S.C.R.A.B.B.L.E.D.

Here is an innocent looking boy, smiling cutely and inviting you to play a game of Scrabble with him. Sure, you think, he's only 3 years old. I can whoop him easily enough. And so the game begins. You play, he plays, and the tension mounts. He is hanging with you with every word. Is he hustling you? This kid is good!
He's pulling you in, but there is no escape now. He has the lead, and it's your move. Consider it carefully. If you don't play it right, the kid will win, and you will wallow in freakish misery forever.

(Hold on! Scroll down to the next photo, and then stop!)

Your letters are on the rack at the bottom of the picture. It's your move. Can you salvage the game . . . and your pride?

Have you made your play? How many did you score? Twelve? Thirty? Sixty?

Not bad. But did you realize that, with the board in front of you, you could have scored FOUR HUNDRED AND SIXTY EIGHT POINTS with one word? That's right--468!!!



Now scroll down to see this amazing word placed so expertly on the board, and consider carefully your profound inferiority to my brilliant Scrabble powers.

QUIZZING, baby. QUIZZING. (Yes, QAT is a word, too.)

You, dear reader, have been humbly instructed this day by the Scrabble Master, as has our innocent young player. You might want to record this event for your posterity, though you shall surely never forget it as it has been seared into your soul.

As for the boy, I have taken him on as my young apprentice, and am teaching him the ways of the Scrabble Force. There are always two. I fear one day he may rise in rebellion and usurp my supremacy, but for today, I have reasserted my dominance, and the student has not yet become the master.

Explanatory Note: I play way too much computer Scrabble, as you can probably tell. Grant loves to play with me, and he actually has a good rudimentary understanding of the rules and strategy. "Put it on the red square, Daddy." Sometimes we'll get the real board out, and move the letters around. He gets to pick whatever letters he wants, and thus he usually spells JOY or GRANT or MOM or DAD. The above example was not a real game, but an attempt to create the highest scoring word possible. I think you could tweak things here or there and pull a few more points out, but basically this word in this situation is as near to Scrabble perfection as you can humanly get.

But seriously, I am GOOD. Sometimes I dazzle myself with my own brillance. I can defeat the "Advanced" level on the computer nine times out of ten, and my average score per game in 347 points. Most games now, I will use all of my letters on one word at least once and get the 50 point bonus.

What are my secrets? Glad you asked:

1. I have discovered the higher level of game strategy, and I do not go for the fanciest or most obscure or most creative words. Rather, I go for points, baby, points. Every time. Relentlessly. Points are my only guiding star. The flashy words will come, but never at the expense of points.
2. You must master the small words, like "AA," "OE," "UT," "XI," "JO," etc. There are hundreds of these small obscure words in the Scrabble dictionary, and you must learn them all in order to maximize your playing opportunities and word combinations.
3. Never make a play that does not include at least two words, or words in at least two directions. This way, you double your points everytime.
4. Play defensively. Do not leave a triple word space wide open for your opponent to exploit. If you must, play a lower scoring word on this space in order to prevent your opponent from using it.
5. Make your high-point letters work for you (X,J,Q,Z), but don't hold onto them at all cost, or it will hamper the rest of your game. Get rid of them in a fairly quick manner. Take your points, and get on with it.
6. Your mid-range letters should do the heavy lifting. Use your H, P, K, W, and Y wisely, and get them on double or triple points spaces every time. (But get rid of V quickly. It's a very hard one to utilize.)
7. Finally, you must learn to EXCHANGE. I cannot overemphasize this. (Well, actually, I guess I AM overemphasizing this, just like pretty much everything else in this post. But you must understand, Scrabble is a big part of my life and I have invested many hours at great personal sacrifice to my wife in order to acquire this knowledge.) If you have a rack full of vowels and low scoring letters, then pull the trigger, dump your rack, and start fresh. You can't win unless you're playing with mid- to high-points letters, and you will be better off taking a one round zero than in trying to score points with AAEIURS.

I hope you found this post as invigorating as I have. We all must seek for our greatness in life. I happen to have found mine on the Scrabble board.

Four hundred and sixty eight points? Sometimes I amaze even myself.

You're welcome. :)

The Sweet Dish

There is nothing in basketball sweeter than a great assist: a perfect no-look pass that threads the needle, finds its target, and drops jaws. (A close runner-up would be me busting a three on some fool's head.)

What makes a sweet dish so thrilling? Other hoops skills are more purely athletic: shooting, dunking, dribbling, etc. But passing is first a cerebral and secondarily (but equally) an athletic skill.

However, it's not cerebral in a pre-meditated, logical way. Rather, it is cerebral in the sense of the "Blink" phenomenon: the brain's intuitive, instanenous assesment of a fluid and complex situation (nine other players and a ball all moving independently) that materializes into decisive, coordinated action.

The passer sees the floor, evaluates which teammate is in a position to receive the ball so as to score quickly, anticipates if there are any defenders likely to thwart the play, decides on whether the play is worth the risk, and then generates a rapid plan to move muscles and bones in such a way as to deliver the goods. Add to that complex thought process the no-look elements: trying to disguise the pass by looking away, or throwing in extra hand movements to disguise the ultimate direction of the pass, or coordinating more complex body movements such as taking the ball between the legs or behind the back, or passing to a player who is no longer in your field of vision based on where you think they will be from when you last saw them. Throw into that mix the higher elements of game strategy: should I take the risk or protect the ball? who is hot and how do I get them the ball? where are the mismatches or where will the double team come from?

