the wordle long game
playing to win today or
to win everyday

Not much of a surprise I would think to say that I was bit by the wordle bug.

I resisted it at first but then it became part of my morning reading.

Finished with the news while finishing my morning coffee, wordle often add the last little bit of mental stimulation to get me to wake up before starting my day.

I’d enter a some letters and then go through the steps and puzzle out the days word … or not … and go one.

I was asked, “What’s your start word?”

“Audio,” I would respond.

Then something changed.

I had been a casual ‘day’ player and never logged in.

The NYT games managers kept telling me there was so much more available if I would register, so I finally did and a new day dawned.

I now had statistics on my all time wordle performance.

And my game changed.

Instead of playing to win today, I began playing to win everyday.

It wasn’t today’s word that mattered, it was today’s win that I was after, to add my daily string of wordle wins.

I hit 14 days in a row.

Then 21.

The 61.

Then 69 and I was traveling and started a game while in the airport and forgot and never finished and broke that string.

Oh well.

I no longer use my “Start word.”

I use four of them.

I puzzled out one morning in the shower that snore, black, fight and dumpy did not repeat any words and used up 20 of 26 characters.

While I will cycle thru which word I use first, I will enter all 4 four words unless I can make a really good guess.

The result.

112 of my wins are on the fifth choice.

61 are on the 4th choice.

I have never hit the first word while logged in but in my mind I did once.

And 3 times, I made the correct guess on my 2nd choice.

Currently I am on a 21 day win streak with an overall 96% success rate.

Like a dependable quarterback, I see opportunities but I work through my progressions and in the end, win the game.

Sure there are those, like the star quarterback who can hit that long bomb and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat … once in awhile.

Go ahead and play.

Go ahead and enter a word and then make an ‘educated’ guess based on your remaining letters.

You could get it right.

Beware of those double letter words like muddy or a word like refer with double double letters.

I am playing wordle, the wordle long game.

I am going for 99%.

Which with my current number of losses, if I don’t lose again and do the math right, will take another 750 games or just over 2 years.

The wordle long game.

Just win baby.

he wrote we have proved
ourselves inept fools on so
many mortal fronts

I suspect that it’s inappropriate to strand myself on a high horse when it comes to what people eat. We have proved ourselves inept fools on so many mortal fronts — from our utter disregard of the natural world to our notions of ethnic virtue to the hellish marriage of politics and war — that perhaps we should be allowed to pick at garbage like happy crows. When I was growing up in the Calvinist Midwest, the assumption that we eat to live, not live to eat, was part of the Gospels. (With the exception, of course, of holiday feasts. Certain women were famous for their pie-making abilities, while certain men, like my father, were admired for being able to barbecue two hundred chickens at once for a church picnic.) I recall that working in the fields for ten hours a day required an ample breakfast and three big sandwiches for lunch. At the time, I don’t think I believed I was all that different from the other farm animals.

Jim Harrison in A Really Big Lunch published in the New Yorker, Aug 29, 2004.

Garrison Keillor wrote in his 1991 book, WLT: A Radio Romance, “Don’t concern yourself with things you can’t change, I say. It’s more important to make a very good cup of coffee in the morning and a very good piece of toast than it is to worry about Josef Stalin, because I can do something about breakfast and I can’t do anything about Stalin, and I’m sure he’s having a wonderful breakfast.”

There seems to a synergy here.