ROUND 3: We are back, and I expect things to get a little tougher now.

1:31pm: cryptoporticus, escritoire, rutabaga. They're not messing around.

5:05pm: And yet some kids get Pickwickian, haberdasher, (tales of ) ribaldry, and Pythagorean. It's execrable!

5:17pm: Fifth grade is too early to see The Godfather, so "kahn-sihl-YARE-ee," is a problem even when Dr. Bailly adds "kahn-SIG-lee-air-ee" as an alternate pronunciation.

5:41pm: CONTROVERSY!  We go to instant replay to see if JoJo Widi stopped himself short enough in trying to correct himself on 'gamboge'.  He didn't.  He went g-a-m-b then briefly said 'a' before going 'o' and asking to restart with g-a-m-b-o. It was a really close call.

214/283 remain for the cutdown.

VICTOR SUTTON OF AUBURN, ALABAMA, COME ON DOWN!  Two rounds today, streaming online on ESPN3, and both are ding-and-you're-out.

There are two preliminary rounds today in which all 285 spellers will face the microphone, Dr. Jacques Bailly, and the cameras of ESPN3 online (in both "play along" and more aggressively chyroned versions). Spellers receive 3 points for each word spelled correctly today; add that number to yesterday's written round score, and the top up-to-50 spellers advance to the semifinals tomorrow.

You can follow along in a few places (in addition to here): the Bee website, and a few places on Twitter worth noting: @ScrippsBee, @PeterSokolowski @APBenNuckols, and hashtag #SpellingBee. And join our Hive on the Buzzworthy app --  the access code is 7EFA53.

[Last year, 223/281 of the spellers aced the first two rounds.]

8:27 am:  31/32 through so far, on words that all these kids should be acing.  No one's saying sayonara upon receiving ... that word, and our triumvirate of Spellers From  The North has survived. As for the one child who has erred so far, the story of how he got to National Harbor will break your heart.

8:47 am: 61/63.  Marieke Western is given 'maraca'.  Really? she asks Dr. Bailly. Yep. Nailed it. These are generally easy words -- flamboyant, philanthropy, samaritan, paradox. As usual, I hope the afternoon words are harder.

9:25 am: 115/118. "Zander Worm" sounds like the name of an extra in Starship Troopers, but he's through with 'bayou.' And our Yiddish Watch has begun: 'kishke.'

9:40 am: 137/141: Halftime. Dev Jaiswal asked Dr. Bailly, "Do you have an amusing sentence?" for 'bravura'. Also, he's wearing a bowtie. Awesome.

10:07 am: Two spellers have withdrawn from the competition.  (HT: Amy Goldstein.) We are not going to speculate as to why.  These are children. We wish them well.

10:33 am: 185/189. An eclectic mix of words for the erudite, as we accommodate an act of altruism with an AHN-tuh-rahzh plug.

11:35 am: The last 200+ spellers have been correct. I'm fine with that -- for one round. They all schlepped to National Harbor, often at considerable family expense, and deserve to have one shining moment each at the microphone. (One.)

11:40 am: Round's over.  279/283 advance to the afternoon.

WE HAVE SPIES. EVERYWHERE:  Here's the twelve words on today's preliminary spelling round.  (Vocab separately.)  They could do it via multiple choice, but y'all can do it without that assistance, right?

• RITH-mih-kuh-lee, RITH-mihk-lee: Have you seen me on a dance floor? The opposite of that.
• kuh-LAH-tuh-ruhl: underrated Tom Cruise film.
• jih-BOOM: my daughter's been to sailing camp. She knows this I don't.
• kap-SAY-uh-sihn, kap-SAY-sin:  what gets you on the Scoville scale
• puh-ROOSH: literally, the color of a parakeet (in French)
• tar-SOAR-uh-fee: stitching up eyelids, oh-ho-ho-ho!
• cher-tuh-SEE-nuh: "a Renaissance Italian style of elaborate inlay of bone, ivory, light-colored wood, metal, or other material in stylized designs against a dark background"
• gore-guh-NE-ahn: Medusa pictures used to scare away bad things
• muh-NYEHR, muh-NYEH-uhr: cooked in brown butter. Filet of sole, maybe?
• RAHN-duh-vel: a South African hut.
• tah-BLEE-tuh: Pueblo headdress.
• SCHMEAR-kayz, SCHMEAR-kay-zuh:  cottage cheese.

WEE, BEADY EYES:  Kentucky Fried Chicken is trying to rebrand, again, resurrecting The Colonel (as portrayed by Darrell Hammond) but, um ...

Perhaps KFC's biggest gamble: Reviving the long-dead visage of Colonel Sanders himself, "the brand’s greatest asset," with a handful of increasingly odd "web, broadcast, social media and in-store experiences." 

"Young people all have this idea that everyone can be a star on social media. Well, the Colonel was the consummate American showman," said Kevin Hochman, KFC's chief marketing officer. "People see him as an old person, because we haven't talked about him in a while. But he was the person with bling before bling was even a word."

Sounds like a totally outrageous paradigm to me.  Is the new Colonel edgy? in your face?  Does he get biz-zay, consistently and thoroughly?

