Words with Friends, An Idiot’s Guide, Part 6: Trolling for celebrities

Celebrity Words with Friends enthusiast, Alec Baldwin

I’m not sure what your process is for coming up with things to write about, but I tend to write about what I know. Or what I pretend to know. Or what I feel the need to rant incessantly about which I may or may not know.

But almost without fail, when I begin this process saying to myself, “You know what would be a really stupid thing to write about?”, it’s blog fodder gold and the beginning of a never-ending series. Such was the case when I decided to write about my adventures with a little iPhone app called Words with Friends.

Not since I wrote about my encounters with the Pornographic Cheese Butler at my local grocery store has my penchant for being completely ridiculous been so well received. If you’re new here, or have somehow missed the first five parts of this series, you can find them here:

Words with friends, An Idiot’s Guide

Words with friends, An Idiot’s Guide, Part 2

Words with friends, An Idiot’s Guide, Part 3: Strategery

Words with friends, An Idiot’s Guide, Part 4: More words that shouldn’t be

Words with Friends, An Idiot’s Guide Part 5: Know your opponent

Trust me when I tell you, “An Idiot’s Guide” is an apt title. Here’s a brief excerpt from my first post where I explain my complete frustration and utter confusion with this game:

After much nagging from a few online friends, I decided to download a free Words with Friends app onto my iPhone a few months ago. Of course, having never played Scrabble before, I had no clue what to do. In retrospect, I suppose I could have googled “How to play words with friends”, but that would have been entirely too obvious and logical.

Instead, I would open the app every few days and stare at it. I started a few games, but it kept telling me something about an invalid tile placement or some such nonsense. I’m sure whomever I was attempting to play with assumed a toddler had gotten hold of their mother’s cell phone, and if anyone who doesn’t read this blog asks, that’s the story I’m going with.

Now, before you Scrabble/Words with Friends experts roll your eyes at me (some of you probably already are), let me explain how I interpreted this game screen.

  • The Star — Yeah. No idea what that was about. I didn’t realize your first word had to have one of the letters on that star. As a matter of fact, I thought one of the objects was to AVOID the star. (Welcome to my brain.)
  • DL, TL, DW, TW, et. al. — As some of you may know, I’m not a big fan of acronyms, so my brain does not seek them out. Imagine my frustration when I would make a great word like hanDLe, or DWight or TWeet and it refused me. Stupid game…

I was very likely the worst Words with Friends player ever to download the app. But it’s been several months and many games since my initiation into the world of online pseudo-Scrabble, and like those tobacco company ad executives were fond of saying in order to encourage women to smoke cigarettes,

“I’ve come a long way, baby!”

So much so, that lately I’ve been challenged by several new opponents. Some of them I know personally or through social media, but the vast majority are complete strangers. A couple of folks even mentioned reading my Idiot’s Guides. Several would send me a text during the game which simply said “Hi”, which I thought was a little weird, but whatever. One of my new opponents sent me a game text which said, “Nice move, Dish!”. I immediately texted him back, “Do I know you?”, because that was my nickname in high school, but no one calls me that anymore. His answer surprised me:

SNORT! I wonder how many people playing Words with Friends with Katdish or Katdish10 (I have 2 accounts because I forgot I had the first one) think they’re playing someone famous.

Come to think of it, I do share a name with a famous celebrity mother. I actually used to get Google Alerts for Kathy Richards, but I unsubscribed because I really don’t care what Paris Hilton’s mother did last weekend, nor do I want to play Words with Friends with her, but again. Whatever.

If you ARE playing Words with Friends with me under the assumption that you are playing someone famous, I’m sorry to disappoint you. Good luck in the future with your quest for brushes with greatness. Maybe Snookie plays Words with Friends…

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