Deja Vu

By now you've read all about the latest mass shooting, which happened Friday morning in suburban Connecticut, where six teachers and twenty children were shot and killed by a 20-year-old man. You don't need me to tell you what a heartbreaking tragedy it is. But the absolutely maddening aspect is that the events before, during, and after the disaster follow a well-established pattern, as regular as the tides. Several times a year, a troubled loner will decide he is going to take his revenge on a system that does not understand him. He (it's always a man, typically young) will plan his triumphant statement over the course of a few months, targeting specific people and/or plotting carefully to maximize the number of kills before turning a gun on himself. He will head to his local gun shop or, even better, a gun show, where he can easily purchase weapons and ammo whose only purpose is to kill people efficiently. The big day comes, and he heads to a public venue, typically somewhere indoors where it's easier to control the situation. With a full clip and an empty conscience, he is now God and Superman. Once he starts firing, it gets easier. A few minutes later, he is dead. Within the following week we find that he was seemingly normal, though odd and reclusive, and we wonder how it could have happened.

We don't need to wonder. They don't all follow that pattern exactly, but they tend to fit the general outline. Again and again. The most common variation is someone who flew into a rage and happened to have guns handy.

The reaction, on the other hand, does fit a pattern. And it drives me crazy. Because this is a societal problem, actually one specific to the US, reaction quickly becomes political. That's fine, because it's in the policy area that we're likely to find a solution. Or decide that no solution is needed. We've become so rotely partisan that the dialogue that ensues is entirely predictable.

1. We will debate whether we should even debate gun policy.

Red: Now is not the time to talk about gun control.

[Wrong. Now is absolutely the time to talk about gun control. Whenever someone says "Now is not the time to talk about X", they mean "We should never talk about X, because I really can't defend my position rationally." If a drunk driver kills a kid after having had eight DUI convictions, it's time to start
talking about DUI laws.]

Blue: We need to talk about gun control.

[Correct. But good luck with that. Obama is too concerned with his Grand Bargain to stand up to the NRA. That needs to change.]

2. Some NRA nutjob will give his expert opinion that the tragedy could have been prevented (or minimized, giving himself some wiggle room) if only everyone involved had been armed.

It's often Wayne LaPierre, the head of the NRA. After the Lynchburg massacre of VA Tech students, he bemoaned the fact that the students and teachers there were not packing heat. After the recent killings in Kansas City where a Chiefs linebacker killed his girlfriend in front of their three-month old daughter and his mother, LaPierre weighed in that everything would have turned out much better if the girlfriend (and presumably the mother) had weapons as well. That argument has never had any relation to facts or evidence. It reflects a fantasy of the Old West, with white hats and black hats, and at the end of the movie you know that the white hats are going to prevail.

3. The really idiotic arguments concerning guns will come out.

These are too great in number and too stupendously ignorant to cover completely, so I'll just gloss over a few:

- "He could have done the same thing with a knife."

No, he couldn't. How stupid are you? A gun is a ranged weapon. A knife is not. It takes much more effort, time, and proximity to kill someone with a knife. A variation on the knife argument is: "It's possible for X to kill someone, so if you ban guns you'd have to ban X", substituting anything from pencils to water for X.

- "Guns don't kill people ..." Yes they do. Are you willing to repeat your platitude to the parents of one of the children killed on Friday? Guns absolutely kill people. Don't hide behind the rhetorical device of agency. I suppose you're willing to claim that heroin, nuclear bombs, cigarettes, and cancer don't kill people either. Set any of those on a table by itself (a favorite exercise of the proponents of this argument), and no one dies.

- "If you outlaw guns ..." This one is so thoughtless I can't finish writing it. The proper finish to that opening is a lot less pithy: "... then at some point only the folks who should have guns, for example cops, would have guns, and we'd all be a lot safer."

- "Freedom". What freedom? Every society limits individual freedom in the interest of the common good. That's what laws are for. Guns make it very easy to kill people and serve no other useful purpose.
How about the freedom to gather in public places without getting shot?

