I mentioned crosswords in the "About me" thingy on the right. I daresay there's a good degree of overlap between addictions to crosswords and Boggle. I began boggling maybe in the late 70s, I'm pretty sure at the inducement of my close friend Marc who is, among a few zillion other things, a crossword and Scrabble fanatic. We played almost every time we got together, jiggling that cube, racing to find the words.

The activity dwindled in the past bunch of years (though we still Scrabble with some regularity) but a month or so ago, I found a link to WeBoggle on the fine geekpress.com site.

The addiction has been total. It's very well designed with an excellent dictionary serving as referee. Best, there's a new game every 3 1/2 minutes or so (the game itself has a 3-minute limit) and you're playing in real time against whomever else is on-line. Crowds seem to range between 75-200 people in my experience. Quick typing fingers help. I've managed to eke out wins 4-5 times, finished in the top 10 pretty often, though I'd guess my average finish is about 15th. I'm almost always astonished by the number of words I simply don't see. There was a study I read about recently, I think on the Edge site, where the subject was asked to watch some people dancing or exercising on a video during which a person in a gorilla suit walked by in the background. Almost 50% of the participants failed to see it. Amazing; gets you wondering how much you're missing every day...Boggling does something similar. Great fun, anyway.

Off to France tomorrow evening, staying at Keith's place in Nantes for two days then Paris for five, accommodating Linda as she eases back into normality after a week with her sister....