by After a month or more of drought-like conditions, it’s been a wet weekend, so no tennis. Yesterday I was very glad of that – I felt shattered. My maths lesson is now a 17.5 km round trip. I was happy to not do a whole lot in the late afternoon and evening. Poker tournaments have been thin on the ground this month, but I managed to fire up three and win one, making $48 on the session.
Last week we had a storm that was spectacular, and for some residents of Timiș, pretty damaging. Thankfully it didn’t make it to the level of the short, sharp soup-swirler of September 2017 – a hellish quarter-hour that killed eight people in and around the city.
It’s been a good day for Wordle. This was today’s English version:
I hardly played this optimally. An initial-N word isn’t great, then I doubled a consonant on my second guess. My third guess (remembering that Wordle uses American spellings) wasn’t bad, but then the solution was about as American as it gets. My final guess was a toss-up between the solution and KAZOO, though I would have guessed TABOO if I’d seen it. BAYOU reminded me of the time I visited Louisiana in 2015. We boarded our boat, about to embark on a tour of the bayou, when the outboard motor simply fell off. Our skipper must have been in his eighties at least, and he tried to jury-rig the motor to the boat somehow. At this point our young guide made the correct (but sad) decision to call the whole thing off. Instead we did a tour of the Louisiana state house in Baton Rouge – the tallest and perhaps most expensive state house in the country, in one of its poorest states. We did manage to go on an alligator swamp tour, which was well worth doing, and I even picked up a small alligator. Today’s winning word also appears in a number of songs – Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Born on the Bayou, Hank Williams’ Jambalaya (On the Bayou) and also in That Was Your Mother, the penultimate song of Paul Simon’s Graceland album, where he sings about “King of the Bayou”.
Here’s today’s Romanian Wordle:
FRIGE was a total guess. How didn’t I know it? It’s an everyday word, and it means to roast, to fry, to bake, or to grill. The past tense of frige is fript, which is where the common word friptură (“steak”) comes from. I think the problem for me here was frig, an ultra-common word meaning “cold”. (Think “frigid” or “refrigerate”.) The first person singular and third person plural forms of frige are both frig. So you’ve got one frig meaning cold and another frig that means to make something very hot. That’s frigging fantastic, and if I hadn’t done today’s Wordle I still wouldn’t know that.
