Day: January 16, 2008

Whither Scrabulous?

Oh…this is very bad news:

Facebook has been asked to remove the Scrabulous game from its website by the makers of Scrabble.The Facebook add-on has proved hugely popular on the social network site and regularly racks up more than 500,000 daily users.

Lawyers for toy makers Hasbro and Mattel say Scrabulous infringes their copyright on the board-based word game.

I play an obscene amount of Scrabble online using the Facebook application — and in fact see very limited use for Facebook beyond it. If Scrabulous should suddenly disappear, it would leave a large, tile-shaped hole in my being.

Link via Gerry Canavan, who’s not wrong that Hasbro/Mattel should “offer Facebook the opportunity for a license so they can get a piece of the action.” Like him, I’d always assumed this had already happened.

No clowning around

In his review of Shakes the Clown, Roger Ebert wrote:

Like a lot of small children, I instinctively knew that clowns were not clowns, but adult males dressed up in a weird way for reasons I would rather not know anything about. They pretended they wanted to be my friends, and yet they hid themselves behind bizarre and frightening disguises. They didn’t look like fun friends to me.

Which I guess I understand, just as much as I understand the results of this study, but I’ve never really had a problem with clowns. I’ve never been afraid of them.

Actually, while the article suggests that many children don’t like clowns because they’re afraid of them, that isn’t necessarily the case. It’s difficult to say without seeing the study itself. Many children might simply dislike their use in a therapeutic setting. After all, these were clowns at the hospital, where no kid wants to be anyway, and under those circumstances, the antics of even the best of clowns might seem forced and unpleasant. It might be interesting and worthwhile to investigate what children think of clowns in other, maybe more conducive settings — like, say, the circus.

Via sagittaire.