Sunday, February 21, 2016

What a world we live in (part 63,992)...

What a world we live in (part 63,992)...  For the past few months, I've been playing Scrabble with a new partner, a friend of my sister whom I've never actually met.  She's a computer science and math professor, and we play our Scrabble games over the Internet.  Her name is Jo, and we've played well over 100 games at this point.  I'm ahead in our little competition, but I am in awe of her.  Why?  Well, for starters, English is not her first language.  Jo is Polish.  She grew up in the Soviet Union, lived through its collapse, and somewhere along the line picked enough English to be a respectable Scrabble competitor.  If you know the game, then you know that's pretty amazing!  Then there's Jo's sheer determination -- she keeps right on playing even after getting whipped badly several times in a row.

Yup.  I am in awe...

Update: Jo has corrected me – she did not grow up in the Soviet Union, but rather in Poland.  While we in the West didn't differentiate very much between the actual Soviet Union and its satellite countries, in fact they actually were different questions.  To the citizens of those countries, that's a big distinction!

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