This is 13 year-old Evan O'Dorney from Northern California and he won the 80th annual Scripps-Howard National Spelling Bee last night by spelling the word shown above.
How the hell did I spend a night watching this???
Well, the Dodgers were playing on the East Coast. Everything else is in reruns. And I had been intrigued by this same spelling bee which had been depicted in the Oscar-nominated "Spellbound" which came out a few years back. ABC was devoting two hours of prime time to this sucker now. What the heck.
By the time my roommate and I stopped in on this, they had already whittled it down to 15 finalists. Of course, the commentators mentioned that words had gotten harder over time. I am confused by this as people have gotten stupider over time. A geometric progression going in opposite directions. The winning word in 1932 was "knack." The winning word in 1990 or so was "kamikaze." I was able to write both of them here without running spellcheck. But, the words last night were a nightmare to say the least. Girolle. Vituline. Fauchard. The only words that we could grapple with were pappardelle and yosenabe, probably because both are featured on menus and we certainly eat out more than we spell.
The competing kids, of course, looked like the math club which you avoided like an Atlanta attorney with TB. Most of them have probably had their lunch money stolen on multiple occasions. Can you spell the following?
C-r-e-a-m c-h-e-e-s-e k-i-c-k-e-d o-u-t o-f y-o-u.
A couple of the geniuses were kind of scary. One looked like the type who would keep a shoebox under his bed full of Barbie dolls with the heads ripped off. Over half of the 15 finalists were, of course, Asian. This begs for the sequel show "The National Driver's Education Road Test."
When each of them got presented with their next word, they would spend about 3 minutes asking over and over for all pronounciations, definitions, language of origin, etc. Not one single word comes up in any of my conversations ever. One word was the Yiddish word for a storeroom where damaged Torahs are kept. What the hell ever happened to "attic?"
You could actually hear the wheels turning in these kids' heads as they were grappling with their response. They all wore these cardboard placards around their necks. These came in handy because they would try to write out the word in question on the back of the placard. Not with a pen, mind you. No, they wrote them out in their imagination. Cue the cuckoo clock, please.
Eventually, one girl was left standing among 6 finalists. She was wearing 25 bracelets on her arm as a good luck charm. I was waiting for the commentators to mention that she would be the first gypsy to ever win the National Spelling Bee. But she got tripped up by some German word that was probably extracted from Hitler's "Mein Kampf." (Spelled correctly, please note)
It's also interesting to note that the majority of these nudniks are home schooled. Which essentially means they can spell 23-letter words, but can't have a simple 30-second conversation with the Good Humor Man.
The last two standing were this O'Dorky kid and some kid from Canada, who we ended up rooting for because he looked fairly normal. This boy, Nate Gartke, sort of appeared like he would much prefer scamming some girl under the bleachers than stand around on national TV yelling letters. Our guess is he was the only one on the stage who had a condom in his wallet. (Although the gypsy girl might have been Bohemian enough to have one in her Jansport bag.)
Nate got messed up on the third word of the championship round. Evan spelled out serrefine. Bee over.
Of course, the three people in the country who TiVoed this got screwed as this thing ran 10 minutes over the designated two hours. If those folks also messed up on the Idol finale last week, I am sure they have a choice word to spell as well.
F-U-C-Q-U-E.
Dinner last night: sauteed chicken with sundried tomatoes and spinach.
1 comment:
I was in a spelling bee in the eighth grade. We had to stand on stage with bright lights blinding us. Worst case of dry mouth I ever had. I lost but the consolation prize was a pen.
I watched "Spellbound" and found it overrated. All the kids were d-u-l-l.
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