In the spirit of the recently ongoing Olympics, here’s a cute game called Track & Field that will put you in the game, when you can’t partake in the sports, yourself. I like running as much as the next self-professed runner, but I will never be referred to as an Olympian – not in this lifetime – nor will I ever participate in any televised events, with fans cheering in stadiums, while donning those ridiculously skintight shorts that long distance runners use, the wedgie ones barely covering their sinewy muscles.

Ruuunnnnn!!!!

No, I’m content to satisfy my Olympian urges with this game by Playman Sports, where I may select an avatar to participate in one of several events, including the 100m dash, the long jump, the 110m hurdles, the pole vault, and the javelin toss. You may select one of 12 characters as your avatar, the default being a duo of red-headed twins. I took a liking to the rather Germanic looking blonde with green beret, much in the same tough vein as Cammy from Street Fighter II. Oh, how I loved Cammy, in all her muscly, braided hair glory. For my character, I chose the Ukrainian flag, for no particular reason, other than I love saying the Ukraine, with a thick, horribly affected accent. If you don’t like the Ukraine (why wouldn’t you?!), don’t worry, there are plenty of other countries to choose.

Tap the numbers in order to jump better and faster.

After creating your carefully crafted avatar, you may go to the Challenge section as an Amateur, where you may participate in any of the aforementioned events; you must beat each event, and the final tournament, before you can unlock the Pro mode. I have yet to beat the Pro section – it’s quite difficult – but I assume the Survival Mode, as indicated by the tightly clad Eskimo on the main screen, will be unlocked for use as soon as I beat the Pro tournament. Multiplayer is available right away, should you want to take your hurdling, running, jumping and throwing skills to the global universe of Track & Field players, but as my readers know, I’m a lover of the single player. Though, I digress – multiplayer is awesome. Suddenly, instead of just one A.I. opponent, you now have four or five players running alongside you and jumping at different times. It’s pretty cool to watch, and I’m curious why the single player mode doesn’t offer you more opponents.

After you’ve selected your event – say, the long jump – I highly recommend you read through the instructions before participating. The game isn’t obviously intuitive the first time around, so the instructions give some much needed insight into what the orange and green buttons mean. “Buttons?” you may ask. For each event, you power your player forward, to hopeful victory, by tapping the orange buttons to start, and by tapping the green buttons as soon as they appear onscreen, then ending with a calculated press and release of two orange buttons to give your player the final surge of power to propel himself forward to the finish. The more quickly you react and tap to the green buttons, the better your player will perform – whether he’s running, or jumping, or otherwise. The use of the orange buttons can be trickier in some events than others – the pole vault, for example, took Ocie and I countless tries before we finally succeeded in figuring out that the orange buttons must be pushed at one, single moment, otherwise your character will fail miserably, hoisting himself a mere foot or two off the ground before haplessly falling, or just not making it into the air at all. Not exactly the Olympian feat we all admire. I believe it was I, who finally figured that as soon as your player begins moving the pole forward and down, you must then, and only then, press the orange buttons – despite their repeated glaring onscreen – to successfully vault yourself into the air, and over the high beam, to land down on the other side in triumph. Phew! What a workout that was.

Out of all the events, the pole vault and the long jump are the two most frustrating and difficult to master. You challenge different opponents, randomly, for each event, and you must conquer them in three rounds to successfully complete an event. If you’re lousy at the game (a little like me), then at least the game is enjoyable to watch, with its retro-stylized graphics that seem appropriate for a classic Nintendo. I always appreciate anything retro, anyway.

Definitely a fun game to pick up whenever the urge to compete strikes, with Track & Field you don’t have to worry about scraped knees or muddy shorts. Just make your player do all the dirty work and reap the applause, anyway.

Well, I know that’s definitely not true. Not that Petaluma is laden with crime, or anything, but we do have plenty of cops to go around. In some ways, our cops are more visible than those in Oakland, less likely to be lurking in dark alleyways and more prone to driving aimlessly, in full black and white splendor,  around town, in the hopes of nabbing a senior citizen in a rolling stop, or pulling over a teenager who drives two miles above the speed limit. They’re a crafty bunch, the Petaluma troopers, and spotting three around town in one afternoon is a common occurrence. Daily, even.

I suppose that’s why I really wanted to like SpotACop. In Petaluma, residents like to gripe about the police, and for a small town, quaint and lovely with a crumbly patina, we have a surprising amount of DUI’s handed out, like raffle tickets – in small towns, teenagers have nothing better to do than roam the empty hillsides, drinking their Mickeys and their 40 oz Miller High Lifes – the essential, tarnished oil cred of every bankrupt youth – and many of them jump in their cars, maybe just with a tiny buzz, because they know that cops have better things to do than pull over kids on an empty, dirt road. I suppose that’s one reason we call teenagers naive and reckless. But, in any case, the cops in Petaluma are perfectionists, and there are way too many of them for the amount of disturbances we see in Petaluma.

