Cryptic byword how to#
Cryptic byword skin#

When I was just a kid and trying to figure out what i wanted to do with my life… and couldn’t… my family said “take secretarial courses! You’ll always have a job!” So I did, as I had no real avocation for anything. I don’t mind Cryptic Byword now and again, but I just can’t sit still for that stuff.

They think EXPELLEE is a word but they don’t take ANHINGA.Īfraid I’m not big on games of any kind.

Cryptic byword skin#

Our arm skin would flap like dog lips in a car window. Our knees would fly off like hubcaps in a sharp turn. We’d have pedaled straight through menopause and beyond. We’d still be doing them whether we wanted to or not. If we’d done the first one also, we’d have been in a diminishing number of people who’d done them all.

We had a great time on Cycle Oregons Two through Eight and that was that. My friend Margo and I went on the week-long Cycle Oregon ride in 1989. If you’re the kind of person who has recently tried to turn the pages of a paperback by touching the margin, that kind of thing is important.īut then I realized how debilitating a streak can be. I wish the Spelling Bee would tell me how many times I was Queen Bee, I found myself thinking. It would be so much better to just have an official results page online somewhere a friend might trip over it, say, when you’re going to show them a cool video but you kind of accidentally click on the wrong tab. You’d have to set up a spreadsheet yourself, and that would be immodest. Because the thing about the Spelling Bee game is, unlike Wordle, it doesn’t keep track of your glory.

It’s a pretty short trip between waking up yelling ANONYMY! and staying awake thinking about all the news you were trying to ignore.Īnyway, if you have a degree of propriety and don’t have your own blog, no one will ever know how good you are at these things. But apparently it is possible to solve things in your sleep, because the other night I shot awake at 2am and thought: ANONYMY! Which was the word I was missing for my crown. I haven’t solved it yet after all these years.

Cryptic byword how to#

Generally the only problem I tackle when asleep is how to run to a gate on the far side of a huge airport in thirty seconds. They say that your brain can solve problems for you when you’re asleep. It’s my Queen Bee throne.Īfter a few weeks of this it becomes an obsession. And often the rest of the words will occur to me while I’m on the toilet, uh, thinking. Which, of course, means now I can’t stop until I get to Genius, no matter what else I need to do that day. (You just have to step on Louie Gohmert’s head.) The third time I played, I drew a blank momentarily and stopped short of Genius, because I didn’t yet realize I can always get to Genius. If you keep plugging away and get them all, you achieve Queen Bee. It starts out at Beginner and goes through Louie Gohmert, Short Bus, Postal Supervisor, Parking Lot Pigeon, and Golden Retriever before fetching up at the Genius Level, at which point you can sit back and enjoy a little display of digital applause from the Times, but it doesn’t mean you’ve found all the words. Let alone everyone not in the room.Īs you find more and more words, the Spelling Bee helpfully tells you how you’re ranking. Back in the fossil times, you could play a game without crowing about your victories to anyone not in the room. It’s not like we played it with anyone else. Oh, come to Mama! Our family played a version of this almost every day of our childhood. Make as many words as you can with a set of seven letters, one of which must be in every word. There’s a lot of news to ignore out there.īut then came Wordle, and Quordle, and-God Bless America and the New York Times-the Spelling Bee! The NYT daily Spelling Bee is my kind of game. I begged her to play it twice a day so it would last longer. I play one of the scrabble games with my friend Devon. Ignoring the news has gotten to be a full-time occupation, and if you’re going to do it successfully and still spend way too much time online, you need to play a lot of games.