And all of that must happen in a fraction of a fraction of a second, or else the great assist becomes the conspicuous turnover, and the coach sits you on the pine and screams at you to stop hot-dogging it. But then Judy Osse screams from the bleachers that it was a foul and that the refs stink, and you feel briefly better, but in an unsettling, unjust sort of way, for you know in fact that it was not a foul, and that in fact you were hotdogging it, and she has sadly been blinded by her rage.

Of course, this is not an individual effort. In order for a great pass to turn into an assist, another player must catch the ball and then put the proverbial biscuit in the proverbial basket. This frequent failure on the part of the other players is what led to the purely Foster statistical category of the "Would-Be Assist." After all, is it my fault if another player is too ungainly and uncoordinated to take my gift and complete the simple act of placing it through the hoop? Do not rob me of my glory through another's incompetence. Credit me, rather, with a Would-Be Assist.

That brings up the final element of passing that makes it so enthralling: it is ultimately an altruistic endeavor, sacrificing individual glory for the team's benefit, providing teammates with the opportunity to succeed and to taste of the ultimate success of the sport, namely scoring baskets.

Ah, scoring baskets. As I get older and my days of hoop viability dwindle, this final fact is why I no longer pass the ball. I must approach the game selfishly now, opting to shoot the rock until the lights turn out--teammates be darned--for the sun is fading and the opportunities for glory are precious and limited. Give me the dang ball, and let it rain.

In all honesty, I revel in making a great pass more than anything else in the sport. My greatest basketball heroes have been great passers: Magic, Larry, Michael (yes, MJ was a gifted passer), Stockton, Kidd, and now Steve Nash.

Enjoy this video mix that celebrates the sweet dish, set to a European soccer chant with a nice techno beat.

This is basketball at its most beautiful.

Breathe Out

My phone rang at one a.m. this morning, the hospital nurse informing me that one of my favorite and most challenging patients had peacefully passed away.

This pleasant woman had been terribly ill and suffered greatly over the past nine months, and her death came as a relief and a blessing. Her devoted husband, who lovingly cared for at home right up until the end, called me yesterday, concerned that as she approached death her suffering had become unbearable. We arranged transport to the hospital so that we could administer comfort care and pain medications in this final paragraph of the final chapter of her life.

She was a medical disaster, with severe disease infiltrating nearly all of her organ systems. I began caring for her in the hospital early last fall, with one complication rolling into the next, her body succumbing to the full brunt of years of accumulated damage. Her legs were useless, painfully swollen appendages filled with blood clots; she had festering sores all over her body; she had relentless nausea; she had horrific back and neck pain. Yet through her trials, she somehow attempted to remain pleasant and cheerful, endearing her to myself and the hospital staff, though we all knew she produced her cheerful greetings by stifling her painful grimaces.

Sometime before Christmas, we had a conference with her and her family and decided to change course in her care: rather than try to "cure" her, we would shift our focus towards allowing her to go home and enjoy some form of quality of life. This meant changing her therapy goals from re-learning how to walk to accepting a wheelchair and a home hospital bed, and even more it meant conceding her fate to the ever-encroaching diseases that would eventually consume her strength and then her life. But she had fought long enough, and now she just wanted to go home. In early January, I released her from the hospital, and while she continued to suffer, we all took comfort in knowing she was where she wanted to be. I saw her regularly in clinic through the winter and spring, and we both waited patiently for the end.

When she came into the hospital yesterday morning, she was still coherent enough to hold a conversation with me. She asked me in short gasps if she was going to die. I told her yes, but that I would make sure she was comfortable. She tried to smile, grasped my hand and whispered, "Thank you." I stroked her forehead and told her what a privilege it had been to know her and care for her. As she closed her eyes to rest, I felt my missionary compulsion to wish her peace, to comfort her my with belief that soon she would open her eyes and be embraced by the light of a new life, where she would be free from these awful mortal shackles. But she was already asleep, and I fought back the words and a few tears and said nothing more, just squeezing her hand, answering a few questions from her tearful husband and daughter, and returning to my afternoon clinic.

By early evening she was slipping from consciousness. I spoke again with the family, guessing with them that she probably would pass away later that night, and consulted with the nurse about giving as much pain medicine as necessary to keep her comfortable. I then went home and enjoyed the evening with my family, though her impending death hovered in an easily accessible recess of my brain. Her husband, who had not slept for the previous two nights, left her hospital room around ten p.m. to nap in his car. He awoke at one a.m. with a feeling he needed to hurry back to her room. As he crossed through the doorway, his daughter and the nurse stood watch at the bedside, and when he approached her she took her final breath. The nurse called me at home a few minutes later to report her death.

When I talked to her husband this morning, he expressed relief and even joy at her passing, knowing that she was no longer suffering, and concurrently feeling the emotional and physical burden of providing her care lifted from his strong but aged shoulders.

I believe that doctors are conflicted about death. We are inevitably, unceasingly exposed to it and the threat of it, and thus we treat it as the enemy and wage mortal combat against it. Yet this is asymetric warfare, as death always--eventually--wins.

But death was no enemy last night, rather a rescue vessel that pulled my drowning patient from an ocean of turmoil to carry her home. Having never died myself, I have no personal experience with what happens after we take our last breath, only a strong, nearly tangible faith that something perfect and wonderful awaits us.

I have cradled hundreds of newborns as they take their first breath, and cared for hundreds of the elderly as they take their last. These first breaths mingle with the blood and sweat of birth and are met with tears of joy by parents and doctors. These final breaths too often are taken amidst furious chaos as doctors and nurses scramble to administer oxygen, CPR and medications, and as sobs of fear and sorrow grip the throats of the surviving family.

But sometimes the howling storm briefly subsides, and the final breath is taken in a moment of tranquility, like a sigh of relief or the soft swish of a boat slipping from dock and drifting into the ocean, and the spirit journeys on and on.