FreeRice

If you need to find a website that’ll help you waste 15 minutes (or 20 or 30 or a couple hours), you can check out FreeRice. It presents you with vocabulary words and you pick out what it means among four choices. For each correct answer, the website will donate 20 grains of rice to… someplace that needs rice. As you get right or wrong answers, the difficulty of the words changes—the site shows what level you’re at and what your best level was.

Up to this point, I matched a few words at level 42, but I’m gettin’ sleepy and my vocabulary is slowly diminishing. In another half hour, I’ll be lucky to understand the word “diminishing”. Or “vocabulary”, for that matter. But at least I can take comfort in knowing that while I could have gone to bed much earlier, I did the humanitarian thing and sat in front of my computer for a couple hours. No need to thank me—it was the right thing to do.