SpotACop was created with the intent of warning drivers of these impending cop interactions, to prompt drivers to slow their speed ahead of time, and to drive cautiously, within those DMV regulations – you know, those rules we like to treat like guidelines, starting from the time we leave the DMV with that brand new shiny license. Oh, right… those. Or maybe, SpotACop was created with a more mischievous bent, to warn those driving without a license to take a detour instead of driving past the cop on the 101, ready to pull over anyone with the slightest grievance, or to warn those driving drunk of an oncoming checkpoint just a mile down the road. Well, regardless of the app catering to those in illicit activities, the app can certainly be used in this manner.

Unfortunately (or fortunately?), SpotACop doesn’t work very well. You must use your current location – despite the app offering the “Don’t Allow” option – otherwise the app will jitter and spurt, shooting out bolts and coils, and reading an error message repeatedly. However, if you are based in Petaluma, or based in any location other than a huge city, I’m sure,  SpotACop won’t spot-a-cop, and all you’ll be left with is a useless app, that registers nothing, and that doesn’t allow you to look up another location. On an amusing side note, SpotACop gives you the option of changing your search radius from 1 to a, gee, whopping 5 miles, so you can search for nothing even further away. Until this app works out its quirks and develops a community user base, I don’t see it being useful at all. And, honestly, I don’t think many people would be inclined to use this app – I think most of us are inclined to fend for ourselves, and if someone else gets pulled over, then at least that someone isn’t us. This app should be renamed SpotAWhat? and include, in parentheses, For Repeat Offenders Only.

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*When using the promotion code to download for free, it’s on a first-come, first-served basis. Out of courtesy, please leave a comment below mentioning you’ve used the promotion code.

I remember being horrible at Scrabble when I began playing regularly some time in college, jumping for joy when I first hit those double digit scores, and performing obnoxious victory jigs whenever I landed a bingo, to the other players’ collective annoyance. Becoming a better player has definitely humbled my exuberance. Scrabble, I think, is especially hard for erudite folk with an appreciation for the vagaries and intricacies of language. It’s easy to think too critically of a game where the targeted placement of small and common ox can earn you 30 or more points, while the more impressive, and articulate eremite (a recluse, especially for religious reasons) may only tally at a paltry 12. I remember thinking that Scrabble took the joy out of creative vocabulary, the pleasure of laying down an obscure word, in favor of memorizing two-letter word lists and Q-word lists, in the silly, regimented hope of achieving some impenetrable word arsenal. These word lists that every serious player commits to memory just seemed so confining and didactic to me, to warrant any permanent spot in my weekly rotation of board games. But, like a phonetic hooker in those dank, forlorn corridors of unused word games, Scrabble tempts you and weaves words and anagrams in a way no other game does.

Scrabble was released for the iPhone a little while ago, but like most board games cum iPhone games, it has a longevity that renders it ageless. For this adaptation, EA Games took the game by the reigns and added a certain panache that I have come to equate with Electronic Arts: a slick, bouncy soundtrack, excellent interfaces, breezy multiplayer, and easy in-game navigation. The design of both the main screen and the board are digital clones of the actual Scrabble packaging, the red lines, and the Scrabble font near exact replicas of the originals – a definite plus for we, Scrabble aficionados in need of a perfect homage. To play, you may opt for a Quick Play, or connect with Facebook to enjoy a game with your close friends, or just opt for wi-fi multiplayer, to perhaps play with a stranger in your current location. I’m a solo kind of gal, so I usually tap the Quick Play and challenge the CPU, taking great enjoyment in my linguistic overtaking of its, apparently, computationally-challenged battlefront (it has yet to beat me). My one disappointment with Quick Play – and where other games like Words with Friends win me over – is you can only play one game at a time. This is pretty absurd considering you may want a backup game should you hit a roadblock with the first. But, true to Scrabble, or any physical board game, once you start a game, you should see it to the end.

I tend to turn off the music to allay any outside disturbances (how serious do I sound?), but considering it’s light, and possibly the least obtrusive music I’ve heard thus far for a game, I often just keep it on. I also don’t bother with uploading my own soundtrack to Scrabble, but it’s nice to know the option is there, and I’m sure many people play considerably better with Lady Gaga serenading them about their Poker Faces – maybe I’ll try that. By default, Scrabble peppers you with Game Tips – how to move your tile with one finger, while using another finger to move the screen; double tapping to zoom in and ditto to zoom out; pinching to accomplish the same – but you can turn these off, as any regular iPhone user will intuitively figure out how to control the game. The game board is naturally set at a distance so you may view the entire playing field, but whenever you move a tile to play, the game will automatically zoom in to your approached location – otherwise, you may double-tap anywhere on screen to zoom in on a particular location. When setting down tiles to form words, the game will automatically calculate the score, making decisions easier when oscillating between two or more possible plays. Should a word not be valid, the game will tell you, highlighting the words in red – you may then easily take back this play by tapping the Recall button, placing the tiles back on your rack. Shuffling is also made easier with a Shuffle button, to shuffle at random, or you can manually move the letters yourself, definitely more convenient when you’re working out those pesky anagrams.

