Here’s an undated video of an earlier Scripps National Spelling Bee where this confused youngster is being asked to spell “negus,” the term used for an Ethiopian monarch, and you can just see the kid looking around, perhaps waiting for a cadre of young toughs to pummel him through the stage at the first sign of anything potentially inappropriate. And then I can’t tell if he’s acting surprised at the end because he actually spelled the word correctly or because that group of angry gentleman made a charge at the stage to get him. Via The Smoking Section.
Thirteen-year-old Kavya Shivashankar of Kansas (pictured from 2008) won the 82nd annual Scripps National Spelling Bee, which aired on prime-time TV for the fourth straight year. Kavya locked down her first place finish when she correctly spelled…wait, Kansas? We’re sure that she’s from Kansas? I mean, I thought “Shivashankar” had Rust Belt written all over it. Kavya’s technique of drawing out etymological clues from the judges and “writing” the word on her hand drew jeers from the KSK Live Blog, who joked that Kavya should not be allowed to collect her $40,000 in cash and prizes until she successfully spells her own name. From The Journal:
Ms. Shivashankar was making her fourth appearance at the bee, having finished 10th, eighth and fourth over the last three years. She enjoys playing the violin, bicycling, swimming and learning Indian classical dance, and her role model is Nupur Lala, the 1999 champion featured in the documentary “Spellbound.”
Second place went to 12-year-old Tim Ruiter of Centreville, Va., the only non-teenager in the finals. He misspelled “maecenas,” which means a cultural benefactor.
In grown-up stuff, the Cleveland Cavaliers pulled within one game in their series with Orlando with a 112-102 win last night in Ohio. The Magic were down by 22 at one point, but LeBron’s 17 points in the 4th led the way for a not-so-dramatic finish. Game 6 will be Saturday in Orlando.
Yup, it's another spelling bee post that has nothing to do with Erin Andrews, who lives both in awe of these little idiot savants and in the fear of the fact that they may correct her on air. That's much worse than Bruce Pearl groping her while cameras are rolling.
Dan Steinberg, who works for some faded newspaper that just underwent a huge round of buyouts, is on the scene at the Grand Hyatt in D.C. getting all the colorful anecdotes and tidbits that the little overparented freaks produce. In his wanderings, Agent Baldiepants stumbled upon the board where the spellers are trying to organize late-night soccer orgies and dates with Mark Foley.
There's a big bulletin board outside the ballroom on which spellers can send and receive messages. Many of the posted items are entreaties from news organizations for interviews with all spellers from Minnesota, for example, or with a specific speller from a specific city. Others are speller-to-speller missives.
There are the wonders of access, future wage slaves of the MSM: Scribbling entreaties to 4th graders on notebook paper.
I like how the kid had to draw a picture of the soccer ball on the notice, however. Because these kids don't understand the meanings of words, which exist only as peculiar permutations of letters they must memorize so as not to get beaten by their first-generation immigrant parents.