[I also question the reporter's describing it as a "Cersei-Margaery-style battle with Chick-fil-A." There's got to be a better GoT analogy.]

PAMPOOTIE:  Right now in National Harbor, Maryland, 285 incredibly talented children are sitting down for a four-part spelling and vocabulary test which will help determine their fates at the 2015 Scripps National Spelling Bee, and for the 13th year* we will be trying to cover all of the joy, agita, and triumph. If you're not a regular here, welcome aboard; if you only come here this one week per-year, welcome back.

For newcomers trying to get their bearings, here's a short list of things we do and don't like about The Bee:

Like

• Smart kids being awesome. Smart kids being awesome.
• That part late in the Bee when we get to words of Finnish, Mayan, Welsh, Afrikaans, and Egyptian origins.
• Jamaican and Canadian spellers, except the 2008 Canadian Bloodbath round which was really unfortunate.**
• Foodie words, because it's the only time in the competition many grownups feel smart.
• Dr. Jacques Bailly 
• Sardoodledom.
• When Bee veterans, coaches, and parents come here and share their wisdom and experience. If you go back to our archives for the last week of May, every year, you'll find some great stuff.

Don't Like

• Use of computerized competition to impose artificial elimination checkpoints for tv purposes, especially in the cutoff from Thursday afternoon to Thursday night.
• Interviewing kids in the middle of the competition
• Interviewing kids right after they've been eliminated
• Cutesy filler pieces which demean how hard these kids work
• The fact that the bulk of the first hour of primetime will be dominated by filler, and not spelling.
• Yiddish words capable of multiple correct spellings (otherwise known as The Marsha Special), and capable of igniting Bee controversy.
• Amateur psychoanalysis of the kids and their parents. As I've written before, which is as close to a mission statement as we've got:

"What we won't do is mock the kids, or presume we can learn anything meaningful about them or their parents based on the brief slices we see on tv. As my favorite line from Frost/Nixon goes, 'The first and greatest sin or deception of television is that it simplifies, it diminishes. Great, complex ideas, tranches of time. Whole careers become reduced to a single snapshot.' We will try to be modest about what we believe we're seeing; the only thing we can know for sure is whether the word is spelled correctly, and what we learn from former spellers thereafter."

Or, as Shonda explained in 2013: "What I love about the Bee is its celebration of intelligence.  The Bee at its best is a dance party for braininess, a nerdgasm for smarty-pants. The Bee is home for those of us who maybe can not throw a ball or run without our inhalers. The Bee is a place for people who like to read, who enjoy math, who love science and art and geography and words, words, words.  The Bee is for people who have plans that do not include being a Real Housewife of Anything. The Bee is the only way our people will ever be on ESPN. And that makes the Bee awesome. The Bee is a celebration."

Come celebrate with us this week.

* Yes, still blogging after all these years. I kinda feel like we're the last people using rotary phones, dot-matrix printers and WordPerfect.

** Described here as, by various commenters, "The worst Canadian disaster since Glass Tiger broke up," "the worst Canadian disaster since Thicke of the Night," "must be like what it was like when the Quebec Nordiques and Winnipeg Jets left the country," "like when Neil Young moved to Topanga Canyon," "like when Vince Carter started mailing it in so that he could get traded to New Jersey," "like Eric Lindros insisting to the Nordiques that he wanted to play for the Flyers," and "the worst day for ONttN this year, even more so than Steven Page's leaving Barenaked Ladies."

BECAUSE THERE'S NOT ENOUGH PRESSURE:  Ben Nuckols' table-setter for the Bee explains one change in the format:

The [premlimary] test scores will be announced and spellers will be ranked heading into the [Thursday] semifinals. 

Tim Weinkauf, the lead producer of ESPN's coverage, said he'll take advantage of that change by showing golf-style leaderboards and highlighting the spellers who can work their way into the finals if someone ahead of them falters. 

"I think it allows for more dramatic moments because there will be those certain kids that are on the bubble," Weinkauf said.

I'm assuming that after the written round, everyone's checking the words anyway such that the kids who did perfect (or close) already know it. It's the rest who won't otherwise know how far back they stand: now, basically, there will some kids who know that they've got no realistic chance to advance absent a miraculous decimation of the other kids, no matter what. Why? Because ESPN is again imposing an artificial cutoff on the best kids rather than letting them spell-til-they-drop as in the past. Boo.

As previously discussed: I think it's fair to use a written to cull the group from the initial 285, after two live rounds on Wednesday, down to a reasonable number for Thursday morning. But from there, it should solely be decided on what happens at the live microphone. However long it takes. The kids deserve that chance.

I'LL TAKE NON-DESULTORY PHILLIPICS PHILIPPICS FOR $1000, ALEX:  Art Garfunkel still thinks Paul Simon gets too much credit:

“George [Harrison] came up to me at a party once and said “my Paul is to me what your Paul is to you.” He meant that psychologically they had the same effect on us. The Pauls sidelined us. I think George felt suppressed by Paul and I think that’s what he saw with me and my Paul. Here’s the truth: McCartney was a helluva music man who gave the band its energy, but he also ran away with a lot of the glory.”

Oh, there's more.