It’s too bad the relative ease of this Scrabble won’t make winning the game any easier – but wait! For this Scrabble, Electronic Arts threw us a freebie with the Best Word option. Hardcore Scrabble fans will surely scoff at this option, seeing it to be a cop-out for n00bs who don’t have the patience to think critically about what possibilities lay ahead, and that may be a valid concern. It’s definitely easy to drift your glance down at the reassuring heart button, oozing warmth with its Best Word, beckoning all that is safe and assured. I say ignore the button if you’re already an adept player, confident in your abilities, but I definitely won’t tell beginning players to overlook its help.

Sometimes it’s good to get a freebie. For a game like Scrabble, it can point you in the right direction.

When I still lived with my parents, in my teenage years not too long ago, I once came upon a book my brother brought home from school, a curiosity, because he rarely brought home anything at all. It was a book like any other, of the young adult vein, and without so much as a whiff of indecision I opened the book and started to read. It was a book, after all. I can hardly refrain from touching them as I pass by sideboards and bookshelves rife with them. Little did I know that this book was Harry Potter – or, to be more exact, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone – and that the next three hours of my life would be spent with my nose interminably stuck to the flipping pages as I read the story in its entirety, from beginning to end. The feeling I had upon completing the book was sheer exhilaration, a rejuvenation of sorts, from this breath of fresh air in children’s literature, this excellent and imaginative evolution from the days of R.L. Stine. Over the next few years I became one of the many Harry Potter fans, eagerly awaiting the next books at midnight openings – with or without Hermione getup and Griffindor scarf wrapped around my bushy locks – and quivering with anticipation every time I read through spoiler columns of the upcoming Harry Potter movies. When the first movie of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is released, you can be sure I will be camping overnight, like Star Wars all over again. So, it goes without saying I was eagerly anticipating Harry Potter Spells for the iPhone.

The Harry Potter movies are not stellar by any means. Each director – it seems there are many – took his own creative liberties in interpreting both characterizations and the book’s events, oftentimes in ways the audience found highly disagreeable. The movie Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix made a huge error when it had Harry’s prophecy spoken aloud as soon as Harry touched the orb when he and his motley comrades were in the Hall of Prophecies. The whole point of the prophecy was only the person for whom it was predicted – in this case, Harry – could touch it, and only when the orb itself was shattered, could the prophecy be released and heard. That’s why the Death Eaters needed Harry to grab it and give it to them, they being unable to hear it for themselves. In the movie, the prophecy rings out for all to hear, eliminating the reason the Death Eaters needed Harry’s assistance. It was preposterous. Not to mention, the adventures Harry and his friends encounter in the Department on Mysteries are gripping to read, and yet none but the Hall of Prophecies were included, and even the director ruined that. But, my quibbles are my quibbles. It’s only too bad the Harry Potter Spells apps falls into this disappointing trend of digital interpretation.

The app starts off promising. A snazzy WB introduction followed by the typically hazy shroud that encases the title Harry Potter Spells put me in the right, magical mindset, and a voice saying “Welcome to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry,” with the Harry Potter theme music was just icing on the cake. Even better, the app showcases its raw Harry Potter fan-dom by putting its users through the Sorting Hat ritual. I was horrified to be placed in the House of Slytherin (“but, but… I’m a Ravenclaw!”), but if I really disliked this sorting, there’s an option to be re-sorted. It’s all in good fun, anyway, even if the Slytherins tend to be evil. Really evil.

Before even downloading the app I was impressed with the clever idea to use the iPhone as a wand, using motions to mimic the wand casting of spells. I mean, how utterly cool is that? My excitement reached a pinnacle of intensity after I checked out the spell chart, which included various offensive and defensive spells read about in the books, spells like the ever-popular (almost a household term) Expelliarmus, Stupefy, Confundo, Petrificus Totalus and Alohomora. A guide is provided with drawings of a vintage, yellowed design prompting you to the proper movements for wand casting. It seems simple enough in theory: hold your iPhone horizontally at all times, parallel to the ground, and cast spells by pressing your thumb onscreen and drawing shapes in the air, without too much wild gesticulating. You can even record your voice when casting a spell so your own voiced yells “Expelliarmus” instead of the stock, default voice. My boyfriend kept casting me aggrieved looks when I would cast spells, hear my voice, and nearly die from a fit of the giggles. But, my elation soon subsided because it was only until I tapped the Learning tab – used for unlocking spells – that I learned just how misleadingly easy these directions are.

Learning a new skill is always hard. It requires finesse, patience, and constant practice, but I’m beginning to understand why Hermione is always so frazzled. Casting spells is rough. The Expelliarmus movement is easy enough in writing – just a simple dash to the left and then down, but after countless episodes in the Learning module, with the app yelling “Incorrect!” I was bristling with annoyance. First, I cast my wand and the app tells me it’s too slow. I pick up the speed and it tells me I’m too fast. Then it tells me cheerfully to, “Try Again!” three more times, and then I receive a failing grade and must try all over again. Next thing I know I’m throwing my iPhone across the room and yelling, “Oh look! My phone was flung from my hand and I didn’t even have say Expelliarmus!” followed by many expletives. If I were Harry Potter, objects would have started levitating around the room, papers would have mysteriously appeared out of thin air and started fluttering is a flurry, and electrical sockets would have started snap, crackle popping.

