I came across¹, a site that I think is pretty fun. It’s got a bit of a running vocabulary quiz. At the same time, the site is set up such that for each word you get right, 10 grains of rice get donated through the United Nations. (The rice is paid for by advertisers.)
It’s kinda cool to see the running totals they have posted, too. The site only started on October 7th of this year. Yesterday, 198,342,51 grains of rice were donated, whereas 6,645,520 were donated 1 month ago.
Anyhow, that’s getting to be a decent amount of rice. And it’s inspired me to throw together a bit of a list of rice things. Even though it’s not Thursday. It’s a short list, anyhow.
A Few Grains of Rice
- One Grain Of Rice: A Mathematical Folktale A picture book by Demi.
It’s the story of Rani, a clever girl who outsmarts a very selfish raja and saves her village. When offered a reward for a good deed, she asks only for one grain of rice, doubled each day for 30 days. Remember your math? That’s lots of rice: enough to feed a village for a good long time–and to teach a greedy raja a lesson.
- On a Bed of Rice: An Asian American Erotic Feast, edited by Geraldine Kudaka. An erotic anthology. I like the name, what with the mixed meanings of food and sex. And if there are two things I like (aside from pants), they’re food and sex. (I also just found myself thinking that a somewhat similar phrase would make for an interesting book title, too. “On a Bed of Noodles.” Perhaps it could be an erotic humor anthology.)
- “Rice, rice baby,” by Weird Al. I think you can guess which song it parodies.
- 米国 beikoku, a Japanese term for the US, which means “rice country”
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Aside from the bit about donating rice, I find it fun to test my word knowledge and learn new words. So far, my favorite new word that I’ve learned is, without doubt, omphaloskepsis. It means navel-gazing. And then I thought to myself, “now that would be a fine blog name.” Indeed, it is.
Other words I have encountered which make me happy include the following:
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eructate=belch
anserine=gooselike
bumbershoot = umbrella
edentulous=toothless
demulcent = soothing
Anyone want to go play for a bit and bring me back some tasty word morsels?
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¹ I came across links to this site at least 3 times, though I can only track down one, which wasn’t even the first place I saw it. Anyone else reading this post about it?
collecting tokens 
oh, so many people are blogging about this. i cannot afford getting addicted to anything new so I am not going to click over there. i refuse.
rice, rice, baby
of rice and (wo)men.
i’ve been addicted to that site for awhile now. the sucky part is that it really should cut you off once you miss a word.
OK, and I kid you not – i hopped over to free up more rice and then to lament over the fact that the US hasn’t even set a schedule for giving to end poverty yet and then played a few more rounds and the word was:
Insouciant
and one of the choices was, are you ready for this?
Pants.
Dude.
fun new procrastination! word i love, not from there, but i imagine it’ll show up at some point: turophile. a lover of cheese.
and if you ever get around to women who kick ass who cut off their hair, the only one i can think of is xena’s sidekick, gabrielle, who cuts it off in one of the later seasons.
I played this game at work and donated over 11,000 grains of rice by the time I looked up. I got to level 49 more than once, but couldn’t stay there.
And another reference to rice for you:
Mighty Mountain and the Three Strong Women
http://www.amazon.com/Mighty-Mountain-Three-Strong-Women/dp/0912078863/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195462104&sr=8-1
It’s tenuous, but one of my favourite, all-time books deserves a mention wherever it can get it.
That site is viral – I’ve seen it in a lot of places. I’ve also seen some bashing of it – like they make a lot of money on the ads at the bottom, and probably aren’t contributing all that much. Still, though, it’s a lot of fun.
Jen’s right – it should kick you out when you get a word wrong.
oh, Alejna. thank you so very very much for providing me with the most A++ way to waste time at work this am. srsly. watching that little “vocab level” number go up was the most enticing of carrots to dangle in front of me to get me to keep giving people some rice…
What a great site! Thanks for posting that.
The Free Rice site is cool. thanks.
BubandPie was talking about this last week too. I’ll have to check it out. A word I love: effluent.
A rice title to add to your list: Eliza Carthy’s Red/Rice (she’s a Brit folk fiddle player).
Very interesting… as always! Cheers from Switzerland.