A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

EVEN THE BEST SPELLER NEEDS GOOD LUCK: As you're preparing your entries for our annual National Spelling Bee pool, here's a few more to consider:

• ALOTT5MA fave Kavya Shivashankar of Olathe (KS), the lone rookie to make it to prime time last year, is back for seconds.
  
• Second-timer Isabel Jacobsen of Madison, Wisconsin, whose coach (who himself competed in nationals decades ago) has drilled her in the fact that "more than 10 percent of contestants are eliminated by misspelling a word with a French origin."
  
• Eleven-year-old Jonathan Schut of P.E.I., who's spending an hour a day studying with his mom.
• Paige Tang of Jackson, Tenn., who's gone from misspelling "vigilante" last year to the Nationals, though she hopes "they don't ask many words from other languages" because "words from Latin, Greek and German have a lot of letters and can be hard to spell."
• Brownsville (TX)'s Blessing Taclobao, finally free from the local immovable object that was four-timer Nidharshan Anandasivam.
• West Virginia's Sam Matherly, who says "I just got braces this year, and glasses, and then I won the spelling bee. Now, I’m officially a nerd," with a goal of winning the Bee now, the Nextel Cup next.
  
• Saskatchewan's Anqi Dong says he doesn't care about the cameras in his third attempt; he just wants to win.
• DC's Olivia Laesch explains the importance of all those etymology questions.
• Did you know that the favorite word of four-timer Maithreyi Gopalakrishnan of Colorado was pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis? That's hardcore.
  

Wednesday, live coverage begins. Oh, and Samir Patel is now saying that "I'm not doing it for the prize alone, but if it wasn't for the prize, I probably wouldn't be doing it."