It was only after an hour or two did I realize the patterns drawn on the spell chart weren’t limited to a two dimensional plane (thanks, brain). For the Lumos spell, it appears that you have to shoot your wand forward and back, when really, you must lift your phone up and then down, abruptly. I guess the “hold your phone horizontally at all times” confusingly made me lean toward the inclination that your castings, as well, should only be horizontal. In other words, don’t look straight down at the spell castings, and mime that movement exactly. Think three-dimensionally.

For moments like these, the app directs you to the Practice “room” or tab, where you can wave your wand around to your heart’s desire without a set time limit or end result. To aid in your practice, the Spell Chart is visible in the background, giving you all the movements for each spell. While the freedom to wave as you please is a nice touch, it leaves much to be desired. You can wave your wand endlessly, but unlike in the Learning section, there is no feedback to your maniacal waving. For all you know, you could be performing each wave differently, without consistency, and think to yourself, “yea, okay. I have the hang of it,” only to get a pathetic 40% accuracy in your Lumos demonstration. Apparently, practice does not make perfect. There aren’t even spell castings like in the Learning Module, which is the whole point of Harry Potter Spells – we want to see the cool special effects, that cool jet of cool blue light shooting from our wand’s tip. The Practice section should be exactly like the Learning module, with all its Incorrects and Too slows and spell castings – just without a set amount of tries.

Once you feel confident enough in your skills (I’ve unlocked as far as Protego, with most of my rankings 80% and above), there’s the awesome option to duel. Even people who don’t like the Harry Potter series can appreciate an impressive wizard duel, with shooting beams of light and exploding objects (come on LOTR fans, Gandalf’s magic wasn’t nearly impressive enough in the movies). I recommend memorizing the spells, because looking through the spell chart is a pain, and will usually result in your wand being knocked from your hand. Oh, that Expelliarmus.

To duel, you may either play with someone nearby, online, or all by your lonesome (this could actually pose as the real practice space, more so than the Practice tab). At the top of the screen is your opponent’s health bar, with your health and energy bar at the bottom. Alerts at the top left of the screen warn you about incoming offensive spells so you can quickly retaliate with the appropriate defensive spell to counter it. If you’re good, you could have an epic battle of yellow, blue, white and purple lights (thankfully, the game has different animations for each spell. I would have immediately boycotted the app if all the spells looked the same). For those not in the know about spells in the Harry Potter world, here’s a brief rundown. Offensive spells include Petrificus totalus, Expelliarmus, Confundo, Stupefy, Incendio, Oppugno, and Confrigo. Defensive spells include Protego, Finite incantatem, and Aguamenti. Some defensive spells are better suited for one offensive spell over another, such as in the case of Aguamenti. I would recommend using this water spell against the fire spell Incendio, more so than against Petrificus totalus, a spell that locks you up like a stone, rendering you immobile. Water versus fire, okay. Water versus total body lockdown? Not so much. Don’t worry, you’ll get the hang of it.

Dueling online can be slow and very choppy, so I recommend just duking it out wizard-style with fellow, nearby Harry Potter afficionados. I’m dying to see two kids battle on the street, dodging behind trees and yelling “Stupefy!” at each other. I would be happy to be stupefied just to see a moment of this, but unfortunately, the spell casting is probably too frustrating and difficult for most children to handle. Which leaves me to wonder, who will be using this app? I mean, I certainly enjoyed playing with it, but am I really going to duel with other 25 year olds? I like Harry Potter, and I certainly like clever apps such as this one, but there’s a missing demographic afoot here. Then again, it will definitely appeal to those crazed fans who order wands online, visit gossip sites nonstop, and order all sorts of Harry Potter type knick-knacks for their collection. I have to admit… those wands looks pretty cool.

Bump takes the time out of trading information by transposing the physical act of bumping into someone onto your iPhone. Rather than reenacting the scene above, Bump allows you to simply bump your iPhone against another iPhone, and voila, instant information exchange. And, don’t worry about scratches and dings either – really, you’re lightly bumping each other’s hands as you hold your respective phones. First, you choose your name from your own Contact List, so Bump knows who you are, what your personal information is. When bumping with another person, you may opt to share your entire contact card, or you may opt to share a select few, perhaps just your phone number and email, and no personal photo or home address. Unlike when Bluetooth first came out, with Bump no one can see or access your information until you physically bump phones. It is pretty sensitive, though, so just make sure you don’t have the app active when you don’t want to swap information. If you want, you can integrate Bump with Facebook so you can tell people who you’re bumping with – “God, really? You’re bumping with him?!” Not necessary, but a nice feature.

