S-P-E-L-L-B-O-U-N-D

I'm sure that title's been used somewhere before. It's not very original.

I don't believe I've talked about this before in any length, but I love the National Spelling Bee. I was a good speller in school and like to watch other kids go at it. I was nowhere near as good as these guys and girls are, though. The competition has become popular enough to be televised in prime time on ABC. One contestant just missed girolle, but the next one just got rascacio.

Here's a Slate article about how bees work in some other countries. Here's one about whether religious girls have more or less sex.

I highly recommend the movie Spellbound, if you haven't seen it. It follows about nine kids through their regional competitions and into the nationals. I think it's fantastic.

There's the girl from Texas whose parents are Mexican immigrants who have been here 25 years but don't speak any English ("That's just lazy!" a friend of mine said). Her brother's got a thick, thick Texas accent. And here she is, competing in the National Spelling Bee.

A little kid from New York (if I remember correctly) who Tony Kornheiser would call a "twitching little freak". He makes all sorts of strange faces and sounds while spelling.

An Indian kid whose sister actually won the competition a few years before, so he has the added pressure of living up to her standard. His dad hired coaches in Spanish, German and French so he could figure out what words are supposed to look like in different languages.

There's a girl from DC that they follow as well. She just studies after school with one of her teachers, nothing fancy.

Other words missed so far: zacate and bouleuterion.

Stuart Scott is interviewing kids backstage after they get eliminated. I think that's a little bit much.

They just gave this kid the word punaise, leading to the following exchange:

Kid: "Aw, geez."
Reader: "It's another word for bedbug."
Kid: "I like bedbug better."

He got it right. Great look on his face when he found out he got it right.

Urgrund is up next. A little tricky, because sometimes in German the d takes a sound more like t in English. Toughie. She missed it when she added a t to the end.

Cilice. A word which gained a certain amount of publicity when it was talked about in The Da Vinci Code. The albino assassin guy wore won as a sort of permanent penance. She missed it.

This girl just asked for the word origin of pelorus, and the reader said it was "unknown". That doesn't seem--I don't want to say "fair"--but come on. That's a real kick in the balls.

The last two movies I've seen have been Spiderman 3 and Once. S3 is okay. Good action, so-so acting, meh story, some funny parts. There's a scene I think is really funny with Bruce Campbell in a French restaurant, and anything in any Spiderman scene with J.K. Simmons as J. Jonah Jameson is great.

Geez, another word with unknown origin. But the kid got rigaree.

Ooh, I bet there are people out there loving Isabel Jacobson, who says one of her favorite words is kakistocracy, which means "rule by the worst people possible". She got helodes correct.

"I don't really like it. I just have to be in it." Yowza. Evan O'Dorney just laid down the hammer. He likes math and music better, he says. And he just nailed schuhplattler.

I think there has to be more than just family present at the competition. There's a pretty big crowd there. I'd love to go.

"You really have to know your German elements to get this word." Well, I do know my German elements, but I would've been killed by abseil.


Fauchard. I got that one, but the kid left off the d. The kid before missed cachalot by one letter, putting an e in place of the second a.

Aw, they're closing Ford's Theatre for 18 months. They do some good stuff there.

Isabel just got epaulement, as did I. The word epaule (with an accent aigu over the first e) means "shoulder" in English. "Epaulettes" are those things worn on the shoulder of uniforms.

You know you're good when you spell laquear. A kid from Canada just blazed through rognon.

cyanophycean. A blue-green alga. I would have gotten the cyan- part from the definition. Greek means it's -phy-. The rest would've killed me. The -cean ending is tough. She missed it. Got the ending wrong. Really hard.

The Canadian kid in the final two says he "metaphorically picks the wings off the butterflies in his stomach", according to Robin Roberts. Yowza. The word vituline seems to be giving him trouble. If he misses, the other kid still has to spell another word correctly to win it. The competition can't end on a missed word, they say. Like "proving it" in a game of H-O-R-S-E. He got it.

ABC has Robin Roberts, Stuart Scott, Mike Golic, and Mike Greenberg working this event. You've come a long way, baby.

If ever you wanted to see "I Dreamed a Dream" sung in Japanese, here's your chance.

Oh come on. It looks like they're going to commercial after every round. There's two kids left! Each round takes maybe three minutes now. Let them go for a while. Jerks.

The Canadian kid missed coryza, but the polymath Evan still has to get serrefine. I bet he knows it. He does.

Coming up next: Grey's Anatomy. Bleh. I'm not saying it's a bad show, I just don't care about it at all. My cousin watched it over last summer. It's great, intense, personal drama which I try to avoid at all costs

Evan doesn't seem too excited. Either he expected to win all along or it's taking a long time to set in. Stuart Scott asked if he wanted to reassess his opinion of the Spelling Bee now that he won. "Am I supposed to say I like it now?" Ha! Congratulations, Evan.

The Short Long Weekend

Long because I took a day off to go to New Orleans for the Jazz Fest, short because I spent chunks of two days traveling.

I flew through Houston, which has the greatest airport in the world. It has both a Popeyes and a Shipley Donuts, which gives it the best chicken and the best donuts in the world. People around here talk about Krispy Kreme and Dunkin' Donuts, and they're good. But they can't hold a candle to Shipley's.

We stayed in the convent with some Marianite nuns. You know when you stay with nuns, it's going to be nice and clean. Friday night we at a place called Ye Olde College Inn, where I had trout meuniere. Next time I may try some else, but I love anything that has "meuniere" attached to it.

You can see the schedule for the day I was at the Jazz Fest here. We started at the gospel tent with the Zulu Gospel Ensemble. Then I wandered over to see the last song by Bonsoir Catin at the Fais Do Do stage. Four talented girls doing it well. They sang a song that seemed to have the words "mon pickup truck" at the end of each line. Love that.

Then over to see Groove Academy at Congo Square. Sounded a little bluesy-funk to me, but I could be wrong. After a few songs I went over to the Jazz Heritage Stage to see the Mahogany Brass Band. I love brass bands. They seem to be made up of the kind of guys who will play all night till the joint shuts down. And the music seemingly never stops. They play a song, and when the song is done, the music keeps going and then another song starts.

Economy Hall tent was packed for the New Leviathan Oriental Foxtrot Orchestra, which is a great name. They dressed like Navy guys and played what sounded to me like the kind of old, old-timey jazz that people would sit around and listen to on the radio in the 1940s. Speaking of great names, I was sorry to miss out on seeing Rockin' Dopsie and the Zydeco Twisters.

I went back over to the Jazz Heritage stage to see the NewBirth Brass Band, which might be the biggest I've seen. I think they had about fifteen guys on stage with trumpets, guitars, trombones, tambourines, saxophones, drums, and maybe four or five other things. Really good.

We closed out the day with Norah Jones at Gentilly stage. Huge crowd. She's got about four songs that I really like (Turn Me On and Lonestar are probably my favorites), and Wikipedia says she's sold about 30 million albums, so she's good. But man was she BORING. She's nice and calm and easygoing, which would be okay if she was playing in front of fifty people in a dining room. With thousands and thousands spread over a big expanse, it just doesn't work. We left about thirty minutes in because she was so dull.

I think it speaks well for the Jazz Fest that they can have Norah Jones, Ludacris, and Rod Stewart all closing out the day on separate stages. The next day it was Brad Paisley, Jill Scott and Bonnie Raitt.