In my Italian class with Gabriella, we played Scrabble in Italian. It was really fun, but not 
easy. A friend Marilyn supplied the game, and Lee, one of the other students, wrote the rules in Italian. The rules are similar, if not identical, to the rules in English. But playing the game is different—the distribution of letters is different, and your mind has to think in Italian. Here is a little history of the game, as well as some differences between the Italian and English versions.
Scrabble is a word game in which two to four players receive points by placing tiles, each with a single letter, onto a game board that is divided into a 15 x 15 grid of squares. The tiles must form words, which, like a crossword puzzle, flow horizontally or vertically. The tiles have different values, depending on their frequency or rarity in that particular language. And some of the squares on the game board have different values that tell you when to double or triple the value of a letter or the complete word. The objective of the game is to earn as many points as possible when all of the letters have been used, or there are no more words to form.
The game was invented in 1938 by Alfred Mosher Butts, an American architect. According to a popular story, Butts worked out the distribution and point values of letters by performing a frequency analysis of letters from the front page of the New York Times. He called the game “Criss-Crosswords.” He manufactured a few sets himself, but was not successful in selling the game to any major game manufacturers of the day.
In 1948, a man named James Brunot, a resident of Newtown, Connecticut, bought the 
rights to manufacture the game in exchange for granting Butts a royalty on every unit sold. Brunot made some changes in the game and also changed the name to “Scrabble,” a real word that means “to scratch frantically”. In 1949, Brunot and his family made 2,400 sets in a converted former schoolhouse, but lost money.
According to legend, Scrabble’s big break came in 1952 when Jack Straus, the president of Macy’s, played the game on vacation. Upon returning, he was surprised to find that his store did not carry the game. He placed a large order and within a year, “everyone had to have one.” Unable to meet demand, Brunot sold the manufacturing rights to Selchow and Righter, a Long Island company. In its second year, it sold 4 million sets. In 1986 , Selchow and Righter was sold to Coleco, which soon after went bankrupt. Hasbro purchased the company’s assets, including Scrabble and Parcheesi.
Today the name Scrabble is a trademark of Hasbro, Inc. in the United States and Canada and has been sold by Hasbro’s Parker Brothers division since 1999. Outside the United States and Canada, Scrabble is a trademark of Mattel. The game is sold in 121 countries and is available in 29 languages; approximately 150 million sets have been sold worldwide and roughly one-third of American homes have a Scrabble set.
There are at least 2 versions of Scrabble in both English and Italian. The English-language edition contains 100 letter tiles. (There is also a game called Super Scrabble that has 200 tiles.)
The 2 Italian versions have 120 tiles. The letters J, K, W, X, and Y are absent because 
these letters do not exist in Italian or exist only in certain technical language and in foreign words.
Scarabeo is an Italian variant of Scrabble that is much more popular in Italy than the original game. It is played with a 17 x 17 board, and uses 130 tiles.
The biggest difference between the English game and the Italian is the number and distribution of vowels. Then English version has 9 “A,” 12 “E,”,9 “I,” 8 “O,” and 4 “U.” The Italian version has 14 “A,” 11 “E,” 12 “I,” 15 “O,” and 5 “U.” There are also differences with consonants. For example, in English there are 2 “C,” 2 “M,” and 1 “Z.” In Italian, there are 4 “C,” 5 “M,” and 2 “Z.”
If you try to play the Italian game with American tiles, it will be very difficult!
serve dire altro: è l’Opening day il vero inizio della primavera. Chi invece non lo conosce e storce il naso—“troppo pause, è noioso, non è atletico, è troppo americano, ecc—potrebbe riflettere su questa teoria: il baseball non è lo sport dove non succede niente, ma quello dove succede molto.
In un certo senso, il baseball è un gioco di fallimento. Le migliori 
squadre non vince 2 su 3 partite. Alla fine della stagione, una percentuale di vincite è di solito intorno 0,575. I battitori stelle colpiscono solo circa ,300 per cento – vale a dire, ottengono un successo 3 volte su 10 che arrivano al piatto. E il lanciatore medio vince meno della metà delle sue partenze.
I campioni in carica sono i Kansas City Royals che hanno vinto 95 partite l’anno scorso nella regular season. Divennero noti come una squadra con un grande atteggiamento, in parte perché è
2014, e gli americani si domandano ancora se siano una “dinastia vincente”. Hanno uno stadio bellissimo, sulla baia di San Francisco, con i tifosi in barca che aspettano di raccogliere nell’acqua le palle fuoricampo.
Ma la più grande rivalità possibilmente in tutti gli sport è tra i New York Yankees e i Boston Red Sox. I New York Yankees sono la Juventus del baseball con più titoli (27) e più tifosi in tutto il Paese. Li ami o li odi. I tifosi del Red Sox li chiamano “L’impero del male.” La rivalità risale ai primi anni del 1900. Il proprietario dei Red Sox ha venduto il giocatore stella, Babe Ruth, agli Yankees. Dato che i Red Sox non hanno vinto la World Series per più di 90 anni, questo è conosciuto come “la maledizione del Bambino”. Ora che i Red Sox hanno vinto 2 titoli nel ventunesimo secolo, la maledizione si è sollevata.
Combattimenti nello stadio (e fuori dallo stadio) sono brutti, così come sono i lanciatori che lanciano palle a 90 miglia all’ora alla testa di un battitore. Come tutto il resto, il nostro passatempo nazionale ha un lato cattivo.
Ci sono molti film riguardo il lato romantico del baseball. Tra i miei 
preferiti è “Bull Durham,” in cui Susan Sarandon ogni anno esce con un giocatore della squadra della lega minore locale. Una delle sue migliori linee è: “Io sono in serie monogama”. Più di recente, “Moneyball”, interpretato da Brad Pitt è un film divertente e intelligente riguardo l’arte e la scienza moderna del baseball.
L'Olivo Santa Barbara 