I can see how great this would be in social situations. Picture this: You, in stunning black, curve-hugging dress, enjoy a martini, one olive only, at some swanky but under-the-radar lounge with a few friends, when a conversation with the flushed, tall man to your left – yes, the charming one, not his insipidly bland and testosterone-riddled band of cohorts – strikes a harmonious chord with your literary divulgations (“Really? You like Donna Tartt?”). You swoon, he sweeps, you bump. Despite the unfortunate, but imagined, sexual proclivities of the word bump to the phonetically similar hump, and, no doubt, its present participle bumping, the phrase bumping iPhones is sure to enter mainstream jargon. Bumping will be like the precursor to the actual humping, if you will entertain such coy and textual naughtiness. Bump a friend, bump a coworker, bump a boss, or bump a stranger.

But, all humor and potential blind date rampages aside, the Bump app is an excellent networking tool, a good app for business people to use with full efficacy. It’s free, so there’s no hesitation in downloading. At work you could bump left and right, getting the contact information from all your colleagues (oh haha). But, don’t limit yourself to numbers and emails – you can attach files, whole word docs, and bump to send. If my mom wants some photos of my boyfriend and I, I could just bump them over to her, bypassing the sending to email ordeal. Easy as pie. It’s kind of scary, in a way, thinking information can be so carelessly bumped away. Or, imagine a rough day at work (you’re behind in those TPS Reports). You, with red face, storm over to Jim in accounting, and yell, slamming your phone into his: “HERE’S YOUR F***ING REPORT JIM.” Who needs a punching bag when you can bump phones?

Sorry. It’s too easy to find the humor in this app. Highly worth downloading though, if just for the sheer novelty of it.

I still have the blue crayon doodle of my boyfriend hanging on my fridge that I mocked in my review for Adam’s Art back in June. Several months ago I reviewed a great kid’s app by the name of Adam’s Art that entailed coloring and otherwise painting motions, with the end result of you tacking the picture onto your iPhone “fridge.” Not only was it super cute, it was an effective coloring medium for the iPhone, a doodling app with an added punch.

Doodle Buddy by Pinger, Inc. bridges the gap between Microsoft Paint and the iPhone, transforming this popular, and in some ways, default platform to the iPhone. You start with a white screen, with a toolbar along the bottom for paint colors and brush size, some stock images running the typical gamut of smiley faces to soccer balls and animals, and a set of background templates, should basic white just be oh too boring a blank slate for you. Different backgrounds include a brick wall for the graffiti inclined, a chalk outline for the morbidly inclined, a beach setting, and several random line and dot arrangements, one of which resembles a computer circuit board. The dot arrangement had me a bit confused, until I remembered those dot drawing puzzles, where after following step-by-step directions, you methodically draw seemingly incongruous and nonsensical shapes until they form a cohesive whole at the end (in fourth grade I drew un burro in Spanish class). All in all, the backgrounds, along with the ability to import photos from your album, proved a good angle.

I enjoyed the scritch-scratch sound effects that accompany your drawing motions, and the myriad of sounds heard anytime you stamp a stock image. Some of them are creepy, like the maniacal laughter heard when you use the widely grinning smiley icon, or the gurgly syrupy sound when you splash down a blood spatter image. I was amused to aurally note the soccer ball’s bounce being heavier from its obvious outdoor use to the basketball’s airier bounce sound effect from being bounced on an indoor wooden court. Interesting, albeit random attention to detail on the developer’s part. The drawing motions you make with your finger tip are surprisingly fluid, with none of the jerkiness you’d expect from random jolts of touchscreen interaction dying out, and doodling about proves to be a satisfying experience.

Like any good girl, I started my doodling experiment by drawing out an idyllic meadow scene, complete with trees, blue skies on a sunny day, and birds afloat by some clouds. Next, obviously, would be the idyllic house portrait, with two hatched windows and a door idling between them, on a curiously small cottage with people far too big for such a munchkin house waving happily outside, standing, no doubt, near some giant daffodils. But, I have to grow up at some point, right? Get a little macabre, throw in a dash of the moribund. The chalk outline is fun to toy around with, but other than splattering some bloody splotches around, with the satisfying thwop thwop, there’s not much else to do. I guess I could draw some smiley faces and hopscotch squares in some New Yorker style satire on say, the streets of the Tenderloin, where danger abounds but children flock aplenty.

Doodle Buddy makes doodling a collective experience with its ability to seek out other Doodle Buddy users on your wi-fi search – what would any iPhone app be without social networking? So, instead of being the loner artist, branch out a little and extend a crudely drawn olive branch to a fellow doodler. You guys will be so happy together, especially since the chance of finding a local Doodle Buddy will be slim to none. It’s a good intention, though, and I probably would enjoy the experience of drawing a happy scene while my friend madly skewers my stick people with stakes of red. Hmmm, I must be playing with a boy.