- "The criminals already have guns, so we need them to protect ourselves." Good thinking. Surely more guns will solve this problem of excessive gun violence. By the way, we average over 30,000 gun-related deaths a year, orders of magnitude greater than any other first-world country. Maybe we should try going the other way and getting guns out of the hands of criminals. Just a thought.

- "The Second Amendment." Look up the word "anachronism". The right to bear arms is couched in the context of maintaining a citizen militia, a prevalent concern at the time since they had just spent years in the shadow of a standing British army. Also, the arms at the time were cannons and muskets. It's hard to imagine that the founding fathers intended for automatic rifles to be freely available to any lunatic with a few hundred bucks. That can only be defended by a strict constructionist (hope I got that right) view of the Constitution, which begs the question: Is there any limit? It just says "arms", so I assume I can have a tank, RPGs, and a personal nuclear weapon, as well as unlimited amount of biological and/or chemical weapons, right? Don't impinge my freedom, sir.

4. Politicians will make hay on both sides.

Progressives will be on the right side of the issue, but some of them will not be there for the right reason. Conservatives will be on the wrong side of the issue because their platform demands it, as does the endless stream of campaign contributions from the NRA (an organization that throws around words like "patriotism" and "freedom" while behind the scenes it attends to its real work, which is protecting the profits of weapons manufacturers).

5. At the nadir of the conversation, God will be invoked.

After any horrible event - natural or man-made - God's role as a wish-fulfillment delivery agent will kick into action. It's along the lines of "Our dog died because Mom wouldn't get me an Xbox", but typically on a larger scale with fancier language. At its most innocuous, believers will write the tragedy off as being a part of "God's plan" that is beyond our understanding (while everything that is within our understanding happens to dovetail nicely with the believer's own interests). Dear God: What, exactly, is your plan? Because it's looking like a pretty shitty one.

And then you have assholes like Mike Huckabee, who is leveraging the Newtown tragedy in an attempt to advance his political standing, claiming that God killed those children (or allowed them to be killed, hard to see the difference for an omnipotent being) because part of Huckabee's agenda - more Christianity in public schools - is not being advanced as much as he'd like. In other words, an omnipotent, all-knowing, wise beyond belief being is annoyed that prayer is not allowed in all public schools, so instead of smiting the godless liberals who have been taking religion out of school, he decides to off a bunch of kindergarteners instead? Sounds like a great guy; sign me up to praise him. Here's some news, Mike: If there were a God, you'd be dead by now. More news: There is no plan. There is no God. There are douchebags like Huckabee, studs like Cory Booker, and everyone else. It's just us, Mike. Get used to it and act accordingly.


I could go on in my clumsy way, but there are much better writers to offer perspective. The part that kills me is that it just keeps happening, and our willfully stupid national attachment to guns has a lot to do with it. In a few weeks or a few months, it will happen again.

Apple Support Nightmare

[Two disclaimers: Yes, I realize that the title is redundant, like "Cute Kitten" and such. Second, I'm whining about being able to use shiny modern devices to buy things in a virtual store - these are first-world problems. But you're reading a blog, so they're quite possibly your problems as well.]

While working on my MacBook Pro on Fri Nov 9, a dialog popped up informing me that my Apple ID had been disabled. WTF? Immediately I began trying to figure out why that would happen. Recently I had registered as an Apple developer ... [flashback coming, feel free to skip ... part of the registration process is a long form with a lot of multiple-choice questions, a form that looks like it was designed in 1992. Maybe that was because I was using Chrome, a non-union browser. The questions were along the lines of What platforms will you be developing for? But the form had issues other than ugliness. Many questions, including the one above - four times! - were repeated, not even consecutively but sprinkled throughout the survey. If you didn't answer each instance of the repeated questions, the form was rejected. Once I finally got through the registration process, I got a note into my personal email account congratulating my wife on becoming an Apple developer. Figure that one out. I haven't bothered trying, since I was able to grab Xcode anyway.] ... so I figured that had somehow messed up my Apple ID. Or that someone had cracked it. On Monday I sent a note to Apple support explaining the situation, one they must be familiar with.

