This will be an abbreviated week of posts.  Starting Wednesday, I will be in Reno for five days.  While there I will play 28 games of Scrabble.  They have two major tournaments there a year.  In fact, I played in a small six-game tourney yesterday.  All I'll say about it is - the word WARTIEST is a valid play.  I found out the hard way.

So here is the Minutemen's "The Glory of Man."  Wait, what in the utter hell does this song have to do with Scrabble?  Well, it was featured prominently in Word Wars, a documentary film about competitive Scrabble.  I watch this roughly once every couple of months.  I'd recommend it to anyone, whether you play Scrabble or not.

My fondness for the topic aside, Word Wars does what every good documentary film should do - it actually documents.  Meaning, it follows its arbitrary subject (or subjects, in this case, as in four elite and quirky Scrabblers) to some inevitable conclusion while staying totally faithful to the subject.  Too many "documentaries" made nowadays do just the opposite - the conclusions are completely predetermined and everything in the films exists solely to support those conclusions.  That's the whole problem I have with, for example, Michael Moore's films, as well as those made as Michael Moore rebuttals.  Ditto for that god awful F**k doc.  Call them "polemics", "propaganda pieces", or whatever.  But they're not really documentaries.

Or sometimes the conclusion is way too inevitable and obvious.  As if we needed some movie to tell us that you will run into health problems if you eat McDonald's food non-stop for a month.

But yeah, in any case, let's get back on topic.  God, look at me rant on about staying focused on a subject while completely losing focus on the subject of this post - a kickass Minutemen song.  I'd be a horrible documentarian.

Hear "The Glory of Man" on YouTube.