If health-care reform passes, I hereby announce that I too am going to Costa Rica. To celebrate on the beach! Bring me another margarita, Jorge. La reforma al sistema de salud norteamericana es muy buena!

I’ll admit that this is, in part, because it would enable me to continue my series of vaguely health-care-themed Wordplay Wednesday blog posts. Because I am convinced that’s what the people want: health-care-themed wordplay. Even if there’s polling data to show me otherwise.

Here’s today’s installment. Take two six-letter English words: one for an aging relative, and the other for an inexpensive item. (I found both in standard dictionaries, though one is an alternate spelling.) Place one word inside the other (the way you might put “BERLIN” inside “TIME” to get “TIMBERLINE”) and get a word for a medical practice that might be very expensive for your aging relative.

What are the words?

During our friends’ Oscar party last night (at which I managed to lose the $40 pool by making Avatar-for-Best-Picture my “upset” pick) I thought of a great trivia question that I will never, ever be able to ask.

Here’s the question, which would work great on a pub quiz, or some kind of short-form high school or college quiz bowl, or something. Imagine if you heard a moderator ask you the following:

“What’s the only movie to win a Best Picture Oscar whose protagonist was named Oscar?”

But the only trivia questions I’ve written lately have been for use in a weekly email trivia quiz (see left sidebar) or a mammoth book (see this self-promotional page), and this question doesn’t work in written form. If you figure out the answer, you’ll probably see why.

Standing in line for a concert the other night, I was telling my brother about 2666, the posthumous Roberto Bolaño book that I’m in the middle of. When I described the novel, he told me that the plot and Latin American setting made it sound all magic-realism-y. I told him it was actually a lot more like reading Pynchon.

Then, seized by a sudden flash of doubt as to whether that was a good comparison or not, I pulled out my phone and Googled “bolano 2666 pynchon.” Yes, I was relieved to see: almost 30,000 hits. Sweet validation. Reading 2666 is indeed a lot like reading Pynchon.

I was sort of horrified when I realized what I’d done. Much has been written about the ability of new information technologies to rot our memory–in fact, there’s a gloomy bit in my upcoming book about how GPS is going to turn us all into navigational cripples as well. But this is the first time it had occurred to me that having vast stores of information at our fingertips has the potential to replace our critical thinking as well.

And they haven’t even put the iChip in our brains yet…

We are the last people in the world to own a DVR, so Mindy and I had time to kill during the ad breaks in last night’s kick-ass Lost. I don’t remember why, but we were trying to figure out what makes it okay to call some actors, but not others, by their last names only. (“Did you see that new De Niro movie?” vs. “Did you see that new Pitt movie?”)

Obviously it’s not just level of stardom, since Brad Pitt or Will Smith are as A-list as you get, and they don’t work. For a while we thought it was just for Italians (or Italian-sounding names, anyway) only:

But then a Shutter Island trailer came on and I tried saying, “I hear Ruffalo is really good in that,” which cracked us both up.

Turns out it’s easy to come up with counter-examples to the “Italian rule” though:

It seems that you need some perfect storm of (a) mellifluous last name, (b) distinctive last name, and (c) iconic stardom to get the last-name nod. I presume (a) is what gives you all the non-Cage Italians, and (b) is what disqualifies iconic stars like Harrison Ford and Cary Grant.

I guess I could have added that you also have to have (d) a penis, since a few minutes’ thought only reveals one actress in the whole history of movies with this kind of “last name recognition.” (Stars who needed a man to make the cut, a la “Bogie and Bacall” or “Tracy-Hepburn,” don’t count.) Who am I thinking of?

Edited to add: Readers actually found two such actresses, here.

I had an interesting philosophical question while in line at the post office yesterday. (Not “Do postal workers think jokes about gun-toting ‘disgruntled postal workers’ are funny?” I found out some time ago that the answer to that one is a definite “No.”)

I was mailing an envelope that was obviously heavier than an ounce, but the only stamps I had on me were those “Forever” stamps that don’t expire. (Stockpiling these things is a sucker’s bet, by the way.) I was about to slap two “Forever” stamps on my envelope when I experienced a moment of ontological vertigo: what would this do to my envelope? Stamps cost 44 cents now, I think. Does putting two “Forever” stamps on your letter equal 88 cents? Or have you just guaranteed delivery of one ounce for…twice forever?

