I just discovered Phrazle a couple weeks ago. It is essentially a variant of Wordle that asks you to identify a phrase rather than a six-letter word. For Wordle I developed a personal strategy that simplified the game to the point of rendering it not very challenging. I decided to see if the same would apply to this one.
New Phrazles are offered every twelve hours, and each gives you six chances to guess the phrase. Previously used phrases are compiled here; readers of The Guardian have complained that too many of the phrases are "Americanisms." Solving a short phrase does require a bit of luck when you enter the first guess (I try to test the vowels first):
- and short phrases with repeating letters can also be difficult:
It is not necessary that your entry be an actual phrase, so in a long mystery phrase one has the opportunity to test a good proportion of the commonly-used letters -
Note that if you solve one of the words on the first try but don't know the whole phrase, you can use that space to test out other letters (see above). Sometimes solving one word will reveal the answer, as in this case where the second word had to be "thick" -
The hardest one I have encountered was "Butterflies in my stomach" because only 11-letter words could be entered in the first spaces and I don't have a lot of those in my head.
The first time I played I failed because I was confused about the color rules, but after that it has been pretty easy...
I'm going to move on to other online games, but decided to leave this here for other wordsmith readers who might enjoy giving it a try. Feel free to offer your own suggestions in the comments.
This is the sort of WTF lawsuit that's supposed to only show up in law school textbooks. The usual law school answer, BTW, is that (1) the government definitionally is not a trespasser (it's a taking, not a trespassing), (2) an ungated road is definitionally not something that can be trespassed on (it's an implied invitation), and (3) 20+ years of failing to object is more than enough time to waive your legal rights (adverse possession).
The powerful winter storm burying the Northeast in snow is making life miserable for commuters, postal carriers, and pretty much anyone who has to venture outside. But while all that snow is a hindrance to travel in the short term, it could play a role in making travel better, or at least safer, in the long term.
Meet the sneckdown, a public planning nerd's favorite winter weather tool. A combination of "snowy" and "neckdown" — a term for traffic-calming curb extensions installed at intersections to narrow streets, giving pedestrians a shorter distance to cross — sneckdown refers to the roadside swaths of snow and slush left untouched by tire tracks.
Some examples:
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You get the idea.
These unblemished patches of snow reveal where vehicles actually travel on roads; they're "nature's tracing paper," as Clarence Eckerson, Jr., says at Streetfilms. They also help us better understand how roads can be redesigned to reclaim paved space and be safer.
"The wider a street, the safer drivers feel exceeding the speed limit," according to Transportation Alternatives, a New York City advocacy group. "Where normally drivers are jockeying for position, snow banks on both sides of the street keep drivers in line and in their lane, demonstrating how narrow the street could be."
(Full disclosure: I am a card-carrying member of Transportation Alternatives, and an avid cyclist.)
Since at least the 1990s, urban planners have observed pedestrian and vehicle tracks in the snow to analyze our travel patterns. Eckerson shot two short films, in 2006 and 2011, documenting the phenomenon. Here's the more recent:
In 2011, Philadelphia actually used sneckdowns to redesign a major street corner. "For us it was just a really compelling way of showing there was way too much street and not nearly enough place for people," Prema Gupta, a city planner involved in the project, told Streetsblog. And in Raleigh, N.C., the Office of Transportation and Planning this week urged residents to share their photos of sneckdowns.
Back in the '80s, engineers in Australia dusted intersections with flour to achieve the same end. After waiting a few hours, they photographed the intersections from high up, revealing where and how roads could be tweaked.
And that's exactly why proponents say sneckdowns are so valuable. Plotting roads based on estimated traffic patterns is one thing; observing traffic patterns in real life — and learning from them — is another. Sneckdowns "let you watch real-time human behavior," Gary Toth, of New York's Project for Public Spaces, tells The Economist, "rather than using computer models to predict it — models that often get it wrong."
