GET ON YOUR FEET ALL NIGHT LONG:  It was only six years ago when I started lamenting about the virtual absence of Latino winners of the Kennedy Center Honors for Outstanding Lifetime Achievement in the Field of Excellence, asking "Do we need to wait 20-30 years for Gloria Estefan and John Leguizamo to win?"

So it's nice to note that Gloria Estefan is indeed one of this year's honorees, along with Lionel Richie, LL Cool J, dancer Carmen de Lavallade, and holy shit how the hell has Norman Lear not won this before?

LL is the first hip-hop artist to be so honored -- I think that gives a lot of weight to his acting/hosting endeavors, because I can't otherwise conceive of a reason for his going in before Run-DMC.  (Oh, wait: his show's on CBS. Nevermind.)

As for Lear: holy fucking shit, what were they waiting for?  

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.