Thursday, May 29, 2008

CHEYENNE PLASTER IS NOW MY FAVORITE NAME EVER: What is it? Is it a spackle? A J. Crew catalog color? A brand of illicit drug?

Round 3 is on. Meanwhile, according to the R3 results so far, Alabama, Alaska, American Samoa, and the Bahamas are out; everybody in R3 so far is right on (including Tia Thomas -- this could be her year); and I am refusing to pun the name of our first speller, So-Young Chung.

And just like that, three Canadians are down. But not superstar Anqi Dong, who tames the hardest word of the round so far.

Missed "use it in a song" opportunity: "Appreciate your courtesy/your well-worn politesse/but you got yourself into your own mess" (OK Go, "Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time"). And Jordan Lay, all the way from a base in Germany, is down on "wainscot."

Most spellers come from newspapers, or at least "newspapers" (like the Washington Informer, which is less a newspaper than something that meets you in the bowels of a parking garage to tell you to follow the money). Rose Sloan (and, really, every Rose has a Sloan, am I right?) comes to us from a utility company, and she correctly spells kwuh-TUR-nee-uhn, which everybody knows means "an expression of the form a + bi + cj + dk, where a, b, c, and d are real numbers; i2 = j2 = k2 = −1; and ij = −ji = k, jk = −kj = i, and ki = −ik = j."

High drama: high-seed and four-timer Sameer Mishra's pops up at 97, meaning that his computer test overcame his first-round blunder. With the relatively easy dem-i-tas, he lives to spell again. Mishra is like the Boston Celtics of the Bee -- he's making it a lot more interesting than he should.

Evans is through. So we still have Thomas, Mishra, Evans, Dong, and Shekhar. The heavy hitters are still hitting heavy.

I love the picture of Matthew Koh, Round 3's last indefatigably successful speller. "Your human emotions intrigue me. Shall I now spell you into submission?" So sorry, though, to end the round by losing Wheeling, West Virginia's Karen Laska, who got us this post over at USS Mariner.

On to Round 4!

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