LAGNIAPPE: A few of my favorite pieces from Bees past:

• Samir Patel on what it's like to be the "Tony Romo" of the Bee and life after the Bee.
• Catherine Cojocaru on being a primetime finalist.
• Raf Noboa on his surprising run in the 1991 Bee.
• JJ Goldstein checks in with a number of Bee veterans.
• Via Heather, President Reagan's remarks upon greeting the 1983 Bee finalists.

See you at 8pm EDT.

SPELLING BEE, ROUND 6:  32 Spellers remain.  Here we go....

3:52 pm  Isabel Cholbi steps up to the microphone.  Looks at Jacques Bailly.  And says "We meet again."

Man, these kids are great.

Isabel Cholbi's word is ecphonesis.  She gets it wrong!  Oh no!  Isabel is gone!

And then we lose Audrey Bantug too.  Eva Kitlen seems to be having a sort of panic attack about the word cabotinage.  And she's gone too.  First three spellers gone quickly.

Himanvi Kopuri in working on pancratiast and she goes down too!

The Bee is a bloodbath.  The words in this round feel exponentially harder than they did in the last round.  The spellers seated look worried.

Anuk Dayaprema gets dolabriform.  And he spells it right.  Whew.  I was starting to think dark thoughts...

THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE:   It is happening.  And honestly people?  I am so excited that it’s almost sad.  This is my SuperBowl.  This is my Day.  Welcome to the Scripps National Spelling Bee.  The Semifinals are about to begin at 2 pm EST (on ESPN2 if you want to watch and who doesn’t want to watch?) and I’ll be live-blogging old-school style as best I can from my office here at Scandal on the Sunset-Gower lot where I’m totally supposed to be breaking stories for Season 3 but I can’t because children are spelling.

CHILDREN ARE SPELLING.

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.

Sadly, it is also a competition.   There are 42 semifinalists spelling today.  Only one will win (yeah, there’s a teeny possibility of co-champions but let's not even think about that).  ONLY ONE WILL WIN.

Let's find out who it's going to be, shall we?

MORNING AT THE BEE: This is very strange, having no spelling going on this morning. Why are the semifinal rounds in the afternoon, giving the kids minimal break time before the finals, rather than now?

Regardless, they've posted the semifinal computer test administered last night, with the following twelve hardcore spelling words:

• uh-PAH-fuh-gee: It's like that thing of where there's a small hollow curvature at the top or bottom of the shaft of a column.
• BOOM-slahng, BOOM-slang: Snake from Southern Africa.
• krip-tahm-NEE-zhuh: It's like that thing of where you remember something only you don't realize you're remembering it and think you're being conscious of it for the first time.
• dih-jehr-AH-tee: nerds
• YOU-tuh-lee: It's like that thing of where your body is made up of a constant number of cells.
• ji-ro-KAH-tuh-lid: worm (ji rhyming with eye, to be clear)
• kah-fee-KLOTCH, koh-fee-KLUTCH: It's like that thing of where someone else takes the last cinnamon roll and you have to sit around and listen to other people talking too much.
• mehr-tench-EE-uh, mehr-ten(t)-SEE-uh: also known as the Virginia cowslip, which I'm sure is a euphemism for something.
• ah-no-mah-SEE-oh-luh-gee: study of grouped words
• puh-hoo-tuh-KA-wuh: a curvaceous New Zealand tree.
• te-KWIST-lah-TAY-kuhn: a particular language family deriving from Mexico.

The twelve vocab words were slightly less onerous -- I'll assume you can use dilettante, enigmatic, lionize, and sangroid in a sentence, but what about anacouluthon, gossalgia, hyalescent, keratectomy, sedulous, telluria, vitrine, and xylophagous?

Below the fold, Cliff has some thoughts on the semis field:

TIME FLIES:  Has it really been five years since we first met speller Catherine Cojocaru? She hit primetime in 2008, and since then has been a regular member of our community during Bee season. She'll be back for the live coverage tonight, and in the meantime files this update on how she's doing:

I WISH THERE WAS NO BLACK AND WHITE I WISH THERE WERE NO RULES:  Controversy at the Bee, as the alternative spelling viruscide (for viricide/virucide) was deemed acceptable enough in the written round to allow a 42nd speller to qualify for tomorrow.

THE 2013 SPELLING BEE POOL:  Forty-two spellers remain. Our rules are similar to last year's -- with two five-timers (Cundey, Keeton) and five four-timers (Remmer, Born, Hathwar, Mahankali, and Reddy) returning among the semifinalists, as well as two returning prime-timers, I'm going to restrict the use of veterans again.

So: pick two spellers, only one of whom can be one of the four- or five-timers listed above. While individual spellers can be used more than once, you cannot repeat the same pairing that someone else has already submitted. First come, first served, and you cannot choose a speller once s/he spells tomorrow afternoon. You will get one point for each word your spellers correctly spell during tomorrow's rounds of the Bee, which resumes at 2pm eastern on ESPN2. In addition, each speller will receive an additional point for reaching primetime, to account for the computer-based cutoff after tomorrow afternoon's two live rounds. Most points wins; tiebreaker will be whoever has the individual speller going the furthest.

Previous pool winners are Elicia Chamberlin in 2006 (Close/Hooks), Professor Jeff and Amy tied in 2007 (O'Dorney and Thomas/Horton), KJ in 2008 (Mishra/K Shivashankar), Cagey (K Shivashankar/Pastapur) in 2009, Bob Loblaw/Jenn tied in 2010 (Veeramani and Chemudupaty/Denniss); 2011's winner was Nupur Lala (the Roy/Ye Keystone combo); and in 2012 our winner was Bobby (Snigdha Nandipati and Arvind Mahankali).

It's my pool; I go first: I will take Arvind Mahankali again, because that's quite a streak of performances under the lights, and Gokul Venkatachalam. Your turn.

added: In order to protect the integrity of the first-come, first-served nature of the pool, please don't edit your entry. If you need to make a change, reply to your original comment.