Rice that is free.

Two things:

1. You need to have Google Reader. What is it? If you have Gmail, just click on the little blue link that says "Reader" in the upper left-hand corner. All will be explained. You need it because you don't want to have to come visit my blog every day to find out whether or not I have posted. Say you want to be able to ignore my blog completely unless I post something. Well, Google Reader will tell you when I've posted so you don't have to go look for yourself. This will work with any website that has an RSS feed. If you don't know what that is...well anyway, I'm done explaining things for now. I'm really the wrong person to be explaining them anyway. I just barely figured out what some of this stuff is several months ago, and I don't use it that much as it is.

2. I, in fact, use Google Reader. With it, I stay up to date on politics (more or less), movie trailers, my favorite webcomics, my favorite band, and a handful of my friends' blogs.

Today, while I was reading a recebt post on The Fischbowl, I was alerted to a pretty cool site called "FreeRice." Here's what you do: You go to the website and immediately start answering vocab questions. For every question you answer correctly, they donate 20 grains of rice to The United Nations World Food Program.

And they're not messing around with the vocab. There are 60 levels of difficulty, and they escalate as you answer correctly. On level one are words like "liquid" and "dozen" and "awful." On level 60 are words like "champher" and "apodeictic" and "lansquenet." With all of my knowledge and lucky guesses, I could only get up to level 42 ("jambeau" and "horologe" and "picaresque"), but you can start on any level you'd like. It's just that if you start at level 60, you'll probably fail to win any free rice for anyone.

So, fun times. Start a Google Reader account, improve your vocab, and win free rice for hungry people.