So I asked. Turns out there’s no need for any Cantorian theory: yes, you can use multiple “Forever” stamps. Of course, I woke up this morning to this headline, so who knows what’s going to happen. If the Post Office hikes rates and cancels Saturday delivery and is still hemorrhaging money, maybe “Forever” stamps will have to be scaled back to “At Least Three or Four Weeks” stamps or something.

I have finally been successful in bullying random strangers into pretending to be interested in my winter outerwear! A helpful reader named David emailed me to say

Your gloves are probably meant to be commuter gloves. The rubber on the thumb and two fingers is meant to aid in braking and shifting on your bike. Many long-fingered cycling gloves have this feature.

My gloves don’t look as space-age as the pictures of like gloves he encloses, but I think he might be on to something.

We were at a science museum over the weekend with the kiddies, and I discovered that my son Dylan and my sister-in-law Faith have something in common: they love those machines that squeeze your pennies into…weird oval non-pennies with pictures of the Wright Brothers or something on them. I have no idea what to call these machines, but you know the ones, right?

When I was a kid, I remembered, I had developed an elaborate conspiracy theory about these machines. For some reason, I was convinced that your penny wasn’t really getting squeezed, but that the pennies were dropping into some hidden receptacle and being replaced with pre-molded copper ovals.

My brother’s opinion was that my “fradulent” penny-pressing machine would actually be less efficient than squishing the penny through some kind of elaborate system of heavy gears, maybe something that looks like the inside of a clock tower or factory where Batman would fight the Joker. (My phony machines would require refilling, more moving parts, a separate factory somewhere minting the oval coins, etc.) But I still can’t shake the idea that there’s something funny going on. You never actually see the penny get squished, do you? What are you hiding, Press-a-Penny machine?!?

This site makes it look like penny-squishing machines are legit–and profitable! (There’s also a fascinating section on how mangling currency is probably legal in the U.S. but possibly not overseas.) But still, but still. I would like to mark up a penny with lipstick or magic marker or something and then it run it through one of these machines. If it comes out squeaky-clean, see? I’ve blown the lid off this thing!

My brother and his family are visiting us this week. He and his wife thought that Tuesday’s blog entry, about my unusually designed gloves, was a real cliff-hanger. They expected me to actually know why my glove fingertips are asymmetrical! Well I don’t. Most of the time I don’t even know where my gloves are.

If I had to guess, I feel pretty good about my original idea that it has something to do with holding a pen: it’s hard to write with gloves on, and those are the three fingers you would need, unless you hold your pen like an r-word. By the way, did you read the recent thing about Apple patenting iPhone-friendly gloves? Dig the helpful flowchart. I wish I’d had a pair of those in D.C. last week.

While I’m linking to random stuff: Eric Williams points out via email that old-timey quiz shows–even sorta-lowbrow, Tom Kennedy-hosted ones like Split Second–were actually cleverly written and blisteringly paced by today’s standards. What a great clip! I would watch that show five times a day if it were still on.

…because we have tickets to Magnetic Fields at Town Hall tonight. So pumped!

This is pretty perverse, but sometimes I secretly hope that bands–even bands I like–will break up or decide never to tour again, right after I see them. Just to make the experience more momentous and ephemeral and me, therefore, more awesome! In this case, Stephen Merritt’s hyperacusis isn’t getting any better, so who knows if this will be the last tour.

Wordplay Wednesday! I recently stayed at a hotel where the rooms were stocked with the typical hotel amenities. I noticed that if you took the name of one of the amenities–a common two-word phrase of 15 letters–and removed the first letter, you’d get the name of another of the room’s amenities. You might also find both these things around your house, or at a big box store. What are they?

Edited to add: This was eventually solved here, and I realized I could have made the puzzle easier by pointing out that one of the amenities is the “Cockney pronunciation” of the other.

Living in balmy Seattle, I haven’t had to wear gloves in years, but I sure needed them last week in D.C.! It was freezing. Plus the kids kept throwing snowballs at me.

So I only recently noticed an odd design feature of my gloves: they only have that grippy palm rubber stuff on the thumb and its two neighboring fingertips. The ring-finger and the pinkie have to make do with fleece.

Why is this? It’s not immediately clear to me that those are my two fingers that never need any grippiness. I just tried picking up a wide variety of things, and it seems like some items actually require the pinky to be more of a load-bearing finger than the middle finger. Is the idea that this feature lets you, say, write with a ballpoint pen while wearing gloves? Is it good to have two fingers soft and fleece-y at all times for nose picking? I give up.

