Got a mattock? There are whales to be flenced. (what can FreeRice.com do for you?)

I was going a little crazy this morning from lack of stimuli (back from Spain, counting the days until I get to New York...what's a high- functioning- obsessive- personality- type girl to do?), sitting there thinking about the events of my life and how downright screwed up the world is, feeling selfish for being in a position to indulge those kinds of thoughts, et cetera.

Which brings me to www.FreeRice.com. It's a Web site that simultaneously manages to intellectually stimulate through a word game and donate rice to the third world. It's like Robin Hood, but seeing how our society is over being altruistic these days, it's a win-win for both sides: Not only are the poor fed, but the rich (all of us blessed few who live above the poverty line) get smarter. How's that for privatized charity?

Here's the procedure:

No pesky registration required. That's right, no "just give us your email so we can send you things to spam your inbox later" (now let us imagine a world without that).
You just go to the Web site, and click.
Yup.

So even amidst my "unproductive" morning, I can feel good about donating 500 grains of rice within minutes, learning words like "mattock" (a pickax for digging) and "flence" (to strip away blubber from) along the way, which I hope find a way in my regular vocabulary soon. But not as much as I hope some starving Sudanese child gets a meal tonight.

www.FreeRice.com