I know, I know, I’m a couple days late with this, but anyway… as a former spelling bee geek (it’s been 12 years, believe it or not), I have to post this…

Belated congrats to Kavya Shivashankar, winner of the 2009 National Spelling Bee— and, for that matter, to everyone else who made it into the Bee, as that alone is a major achievement. You all definitely weren’t Laodicean about spelling, that’s for sure!

And since I forgot to post this after the 2008 bee, extremely belated congrats to Sameer Mishra for winning a great guerdon in that year’s bee.

Edited to add: Oh, yeah, I forgot! Special thanks to the Spelling Bee staff for throwing in “blancmange” as a word this year. As a fan of Monty Python’s Science Fiction Sketch, I salute you; indeed, I even suggested the word on my blog three years ago.

For those who’ve come here looking for the Forums section that used to be on my site, I’ve closed it— there wasn’t enough interest in it; the one section that did get posts (“Music in Commercials”) served the same purpose as Adtunes.com, which I also participate in; and besides, I’ve been so busy with grad school and side projects that I haven’t had much time for moderating/keeping up the forum.

I may be opening a new one in the future, but for now, I feel it’s best to close it while keeping the archives up in a read-only form for browsing. Those can be found here, for those who need it.

Sorry for anyone who was actually interested in this section of my site, but honestly, it’d grown too old and crufty and felt like the section needed a reboot anyway…