Seismograph

I am watching the live telecast of the National Spelling Bee. I can't believe they are doing play-by-play coverage of it, like it is a sporting event, complete with Robin Roberts. Her co-announcer gives the little facts, like "the last time someone from Illinois won..." Kind of like in baseball when the announcers say "the last time a pitcher struck out four batters in a row named Frank was..."

I can't stop singing songs from the 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.

I remember when I was in my school spelling bee in sixth grade. I knew how to spell my last word: seismograph, but I got over-confident and spelled it too quickly and forgot the 'm'. Of course I knew it had an 'm,' I just went too fast. Following the rules, I knew that once I started spelling the word, the sequences of letters already spoken may not be changed. So I was done. Fourth place. My arch-nemesis Russ told everyone on the bus the next day that he had fourth, when he really came in fifth. I can't believe I still remember all this in vivid detail, 17 years later. And that is without it being stored in the ABC television archives.