Facebook: what know they of North America who only North America know?

There's a game you can play on Facebook, an application called Scramble, which involves random letters, like Scrabble tiles, on a 4X4 grid. You're given three minutes to find as many words as possible, moving up, down, backwards, forwards or diagonally from letter to letter.

Points scored increase exponentially with word length, so you get one point for a 3-letter word, 2 for 4 letters, 4 for 5 and so on. This being a culture very very big on empowerfulification, not unlike the Victorian Education Department in the 1980s, Scramble boosts your self-esteem every three minutes by flashing you up messages like this: CONGRATULATIONS! YOU GOT 139TH PLACE!

At the end of each game the screen also flashes up a list of all the possible words for that board, with green ticks next to all the ones you scored. If you've scored a word that nobody else online playing that particular game along with you found (and sometimes there are 400 people playing a single game), you get a blue star.

I am pretty ordinary at this game. I've been reading and writing the alphabet's 26 beautiful letters strictly from left to right for anything from two to sixteen hours a day, every day, since some time in the 1950s. Following letters in all directions to make a word does not sit well with me.

But I do score the occasional blue star. And I've noticed that when I get blue stars, I almost always get them in a very particular category of word, and it's nothing you'd think was obvious.

I often, for example, score words in Biblical forms and you'd think that might rack me up a few blue stars. While hath and wert are a doddle for anybody, you'd kind of expect you might score a blue star occasionally for sayeth and doeth and cometh and goeth and other such constructions that trippeth not off the tongue. But no. The overwhelming majority of Facebookers are young North Americans and they know their Bible pretty good.

But here are some words they're obviously not all that familiar with, because I've scored blue stars for all of them: NORI, SARI, GADO, OBI, HAIKU, VINDALOO.

You have to wonder.

Bracks #2

Just watched Bracks' rather lovely speech to the press.

He looks together, cheerful, energetic, relieved and uncrumpled. He is the opposite of ashen or shaken. He can hardly stop smiling.

He says that 'the events of recent weeks' have only confirmed, rather than caused, his decision to resign. And by the look of him, this is true.

So here's my theory: he has watched Blair (his almost-contemporary); he has watched Howard; and he has thought Hmmm, who's looking better, in every possible way?

Can it be that we've finally reached an era in which politicians do not grimly cling onto power at any cost but go in an orderly fashion, leaving their constituencies and their parties in good shape and their own psyches intact or even rejuvenated?

I'm guessing that male journalists and politicans over about 55 will find this incomprehensible, and will keep insisting that there's some other reason Bracks isn't telling us about. But probably nobody else will.