Can’t get enough of President Bush’s interesting uses of the English language? Check out DubyaSpeak.com for a whole load of quotations, nicely categorized for easy browsing.

It’s official: Mozilla is no longer in the beta stage. Go get your copy of Mozilla 1.0 now!

This may be one of the most amusing articles on the National Spelling Bee that I’ve read: "Great sports any way you spell it". (Thanks to Ari Goldstein, who says he found out about the link from Bee staffer William Dolan.)

Here’s the actual text of a “medical” spam e-mail that I just received. Misused apostrophes, commas used as apostrophes, misused quotation marks, stupid misspellings…wow, this runs the whole gamut of stupid proofreading.

I guess it’s true: spammers really aren’t the brightest bulbs in the box, so to speak.

Edited 2005/01/20 to add: I was sent a cease-and-desist notice by a company which shall remain unnamed, claiming that the spam snippet I had originally posted in this entry violated their trademarks. This, despite the fact that I cannot find anything even remotely resembling the trademarks mentioned in what I quoted. I’ll investigate this further, and may restore it upon further analysis…

Edited 2006/11/02 to add: I had totally forgotten about this post, but to be honest, I thought the company in question didn’t have a legal leg to stand on in the first place even when I received the C&D notice (no doubt they found the original spam with a web search for a certain product name, and didn’t do any further investigation). So I’m reposting the file with a very clear disclaimer at the beginning…and blocking search engine hits to the file in robots.txt just for good measure, so it has to be found through this post.

Redundancy of the day, heard during the play-by-play commentary for a soccer game: “He’s overjoyed with excitement!”

OK, I have to see this episode of Frasier when it comes on next week. I’ve heard from some reliable Websterian sources that it’s a good one– and it couldn’t re-air at a more appropriate time.

(Yes, I know. I don’t watch much TV. What’s wrong with that? ;-))

[Note: TVGuide now states that Frasier will not air at all this Thursday. I don’t get it. The episode that was originally scheduled to air was the one involving the Spelling Bee, naturally…]

Congratulations are due to all 250 people who participated in the National Spelling Bee over the past couple of days. And extra-special congratulations go to Pratyush Buddiga, the winner of that prestigious event. May you, and all the other spellers, lead lives full of prospicience!

OK, seriously… you all ruled. And I’m anxious to see whether JJ Goldstein (how’s it feel to have tied for third?) or Catherine Miller (that distant relative of Webster himself), among others, make it back next year…

Amusing, music-geek-oriented scientific parody (thanks to Kat for the link): Experimental demonstration of the tomatotopic organization in the Soprano. Be sure to read the bibliography; some great intellectual and/or multilingual puns in there…

I really wish my cable system offered ESPN Classic as a free channel right now. They’re running the National Spelling Bees from 1996 through 1999 in chronological order today.

So why is this such a big deal to me? Well, for those who don’t know, I participated in the 1997 National Spelling Bee– as contestant number 38, naturally. (Yes, that’s where the 38 in Zone38 came from…)

Woohoo. I just got the call that my name was drawn for the Jeopardy! college tournament tryouts in Houston. Yay. I can’t wait– maybe I’ll make it onto the show this year… ::crosses fingers::