Not my practice blog, by Scott Knaster

National Spelling Bee

Next Wednesday and Thursday on ESPN and ESPN2: live coverage of the National Spelling Bee (see bottom of page). It's must-see TV.

One of the highlights of my youth was my Spelling Bee career. When you're a pudgy little nerd, you take your competitive events where you can get them, and I was a great speller. In 8th grade I took the Denver written spelling test and I did well enough to qualify for the state test, also in Denver. That memorable day began with the test in a fancy hotel downtown, followed by a lunch banquet for all us little geeks and our parents. After lunch, the top 20 spellers, based on the state written test, were announced -- I was one of them!

They piled us into taxis -- my first ever, having grown up in the Denver, where everybody has a car -- and sent us to the studios of channel 7, a local TV station that broadcast the final rounds live. I survived for an hour or so under the hot studio lights. What pressure! Then, with 5 people remaining, I met my fate: frontispiece, which I misspelled "fronticepiece". Ding! My fifth-place finish earned me a dictionary, which I still have somewhere.

All my spelling bee memories are happy. There was no cramming, no parental or self-imposed pressure, no worrying. I only wished there had been a professional spelling league in which I could become a star and earn a living. Yes, dreams die hard.

Ostrich

Yep, it's an ostrich. Definitely.

Duckomenta

Die Duckomenta puts Disney pals into famous works of art through the ages. Wacky!

(I got the link from Boing Boing).

Weird injuries

Dave P points to an article about freak baseball injuries: back injury while sneezing and chili oil in the eyes are two of the wackiest.

Printing a TV

Epson has figured out how to create a prototype 40-inch display using organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology. Here's how they make it:

Nagano-based Seiko Epson said it had succeeded in using ink jet printing technology to deposit organic layers on large-size TFT (thin film transistor) substrates.

Cool!

(link courtesy Jack S.)

Caption contest!

Shame

"Do you pray to Allah?" one asked. "I said yes. They said, '[Expletive] you. And [expletive] him.' One of them said, 'You are not getting out of here health[y], you are getting out of here handicapped. And he said to me, 'Are you married?' I said, 'Yes.' They said, 'If your wife saw you like this, she will be disappointed.' One of them said, 'But if I saw her now she would not be disappointed now because I would rape her.' "

Link

Macintosh time warp

Want to see and feel what a Mac looked like, circa 1986? Check out this remarkable simulation. Yes, that's right: back then, all Macs were in German. ;-)

Baseball is very old

The origin of baseball is an ongoing mystery. Historians have long since debunked the old myth that baseball was created by Abner Doubleday in 1839. Now there's the discovery of the oldest-ever reference to "base ball", in a Pittsfield, Massachusetts document from 1791. It was a city ordinance outlawing the game in the vicinity of the new town hall, to protect its windows. ;-)

And despite more than 130 years of Major League Baseball, last night Randy Johnson of Arizona pitched only the 17th perfect game in history, a mathematically lovely event in which one team's pitcher gets 27 consecutive outs, allowing no baserunners for the entire game.

Andy Kaufman

Andy Kaufman died 20 years ago last Sunday, probably. Just in case he was faking, he was supposed to come back and announce the prank at a show in L.A. I haven't heard anything about it, so I can only assume Andy has decided to continue the hoax for awhile longer.

Andy was a unique performer, one of my favorites back in the day. Many people make the mistake of thinking that Andy was a comedian -- he wasn't. He was a reality hacker. I remember the first time I saw him, on Saturday Night Live. He sucked everybody in by doing Foreign Man, then turned into "The Elvis" and left the audience stunned. The punch line was Foreign Man saying "Tank you very much". He once disguised himself as a street person and heckled people lined up to buy tickets to his show. When I saw him perform live, he lip-synced to a Mighty Mouse record, wrestled audience members, and sang "100 Bottles Of Beer On The Wall", all the way through as the audience got increasingly cranky.

C'mon back, Andy!