FreeRice

If you need to find a website that’ll help you waste 15 minutes (or 20 or 30 or a couple hours), you can check out FreeRice. It presents you with vocabulary words and you pick out what it means among four choices. For each correct answer, the website will donate 20 grains of rice to… someplace that needs rice. As you get right or wrong answers, the difficulty of the words changes—the site shows what level you’re at and what your best level was.

Up to this point, I matched a few words at level 42, but I’m gettin’ sleepy and my vocabulary is slowly diminishing. In another half hour, I’ll be lucky to understand the word “diminishing”. Or “vocabulary”, for that matter. But at least I can take comfort in knowing that while I could have gone to bed much earlier, I did the humanitarian thing and sat in front of my computer for a couple hours. No need to thank me—it was the right thing to do.

Stacking the deck

I know I’m way behind in all the Beauty and the Geek recaps, but after seeing last night’s “final episode”, I felt the need to speak up. While I know that the producers love to manipulate storylines and show footage that affects how viewers see each person, Nicole and Sam got majorly screwed. Continue reading “Stacking the deck”

How to make a bad first impression

Seen on craigslist.org:

“Need an editor or writer to help create this year’s holiday letter to friends and family. I am an English teacher with loads of editing and writing experience. I’m reliable and affordable and I look forward to hearing from you!”

Either the English teacher needs help editing and writing a holiday letter or the English teacher needs help with his/her English…