The 5,420-square-foot property was put on the market by Janet Munger, a retired school superintendent, and her brother Christopher Munger, a manager at General Motors. The siblings were shocked last week when they noticed their listing suddenly had hundreds of thousands of page views.
"This couldn't be correct!" Christopher said in a phone interview with Digg.
Christopher remembers doing a double-take on the spike in traffic to the ad for his family home.
The listing's enthusiastic reaction could most likely be attributed to the wonderfully extravagant Christmas decorations that surprise viewers as they explore the interiors of the residence on Zillow.
Decking the house out in life-size nutcrackers, garlands, wreaths, stockings and statues, the Mungers spared no expense to make it a celebration of the Yuletide. The Mungers said the assortment of spectacularly ornate holiday baubles came from years of collecting.
"Chris and I have always wanted our home and both of our work environments to embody joy, happiness and warmth," Janet said. "Holidays were special events at our home for all team members and their families. Santa's wonderland was established in each room throughout our house for all families, including their children and grandchildren. These were memorable times for everyone."
"My sister has a unique passion," Christopher observed. "We do damage everywhere."
"We would go to the San Francisco Music Box Factory store and buy them out," Janet revealed.
Janet said that the festive, castle-like interior is a year-round aesthetic.
The family hopes to move to Florida once the property is sold but said they would always hold warm memories of the reactions visitors had as they entered the house.
"They'll come in and it would be Christmas every day," Janet said.
The home can be yours for $2.19 million.
Top players aren’t interested in words for communication, just for maximising their score. Indeed, believe it or not, some of the top players don’t speak very good English; they’re from Thailand or Malaysia and have memorised all these non-words with one goal in mind — winning tournaments.
It turns out that ybet is an archaic past participle of beat. At least that’s what the dictionaries say. But that’s the problem: these are special Scrabble dictionaries containing hundreds of obsolete junk words never attested in modern English but which top players find highly convenient when they’ve got a load of rubbish on their rack and want to dump it on the board.
And then they get indignant when you complain that the bizarre combination of letters for which they’ve just awarded themselves 70-odd points is not a real word. It’s like in Roald Dahl’s The Magic Finger when the duck asks Mr Gregg why humans shoot them:
“
‘We are allowed to shoot ducks!’
‘Who allows you?’ asked the duck.
‘We allow each other,’ said Mr Gregg.
No; if you want a level playing field the first thing to do is make sure you’re not playing against someone who sincerely believes that skriegh is a word just because it appears in a list some loser compiled so that losers can be winners.
I can’t emphasise this too strongly. As the old joke goes, when the cardiologist was asked how you can avoid having a heart attack, he said: ‘Choose your parents carefully.’ Same principle here: if you want to win at Scrabble, first make sure you’re playing the right person.
Now to the game itself. The main thing is to try to get your hands on both of the blank tiles and all four S tiles. Get them and the game’s as good as yours. There are various ways of securing these goodies but the only thing honest players can do is maximise their chances by playing the longest words possible so as to take more replacement tiles out of the bag. You can play a three-letter word for 20 points or a five-letter word for 17? Play the longer word — it’s worth sacrificing those three points to get two more chances to pull an S or a blank out of the bag.
And when playing Scrabble, although you take out letters and you put on words, you should think in syllables. Lots of words end in ing, ful, ive and ous, for example. A rack with N D I A E G R may not look so brilliant at first sight but once you spot the suffix ing you’ll soon see reading and a chance of bagging the 50 bonus points for playing all of your tiles.
Despite what the nerd dictionaries say, dich is not an English word. But yuk, thingy, shindig and nerd are. Lots of players think this game is about showing off posh vocab and forget all about slang and colloquialisms. A list of useful words for Scrabble contains zilch, phew, geez, schlep, confab… and loads more like that.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/among-us-mod-always-impos/ofhdmdhggdmlnigdgcfkoemmjecjccbk
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/among-us-mod-always-impos/ofhdmdhggdmlnigdgcfkoemmjecjccbk?hl=en
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/among-us-mod-always-impos/ofhdmdhggdmlnigdgcfkoemmjecjccbk?hl=fr
Which brings me to the important question of rude words. Playing a ‘word’ like zax is rude because it’s taking an unfair advantage. Playing everyday words which in conversation might be considered taboo is not rude; the game, after all, should be a celebration of our language’s rich and vibrant vocabulary.
Some years ago I was playing my 97-year-old neighbour. (Remember what I said about choosing your opponent carefully?) Things were not going well; I was 40 points adrift in the endgame with just T H A S left on my rack. But when Marjorie, offloading letters and heading for the finish line as fast as she could, played hit, I saw my chance.