Let Me Tell You about Snood

I don't mean to brag, but I can waste time with the best of them. And perhaps no single activity, besides of course my good friend television, has been to helpful to me in the pure wasting of time (that is, time which is by no accounts productive--it does not include, for example, doing the dishes when you ought to be doing homework or doing something rewarding like talking on the phone to friends or reading for pleasure) than Snood.

When you want to do something completely mindless, Snood is a great candidate. It requires less thought than computer card games and is brighter and more cheerful than Minesweeper. It's the whole package.

You see, you have this board full of Snoods

And you try to clear them all away by shooting like-colored Snoods at them, like so:

You can download Snood for yourselves if you want to, but--as much mindless joy-like emotion as I personally derive from it--I don't recommend it. First of all, there is the addictiveness that I have alluded to, and then of course there's the fact that it isn't free. Oh, of course, it's free to begin with, but like all good drug dealers, the Snood guys make you pay after you've played so many rounds. Sad to say, I did go ahead and get the deluxe version. . . . I had to see the cool features.

You see, with the super deluxe non-free version, you don't have to use those regular Snood shapes if you don't want to. They have others, like dinosaurs and presidents. (You know without me telling you that it was the promise of presidential Snoods that lured me in, don't you?) But frankly, they're lame. The dinosaurs looks stupid, and the presidents are all in shades of tan, making it well nigh impossible to see what you're doing. But.

You can make your own Snoods.

Yes, that's right, I made British monarch Snoods.

There are two of each because the Snoods kind of blink and move, so we have:

Charles II, regular/winking at some fine ladies

Charles I, not decapitated/decapitated

Henry VII, glaring/smiling with pound signs for eyes

Henry VIII, pious and grumpy/heathen and happy

Elizabeth I, benevolent/yelling

Richard III, regular Joe/crazy evil hunchback

James I, with/without kicky feather in his cap

and, in place of skulls in the original set, the ghosts of the Princes in the Tower.

Man, I'm a nerd.