Bee Update!

The winner was the refreshingly normal Katharine "Kari" Close, who took the top spot of the three final contestants: all cute, seemingly normal girls. (Although one of them was Canadian.) Close's win instantly spawned hundreds of annoying puns like, "Close Call!"

Speaking of the Canadian, she came in second. Which meant she almost won! Whew, that was close. It would have been embarrassing to have a Canadian win our national spelling bee, though I do think it's nice of us to let them in. Incidentally, it's a good thing she didn't win, as her surname is Hackett. You can imagine the headlines: "She can Hackett!" Some of those puns were uttered by the commentators. Incidentally, a spelling bee really does not need commentators.

Anyway, the word Finola Hackett, aka The Canadian, got eliminated on was a word that has been featured right here at An Awfully Big Adventure: weltschmerz.

By the way, ABC is stupid. Airing the bee for the first time (it's usually carried on ESPN), they decided to make it more dramatic by having the parents sit onstage. This was a complete failure, since they failed to bring out any chairs for the contestants to sit on once they were eliminated. This was obviously a conscious decision and would have been easily remedied, since there was obviously some major chair-moving going on: during commercial breaks the chairs of the eliminated contestants were removed from the contestants' area. So, each time a speller missed a word and had to leave the competition, instead of being allowed to leave the stage and go to the interview area or just go cry in the bathroom like they probably wanted to, they had to sheepishly wander up to their parents who would hug them, then try to share a chair or make space on the floor! It was a complete cluster, and in one painful instance led a child in need of a hug to awkwardly sit on/straddle his clearly embarrassed mother. Kid: straddling your mother on live television is a really good way to get beat up when you go back to school next year.

But other than ABC's idiocy, the show was great. Yay! You're all winners! (Especially you.)