Probably the best feature of Doodle Buddy is this neat hazing feature, like rubbing chalk drawings so the colors blend together and add dimension. If you check out Doodle Buddy on the iTunes store, one of the showcased artwork pieces is someone’s personal beach photo complemented by this amazing, drawn sky of blended pink, orange and blue. It’s really quite cool, and shows what exactly you can accomplish with this incredibly simple app if you put the time into it. Obviously, Doodle Buddy is meant just for fun, and kids are bound to love it, but it’s nice to know it can have some impressive results, all with the tip of your finger.

“The position calls for someone with ‘a passion for pop culture.’ I don’t know if I have a passion for pop culture – I’m not even sure you can have passion for it, but then again I’m not even sure I know anything about pop culture.”

“Yea, this coming from someone who buys US Weekly and pours through it with the voracious hunger of someone plunging a knife through a rib eye steak. That’s about as passionate as you can get.”

It’s true, pop culture once had a definition somewhere in the blurred lines between trivial pursuit and comtemporary culture. It encompasses a knowledge of current events in a wide range of thoroughfares, from art to literature and theater, from new and notable figures to the idolized occurrences on popular shows like One Tree Hill and Fringe. It is all at once trivial and frivolous information, snubbed nosed by the ranks of high-brow society, but trickles through our lives everywhere in the form of vernacular, attitudes, and conversational interludes. Lately, however – and this is my own empirical observation – within the past several years pop culture has winnowed down into, funnily enough, a more trashy version of itself. With Gossip columns, celebrity rags, US Weekly rumor mills, and more, the word “paparazzi” has been so embedded in our colloquial usage that even a popular pop star named Lady Gaga wrote a song after it. Pop culture’s definition has mutated more into the latest celebrity rumors, who is sleeping with whom, spotted sightings – there’s even a “They’re Just Like Us!” section in the US Weekly magazine, with photos of celebrities in their sweatpants and eating. Type in any celebrity’s name in google and you’re sure to be inundated with pop culture websites of all kinds, the queen of which, in my eyes, is PopSugar.com.

PopSugar.com is one of the more popular and visited gossip sites, reaching 8.5 million users per month as of September 2008, and they now have their own iPhone app, PopSugar Mobile. Every day, postings cover the latest celebrity and entertainment news, from Kristen Stewart sightings around town while filming New Moon, to pared down interviews of the latest celebrity to be featured on the cover of Vanity Fair. Touted as “insanely addictive,” PopSugar strikes a clever medium between entertainment news spot and celebrity rag; it manages to be classy and fair without poking around in the mud. No, PopSugar is far too fashionable and savvy to mar her red-laquered Christian Louboutins, kthanks.

Just posted at 11:30 am on PopSugar, today, was a short blurb on Gisele Bundchen and Tom Brady dining in Miami, with some clever sentences linking back to other related gossip news on the site. The post, itself, is short and insignificant, barely an afterthought to write, but it holds trivial news on the pregnant Gisele that so many people, particularly women, find utterly fascinating and gripping – addicting, you could say.  People clamor for this stuff, and PopSugar knows how to deliver its goods, with juicy posts and polls and plenty of pictures for pizzazz.

But, in all fairness, Sugar Inc. covers a wide spectrum of information – PopSugar is simply their biggest avenue. The company, and PopSugar Mobile, is also comprised of FabSugar, BellaSugar, TresSugar, BuzzSugar, CasaSugar, FitSugar, LilSugar, YumSugar, GeekSugar, SavvySugar, and PetSugar. Are you in a diabetic coma yet? These other sites are nowhere near as popular as PopSugar, but they always manage to include a dash of celebrity tidbit, and you may access all of them on the mobile app.

The mobile app is incredibly clean and easy to use – so easy, in fact, there’s hardly anything worth noting aside from it’s pretty and effective. All the latest stories for each of the sub sites are accessed through the main page, FabSugar and BellaSugar and all the others taking up residence as miniaturized, tab versions of themselves, with a simple tap taking you to an in-app listing of all the latest postings. Another tap will take you to the post, also in-app, with the option to mail the site link to someone if you find that article,“Are Brazilian Waxes Necessary” to the liking of your girlfriends (just FYI, I think women already abide by way too many cultural beauty expectations, and the last thing we need to add to feel pretty for a guy is to painstakingly rip out all our pubic hairs on our very tender labia. I don’t think many women like hairy ***holes. Guess men need to rip away!). When you want more stores, just tap Load More Stories at the bottom of the page. It’s actually very refreshing to read about A-Listers and the latest recipe on FitSugar on the go.

I’m actually a fan of YumSugar, GeekSugar and FitSugar, as they cover small postings and blurbs on areas of life interesting to me – the rest I could really do without. But, for comparison’s sake, against other gossip avenues, and other beauty sites, PopSugar is incredibly versatile and is pretty without the fuss – a natural, cool wave of hair middling between US Weekly’s bed hed and Vanity Fair’s heavily sprayed and manicured coif. Free for the taking, the PopSugar Mobile app is one I, and many other girls, will probably be toting around in their slinky iPhone cases.

Basically, Touch Point is an arcade shooting game that hinges on reactivity and receptivity. Touch Point offers 10 different challenging levels, each of them with 3 different difficulties.