On a different subject: a guy named Tom Toce is apparently one of the contestants on Jeopardy! tonight. He got in touch with me to let me know that he’s a good friend of Julia Lazarus, a very good Jeopardy! player who nearly beat me during my very first game back in 2004, and that he tried out for the show, he says, in order to avenge her loss. Well, I’m not on tonight’s show, of course, so as revenge goes it’s served pretty freezer-burned, but I’m curious to see how it goes for him.

I had a few minutes while driving down to Monterey yesterday, so when I saw a sign for “Mission San Juan Batista” a few miles off the 101, I swung by. I’d never been there before. I only know the historic Spanish mission from its appearance in two key sequences of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, maybe my favorite movie of all time.

In real life, the mission doesn’t have a bell tower of the kind that crucially triggers Jimmy Stewart’s title condition in the Hitchcock film. In fact, it has no tower at all: the one you see in the film is either a matte painting or a studio set, depending on the shot. What I didn’t know is that in 1976, the mission built a three-bell campanario (bell wall) on the end of the building, even though opinions differ as to whether the original mission, built in 1797, ever hard one. If they’re adding spurious features, hey, add the Jimmy Stewart bell tower! I am totally in favor of renovating historic monuments so they look more like they do in movies. If I were administering the Statue of Liberty, I’d make it look like it does at the end of Planet of the Apes.

That stretch of Highway 101 is full of “Speed Enforced by Aircraft” signs. I found myself wondering how that works. Is it a hoax/deterrent? Is there really a cost-effective way to keep airplanes in the sky just to pull over a couple speeders per hour? Will a Cessna strafe you? Will menacing black helicopters drop suddenly onto the highway in front of you?

This Yahoo! answer makes it sound like a relatively boring operation involving a helicopter and multiple cars. Too bad. I must have been in a Hitchcock mood, because I wanted to see the menacing crop duster plane from North by Northwest.

In the Salt Lake City airport, briefly, on the way home to Seattle. Sorry the blog has been neglected lately…I leave tomorrow for San Francisco to do a few more interviews for the book, so it’ll get worse before it gets better.

The moving sidewalks in this airport have the familiar “Stand Left/Walk Right” sign posted every 75 feet or so. And as I notice every time I come through here, many sidewalk users here seem to think this means they can split the difference, that the sign implies: “Walk Really Slow: Right in the Middle.” I guess it only makes sense.

What better way to get everyone pumped for the pinnacle of world sport than with the adrenaline-spiking showmanship of Sarah McLachlan, Joni Mitchell, kd lang, uh, Leonard Cohen…

Jeez, Canada, I know you’re all mellow and polite and whatnot, but it’s the freaking Olympics. It’s okay to rock. A little. (When I say “a little,” I mean “more than Bryan Adams.”)

I can’t really believe it, but we made it into snow-sick Washington, D.C. yesterday as scheduled. Early, even! We planned this little Presidents Day trip months ago, and just happened to choose one of the first flights that ended up making it into BWI for days. What with, you know, the 72 inches of snow and all.

And today the trains are (mostly) running and the gubmint is (mostly) open, so I can even do the interviews I needed to do today! I can’t really believe everything worked out. And the kids are loving the snow. They are probably the only ones on the entire Eastern Seaboard loving the snow right now.

New York looks great under new-fallen snow. DC, not so much. White marble needs green grass under it, or it just looks dingy.

We’re supposed to flying out to D.C. tomorrow afternoon but, uh, you might have heard that the weather’s not cooperating right now. I’m just keeping my fingers crossed. And hoping that the federal government decides to open its door on Friday, so I can do the interviews I need for my book.

In the meantime: Wordplay Wednesday!

You might have seen this one before: can you name a common word that has four consecutive letters of the alphabet (like ABCD) in it, running consecutively? There are actually at least two common options here, but they use the same four-letter run.

Here’s my own little sequel. I decided to see if any words contain, consecutively, four consecutive letters of the alphabet running backward (i.e. DCBA). After much fruitless searching, I finally found one such word in the Oxford English Dictionary. I doubt you’ve ever used the word, but you might be able to figure it out, if I tell you that it means “the plugging or filling of a wound or cavity.” Any ideas?

I love IMDb résumés that seem to tell a story, or hide a mystery.

Last night Mindy and I were watching Two Lovers, that Joaquin Phoenix-Gwyneth Paltrow thing from last year. (In general, we love movies where the stars have seven letters in both their first and last names.) It was pretty good.

But the whole movie, I was annoyed that I could halfway-recognize the actress playing Joaquin’s girlfriend’s mom, Carol Cohen. She must have been on a couple Law & Orders, I decided.

Today I looked her up on IMDb. Her name is “Julie Budd,” which rang a bell. Where do I know that name…?

Turns out Ms. Budd has only acted once before in film or TV…and its was 27 years ago! She plays the Streisand-esque singer in the crappy 1981 Disney movie The Devil and Max Devlin, with Elliott Gould and Bill Cosby. We had it on VHS when I was a kid and watched it over and over. “Roses and rainbows…”

So she makes a splashy debut in The Devil and Max Devlin (“Introducing Julie Budd!”) and then doesn’t act again for almost thirty years! But then lands a co-starring part in a pretty big movie. Seems like there must be a story there, though Ms. Budd’s website doesn’t provide many clues.

Does Abe Vigoda do his own stunts? You know Betty White does, because she is some kind of ageless robot. Come on, do you know any 105-year-olds who are pretty good Password players? When I play board games with people a generation older than me, it becomes clear that the “game neurons” in your brain all die off at the same time the day you turn fifty.

Wow, the controversial Tom Tebow ad is the softest sell of all time. I guess Focus on the Family figures they got their money worth with all the meta-hype around the ad, so they didn’t even have to mention abortion in the ad itself. (In that sense, it’s sort of like those content-free “We wasted millions!” Super Bowl ads that popped up during the first dotcom bubble. The point is the price of the ad, not anything in it.) I wonder if Focus on the Family remembers that most Americans watching the game have never read a paper or news website in their lives and will have no idea that the meta-controversy even happened. I wonder what those viewers thought the ad was for. Some kind of MLM product that the Tebows are hawking?

I don’t care what Phil Simms says: Payton’s going for it on fourth and goal was a terrible call. You’re only down 10-3! And wow, are Nantz and Simms the most boring team in broadcasting or what? They are Wonder Bread in sportscaster form.

Have to admire Simms for sticking with his approval of the gutsy call, though, even after it didn’t work. Typically football commentary is all about 20-20 hindsight. This is a good call, because it worked! That identical call was bad, because it didn’t work! All these guys should have to take some undergrad econ and statistics courses.

If the Leno-Letterman shocker was the ad highlight of the night for you like it was for me, check out this astonishingly detailed New York Times piece on its top-secret making. Uh, couldn’t this have been put together digitally for a fraction of the time/cost that all these corporate jet trips cost? The Times doesn’t go into Leno’s possible motivations for recording a high-profile ad for his competition, but it isn’t hard to guess: he wants to be perceived as “Nice Guy Jay” again despite his recent antics. Uh, that ship might have sailed, Jay.

Dylan, during the anemic-sounding halftime set by The Who: “When does the Super Bowl start again? Because this…is terrible.”

Okay, love the onside kick call. But only because it worked! Otherwise it would have been a terrible idea.

These GoDaddy ads are sapping my will to live. So they don’t hire an advertising agency? They just let the boss’s son (or some other untalented person with a Danica Patrick fetish) write and shoot the spots? Super Bowl ads are all about the high-concept twist, you idiots. Like if you set up that Danica Patrick’s going to come out in a tight T-shirt…and then Dan Patrick comes out instead. Now that’s an ad!

Holy cow, Tracy Porter is fast. On my screen he shows up like a blurry drybrush tornado, a la the Tasmanian Devil. That is ball game, ladies and gentlemen.

A tricky social situation I’d never thought of: what do you do when your identical twin dies?

Well, you bury and mourn him or her, of course, and then go through their stuff. (You know it will fit you!) But here’s what I’m getting at: when you show up at the funeral, many of the deceased’s friends, co-workers, etc. will never have met you. I’d guess that somewhere around a third of them might not even know he or she was a twin.

In other words: there will be whispers, pointing, dropped drinks, maybe screams. You will be widely assumed to be the dead, come back to life.

I’d never considered this problem before (believe it or not!) until last night, when I was talking to an eightysomething widow who lives in my neighborhood. Her husband was an identical twin, and this very thing happened at this funeral. His twin lived across the country, most of the mourners had no idea who he was, and the funeral was disrupted by mass confusion.

