Thursday is THRILLING MYSTERY DAY

Okay detectives:

A mystery is afoot! Time to open your detective closets and dust off your detective magnifying glasses and your detective tobacco pipes and your skeptical portly detective sidekicks and your detective brandy and your detective hats, for your refined skills and keen, penetrating intellect are desperately needed in Harwich, Massachusetts:

Mystery piano in woods perplexes police.


The real mystery, of course, is how a 12 year old reporter accidentally dropped his homework into the CNN tubes. JUST KIDDING JOSH LEVS! It is a very well written article with no spelling mistakes. A+. In fact, if you were to ask what my favorite part of the article is, I would have to say THE WHOLE THING.

Here is a good representative excerpt:

Sgt. Adam Hutton of the Harwich Police Department said information has been broadcast to all the other police departments in the Cape Cod area in hopes of drumming up a clue, however minor it may be.

But so far, the investigation is flat.

BA-DUM-CHING! Bam! You can tell that Josh Levs was in the zone with this article (I bet his friends call it "totally Levs-itating").

Does anyone remember when Norm MacDonald used to do the Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live? There was this one news clip about some sort of small-town parade overlaid with the commentary, "at 2:30 the parade will include a drill performance featuring the entire Middleton police squad." After the clip, MacDonald just stared at the camera for a beat before turning 90 degrees in his chair and reporting into a fake tape recorder, "Note to self: Go on a crime spree in Middleton at 2:30". I'm pretty sure that bit was the peak of Norm MacDonald's Weekend Update career. Hilarious.

I bring this up because I totally peaked at Scrabble a couple of days ago. The intensity of my Scrabble hatred is equaled only by the intensity of my Scrabble incompetence. Here is a conversation that happens EVERY SCRABBLE GAME:

OPPONENT: My word is "ZAS" over a triple letter score and a quadruple word score and the instant win square for 6000000 points.
GRANT: What? "ZAS" is not a word.
OPPONENT: Yes it is.
GRANT: No way, what does it mean?
OPPONENT: It is the plural form of "ZA".
GRANT: What? "ZA" is not a word.
OPPONENT: Yes it is. It is in the magical Scrabble Dictionary.
GRANT: What? I'm going to look it up in my normal dictionary.
OPPONENT: It won't be in the normal dictionary. You have to look it up in the magical Scrabble Dictionary.
GRANT: Well then I am going to spell "KQIIIZAS" with my turn. It is the plural form of "KQIIIZA". It is in the authoritative I Cheat At Scrabble Dictionary that I just wrote.
OPPONENT: You are just sad because you suck at Scrabble. It's your turn for real.
...
[10 minutes later]
...
GRANT: So is KQIIIZAS a word?
...
[10 minutes later]
...
GRANT: I am going to add an "S" to "CAT" to spell "CATS". 6 points.

Those few who were awake at noon or so this last Saturday probably felt the earth twist and grind for several tense moments, and perhaps felt a charged tingle in the air, and perhaps witnessed televisions suddenly going to static and toilet water flushing the opposite direction and clouds of locusts bursting into flames of blood. The cycle of every celestial orbit synced for a brief universal moment, sending a concentrated beam of transcendental energy directly into my mouth (which was in the process of accepting enchilada) as I was pondering my next groundbreaking Scrabble move. My eyes went completely white and rolled back in my head and strings of lightning shot out of my fingers and my body started convulsing and I chewed my enchilada twice as fast as a normal person could. The sun flickered and dimmed, and all of the napkins on the adjacent restaurant tables blew away, and I was wrapped in a little travel-size personal tornado of sparks and fire and lightning and glitter and leaves and little miniature barns and cows and stuff.

Much like a mother will suddenly find herself with the strength to lift a vehicle off of a pinned child, I was suddenly filled with superhuman Scrabble strength. When I came out of my hurricane power trance, I was stunned to find that my turn was over! I had used every letter in my tray (which is a Scrabble move called a "bingo", which is odd because usually Scrabble players are really good at making up new words). It was easy to find my letters because they were still smoking from the intense Scrabble fury I had unleashed upon the landscape of the game board. I had spelled "RIGHTEOUS" intersecting two existing words and crossing two triple word scores. Game, set, match. Victory. Checkmate. XOOJOQW (I bet that means "checkmate" in the magical Scrabble Dictionary).

My next turn I added a "Y" to "WIND" to spell "WINDY".

Anyway, I bet that's the kind of zone Josh Levs was in when he wrote about the mystery piano. How else could you explain this:

Asked whether Harwich police will be holding a holiday party in the storage bay -- tickling the ivories, pouring eggnog -- while they await word of the piano's origin and fate, Hutton laughed. No such plans.

That is totally the Scrabble Hurricane Power Trance applied to journalism.

The End.

IMPORTANT UNRELATED UPDATE:

Okay, my friend Heidi just shared this and I am actually still crying from laughing so hard:


Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn't seen it) from Joe Nicolosi on Vimeo.

Now for real The End.