Shortly after that, my wife got a call informing us of fraudulent use of the credit card backing the Apple ID / iTunes account. Okay, now the disable made sense. Should be easy to get things operational again: Just provide a new working credit card, then back to being a good little online media shopper, right?

The auto-reply to my support note instructed me to call a support number so that I could talk to an Account Security Advisor and re-enable my Apple ID. Okay, that's fine. I had already gotten the replacement credit card and updated my iTunes account, but there's always some little switch that needs to be flipped. I called the number, and walked blithely into the gates of hell. At the other end was one of those infuriating voice-response systems. Like most of those, it only partially overlapped with what I was trying to do. As I got deeper and deeper, I grew increasingly despondent that I would never hear "To talk to an Account Security Advisor, press 1". At one point it made me look up and laboriously key in the serial number to the device I was calling about, which there was none since my problem was with an account out in the ether. I went with the number on my MBP. At no point was it possible to get to anything remotely related to account security. Finally I was informed that I needed to pay Apple support $19 if I wanted to continue. At that point I began thinking it would be worth switching to Android.

I called the number a couple more times to make sure I hadn't missed a relevant option. I had not.

Back to email. My next note was not so patient in tone. In addition to the account lock issue, I mentioned the mixup with my developer registration, and as a throw-in the classic iTunes problem where it attempts to download content (in my case, two TV shows) that you don't want, with no way to make it ever stop trying to do that. The response to that note instructed me to go to online Apple support and say that I have a "lost or forgotten Apple ID password" (which wasn't true, but whatever) so that I could set up for a call from Apple support. I filled out the form with my information, including my iPhone's number, and figured that if I could at least talk to a human I could make some headway on this whole problem of flipping the switch to turn my account back on.


No call came. Eventually I got an email saying that I had provided the wrong phone number, though that note itself listed my correct phone number. Their reply advised me to go into my online case and set up another call. It took me a few tries to do that, since it's not all that clear in the support interface how to do it from there. Once I found the right page and entered my phone number again, I got a failure response page that said simply "(scrfailure)". Cool.

After another try I was able to schedule another support call. The same thing happened - no call, then an email saying I had provided the wrong number.

I tried giving them my house phone number. No dice.

Finally I had the idea that maybe they didn't like the format I was using for my phone number: 123-456-7890. So I tried the full format: +1 (123) 456-7890, and the form rejected it. I removed the country code (+1), submitted the form, and a few minutes later my phone rang. Good news, but … WTF? Mighty Apple - leaders of the free world in the field of user-friendly tech - is incapable of parsing a ten-digit US phone number without parentheses around the area code? Let me know if you've ever typed a paren while dialing a number on your iPhone. You haven't, because it doesn't appear on the keypad. Maybe Apple support doesn't have iPhones. Maybe they are all stuck in a basement in some godforsaken bombed-out ruin of a decaying city, and all they have is rotary phones. Parentheses? Seriously? The last time Apple was at a singles bar picking up some hot nerdy chick, did it say "Give me your digits, plus all the necessary correctly placed punctuation"?

Once I got someone on the phone, it wasn't too hard to resolve the issue. They asked me three security questions (and not just the last four digits of my SSN, having learned that lesson), put me on hold, and a few minutes later my account was enabled. After several rounds of email and half a day of roadblocks and dead ends, I was able to buy dippy electronic music again.

Words With Friends Strategy Guide

I've been playing WWF since it came out, and have been doing pretty well. My average score is probably somewhere around 420 points. The folks I play with are only moderately defensive, as am I, which makes it more fun. Many people think the key to word games like WWF, Lexulous, or Scrabble is knowing lots of obscure words. That helps a bit, but in my opinion, good strategy is more important. My word knowledge is roughly on par with the people I play against. It doesn't matter as much in a game like WWF where there's no penalty for guessing. Captured below is what goes through my head as I play (minus all the static of course).

