'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Something completely different

I confess that Bill and I share a teeny weeny addiction. It's to a word-game called Perquackey that we've been playing a couple of rounds of, oh, just about every evening for the past four years on which we've both been together.

Yes, of course we played most evenings when we were traveling together in Europe in the summer. And when I was traveling in Palestine in March, Bill rigged a webcam over the playing table so we could play transcontinentally via Skype... I'm afraid our fondness for the game is that bad.

Most people play Perquackey with a 3-minute timer for each round. But we long ago decided that was too slow. So we play with a one-minute timer from another game-box, which makes the game go much faster and builds the adrenalin better.

Not that we're competitive about this, you understand.

So why am I sharing this dark family secret with you right now? Because this evening I got my best score ever, that's why! 4,200 points in one 60-second round. If you've ever played one-minute Perquackey you might understand how elated I felt about that. (The ace in the hole there was the word "floorings", which with 9 letters gave me 1,000 points.)

In case you want to know more fascinating details about how we play, here they are: We use the 1974 Lakeside edition of the game which is better than the later, tin-box "Cardinal Industries" edition in a number of ways. And we use the Scrabble dictionary as our absolute go-to "Bible" on the admissibility of words. Since Bill grew up American and I grew up British, we had to have a neutral arbiter for this; and this, with all its faults, is what we chose.

4,500 here I come...