And you thought they were just garden-variety alcoholics. In fact, the FM crack staff also get their kicks from Boggle. Boggle, for the unconverted amongst you, is a surprisingly addictive word-search game where one hunts forwards, backwards, up, down and diagonally in a grid of lettered cubes. Though some use a 4-by-4 grid, FM favors the deluxe 5-by-5 model for, as the box reads, “those BOGGLE lovers who can’t stop connecting letters to spell words and collect more points.” True! In the space of three minutes, one must find words no less than four letters in length. Proper nouns are not allowed and the same letter cube can be used only once per word. A quick tutorial for clarification:
K E N Y O
N S E A N
M A T T H
E W W E A
V E R F M
To get the word “KEEN,” one moves in many directions and each letter cube is used no more than once. After three minutes are up, players compare their list of words found—if more than one player has found the same word, all must strike it from their list. Words found by only one player are assigned scores: 1 point for a four-letter word, 2 points for a five-letter word, and so on.
FM, full of those Boggle lovers who can’t stop connecting letters to spell words and collect more points, turned to Arts for a chance—three rounds of Boggle—to prove their word-finding superiority. Arts met the challenge through puffing out their chests and many calls of “Bring it!” These actions were returned in the form of good old-fashioned e-mail thrashings:
Date: Thu, 7 Nov 2002 03:22:24 -0500 (EST)
From: Benjamin David Mathis-Lilley To: Thalia Shoshana Field Subject: two things I’ve heard you’ve been talking some shit Boggle-wise. Let me just say that I’m not a betting man, but the odds are good that you, “Matt Sussman” (if that is his real name) and whatever other monosyllabic punks you drag into this FM-Arts smackdown will be weeping in pain and contrition before that three-minute glass is even halfway down. This will be a relentless vocabulatory pounding that could only be surpassed by William Safire playing George W. Bush at Scrabble. Christine Yokoyama is a 100-pound ball of four-, five-, six- and even seven-letter fury, and she will end you. Sadly, at last Thursday’s Boggle tournament, flyweight Boggle heavyweight Christine C. Yokoyama ’04 was unable to bring the FM team to victory. FM faced handicaps from the start, namely intoxication from consumption of dangerously fluorescent wine coolers and the conspicuous absence of Gossip Gizzuy and his two points’ worth of gratuitous letters. But the FM team did not go gentle into the good nizzight: Aforementioned trash-talker Benjamin D. Mathis-Lilley ’03 fought the good fight, asking if S-E-I-N-E was a word, or just, you know, a river. Mathis-Lilley was dealt a massive cock-block in the third round by Kenyon S.M. Weaver ’03, when both players discovered they had both found GENE, GENETIC and GENETICS, resulting in no points for either player and yet another loss for the cracked staff, their third out of three. ¡Ay! The Arts staff, considerably more robe robes orbs sore bore bores sober, and, hell, just a lot better at Boggle than their competitors, quashed their competition in each of the three separate rounds, for a final score of 90 against FM’s piddling 44. Arts put shame in FM’s game: Books editor Matthew B. Sussman ’03 scored 18 points in one round alone, while Arts Chair-elect Jacob H. Russell ’05 proudly announced that he was the only one who found P-E-N-I-S. For the sake of numerical balance, the Arts team was joined by FM Associate and Crimson President-elect Amit R. Paley ’04. Paley became incredibly involved in the game, leaning over the board until his leopard-skin boxer shorts were visible. In a later CNN interview, Paley admitted that they were a gift from his mother, and noted that you can’t spell associate without ass. Despite Mathis-Lilley’s earlier assurances that Arts’ scores would “be like a drop in the ocean, an angry FM ocean that forms into a giant tidal wave of words crushing the Arts section like the tidal wave crushed New York City in the 1998 movie Deep Impact,” he was wrong. So very wrong.