I don’t know if there’s an etiquette book to cover this scenario, but–to tide you over until Miss Manners weighs in–here are some Ken Jennings-approved suggestions on how to handle it.

1. If you are the twin, wear a disguise. Not a costume, like a zombie version of your dead sibling. That would be in poor taste. Just something simple to reduce the resemblance: changing the color or style of your hair, for example, or adding a big port-wine birthmark to one side of your face.
2. Conversely, you could perform a similar operation on the twin in the open casket: a tasteful little fake mustache, for example. This is a tempting option, since a dead body will obviously be less inconvenienced by cumbersome cosmetics than you will. What will he or she care? Be warned, however: many attendees might remember what he or she looked like before the change.
3. Embrace the problem. Attend the funeral as a walking piece of performance art: the deceased, as their loved ones would like to remember them. Perhaps you could install yourself at the entrance to the church, performing one of the deceased’s favorite hobbies (juggling, yoga, playing a favorite song on the tuba, reciting all the words to Rex Harrison’s patter songs in My Fair Lady) in tribute to your late twin. A small signboard (or addendum in the invitation) could warn attendees of this touching tribute, so they know not to be surprised.
4. Arrange to die together. Twins are always doing nutty, parallel stuff like that, buying the same neckties and whatnot, so no one will think anything of it.

If anyone tries out any of my tips in real life, I would love to hear. One in 285 U.S. births results in identical twins, which means that 1 in 143 American funerals will be for a twin. And in (almost) every case, one twin will be the first to go, thoughtlessly leaving the other in an awkward social situation! This is a real problem that happens thousands of times in this country every day. Time we stopped talking about the problem and did something about it!

Edited to add: Ed Toutant, leveraging the kind of free time only available to game show zillionaires, actually did the math and discovered that this only happens 18 times a day in America, not “thousands.” How dare he get in the way of my alarmism with mere statistics?

Question. (Dwight Shrute voice off.)

You often see claims that smell is the sense most closely related to memory. This is received wisdom, never challenged. Is it actually true? Is there experimental data to show that smell relates to memory in a way that taste, sight, etc. do not? I guess the olfactory nerve is part of the limbic system, which would tie it to memory, but…I don’t know. It sounds like such a facile observation about such a thorny area of vast human ignorance that it seems little suspect. And ever since I found out the “taste map” of the tongue was BS, I’m skeptical about stuff like this in general.

Anybody know of research on the topic, or is this some bogus “everybody knows” thing? Personally, I do get wafted back to the past very easily by smell: diesel fumes = Seoul, Korea. The sickly, lukewarm smell of institutional food anywhere = my first grade school cafeteria. But I can get the same nostalgia wave from sights, tastes…especially songs. “Sister Havana” just came on KEXP–a song that I doubt I’ve heard in fifteen years–and suddenly it was the summer of 1993.

I am a huge fan of Beatles Rock Band, which we got for our Wii at Christmas. I was at best a mild fan of the other Rock Band games: those games, it turns out, are for people who grew up miming hair-band guitar solos on their tennis rackets. But if you grew up cheekily bobbing your air-guitar neck and grinning to the girls in the crowd like you saw Paul and George do in old Ed Sullivan video, Beatles Rock Band is for you.

The only dispiriting thing about the game for me (besides not being able to master the bass part to “Within You Without You”) is learning how many Beatles lyrics I’ve been singing wrong for thirty years. Did you know that the second verse of “Get Back” is about “sweet Loretta Martin,” not “sweet Loretta Modern”? Yeah, you probably did. You probably also knew that the “Paperback Writer” lyric is not “it’s a thousand pages, will you take a few?” but “it’s a thousand pages, give or take a few,” which makes more sense. I don’t think I ever understood the line “why on earth should I moan” in “A Hard Day’s Night.” I usually just sang something like “so I anershadime own,” with the vague idea that “anershadime” probably isn’t a word.

At least I knew there wasn’t a song about “Ella Marigby.”

I learned two things while re-watching All the President’s Men on DVD the other night:

1. Director Alan Pakula pronounces his last name “puh-KOO-luh.” Embarrassingly, I’d been pronouncing it to rhyme with “Dracula” my whole life. If “Blacula” is a black vampire, I thought “Pakula” might be, I don’t know, a vampire who’s really good at packing. Or a Pakistani vampire. Is that racist?
2. Jack Warden’s character apparently christens the two lead characters “Woodstein.” So here’s my question: was this the first case of the modern trend of combining partnerships into a single name, a la Bennifer and Brangelina? I can’t think of an earlier case. Did Lewis and Clark go by “Clawis”? Did Victorians know the work of “Gillivan” and “Mangels”?

