Games are fun. NICE will periodically feature cool and fun games that you can play while passing time at work, contemplating your next novel or hiding from crazy relatives visiting for the holidays.

Thank you to the ever clued-in T. Mac for bringing this game to our attention. Many of you already know about the obsession inspiring Googlewhack, a game that seems to have been invented in the early century by a group of insane webbies. The Googlewhack site, run by Gary Stock, a veteran search entrepreneur from Kalamazoo, Michigan, allows all Googlewhackers of the world to verify and post their most treasured whacks. As of this posting, over 472,000 Googlewhacks have been recorded on the site.

So, what the heck is a Googlewhack? It's simply when Google only finds one match for a two word search. There are some rules, like no proper nouns and English only, please. But, you mostly have your creative and cognitive abilities to toil with. Googlewhacking can absolutely consume you.

I, for instance, could not stop myself for a solid half-hour bout with Google yesterday. After learning of the game I sat and pounded out two word combinations like there was no tomorrow. 'Pickle Remediation', 'Flipper Postulate', 'Grumpy Camel', 'Percolate Zydeco'. You get the picture. The idea is to pick two completely unrelated words such that they could not possibly exist together on the same webpage but once. The golden moment is when it happens: only one Google search result, otherwise known as a pure Googlewhack.

To really set your accomplishment in stone, take your pure Googlewhack to the namesake website and verify your find and post your information to the Googlewhack Stack. The site is a project of Stock, who owns the popular online news-clipping service, Nexcerpt, and XML news feed service, Exfacto. He was formerly a Cryptanalyst with the National Security Agency and also runs UnBlinking, a site dedicated to inspiring people to search for the end of the internet. With search running through his veins, Stock is well qualified to run this gateway to everything 'whacky'.

Oh, by the way, you may be wondering if I ever found that ever-elusive Googlewhack. Indeed, I did: 'Hemorrhoidal Fizzle'. I am proud to say that I am now part of the esteemed Googlewhack Stack.

Excerpt from Googlewhack (12:30AM 02/26/05):
219. hemorrhoidal fizzle -- D. Robert -- New York, NY

D. Robert -- New York, NY