Ok, right off, I know what your smutty mind is thinking… but you’re wrong.  PopCap games is running a Mothers Day “Free For Moms” special for Bejeweled; basically, if you are a mother, you can “purchase” the Classic Bejeweled for free by entering a specific code at checkout.  I’m not going into whether or not Bejeweled is a Geek Game…. it’s a free diversion from heavier games, and is perfect for moms.

Well, Rebecca is of course the mother of my children, so as a special Mother’s Day present, I snagged a copy of it for her.  No, I’m not posting the code for it here; if you want it, sign up for the newsletter.  After a 6 hour marathon StarCraft session (today is my day off), she decided to break in with some light Bejeweled…. and I “played over her shoulder” for a bit (the classic, “Put the Red 7 on the Black 8!” style of solitare annoyance; thankfully she’s patient with me, and we joked about it after I made that reference).  But a serious difference, for the first time ever, came up… she thinks vertically when she sees a move, while I think horizontally.  We look at the same spot, and she sees only the obvious vertical move, or at least sees that first, while I see the obvious horizontal move first.

Forget Mars and Venus…. Men are Horizontal, and Women Vertical.  As we started realizing the difference in the way we saw the pieces, it became obvious that there’s at least a Master’s Thesis in there for some enterprising young scholar.  Anyone else want to report if the spatial difference is real, or just a fragment of one couple, who otherwise thinks very much alike?  Oh, and if YOU are the enterprising scholar, I want to hear about it in the talk back!