I Am So Not A Nuclear Bidet!

I’ve never been a big video gamer. I was terrible at Pac Man and pretty much gave up after that. We have three gaming systems in our house (plus a computer for each person and each dog). You would think I might take advantage of our fancy systems more than I do, but I just don’t. (I do, however, sing a mean version of “Tainted Love” on the Xbox 360 Karaoke game.) But now that I have an itouch, I’ve become obsessed.

I know you’ll think I’m terribly lame when you read what I spend my free time playing. Lately I’ve been playing this:

Yes, I probably spend an hour a day matching sets of pictures of candy with Candy Match. Right now I’m excelling at matching three at a time. I could try to do more, but I fear that if I reach too high right now, my head might explode with the tension. Why do I like it? I haven’t the faintest idea. I’m just so delighted when I do it in “Excellent” time. Not so much when I get “Good” and worse when I get distracted and end up with a “Soso.” It’s been a “Good” kind of day today.

My other procrastination activity (besides certain social network utilities) is this game:

I feel slightly less decadent playing Chicktionary than I do playing Candy Match–seeing as I’m a writer and all. At least it has words. When I was eight or nine, my grandfather would cut out the Word Jumbles from the newspaper and save them for me. We didn’t get the newspaper, so it was a great treat to get them. I wasn’t so great at figuring out the phrases in the end, though.

Chicktionary has silly squawking sounds and interesting but usually simple 7-letter words to rearrange. Hours of fun, I tell you. Occasionally they come up with some words that, frankly, I’ve never heard of. Not crossword-style 3-letter words either. If I’m skeptical, I’ll go to my favorite anagram site to check it out before I even go to the dictionary.

The Internet Anagram Server (or, I, Rearrangement Servant) is one of my favorite places on the web. Today I went there to see if I could find a good character name created from the name of a friend I’d like to sneak into the novel I’m working on. I wasn’t thrilled with the naming result and will have to get creative to get it to work. Never one to miss an opportunity to mess around with words, I went ahead and put my own name in. I’m sure I did it before, long ago–but today I was surprised all over again with the result.

“laurabenedict” has plenty of commonly used letters in it, including all the vowels except “O” and “sometimes Y”. There were 70,815 results! But I found plenty to work with in the first 1000. (Many were kind of icky–I won’t share those. Some were kind of funny, though.)

#1 Eradicable Nut — Definitely my favorite!

#3 Balanced Uteri — Left me wondering if I’m more of a freak of nature than I thought.

#4 Untraceable Id — Professionally appropriate if you read it I.D.–Otherwise too Freudian for my taste.

More:

Cabal Reunited — I must be reincarnated.

Unabated Relic — Too true.

Actual Inbreed — Doubtful.

Ineducable Rat — Not taking this personally, but possibly true.

Audible Nectar — Very sweet. I’ll take this one.

Rabid Nucleate — More likely than above.

Burial Enacted — I expect I’ve left plenty of people feeling this way!

A Breadline Cut — I so would not!

A Bleat Inducer — Ha!

A Tuba Reclined — On a fat-jeans day, definitely.

A Nuclear Bidet — This is just silly.

A Latrine Cubed — This, too. (Do I see a theme?)

I could go on, but I think this one says it all:

A Lunatic Breed!

What’s deviltry is hiding in your name?