Veteran spelling bee reporter Erin Andrews tells TMZ, stringing letters together is no easy business — in fact, it’s so nerve-wracking, some young contestants break a sweat … and even lose consciousness.

But is it an actual sport?

No, but this video is fun to watch, because it’s basically the same type of rationalization and shoulder-shrugging Burnsy and I do on a daily basis at With Leather. “Is dog surfing a sport?” “Well, dogs are cute and surfing is a sport, so why not”. Or even better, “Kate Upton is milking a cow in her underwear, but uh, she was in Sports Illustrated, right? So that’s sports.” I hope she never gets a TV show or appears in a movie, I don’t want to lose her to the Uproxx lifestyle brands.

Also, this video is fun to watch because Erin Andrews is pretty, likeable and looks good in glasses.

[via TMZ]

The 2011 Scripps-Howard National Spelling Bee took place yesterday in Washington, DC and the big winner was Sukanya Roy, pictured above, as she spelled cymotrichous to win the whole damn thing. The spelling bee always draws a lot of criticism when it comes to being aired on ESPN and covered by sports sites like this, but I challenge you to find me a more intense and dramatic competition featuring some of the most intelligent and important young people in the world. Seriously, these kids are our future, so we need them to be spelling those big words. Plus, as a former spelling bee champion (Coral Springs Middle School, two times WHAT SON!), the Scripps event holds a special place in my heart.

These kids deserve the attention and respect, too, because the words they have to spell are ridiculous. I remember when I thought “hippopotamus” was hard, and that was just last week. Thankfully, while these kids show great mental strength and bravery for competing in front of the entire world, they make some pretty ridiculous faces. Now I don’t condone making fun of children, especially when they’re doing something this impressive. I only make fun of kids when they fall down and cry, because someone needs to. Regardless, the champion spellers at Buzzfeed dug up the best of this year’s national spelling bee faces for us to enjoy. Sadly, nobody fainted.

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Protesters have gathered in Washington D.C., not because of the BP oil spill or the economy or the unemployment rate or war or health care or tea parties or bailouts, but because they have a problem with the English language. That problem? Words are too hard for people to learn. And, of course, to voice their displeasure, they picked the Super Bowl of child grammar prodigies – the 2010 Scripps National Spelling Bee.

Four – count them, 1-2-3-4 – protesters launched this assault of the English lexicon that quickly spread to at least a dozen people yesterday, as they are claiming that so many of our words contain letter combinations and sequences that make it too difficult for at least 40 percent of the population to properly learn them. Instead of the words that we all have learned since birth, the protesters would rather we adopt a new system that simplifies words by spelling them how they sound. The idea is so controversial that, when hearing of it, Akshay Buddiga fainted on the spot. *Holds hand up, waits for nerd high-five*

Can you please use douchebags in a sentence, MSNBC.com:

According to literature distributed by the group, it makes more sense for “fruit” to be spelled as “froot,” “slow” should be “slo,” and “heifer” — a word spelled correctly during the first oral round of the bee Thursday by Texas competitor Ramesh Ghanta — should be “hefer.”

Meanwhile, inside the hotel’s Independence Ballroom, 273 spellers celebrated the complexity of the language in all its glory, correctly spelling words like zaibatsu, vibrissae and biauriculate.

The group, pictured above, arrived wielding signs that read, “Enuf is Enuf Enough” and “All We Need is L-U-V” to prove their point that spelling like illiterates would somehow be better for our children. Meanwhile, Chinese children are laughing at this idea in 16 different languages.

Spelling aficionados aren’t taking this argument lightly, though, as one former Scripps contestant told MSNBC that this proposed change would mean the end of the spelling bee as we know it. Replied one of the protesters, “Kwit aktng lyk a litle bich.”

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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.

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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.