Each level has a different theme. Some are levels are a bit confusing (I’ll get to that later) and all themes are nature based.

For the Win

• Incremental challenge
• Social Aspect (say hello to 2.0 – thanks to OpenFeint)
• Nostalgia

Touch Point uses OpenFeint, a social gaming platform, to offer 2 different challenge modes to the players.

I was challenged by my “friend” Meltor (who sounds more like my arch-nemesis with super-villain powers) to a time trial. Meltor, if that even is his given name, challenged me a time trial where I must play for longer than he did without error. No offense Touch Point, but I declined this offer. Meltor has some serious time on his hands (as he’s probably an eighth grader in detention – yes even my arch-nemisis’ weaknesses makes me look bad) and played perfectly for 24 minutes. 24 minutes!? I don’t have that kind of time to shoot at butterflies, hedgehogs, or seahorses.

Although I did not partake in the challenge, I’m sure many people do. I cannot rave enough about incorporating a social aspect (even if this one is wasted on me) in a game because players who are really into it get to find others who also harbor the same addiction to 24 minute binge butterfly shooting.

I can’t help but enjoy playing this with the childhood videogame memories that this brings forth, even if I have ethical issues with killing the gleaming, beautiful, weightless butterflies. I’ve held back from alerting PETA.

Missed Shots

• Character Design
• Snow Level

First and foremost I have to mention the design of this app. The game play and all the bell and whistles are great, but the way that Touch Point looks could use some work. There is no cohesion between the design of the levels and the menues. One minute we are in 2.0 heaven with shiny gradient cartoon characters, and the next we are in a field with realistic looking animals that we will pulverize. All I’m suggesting is getting rid of the little green guys.

My final missed shot falls on the Snow Level. This is some personal beef between me and the hedgehod, er the format. In this level there is a change where you do not need to tap the animal, instead you tap one of the three buttons after a quick glimpse at what your target is. There are no directions and it took me a while to pickup on it. Ok, so I’m acting as a sore looser; forget that… but not the bit about the green guys.

Bottom Line

Touch Point is a successful classic arcade-style inspired game with a new social twist. If you like quick games, this one’s for you.

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It’s true, many locals may simply be lounging in their neighborhood park and sticking to the same coffee shop they’ve faithfully sipped their favorite brew over the years, wondering if they should paint their walls and feeling familiar tidings of boredom on the weekends. But, locals and non-locals alike can surely benefit from knowing a little more about what is going on in their neighborhoods, right under their nose. If you’re fortunate enough to own an iPhone, the app Events Finder by Sputr LLC keeps you up to date and notified on music events, concerts, street fairs, festivals, wine tastings, sporting events, outdoor recreation, book releases, movie events, and more, connecting you through event finder sites like Upcoming, Eventbrite, and TicketStumbler. Upcoming, powered by Yahoo!, is particularly great as it covers varying genres of activity, from comedy and performing arts to public educational and political events. Eventbrite is actually used by various oligopolistic, prestigious, and national institutions – MasterCard, Harvard, US Postal Service – and anything sponsored by these giants is sure to be advertised through this site, and by proxy, through Events Finder.

On the home page, you may narrow your search by Who’s Playing, Fairs & Festivals, Sports & Outdoors, or Movies & Book Releases, or you can simply opt to search for everything by tapping Show Me Everything. The app will automatically try to use your current location, but you can opt out of this feature to search for a specific city, town, or other location; at any time you may tap the GPS icon in the upper left to use your current location. By default, Events Finder locates events within a 25 mile radius within the course of a week. Tap on the funny martini-glass-like icon in the upper right to change these filter options. 25 miles is a bit too local for my taste, especially since my current location of Petaluma is more than 25 miles from San Francisco, the closest city, and my best bet for fun activities. 50 miles is a good average choice – not too far, like 200 miles, but far enough to include more avenues – and I like to see up to 3 weeks  in advance. I never book tickets 3 months in advance, but I’m sure my boyfriend – foamy-mouthed and rabid Ryan Adams fan that he is – would relish this option.

As it turns out, Emmylou Harris is playing tonight at 8:00pm, October 6, at the Wells Fargo Center in Santa Rosa. Tapping on this link brings me to a page with the address, a picture of the silver fox herself, and a short descriptive blurb on the event. As with any good source app, the address will link me to a google map so I may map out directions, and a link to the event finder site, Upcoming, is given as well. Too bad this opens up a separate window in Safari, rather than keeping me in the app (this is always frustrating). Since I like Emmylou Harris, with her stately debonair, and warbling mockingbird of a voice, I’ll tap “Add to Favorites” and neatly tuck it away in my Favorites tab for later inspection. If I feel like sharing, I can email the page to myself or to someone else (most likely my boyfriend, since he’s also a rabid fan of Emmylou Harris, though more of the drooling, sedated fugue kind).

