this story

(08-05) 19:30 PDT NEW ORLEANS (AP) —

It wasn’t a four-letter word, but it was close enough to cause a stir at the National Scrabble Championship Thursday.

In the final round, eventual champion Trey Wright played the word “lez,” which was on a list of offensive words not allowed during the tournament.

Normally, no word is off-limits, but because the games were being taped for broadcast on ESPN, certain terms had been deemed inappropriate, including the three-letter slang for lesbian.

“There are words you just can’t show on television,” Scrabble Association Executive Director John Williams said.

Wright, a 30-year-old concert pianist from Los Angeles, played the word and then drew two replacement tiles so quickly that the referee didn’t notice at first. When he did, he said the slang term had to go.

ESPN officials told Williams the word could stay, but the issue was that Wright had already selected new tiles.

“He violated the rules. But there were also people who were upset that the word was played,” Williams said.

Eric Chaiken, a tournament participant and director of “Word Wars,” a documentary about the Scrabble championship, said the definition of “offensive” was open to interpretation.

“The ultimate absurdity is that you can’t play the word ‘redskins’ on ESPN,” he said.

Williams spoke with Wright and his opponent, David Gibson, then called an emergency meeting of the Scrabble Advisory Board. The board unanimously agreed to remove the word. Wright then returned the two tiles he had selected and played a different word, Williams said.

“We kind of took two steps back,” he said.

Wright, using more innocent words like feijoa (an evergreen shrub) and zebu (a domesticated ox), won the best-of-five final round in three games and pocketed a $25,000 prize.

“Meaning has no consideration when I play,” Wright said.

my true love and i played travel scrabble along the french countryside several summers ago sipping two dollar bottles of wine nibbling off baguettes and all was well.

shes now afraid to play me cuz im the only one who can beat her.

and yes i am calling her out.

leah got her first good in college + rabbit blog + fresyes + capt scurvy

that I don’t have as many hits as I feel I should. I’ll admit it.

I know this blog will never be as popular as Wil Wheaton’s. I was never on Star Trek. Therefore I lose.

I know this blog will never be as popular as the Suicide Girls, even if my titties are as big as some of theirs.

There’s ways that I could get more hits. I know. One way is to just flat out ask people to link to me more, but that’s so pathetic. So desperate. So un-busbloggy.

As you know, one of my favorite blogs is Jeff Jarvis’s BuzzMachine. Jeff gets about ten times the hits that I do.

For some reason I’m not jealous of his hits because when a guy has worked for great newspapers his whole life, and created Entertainment Weekly, then something inside me seems to think that he damn well should be getting ten times more hits than my ass.

But the BuzzMachine taught me a valuable lesson regarding hits+popularity+traffic:

lots of traffic doesnt necessarily mean that you will be getting lots of smart people in your comments.

Read poor Jeff’s comments today for example as he tries to free the blogosphere from it’s addiction of mudslinging. All my man wants to do is have the bloggers and commentors focus on the real issues of the campaigns and his readers couldn’t wait a beat to even let it sink in before they were all, “What about CBS? What about the lying going on!”

It was like Moses coming down from the mountain only to see his people building golden calves.

Let my people rot!

Yes Mr. Jarvis does have some good people who frequent his comments, but certainly not 10 times more than I have.

Do smart people not want to comment on blogs?

Do smart people just have their own blogs?

I try to leave 4-5 comments a day on blogs. How can’t you? I vist maybe 25 blogs a day, leaving comments on a quarter of those seems like a walk in the park.

But am I alone in this practice?

Anyway, looking at Jarvis’s comments today it made me happy that I have what I have, which is a big enough readership that I can do incredibly selfish things like ask for an iPod and three days later get one for free.

And yet the busblog is small enough that the readership are people who actually know a little bit about the history here and the community and the basic idea of what I’m trying to do.

Maybe the million page views that I will end up with this year is enough and I should stop being such a competitive fuck comparing himself to the likes of trekkies and just focus on making a good blog.

Either way, let it be known that I love the readers of this blog and I am very happy that I rarely have to delete any comments, infact the opposite is true, often times I either print the comments that people leave or make a post inspired by them because theyre so good.

mr. blonde + metropolio + demo underground + mass live

I dont blame em. I’d be the shit.

First thing I’d do is make 9/11 a national holiday. It’s a no-brainer.

Never has there been a holiday that everyone in the country could agree on. A holiday where everyone’s lives were affected. A holiday that nobody would forget the date.

A holiday that actually mattered.

Tomorrow I will sit in front of my tv and watch every 9/11 documentary that comes across my big screen. I will remember, I will speculate, I will dive into the heart of darkness, I will cry my eyes out.

To me, that’s what a holiday is supposed to be about.

What happened on 9/11 was important to the United States in that we realized that we are no longer isolated from that sort of madness of the world.

There was a time that we could hide out here in North America in our ignorant bliss. We could sit back and ignore the suicide/homicide bombers in the middle east.

Little did we know that they could come to the land of the free and fuck our shit up.

How naive we were.

Tomorrow’s should-be holiday would be a great time to think about how much of our innocence was lost with our ignorance. Do we live in fear now? No. Should we? Hell no.

How can we make it so that the terrorists stop winning?

They have won, of course. We know this because we see the RNC convention in NY and not Texas or DC, but in the city that Osama hit. We know they won because we haven’t gotten our vengence out on Osama.

We know that they are winning when we it takes us two hours to board a plane to fly for one hour, or when we can no longer bring day packs into baseball games, or when we look at the record-breaking deficit that we now find ourselves in.

Admiting that the enemy is winning isnt admitting defeat, it’s merely facing facts. The terrorists will not win forever. At some point someone will stand up and know how to fight these guys and/or negotiate to a point with them.

I might be as naive as we were pre-9/11, but I do not buy the exact same crap that I was fed as a lad that these terrorists are the same as the commies of the cold war in that they hate us because of our freedom and our mcdonalds and our heathen Christian way of life.

I do get it that some people hate us because of what we represent, but it still doesn’t make sense to me that someone would kamikazee themselves into a building filled with innocent people to damage an image.

There’s a lot to think about tomorrow.

As there will be every 9/11.

As President I would hope that each 9/11 we would mourn our lost innocence/ignorance and try to develop relationships that would foster peace.

Sorry that it would be a holiday so close to Labor Day, but I think this nation would understand.

Why the caps? Cuz Bennett says he wont sling mud if I capitalize + SK Smith + green catfish