Now, snow isn't an infallible predictor of travel patterns. Like pedestrians plodding along in existing footprints, cars, too, often follow each others' tracks through snow to ensure better traction. And with curbs covered in a thick coat of powder, drivers are more liable to bunch in the center of roads to avoid inadvertently thumping a hidden protrusion.
Still, sneckdowns offer a handy — and free — guide to finding potentially wasted space on the roads.
"Certainly taking a photo of a sneckdown does not equate to an absolute mathematical seizure of asphalt to implement traffic calming," Eckerson says. "But it does show where there is a strong, inspiring possibility for change."
During the holidays while GGWash’s office is closed, we’re sharing our favorite posts from 2024: “This story was remarkable when we published it almost a year ago: neighbors had banded together to shut down a dangerous street in front of an elementary school, and they’d kept it going every school day for four months. Well, the story has only gotten more remarkable with time: The effort is well into its second year and still going strong. Those kiddos get to walk to school every day surrounded by so many grown-ups who care so much about making sure they get there safely. This is community at its best.”—Chelsea Allinger, Executive Director
Bancroft Elementary in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood of Northwest DC is carving a new path to make the street in front of the school safe for students and closed to traffic during arrival and departure times. Here’s how we made this happen and what we learned. Every neighborhood school with dangerous streets out front should consider it.
A popular school both in the neighborhood and among Spanish language-dominant students from outside the neighborhood, enrollment has risen now to 772 from just 473 a decade ago. There’s something about the socioeconomic mix of the dual language school that parents and students love. They want to keep it as it has been – a gem. So when our call to action went out, both young parents and older community residents responded, donating hours of volunteer time to “man the barricades” and make the street safe.
A car-induced safety crisis outside the school
School had opened for the 2022 school year and Principal Jessica Morales shared that she was despondent. Car chaos on the street led to many near misses.
Drivers came off Piney Branch Parkway and parents looked for spots to drop off or pick up students in front of the school, squeezing student and parent pedestrians to the edges of the narrow sidewalk as they lined up each day outside our overcrowded school. Drivers honked, angry. Multiple times, cars and trucks came to a standstill facing each other, unable to move, while elementary students darted across the street. In a conversation, Principal Morales called it “an accident waiting to happen.”
A few parents and community member activists in the Mt. Pleasant Village, a neighborhood nonprofit founded by senior residents for social connectivity and to encourage aging in place, went into action.
Neighbors take action
Our goal: to get the street in front of the school closed off to all traffic for the 8:00 am hour of arrival and 3:00 pm hour of dismissal during the 2022-23 school year. We just wanted the District Department of Transportation (DDOT) to try it out. Although temporary and permanent street closure in front of schools has become commonplace in Europe, particularly in Paris, London, and cities in Italy and Scotland, and on this side of the Atlantic in Toronto and New York City, it had never been done in DC.
When we requested help from DDOT and from DC Public Schools (DCPS), the response was a lack of a sense of urgency. They hadn’t budgeted for it, weren’t staffed to do it, and were concerned it might not work. But a one-day DDOT pilot in October 2022 at eight schools, one in each of the eight wards, went smoothly.
We met with our Ward 1 DC Councilmember Brianne Nadeau. She was supportive and encouraged us to just do it. She contacted the then-DDOT Director, Everett Lott. But she warned us that the bureaucracies move slowly. Both she and Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George had sponsored “safe routes to school” acts on the DC Council, and so were supportive of our energy.
The president of the Mt. Pleasant Village, Bill Emmet, wrote a strong letter to Lott. We began a drumbeat about the crisis of lack of safety on Newton Street NW in front of Bancroft. DDOT assigned a staff member, Regina Arlotto, to work with us.
We set a revised goal: To be ready to begin right after spring break in April. We decided not to wait for permission to begin recruiting volunteers to staff the barriers that DDOT said it could provide on either end of the 1700 block of Newton Street.
