Puzzling.

A whole lot of folks will recognize this image. It's the 4-by-4 grid of the daily Connections puzzle published by the New York Times. Today's puzzle wasn't too hard. The yellow and green categories are supposed to be the easiest, but today I got blue first; purple, as usual for me, was whatever was left over once I'd figured out the others.

Anyway, as I said, I got them all right today without making any mistakes -- but that is not always the case. In fact, it is so often not the case that when I consult Mama Google, "connections hint today" kind of pre-populates the query box. I'm beginning to ask myself whether to continue playing. 

I'm not at a loss for other games to play. There's Wordle, of course -- I'd keep playing that -- and the NYT has a relatively new game called Strands that's often fun. (Strands, for the uninitiated, is a word search for which you're not given a word list; instead, you get a clue, and the words hidden in the puzzle all relate to the clue, including the Spangram, which is often a phrase instead of a single word.)

The NYT games have a social media element; players are encouraged to share their scores, which I do. One reason I'm hesitating about dropping Connections is that folks may wonder if something's wrong with me if I stop posting my scores. (This actually happened in the early days of Wordle; I played late one day, and a college friend said she was relieved to see my score posted on Facebook. She was worried something had happened to me.) 

But these three NYT games do take some time to play, and I was already playing a roster of daily games. There's MobilityWare's Solitaire, FreeCell, and Mahjong; and Big Duck Games's Flow Free, Flow Free Hexes, Flow Free Bridges, and Flow Fit (I tried Flow Free Warps, but it messed with my head).

All this started with either Solitaire or Flow Free, both of which I've been playing for years. Here's my winning screen from Flow Free today: 

That's eight years of Flow Free every day -- and counting. I hope to keep the streak going until I'm dead.

On top of all of those, I've started playing three Apple News games, including an intriguing one called Quartiles. You're given 20 word fragments -- sometimes short words or syllables, most often neither one -- and you're supposed to make words out of them. You get one point for a word that uses one tile, two points for two tiles, four points for three tiles, and eight points for four tiles. There are five four-tile words in the puzzle, and if you find all five, you get bonus points. If you earn a total of 100 points, you achieve the rank of Expert. You can keep making words after you reach Expert level, but I tend to bail; after all, I have a whole bunch of other puzzles to do.

So yeah, my life won't be any less rich if I quit one of the NYT games. (The NYT may be less rich, though, if people quit playing; Colin Jost joked at last year's White House Correspondents' Dinner that games subscriptions were the only thing keeping the newspaper afloat.)

What are y'all thinking? Is Connections becoming too annoying?

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Now for something more serious: Today is the 55th anniversary of the shootings at Kent State University. National Guard troops opened fire on a peaceful student protest against the Vietnam War, killing four students, at least one of whom was just walking to class. I remember the shooting, but what I didn't remember -- and what Michael Moore talks about in his Substack today -- is that the National Guard claimed the troops began firing in response to a sniper. The Nixon White House took that version and ran with it. Of course, there was no sniper. 

The Kent State shooting made all the papers, but Moore goes on to say that ten days later, there was another National Guard shooting, at Jackson State College in Mississippi, in which a dozen or so protestors were injured and two students were killed. The National Guard again claimed the troops began shooting in response to a nonexistent sniper. But that incident didn't make the papers -- and I bet you can guess why: the victims in Ohio were white; the victims in Mississippi were Black.

Feel free to draw whatever parallels you like to foreign students today being arrested and deported for protesting the Trump administration.

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One more thing, and then I'll let you get on with your Sunday evening. Today is Star Wars Day, aka May the Fourth. In honor of the day, I'm sharing this meme that TrekMovie-dot-com posted on Facebook today.

Live long and prosper, y'all.

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These moments of bloggy miscellany have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!