November 25, 2002 - Queers got me 66

© 2002 by John Varley; all rights reserved

  

 
   

 

Oceano is part of what they call the Five Cities which, as you move south down the coast, are Shell Beach, Pismo Beach, Grover Beach, Oceano, and Arroyo Grande. A bit north of the Five Cities is Avila Beach. As a memory aid:

 A. Pismo Clam was the drunken movie director played by Jack Norton in the W.C. Fields’ classic, The Bank Dick.

 Grover is a character on "Sesame Street."

The Oceano Roll was a thing Charlie Chaplin did in "The Gold Rush," where he stuck two forks into two dinner rolls and made them dance.

Arroyo Grande means "Big Stream."

Shell is the name of a Big Oil Company. A VERY Big Oil Company.

Avila is "alive" spelled backwards ... if you change one A to an E. Sorry, that's the best I could do.

NEWS: In sports, Lee and I played a game of Scrabble this evening. I won by a score of 333 to 286. It was touch and go, with Lee getting a lot of big scores and me stuck with the Q and Z and no vowels early on, then later the J and X. I stayed alive by spelling OX and AX, with the X on a triple letter score for a SEXTUPLE letter score, something you don't see every day. When she blocked my triple word score up in the left corner things looked dire. But then I laid down QUEERS vertically with the S on the end of OATH ... on the triple word score! (And the "S" tile was actually a blank.) 66 points!

I'm sure Lee wanted you all to hear that.

Lee says: Someone that got EVERY SINGLE TILE worth more than 4 points should have won by more than 47 points, don't you think?

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