Watching the world in reverse

A friend told me a long time ago about this old man who locks up the local cinema hall in a small town. He comes in everyday say 5 minutes before the last show ends, watches the final few minutes of the movie, then when people leave, cleans and locks up the hall. And he has only seen those final few minutes of the movie The Usual Suspects. He knows who is Keyser Söze, but not the legend.

I left like that yesterday. Flipping thru the NYer (March 2), I came across a letter from a reader (Matthew Butterick) of LA) in which the author laments the scoring system for the letters in Scrabble, or rather, that it hasn't been adjusted for inflation with the growing dictionary. "Meanwhile, the fifty point bonus for using all seven tiles, what was one a home run, now seems like a ground-rule double." Now I wish I had read the original article by Judith Thurman in the Jan 19th issue "Spreading the word".