boston Globe opinion piece, Will Americans let [FOTUS] slide the country into dictatorship? “Where are all the protests we saw earlier in the year? No Kings Day, Hands Off, and others. I went to several of these and would go every weekend if there were more of them.”
Welcome to Sunday Stealing. Here we will steal all types of questions from every corner of the blogosphere. Our promise to you is that we will work hard to find the most interesting and intelligent questions. Cheers to all of us thieves!
Here are the Hot Adult Contemporary #1s for 1985. The category went from Easy Listening in 1965 to Adult Contemporary in 1979, to Hot Adult Contemporary with the 20 October 1984 Billboard.
I suppose the strange thing about going to see the