My niece came over for a visit while I was with my girls this week. She is like a third daughter to me as we watched her during the day for many years. Her and my oldest are like sisters. While she was here the other day, she brought a cool little electronic device called "20 Questions". It is a game where you think of any word such as cow, airplane, bicycle, lamp, anything...and the little handheld gizmo will guess what you are thinking after asking you a series of 20 questions. After the 20th question it presents you with answer by saying "you are thinking of a ___". Of course it fills in the blank with its guess.

It is kind of amazing to try and stump this thing. Better still, it is even more fun to try and come up with crazy objects to see if it can guess correctly. We tried to trick it by thinking of fireplace, spaceship, cup...nope, it got us! Some of the questions it asks are "Do you use it at the office?", "Is it bigger than a loaf of bread?", "Can you burn it?", etc. The concept is easy...basically it uses a process of elimination.

One of the last games we played had us all laughing quite hardily. We thought we would fool it (or at least entertain ourselves) by having it guess the word "butt". As you can imagine the chuckles us 13-year olds got as it asked us some of the following questions in a effort to get to the answer. "Does it hold liquids?", "Can you put something in it?" and "Can you smell it?". We were even more amused when it presented us with "you are thinking of a sphincter".