Deciding Which Play To Make

With each turn, you want to make the best play given the circumstances. There will usually be a number of different words you can play, you have the option to trade in between one and all of your letters, or you can pass. The first thing to do is to try to find the biggest play available. If it's a really big one, say at least 40 points, you're done. Usually that's not the case, and instead you'll have a handful of similar plays in the same general scoring range. Most players will play the one that scores the most points, but that's not always the best play. Offhand, I'd guess that I play my highest-scoring word around 70% of the time. Score is the most important factor, but there are other factors to consider: what letters you're left with, defense, buildability, and how well a play is suited to your remaining letters.

Scoring

First you need to figure out what sorts of words you can make with the letters you have. Look for sets of letters that appear in a lot of words, such as ED, ER, ING, TION, IGHT, FUL, PRE, etc. The first group of words to find are ones that can be made from your letters. To play one of those, you'll need to be able to form an additional perpendicular word. The other group of words is those that can be made using letters (usually just one) currently on the board. Since you won't be making multiple words, it's more important for it to score well.

The key to piling up points is to use the multipliers effectively. The board contains double- and triple-letter multipliers (DL and TL), and double- and triple-word multipliers (DW and TW), arranged in a well-thought-out pattern. The layout of the board makes for more interesting gameplay than does Scrabble's layout, in my opinion. There is another implicit multiplier: forming multiple words. Often a very good play can be made by laying a word alongside an existing word. Finally, there is a 35-point bonus for using all seven of your letters (again, a good choice compared to Scrabble's 50-point bonus, which is too dominant).

The best way to use these multipliers is with high-value letters. That's pretty obvious, but it's very important. The higher a letter's value, the more important it is to get it counted at least twice and hopefully more. The chance you can do that depends on the letter's usability, which doesn't always map directly to its point value. There are some sweet spots and some dry areas in the WWF alphabet. Some letters I love, some I hate. Here is a summary of the point values:

0 points: blank
1 point: A E I O R S T
2 points: D L N U
3 points: G H Y
4 points: B C F M P W
5 points: K V
8 points: X
10 points: J Q Z

The most powerful letters are the blank and the S. Those should be doing you some serious good when you play them. Usually I want the S to be gaining me at least ten points when I play it, and the blank fifteen or more. That's not always possible, and it incurs the downside of having tiles you're not willing to use cluttering up your rack.

My favorite letters (aside from the obvious two above) are H B F M P and W, which I feel hit the sweet spot of points and usability. They appear in a lot of two-letter words and generally work well with other letters and most vowels. For those, I hope to get at least 3X value. My least favorite letters are C V and K. The extra point for V and K does not make up for their unwieldiness, and C is just as bad while being worth less. The main hindrance for C and V is that they don't appear in any two-letter words, so playing them in both directions is difficult. I don't mind getting just 2X for those cruddy letters, or even dumping them for 1X (face value).

Down on the low end, the one-pointers are used mostly to leverage bigger words and provide opportunities. They are also useful in pursuing the 35-point bingo. I don't mind getting 1X for them. A corollary to that is that I generally avoid putting a one-pointer on a 2L or 3L spot. The two- and three-point letters fall in the middle: I hope for 2X or 3X respectively (same as the point value, semi-coincidentally). Of course, a lot depends on how much flexibility your rack gives you, and these suggestions are most useful when you have lots of options.

The key to really high scores is using more than one multiplier at a time. The layout of the board provides for several specific high-yield plays:

TL + TL (underrated - can be close to value of TW)
DW + DL
DW + TL
DW + DW (essentially a QW - quadruple word - sweet!)
TW + TL

If you can get two-way action on one of the multipliers, that's even better. The most common placement for a really big score is along an edge with a high-value letter going both ways on the TL, within a word that covers the TW.

If you can play a bingo (all seven letters), you should, even if it's somehow not your highest-scoring play, because bingos are cool.

