Gamers against Bush

©2007 Bloomberg News

Commentary by Jeffrey Burke

Nov. 14 (Bloomberg) -- A team of women bridge players displayed an anti-Bush sign at a Shanghai tournament last month, the New York Times reported today. This was, however, just one more instance of ongoing games-related sedition and protest signage worldwide.

The Scrabble semifinals in Poughkeepsie, New York, saw an unusual instance of rivals in cooperation several weeks ago. The local favorites from Utica, New York, and their opponents out of Waco, Texas, agreed to build a largely anti-Bush board that included the words BUSH, VOTE (crossing NOT), PINHEAD, ASHAMED and a clever four-way crossing of LONE, STAR and STATE with LAMEBRAIN.

Not to be outdone in his related field, Will Shortz put his best puzzle maker to work on a final challenge for the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, directed each year by the Times puzzle editor at a Comfort Inn outside Baltimore. The embedded theme substituted a zero for the BUSH component in various compounds, including O-LEAGUE, O-MAN, O-Y-TAILED and FLAT-O, a part of Brooklyn, New York.

Last week, the 12-woman synchronized-swimming team at the University of California, Irvine, initially confused spectators with the random words produced by letters drawn in black on their white caps, including WITLESS, LIES and BITE US.

The swimmers' political intent was revealed during the final combination, a perfectly straight line that began with legs to knees out of the water and slowly whirled 180 degrees to a position of heads and shoulders out of the water (degree of difficulty 7.9). At that point the audience could read: BUSH IS ALL WET.

A few days later, the Cambridge University Tiddlywinks Club weighed in at a charity event in Torquay, England. Each disc featured a photo of President George W. Bush, and the target cup was a regulation-size replica of a toilet bowl.

Famine and Rice

This past weekend, at North Korea's weekly National Famine Forgetting Sports Assembly, the spectators on one side of the arena used colored placards to make a picture of Bush shaking an admonitory missile-shaped finger; those on the other responded with a broadly smiling Kim Jong-Il and a speech balloon beside him saying I VOTED FOR BUSH.

Finally, just yesterday in Mumbai, India, the annual rice- painting contest came down to a match between two exhausted outsourced writers for Lou Dobbs's nightly ``Hour of Smarm.'' Given the task of reproducing the entire Kama Sutra on a single grain of rice, they instead wrote the name, address and telephone number of every U.S. citizen who actually cast a ballot for the former governor of Texas.

The finished grains were mounted in a display case over a simple card: THEY VOTED FOR BUSH.

(Jeffrey Burke is an editor at Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)