Hooray for wasting time!

At the recommendation of a friend, when Gaby and I got the hankering to procrastinate today, we tried out the following website:
www.freerice.com
This simple but solid little URL provides what few time-wasting Internet destinations can: a sense of satisfaction for the conscience. The site is basically an endless vocabulary test, but as you answer questions correctly, you win grains of rice that are paid for by the site's corporate sponsors and donated to hungry people. Now, procrastination doesn't even have to make you feel guilty!

Furthermore, it's super entertaining to play. Like, a barrel full of monkeys entertaining. The program is written so that it delivers questions at your vocabulary skill level, and you can advance by correctly answering multiple questions at your level, but you can also fall back to a lower level if you answer any question incorrectly. I seriously just spent the last 90 minutes trying to advance past level 50, which seemed like a nearly impossible task, until Gaby walked in and pointed out that there are only 50 levels, so it actually is an impossible task. Sure, I felt momentarily foolish at the loss of the hours I would never get back, but on the flip side my stubbornness is probably feeding an entire village right now. Plus, if you live with word nerds, you can compete with them by incessantly calling out across the apartment the number of the level you've reached. (Or so I've heard.) Oh, who am I kidding? Our apartment sounded like a cattle auction this evening, only with more trash-talking.

By far my best pull of the night: being able to pull the definition of "autochthonous" out of my kiester.