Then the lawyers at DDOT and DCPS got involved. They insisted that a legal Memorandum of Agreement was needed to guarantee volunteers would be provided and other commitments by DCPS and DDOT. It soon became clear that the earliest we could hope to begin was September 2023. So we and the Bancroft administration started preparing parents and residents, presenting at PTO, community, and tenant association meetings, while DDOT distributed flyers to neighboring homes.
The Chancellor didn’t sign the boilerplate Memorandum of Agreement until the week before school opened. It required that we provide at least four volunteers to move barriers to close the street, two at each end. Fortunately, we parents and neighbors hadn’t waited for permission to organize our barricade teams. The Bancroft PTO and the Mt. Pleasant Village each recruited about half of the 35 volunteers who committed to staff the barricade one morning or afternoon per week for the entire year, and on day one of the 2023 school year we were ready to go.
What unfolded exceeded all our expectations.
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Street closures begin
Since September, at around 8:30 to 8:45 each morning, it’s been like a reunion party. Parents and students approach the school, many arriving in small groups on foot. The street in front of the school becomes a safe socializing spot. The boy who just learned to ride a bike shows off. Halloween becomes a costume show-off moment. And each day brings a new level of recognition of the socioeconomic and cultural diversity and friendliness of our school.
We had all anticipated pushback from those parents and neighbors who drive. However, what we thought would be an inconvenience to drivers became the opposite. What had previously been a scramble each day for parent parking spots in front of the school became a process of everyone turning left at the block and those needing to drop off going around to the other side – a shift planned with Regina Arlotto, our contact at DDOT, and Latricia Morgan, our DDOT safety tech. Fewer options meant a more orderly process.
In the first week of closure, a couple of neighbors wanted the barricades moved to get their cars out, and a couple of parents sought special permission to have the barricades moved. But quickly every driver got the message that this permanent hour of closure was working. The exceptions and complaints disappeared.
From traffic chaos to a stronger community
In the end, DDOT stepped up and became – and continues to be – a great partner for our Safe Street experiment. They made improvements to the street signage, the curbs, the traffic assisting barricades. They provided four large but light barricades and fluorescent vests for our volunteers. They trained the volunteers before the first day of school in September and checked in on how it’s going several times during the fall. Latricia Morgan, the regular DDOT safety tech who directs traffic at Mt. Pleasant Street and Newton Street, is the biggest fan of the initiative and her enthusiasm is infectious.
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But perhaps the best outcome of all was the sense of community this Safe Street initiative has achieved in our little neighborhood. The Mt. Pleasant Village recruited volunteers. Young parents who moved recently into the neighborhood for its excellent dual language school also recruited volunteers. Together we volunteer and learn from each other.
The potential conflict that we anticipated between parents who drive from other parts of the city and those able to walk never occurred. Instead, the alienating traffic chaos has been replaced with a visible, engaging, powerful sense of community.
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It is a continuing effort to maintain the level of volunteers needed. The chart of regulars also lists alternate volunteers, ready in case a regular has a conflict. We communicate on WhatsApp groups (a side benefit is older residents learning to use WhatsApp!).
The success of the Bancroft Safe Street Initiative is so appreciated that everyone wants to step up and help. Just the sight of our volunteers brings “thanks” and big smiles from parents each morning and afternoon. We’re happy to share how to do it.
There's SOMETHING here. Yes, the "my dog has a rich inner life" people are overdoing it, but the "dogs can't communicate" people are overdoing it, too.
Consumption of red wine in France has fallen by about 90 per cent since the 1970s, according to Conseil Interprofessionnel du vin de Bordeaux (CIVB), an industry association. Total wine consumption, spanning reds, whites and rosés, is down more than 80 per cent in France since 1945, according to survey data from Nielsen, and the decline is accelerating, with Generation Z purchasing half the volume bought by older millennials.
“With every generation in France we see the change. If the grandfather drank 300 litres of red wine per year, the father drinks 180 litres and the son, 30 litres,” said CIVB board member Jean-Pierre Durand.
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