This just happened like 45 seconds ago.

Me: Hey, did you see J. D. Salinger died?
Mindy (not looking up): Oh, he did?
Me: So did that midget lady from Poltergeist.
Mindy (suddenly interested): Wait, really?

In February 1996, McLean Stevenson (Colonel Henry Blake on M*A*S*H) died. The very next day, Roger Bowen died. Bowen was the actor who had played Colonel Blake in the Robert Altman film MASH. It was a remarkable coincidence, not (as far as I know) any kind of suicide pact or bizarre senior citizen serial killing spree.

So when I saw that actor Pernell Roberts, of Bonanza and Trapper John, M.D. fame, had died earlier this week at age 81, I was concerned. Concerned for Wayne Rogers!

Watch your back, Wayne.

Discovery of the day: the British call bicycle training wheels “stabilisers.” How awesome is that? It sounds like something the starship Enterprise should have, not some dodgy British Eagle kids’ bike.

Also, this thread on the message boards alerted me to one of the great injustices of the Western World: how is durable ex-ABA star Artis Gilmore not in the Basketball Hall of Fame? I only remember Artis from his declining NBA days in the late 80s, coming off the bench for the Bulls and Celtics, long shorn of the triumphant afro that added four inches to his dominating 7′6″-presence in the lane. But that was at the end of a 17-year career that included eleven All-Star appearances and a 1975 ABA title with the Kentucky Colonels. (Best team name EVER!) Websites like this one compellingly illustrate the unfairness of the omission: stats equivalent to a Willis Reed or a Bob Lanier, ABA Rookie of the Year and MVP honors, still the #5 rebounder and the #1 percentage shooter of all time…this is a no-brainer.

He’s next eligible for enshrinement in 2012. Basketball Hall of Fame voters: take the A-Train!

Life as a minor, mostly forgotten TV celebrity brings with it lots of little life dilemmas that the rest of you will never, ever have to face. Case in point:

Sports card collectors being what they are, every month I get a few requests by mail to sign the Allen & Ginter card I appeared on a couple years back.

Today, I was going through a batch of these, and the very first one I opened was addressed, “Dear Takudzwa,” which confused me a little bit. Is this a Japanese or Swahili honorific for “game show champion”? Is it an About Schmidt reference?

Then I pulled out the card. Instead of my own pasty face and slumped shoulders, I see the well-toned physique of Zimbabwean rugby star Takudzwa Ngwenya! The faux-personalized letter about Takduzwa’s “passion, dedication, and determination” is very similar to the enclosed letter I usually get about my Jeopardy! streak. Card collectors must know that they’re more likely to get the autograph if they pretend to be actual fans and not just collectors (or, worse, dealers) blanketing the globe with requests, but I think this guy’s cover is now blown. (Okay, maybe this game show/African rugby fan just had two cards, mine and Takudzwa’s, because we are his two idols.)

What do I do with my new collectible Takudzwa Ngwenya card? YOU MAKE THE CALL.

• Sign it “Takudzwa Ngwenya”?
• Sign it “Ken Jennings”?
• Forge an angry reply from Mr. Ngwenya?
• Toss the SASE and keep the card myself? Because, hey, free Takudzwa.
• Replace it with a “Ken Jennings” card from my own stash? I think I have two or three in a drawer somewhere.

Keep in mind that Takudzwa Ngwenya has always been, far and away, my favorite Zimbabwean rugby player. And somewhere, POSSIBLY RIGHT NOW, he’s opening a letter with my card in it and becoming very, very confused…

In honor of health care reform potentially getting derailed by the recent Massachusetts election, here are two backward-thinking bits of wordplay that occurred to me this week:

1. Take the five-letter word for a very specific type of person. Spell the word backward and you’ll get another word, describing what this person–by definition, especially when used metaphorically–might do to those around him, and vice versa.

2. There’s a six-letter word for a very specifically woven pattern. Reverse the first syllable only (i.e. turn “afro” into “faro”) and you’ll get the name of a material often used for weaving.

What are the words?

Edited to add: It took a few hours, but Michael Farabaugh eventually cracked these here.

We were watching Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Flight of the Red Balloon last night (mostly because I felt ashamed that I’d only seen 43 of the 100 movies on this list) and the subtitles showed me a word I’d never seen before. A piano mover talks about an on-the-job accident that nearly left him tetraplegic.

