National Spelling Bee Is On!

Adam Bonin has noticed that that Philly’s entrant at the spelling bee competition is completely awesome because she has blue-streaked hair. (Though, personally, I would have gone with the “laser” background.)

Thirteen year-old Hannah Schill (an eighth-grader at Penn Alexander) has spelled volute correctly and is in to Round 3 (Update: Correction, we’re not sure if she’s in round three yet). As usual, follow it at ALOTT5MA.

Update: OMG, sabermetrics was just a word in the bee.

Catch The Spelling Bee Before The Philadelphia Contestant Is Eliminated! Oh, Too Late.

Today is the first day of the National Spelling Bee, and as usual A List of Things Thrown Five Minutes Agois liveblogging the proceedings.

If you were tuning in hoping to see Philadelphia’s lone contestant, Fahmida Sarmin (representing the Philadelphia Tribune), you’re out of luck. No word on how Sarmin did on the written portion of the test, but on her lone oral word she spelled “privilege” incorrectly and didn’t qualify for the third round.

It was a bit of a lost cause, anyway. Not to knock Sarmin, but she was the contestant from Philadelphia. I’m surprised lightning didn’t hit her on her way into the competition room.

But it looks like Philadelphia’s circle of losing extends even outside the city limits. The contestant representing the Intelligencer (Doylestown) spelled garbled “garbbled,” the Express-Times (Easton) contestant spelled notarize “notorize.” Meanwhile, the person representing the Pottstown paper got the word bonbon in Round 2. Three Pennsylvania contestants advanced to Round 3, including Micah Walter from the West Chester Daily Local.

On the plus side, I decided against my original idea to spell a bunch of words in this post wrong. Now all the errors are my own stupid mistakes!

A List of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago