DID YOU ORDER THE CODE RED?  Apparently, NBC is still planning A Few Good Men: Live!, and Alec Baldwin will play Col. Jessup.

BOOM SHAKALAKA!:This oral history of NBA Jam is ON FIRE!

I CAN READ, TOO, I JUST DON'T NEED TO BRAG ABOUT IT LIKE STING DOES:  If Ozzy Osbourne wants to list his Top Ten Metal Albums, I am going to listen.

WHAT'S THE STORY, MORNING GLORY? A glorious rant against waiting at restaurants for brunch:

What the fuck is wrong with you? Yeah you, the person waiting in line at a breakfast restaurant. 

You got nothing better to do at 9am on a Saturday morning? Wait in line for 45 minutes to eat a pancake? It’s a God damn mother fucking PANCAKE. You got nothing going on? Life is that easy you can wait in line for a pancake?...

EGOT DESK:  Three EGOT notes of relevance from last night's Tony Awards:

• Most obviously, Bette Midler is now an Oscar away from finishing.  (Somewhat surprisingly, she did not have a Tony already).
• Benj Pasek and Justin Paul seem quite likely to pick up at least one Grammy in February 2018--they'll be eligible for Best Musical Show Album for Evan Hansen and Best Song Written for Visual Media for their La La Land work (they are not producers on the La La Land album, though), leaving them just an Emmy shy.  They are being pushed for the Original Song Emmy this year for "Runnin' Home To You."
• The stealth EGOT competitor?  John Legend, who co-produced Jitney, and is now missing just an Emmy.

EBULLIENT:  All in all, that's the kind of Bee I am thrilled to watch. Because while the central joy of "watching amazing kids do amazing things" remained constant, there's several particularly positive things about this year's Scripps National Spelling Bee I want to highlight, and a few to flag:

The Good:

• I applaud the decision to go into primetime with fifteen spellers, rather than risk having an extra afternoon round calibrated too wrong in either direction. When in doubt, give more kids the lifetime thrill of having that level of coverage.  This proved to be a much better decision than a second written test as a cutoff, especially when knowledge of said results made live rounds futile for too many, or forcing a halt mid-round.
• Zero interviews with spellers after elimination. The kiss-and-cry area, while front stage, was treated with dignity and restraint.
• A minimum of cutesy packages.
• A broadcast which focused on the spellers and gave real insight on what made particular words difficult. 
• Shourav. Mogollon. His mom's reaction. 

Don't Do This Again

• Never, ever, ever consider the possibility of a written test settling a tiebreaker for the final outcome.  That was a bad idea.  Let it never come to fruition.
• I am still not sure how long the Bee should go before declaring a tie (25 rounds between the final two seems like a lot), but I do know that a competition featuring kids and hopefully watched by hundreds of thousands of other kids should not come close to overlapping with The Late Show. Yes, eliminating 14 kids (see above) takes more time than eliminating 10, but this event should never start at 8:30pm in the first place.  Why not 7pm? 
• Related: did the kids have water up there? That's a lot of time under bright lights, and the fatigue was evident -- especially for Rohan.
• Siddur. Siddur should not be a primetime word.  I feel fairly confident about this. [Nor should clafouti(s), even though the speller erred on this.]

Not Quite Right, But I Don't Know What To Do

• The broadcast briefly addressed the topic of the recent dominance of Indian-Americans at the Bee, but in an unsatisfying way. The first time around, it was just a quick note at the statistics on recent winners, but later ESPN aired a prepared piece interviewing some of the spellers as to their theories on why - with one speller's talking about an ethic of hard work not quite coming across correctly tonally. There has been a lot of good reporting on this topic, whether on the importance of the North-South Bee or things like Gene Demby's explaining similarities between the Spelling Bee and basketball in terms of clustering, nurturing, and rewarding talent in discrete communities, and ESPN's overview was more glib and disconcerting than informative. During the Bee itself just might not be the right place for it at all.

Floor is open.

ROUND 12:  Six spellers remain at 10:12 pm.

10:21: And just like that, we are down to four.

10:24pm: We will be seeing that Shourov mic drop on Mogollon for the next decade of Bee coverage.  Thank goodness. That took some serious confidence.