The holy grail of multipliers is an eight-letter word spanning DW + TL + TW. I've only ever been able to do that twice (DIABETIC and ALLSPICE if you're curious, or even if you're not now that you've read it anyway).

You And Your Rack

Unless you play a bingo (all seven letters), you'll be left with one or more letters in your rack when you play, letters you'll have to work with on your next turn. So you should do what you can to make sure your next turn will be enjoyable. If possible, I try to play so that I'm left with at least one vowel and one consonant. Never trust the game to give you good letters to replace the ones you played. Plan for bad letters, or all vowels or all consonants. If you can dump a letter you don't like (or one that's less useful given the board), do that even if you get a point or two less.

Defense

Defense is the rainy day of word games. As in any sport, it's undervalued because it's not nearly as fun as offense. In WWF, I play only moderate defense. To give an idea of the range, a very defensive play would be playing IT on a TW for six points, so that your opponent (who probably has much better options) cannot use that spot to make a big play. Non-defensive plays are those that open up the premium scoring areas (such as the TL + TW combo). If I'm going to open one of those up, I want it to be with a decent play - that way we're both scoring some points. The better your rack, the less defense you need to play, since offense tends to be contagious and you have a good chance of keeping up. It's more fun to lose 390-412 than it is to win 220-215.

Buildability And Suitability

Buildable words are ones that can add letters to the front and/or back to form new words. For example, RACE is a very buildable word, RICE is okay, and RICH not so much. Another form of buildability is parallel play: words laid alongside that form multiple two-letter words. The words above don't do so well there since each has a C, for which there are no two-letter words. Since there are a ton of two-letter words, most words have good parallel buildability.

Suitability is a bit harder to explain. It's mostly intuitive. One way I think of it as how fertile a particular play is with regard to the board and my remaining letters. If the letters I have left can be added to or played alongside the word, cool. You'll notice as you play that certain types of words tend to get grouped together, depending on things like vowel/consonant patterns.

Tricks

Leave an extender in your rack: If you have two plays that differ by a starting or ending letter, leave that letter in your rack so you can use it to make a two-way play later. For example, if you can play MATH, consider playing MAT and using the H to turn it into MATH later while you make a new word with the H. This can be a very fruitful strategy.

If a really good place to play is open (eg a wide-open TW) and you can't use it, open up another one. That way there will be at least one available on your next turn. That's more fun than just trying to block it with a defensive play.

Sometimes you may want to know if something is a word without having to play it, as you consider your options. The way to do that is to play it while you also make a crossing nonsense word like VM or DDC. WWF will tell you all the words that were invalid, so you'll know if the one you were testing is good.

First Turn

Generally, if you can get to the DW and score decent points, that's your play. Otherwise, all options are open. There's no need to score a lot, so a single-digit score is fine. Dump letters you don't like. Play something you can extend. This is also the best time to swap if you feel like it. The only real reason to pass is if you have seven letters of an eight-letter word, and you want to see if your opponent plays that missing letter.

When To Swap

I prefer dumping bad letters to swapping, but if I think it will take me more than two turns to get rid of the crap and work my way to a solid rack, I'll swap. The only tiles I never swap are blank and S. If I have one or more of those and the rest of my rack (which is all I'll be using if there are no good spots for the blank or the S) is useless, I'll swap to see if I can't get some good fodder to combine with the power tiles.

Not An Introduction

There was supposed to be a real introduction. Maybe there will be one later. It was going to be artsy, probably highly derivative, and then the blog would be off and running, ready after a grand start for more pedestrian content such as political commentary, cultural observations, or word game strategy hints. At some point while the introduction was not getting written and the blog was stuck in neutral, I probably made a list. Somehow the list did not get the actual thing done, though of course it sort of felt like it, briefly. That was two or three years ago.

So now there's this. Not the grand entrance I had in mind, if not in actual words then as a vague and pretty picture, not the source but the end of inspiration. Instead I come skulking in, head down, mumbling apologies for being so late, the kind of late that is worse than never. But, to hell with all that. Onward, onward.