Welcome to the first installment of My One Favorite Thing. This will be a regular (maybe weekly) post on the one thing I'm really digging at the moment. It could be a game or activity, an album or song, a movie or TV show, a person, a food, or just about anything at all.

MOFT (pronounced Mahf-tee) this week is Geo Challenge, a geography game on Facebook. The game is actually three minigames in one: You have to match the flag to the country in round 1, name the country just by looking at its shape in round 2, and then place cities in their correct place on the world map in round 3.

Like all Facebook games created by Playfish, Geo Challenge is incredibly addictive and made more so by the fact that you can see the high scores of all of your friends (as well as the top 104 scores by everyone on Facebook, though in my opinion it's full of cheating foreigners). I am now in a silent but obvious battle for supremacy with someone I went to college with and haven't talked to since graduation. It's quite clear neither one of us wants to relinquish the top spot as I've logged onto Facebook the past several mornings only to discover that the bastard has outscored me again, forcing me to delay all normal life activities until I have regained my rightful position as His Royal Geo Challenge Grand Poobah Master Bigness.

I will warn you: there is a downside to Geo Challenge. Every time I close my eyes to go to sleep, I now see various flags floating around in my head. Oh look, there's the Netherlands, or is it France turned 90 degrees? And look, there's Antarctica and Cyprus, countries so devoid of creativity that their flags are a picture of the country (and yet I heartily appreciate the approach of Libya - its plain green flag is minimalistic, eco-friendly, and best of all, insanely easy to identify when it comes up in the game)

And just in case you don't think there's not any practical value with Geo Challenge, well, ok, there's not, but it was kind of cool that I was in a cab today and passed a building with two flags hanging outside and immediately identified them as Bulgaria and the European Union flag.

Ah, my life is sad ...