Wait, “tetraplegic”? So three limbs paralyzed, I thought? But no, of course, that would be triplegia. Which is also a real thing, apparently. Not due to spinal injury, of course. Triplegics usually suffer from cerebral palsy.

“Tetra-” means four, so apparently “tetraplegia” is just a (slightly cooler sounding) synonym for “quadriplegia.” One is of Greek origin and the other Latin, so maybe it’s all context. You would say “That jerk Mussolini sure deserved to be a quadriplegic” but “I hope that annoying family from the Nia Vardalos movie all becomes tetraplegic.”

A while back, some friends had us try some roasted sunflower seeds they had discovered on a trip to China. I immediately got addicted to them–what was that elusive flavor?–and they generously let me have a big bag of the seeds from their rapidly diminishing stockpile. The packaging was entirely in Chinese, so I still had no idea what that vaguely licorice-y taste was. It sure didn’t remind me of anything else I’d ever eaten.

A few months later, Mindy discovered the same seeds at a local Asian grocery. This time, the ingredients list was bilingual. I bought a gigantic bag of them and eagerly looked to see what gave the snack its distinctive taste. Turns out there are only two flavoring ingredients: fennel seed, and a sugar substitute called acesulfame potassium. Wikipedia says it’s not used much in the U.S. because of its bitter aftertaste and possible health concerns in lab rats.

So that was the “secret ingredient” I couldn’t quite put my finger on: a dicey artificial sweetener. I feel betrayed by my Chinese sunflower seeds (yet I’m still stuffing myself with them right now as I type this). So that’s the moral of the story: if you want to keep any cred at all, find out the name of what you’re enjoying first, so you know that it’s okay to enjoy it. You don’t want to be telling everyone about the great new song in the Target ad that you can’t help dancing to…only to find out after the fact that it’s really Ashlee Simpson.

Via Ray Hamel: women have taken the lead for the first time in an on-line Trivial Pursuit “battle of the sexes,” the U.K.’s Guardian reports.

Of course running a major story like this is destined to–boo!–make itself paradoxically untrue within minutes, in some “All Cretans are liars” way. An influx of newly-motivated men stormed the Hasbro site, and men have now widened to a 7,000-point lead again.

I wrote about gender differences in trivia back in Brainiac, and I still feel like my conclusion holds: women might know just as much trivia as men, but they’re much less likely to want to flaunt their knowledge in high-pressure public competitions, so you see a big “gender gap” in fora like quiz shows and academic quiz bowl. A Tuesday Trivia winner once told me that going on Jeopardy! has been a “lifelong dream” of hers, but the idea makes her so nervous that she literally feels faint when considering it. (Her current plan: get Mariah Carey @#$%ed up on her taping day.) Stage fright afflicts both genders, of course, but I get the sense that women are more prone to this special case, “trivia anxiety.” That could explain the more level playing field in an anonymous game like this one.

But the Hasbro website is a bit of a sham: it only counts the total number of correct answers, not any kind of “batting average.” It’s possible that women are answering 60% of their questions correctly, while men are showing up more often but only nailing 40%. Or vice versa. Actually, if we assume that the stereotypes hold and that men are slightly more interested than women in answer trivia questions on-line, then it’s very likely that women are out-answering the men…per capita, anyway.

In Friday’s post, the fine breakfast cereals of the General Mills Corporation helped us “mix” a DJ name–based on a super-villain or street name, just like all your hip-hop favorites!

But I know what you’re thinking. Dear Reese’s Puffs, my DJ name is dope now, but I’m worried that my “flow” may not be as “sick” as I’d like. Can you help?

Of course breakfast cereal can help!

Damn, that is some some tight $#%& right there. Did you see how Reese’s referenced that time Pac referred to himself as “l-l-lyrical” but dissed Biggie as “oh-so-spherical”? Genius.

A local public radio station, KUOW, runs a recurring feature in which unusual people are asked to assemble three songs on a certain theme, and expound upon them in long-winded NPR style. I was the guest this weekend, discussing (apparently) “Mad Skills and the American Dream.” In other words: songs with some link to the world of game shows.

I don’t feel like I said anything that insightful about game shows or pop music, but I did get the local NPR station to play 30 seconds of Eric B and Rakim. Mission accomplished! (If that was, indeed, my admittedly odd mission.)