I-O-Q-R-Z-QUATRO: Welcome back to the microphone, Meghana Giri, as Round 3 begins with 266 spellers remaining.

2:07 pm: Seven kids down so far out of the first 60 spellers. It's a slightly harder round, but not impossibly so. Still, 200+ kids will spell both words correctly today, and only ~50 of them get to move on to tomorrow.

2:47 pm: Sometimes you get "reconcilable," "discrete," or "dowager"; sometimes you get "mussitation" or "piloncillo." Life ain't fair.

MEGHANA GIRI OF ALABAMA, COME ON DOWN!  You are the first speller up to the microphone in today's Round 2, and your word is glahz-nost.  (And you are correct!)

There are two preliminary rounds today in which all 281 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. Get dinged today, and you're out.

You can follow along in a few places (in addition to here): the Bee website, and a few places on Twitter worth noting: @ScrippsBee, @JGWhiteAP, and hashtag #SpellingBee.

8:15 am First two misspelled words are sih-no-SHOOR and KAH-mih-sahr.

9:12 am 91/96 so far, including of the Yiddish and Afrikaans words you've come to know and have ambiguous feelings about over the years.

VIRAL AND ANTIVIRAL:  Two NBC videos worth seeing, for equal and opposite reasons:

• Jimmy Fallon's Game of Desks. Rockefell rises!
• "Under Pressure," the number from Smash which opened the show's series finale. Should people on the streets in future generations ask you "what went wrong?", focus on Debra Messing's line readings to understand the gaps between what this show could have been, thought it was, and ultimately was.

PROMISING TO BE BETTER THAN THE LONG-AWAITED 2 SHARKTOPUS 2 FURIOUS: While the Bee is quiet, I must alert you to the upcoming film Sharknado, which is sure to deliver high quality entertainment on the level of Mansquito.

WHO'S UP FOR SOME BOUILLABAISSE WITH ROUILLE? Early afternoon bullet points:

• Get'cha official program here, including a FAQ on page 10 ("Dr. Bailly mispronounced the word. What can be done?" A: He didn't mispronounce the word.)
• Map of the spellers
• The AP checks in with Nupur Lala
• Tara Singh, 8, this year's youngest competitor (by twenty-six months)
• Alex Cameron's prayer for spellers
• Merriam-Websters' Peter Sokolowski talks with NPR about the history of spelling bees, and the 1913 NYT article he references is here.

WELCOME TO NATIONAL HARBOR:  This morning, two hundred eighty-one of the brightest English-speaking kids in the world will begin the fulfillment of months and years of preparation for the National Spelling Bee, not in front of a microphone but in front of a computer. There, for the first time in Bee history they will be tested in both vocabulary and spelling -- twenty-five words in each section -- with the results having a heavy weight on who will advance after tomorrow's two live rounds. (added: Picture!)

This is now the eleventh year I've been live-blogging the Bee, and as in years past, we're here to celebrate these great kids, to be amazed by what they can do, and to occasionally mock the Bee when the kid from Ghana has to spell the name of the Passover ritual meal, or seven Canadians go down in a row, or when there's a run of words derived from Afrikaans that we just can't believe.

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.

Indeed, we've been blessed to have so many great former competitors join us during Bee Week to share their experiences over the years. (Y'all are welcome back.) Shonda will be returning again, as well.

I feel terribly old-school in still doing this on the blog -- there's an argument that the world has shifted, and we ought to just go to Twitter full-time for the Bee. But I appreciate the Bee-loving community that we create here for one week every May, and if that remains sustainable I'm going to do it.

Good luck to all the competitors, and let's hope for a fun week.

I AM FROM HOLLAND. ISN'T THAT VIERD:  Following ground we explored three years ago, Vulture attempts a taxonomy of comedic threequels.

(Minor gripe: Oceans Thirteen is better than meh.)