10:30pm: These kids actually deserve a commercial break now.  Hope it's not the last -- part of the torture of the past few years is that after a certain point it became unrelenting endurance. This is more humane.  Four spellers still for Round 14.

10:45pm:  Ouch, Shourov.  The VSO and I are having a discussion over the fairness of employing words derived from literature (and trademarks, for that matter).  My argument remains as it's long been: the Bee can't be completely fair as long as each kid's facing different words, so whether a word can be reasoned out from roots, or not, is irrelevant at this stage.  All we can know is who does best in a particular night with his or her words -- that's not the same as who's the Best Speller in the abstract.

10:51pm:  Siddur at this hour seems bizarrely easy.  How did that get into the CWL?

11:03pm: Ananya's getting harder words consistently. Chittarino for Rohan? I'd have had that just via chittara, in pasta.

11:20pm: Tchefuncte and cheiropompholyx are as hard a pair as I've ever seen in a tournament. Wow.

11:27pm: CONGRATULATIONS ANANYA!

GREETINGS FROM NATIONAL HARBOR:  We are kicking it old school tonight -- for the first time since the GWB Administration, I will not be employing the Cover It Live platform to host our finals chat -- and will instead just write it live on the blog, like we did in caveman (i.e., "Netscape") times.  (Long story. Involves new and extremely high fees even for a one-time use.)

Let's have some fun.

8:41 pm: This is not a lawnmower round. These are hard words, but one which a Bee winner would know.  Strisciando requires knowing that middle consonant pairing, but that's it.  Each of these words seems to have one trick like that. For purana, it's that it's actually spelled phonetically.

8:50 pm: Foodie time! Clafouti is a word grownups should get pretty handily. Speller, unfortunately, adds a gratuitous e to the end. Sigh.

9:03:  Yes, they started a half-hour late, but there's no need to run filler (even with the Shivashankar sisters) in the middle of a round.  I can't imagine how painful it is for the kids to wait.

9:14:  And then there were eleven.  Round nine continues here.

9:20p:  I guess "comes from a trademark" is the new Nahuatl/Welsh/Finnish of "oh, crap" when it comes to having a backdoor into a word. (HT: The Very Significant Other.)

9:50pm:  Sorry, tech issues here.  But a gradual drip-drip-drip to leave us with six kids.

9:59pm: Hard to think of a word with more potential traps than pterygoideus. That was damn nice, Shourav.

10:11pm: Round 11 concludes with our second straight perfect round.  Time to bring out the imitative words, and let's move to a new thread.

FIFTEEN SPELLERS REMAIN:  I am thrilled that the Bee has ended the false, wrong, stupid era of having a second computerized test cut down today's finalists to a manageable group for prime time.

We'll instead have a rather large group of 15 finalists at the microphone starting at 8:30pm on ESPN -- a late start for some young kids (a 10-year-old, three 11s, and two 12s by my count), and I do wonder if that, too, might impact how things end up. If nothing else, we probably will have an early lawnmower round, perhaps in the first round, and I think few things suck more than not giving the spellers at least one round on prime time to shine before fourteen of them (or maybe thirteen) ultimately err.

Over the years I've compiled and revised a list of what I like and don't like about the Bee, and I will repeat it again here, with a few changes:

Like

• Smart kids being awesome. Smart kids being awesome.
• Settling it in front of the microphone, as late as it goes.  I am anti-tie, but even more anti-tiebreaker test.
• That part late in the Bee when we get to words of Finnish, Mayan, Welsh, Afrikaans, proper names, 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. Jacque Bailly 
• Sardoodledom.
• When Bee veterans, coaches, and parents come here and share their wisdom and experience. 

Don't Like

• Showing the clip of the kid who fainted. He's a kid.  It wasn't cute. It was scary. It still is.
• 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
• 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."

See you tonight.

WELCOME TO ROUND FOUR:  Forty spellers remain; we are live on ESPN2 at 10am with results online here.

The rules don't seem to say when they'll stop today; presumably, it'll be when a round finishes with 8-12 spellers remaining, but ... it doesn't say, does it?

(Unfortunately, I have a variety of work obligations for much of the day, but I will be popping in whenever I can. Let's hope for some great performances by these kids.)