Congratulations to Sai Gunturi, winner of the 76th Annual National Spelling Bee! Faced with such tough words, your attitude was nonetheless quite pococurante.

Congrats are also due for Evelyn Blacklock, who surprised everyone by making it all the way to second place; JJ Goldstein, spelling family protégé who tied for third place; and Samir Patel, the extremely gifted third-grader with whom Goldstein tied.

Who’d have thought it would go on this long? This is allegedly the longest National Spelling Bee ever… but despite the insane length, it was as fun to watch as it always is for this ex-bee geek.

In an IM with fellow National Spelling Bee alum Toni:

codeman38: <geeting all nostalgic about the NSB…>
codeman38: <getting, even.>
codeman38: <the irony.>
mimeinashoebox: hehe ;D

Oh, and I should add: Good luck to all of the 251 spellers who will be participating in the Bee later this week. I’ve been there; I know what it’s like… admittedly, the Bee itself can be quite stressful, but the week as a whole is nonetheless quite enjoyable. Hey, it’s one of those sorts of events where I actually feel like I fit in; what more can I say?

Hee. While browsing the lists of recently registered domains at Deleted Domains for amusement (yes, I’m a total geek), I happened to stumble across a registration that I found rather amusing: http://www.wwwdothttpdotdotcom.com/. Try reading that URL out loud; it’s bound to confuse people…

From the Search Request Files…

• proofreading excercise – Definitely needed for this person.
• litary agents – I’ve had this one before, but it’s still amusing no matter how many times I see it.
• buckaroo bonzi – That little purple gorilla’s advertisers may be a bit reckless, to be sure, but the sci-fi movie is titled Buckaroo Banzai.
• airport hartsfield pronounced – OK, granted, maybe this person’s not a native speaker, but still…
• "graduates have never" – Oh-kay…
• "i hate arial" – Well, I don’t hate it, but Helvetica does look a lot better than Microsoft’s infamous rip-off of it…

Heh. Someone just spammed me with a message that was meant to be sent as HTML. Only one problem: they somehow managed to send it with a header of text/plain instead, thus causing Mozilla to display all the HTML tags.

It appears to be selling Human Growth Hormone, but I can’t read it for all the invalid HTML tags the spammer put in there to throw spam filters off; the obfuscation in this message is unbelievable. (And Mozilla still marked it as spam regardless…so much for that approach.)

Here’s exactly what I saw, sans URLs:
(more…)

Yet another interesting music video: “Move Your Feet” by Junior Senior. Pretty amazing stuff, given that it’s constrained to a resolution of 90 by 72 pixels!

Via Google, here’s yet another article offering solace for the directionally challenged.

(Honestly, I ought to write such an article myself… if only I could curb my procrastination. But that’s another rant entirely.)

Well, I haven’t posted much to my blog lately (not much has been going on in my life, which explains things to a large degree), but I figure something ought to go here, so I present you with this example of bad proofreading from a banner ad I found yesterday:

OK, so maybe “roomate” is a typo, but still, considering it’s a part of their domain name, you’d think they’d notice it…

Check out the last quote on the “Press” page of the official website for the documentary Spellbound.

“Quintissentially”? ::slaps head::

What’s even worse is that the review that’s being quoted, though missing a word (“all”) due to sloppy proofreading, spells “quintessentially” correctly. Ouch!

In other news, I’m rather miffed to discover that as of right now, there are no screenings of the film in Georgia. (Here’s a link to the production company’s site, which includes a slightly more up-to-date list of screnings.) Maybe I could get together with Kat from the ’96 bee to watch one of the showings in Florida (even though all of them are a reasonably long drive from Orlando, where she lives)? Who knows…

(Edited 30 May ’03: It is showing in Atlanta now.)

Look at this screenshot from Mercer University’s student information page. What’s wrong with this picture? (Hint: Look at the filename…)