Other notable upcoming events in my search radius are the Mill Valley Film Festival at the Smith Rafael Film Center in downtown San Rafael, and, my pick of the litter, Litquake, the annual SF literary festival that spans a week and showcases local and national authors in various events, that grows by the thousand with each coming year. I, despite being a budding writer, have never heard of this event – *Jackie starts buzzing that typical literary geek trend of religious reference and metonymical uses of “blasphemous” and “baptizing”*. Thanks to Events Finder, I’m tempted to attend the Black, White and Read Book Ball this October 9, in particular for the “fabulous and mysterious” dress code (if I were to describe myself as anything, I’d like it to be fabulous and mysterious). Hopefully, the ball (don’t you just love that word? Ball? Gala is too regal, and party just pedestrian) won’t be rife with the excessively and hyper-articulate, those young, starry-eyed 20-somethings prone to literal interpretations of the figurative “rubbing elbows” with highly-publicized authors, and Dave Eggers rolling his eyes in the corner, sipping on his own moonshine concoction. Of course, I won’t know unless I go, right? And that’s what Event Finder is all about.

I would prefer if the app didn’t constantly revert to its original filter options of one week, 25 mile radius search, and I would appreciate better descriptions for some of the events – I realize the app receives its information from those three aforementioned sites, but how hard is it to do a bit of research and fill in a short summary? As someone looking for a good time, I’m more apt to attend the event I can actually read about, skipping over those with only a title and not even a picture to further elucidate. People and institutions hosting such events should also take note, since prompting people to attend requires a week bit of descriptive marketing.

Overall, though, a good app in a pinch, and free to boot, and knowing what’s happening in a week, or just tonight, is far easier when on your iPhone.

Scrabble and Text Twist online are two stand-bys of mine, the first going back to childhood, and the second stemming from High School. But other than just solving anagrams in my head – when on road trips, boring my friends to death, finding most people, and usually I, too, are horribly slow and dull-witted  – I’m not terribly familiar with most word games. I suppose Hangman counts, as does this odd game I own called Scutineyes, that no one seems to know about but me, a game fascinatingly complex and heavily reliant on a vast vocabulary and knowledge base (I relish having an encyclopedic knowledge of dogs and using this to my advantage in this game).

I recently came upon a delightful game called Scramble, for the iPhone, a new version of Zynga’s popular social game, that actually takes its influence from old-school Boggle, without all the noisy plastic clanging of lettered dice in their clear box and templates. To play, you simply tap or drag the letters to form words on the board, trying to form as many as possible in the allotted timespan of 2 minutes. Words must be three letters or longer, with longer words earning more points – the game will save all your “Super 6′s” (words comprised of six letters) in your Trophy room. Sometimes, when staring at the screen too long, so long your pupils waver and dilate unnecessarily and an impending migraine is felt, the letters becomes a jumbled mess of un-navigable trenches where finding a word is all but impossible. To shake up your perspective a bit, touch opposite corners of the boards and twist to rotate, give yourself a fresh angle, or literally shake your iPhone. I prefer the shaking. Shaking is fun.

At first, I was pretty rusty in the gameplay and settled mostly for three-letter words – dig, wig, toe, tea, eat, ate -, usually ones that interconnected with one another for logical ease of play, but also to build upon my long dormant skills of expanding upon a word, finding where hidden nooks and crannies of letters lead to bigger, badder word sources of vocabulary. The dragging mechanism is the game is easy and intuitive, and lends itself to quicker play against a ticking clock than individually tapping each letter; a nice, pleasant bubbling sound is heard as you connect the letters, each one encased in a yellow highlighter color and pulsing to a larger size, and the chosen letters show in the bar above with the point value if accepted. After the time runs out, some clapping is jubilantly heard, as if to ease your nervousness and encourage you to play more. It certainly worked in my case!

I really like how the game makes a point to show all the hidden words in your game board once the time has run out and you’re mind is utterly spent trying to finagle letter combinations into possible words – there comes a point in the game where after you feel you’ve scoured the board dry, you’ll try connecting letters in the desperate, neologistic hope that “meggle” is a word. Having the vast, complete list of words before you will humble your broad-chested, harrumph of victory in two seconds flat, especially after realizing your once impressive tally of 40 words pales to the 96 total words on the board. Oh, and I’m not talking about commonplace words either. It’s pretty embarrassing to play this game if you have a paltry vocabulary – heard of aurist? Diurion? No? How about rusine or ootheca? Cricts? Orcin?!? Too bad, better luck next time.

If challenging yourself becomes too defeatist, or if you feel your brain is expanding to the point where you need to show off your new, awesome vocabulary, you can opt to play online against thousands of Scramble players, annhilating in numbers, or succumbing to last place (bwaaahahha). Playing online is actually my favorite form of playing, because it feeds off that competitive drive to just DO BETTER, and seeing the tiny picture profiles of the biggest challengers you’ll be facing is only more fuel for the fire. If you have a Facebook account and friends who currently play, or would like to play Scramble, you may invite them, even challenge them to a game. Otherwise, when hanging out with friends and feeling like a linguistic guru, play the Pass N Play option with up to three players, so each of you takes a turn with the iPhone.

You can’t escape vocabulary, so why not play in all avenues of life?