Greetings from the smoke-filled environs of northern Virginia where we can barely see down the street today because of the Canadian wildfires. Actually, the haze isn't that bad, but apparently the air quality is. I was outside for a bit to get my nephew on the school bus, and the air did seem to smell a bit smoky/ashy. So stay safe out there.
I opened today with SPORT. I was a little bit worried that the SPO part of the word wouldn't be very helpful, and it wasn't. But I did get yellow tiles for R and T. So not bad for an opening guess. And now my game got intense. I saw on Twitter (yes, I'm still on that hellhole of a site because we're still waiting for a viable alternative to rise) that Patton Oswalt got today's answer in two guesses. Now, he admitted it was lucky and Oswalt is kind of a random celebrity to compare yourself to, but I saw it and it was in my mind, so what are you gonna do? I scoured my available letters, trying to think like Patton Oswalt, which is a fool's errand, the man's mind is one of a kind. I also learned from when he posted that Patton is a-do-the-Wordle-at-midnight person (or maybe it's 9 PM for him in LA. Whatever, wherever, let's move on, there are way too many parenthetical asides in this post.) I wanted to guess RETRO, but came up with TREND for my second guess. I did not get the solve in two.
I did get yellows for TRE. So I had something to work from at this point. For some reason, this felt like a TH word to me. I don't know why, but that's the path I pursued. I didn't really want to put TH at the end like in BROTH (which wouldn't work as a guess anyway because of the O, which has really been a thorn in my side this game, also I already needed to work with an E in the answer) so I looked for where else I could put this letter combination. TH to start was out. I wanted OTHER, but again that damned O wouldn't let it work. But it led me to ETHER for my third guess. Now this was a good guess. It got me an ER at the end of the word and yellows for T and H. I now knew the word was H-THER based on previous guesses. So I had HATER, HITER, and HUTER for available options, and only one of those is actually a word. HATER for the win in four. I'm at 56 for the second time to tie Joe DiMaggio's streak. I wonder if people's streaks ended today since we got a dreaded -ER word. Also, HATER is probably a word that skews younger, so it might trip some solvers up.
I do want to toot my own horn after looking at my results in the Wordle Bot. ETHER was such a good guess for today. Coming out of my second guess, there were 21 possible answers, and ETHER eliminated all possibilities except for the answer. I kind of knew that intuitively based on what I wrote above, but, man, it's nice to see the numbers behind the solve.
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