Friday, June 01, 2007
Feeling spella good
I am a big fan of watching the Scripps National Spelling Bee every year, which is why I was so psyched to come home last night and realize that it was on ABC live in prime time! This is a major upgrade from its former home on ESPN 2, haphazardly scheduled between some dumb bowling tournament and the World Series of Texas Hold 'Em or whatever is usually on. The move to a network prime time slot was sorely needed, as there is only one annual competition more riveting than the Spelling Bee, and that is the Super Bowl.
I first started watching the Spelling Bee in 2003, when it came on while I was on a road trip with my buddies T-Bag and HippieSympathizer. We were supposed to be on the road to Las Vegas, but not even the lure of strippers, booze, and gambling could tear us away from the riveting Spelling Bee action. We got to Vegas a couple hours behind schedule. That year there was this Jamaican chick named Trudy competing, and she was awesome. She was very imperative but at the same time extremely courteous ("I require the word origin, please, Dr. Bailly?", "I will pronounce it 'gwee-shay', please, Dr. Bailly?"), and I was rooting for her bold, hot ass like crazy.
Unfortunately Trudy lost (although to J-Sexy's pride and delight, another Jamaican took home the cup to Kingston in 2004, where it held a place of honor the hallowed offices of the Jamaica Gleaner.)
Anyway, after Trudy's stint bossing around official Bee pronouncer Dr. Jacques Bailly (who normally has the unremarkable job of associate professor of classics at UVM), I was hooked on the National Spelling Bee. Also, given my history as a speller so competetive that I actually once resorted to violence when outspelled by my nemesis in the fourth grade, I find the entire contest riveting and enjoyable. Now that I am almost two decades past eligibility for the Bee, I can finally relax and just enjoy the thrills of watching adolescent nerdlings spell impossibly difficult words.
When I got home last night, I was right in time for the final rounds, and immediately picked out my favorite. From the moment she took the stage, I knew I'd be supporting this little minx, Isabel Jacobson, of Madison, Wisconsin:
Her hobbies are playing the violin and writing short stories, and her trademark is wearing every bracelet she owns for luck. Basically, she is a proto-Razzy. You can tell she tried to really up her hotness level for the national stage (a tough job, since she's at that horrible awkward age where everything, from your teeth to your hips, seems oddly proportioned, your skin and hair look like hell, and you have no idea how to manage your weird little starter breasts), and it completely reminded me of how I spent about two hours banana-clipping my hair back when I went to the Pierce County district spelling bee in the sixth grade. I also made sure to wear my favorite sweater (a cable knit sage green number from the Gap's cardigan collection, circa 1990) and talked my mom into letting me apply mascara. Isabel actually did a much better job than I ever did cleaning up for the camera; she almost has a "7th Heaven"-era Jessica Biel thing going on. Unfortunately, like me, Isabel was thwarted by that pesky Greek "phy." My dreams of spelling glory went down in one fell swoop when I misspelled "asphyxiate" as "assfixiate." Isabel lost on the word "cyanophycean." I was truly disappointed, especially since this was her final year of eligibility and thus her last shot at spelling glory. When the bell dinged indicating that she was incorrect, you could just see the despair in her face as she saw her dreams crushed.
Isabel didn't take her loss nearly as hard as her parents did, however. Spelling Bee parents are right up there with stage and pageant moms in terms of relentless, highly dysfunctional child-pushing. You could see Isabel's mom looking PISSED that Isabel's Greek word origins were a little rusty, and you know that Isabel's getting an earful the entire plane ride back to Madison. Isabel's dad, meanwhile, just placed his face heavily into his hands, as though he were mourning the champion speller that he USED to call "daughter." For years to come, poor Isabel is going to be reminded of how she fucked up "cyanophycean," which is unnecessary because this overachieving vixen doesn't need any parental encouragement, as she'll berate herself for years and years to come, much the same way that I glower at my lab notebook every time I have to write "I humanely sacrificed 4 6-8 week old BALB/c mice by CO2 asphyxiation" in it. I predict that as soon as she gets to high school, Isabel's going to start favoring unflattering thrift store clothes, writing poetry about death, sporting some seriously bad baby dyke hair, and generally doing everything in her power to counter the trauma of being precocious and paraded around for it. Mark my words, it's only a matter of time before girlfriend starts listening to Morrissey and carrying around a copy of The Bell Jar with her everywhere she goes. And possibly experimenting with lesbianism by fingerbanging the androgynous goalkeeper of the girls' soccer team.
After Isabel's departure, things got pretty fierce between the two final boys. They had to contend with some seriously hard words. The boy who ultimately took second place misspelled "coryza," which apparently means "the symptoms of an upper respiratory tract infection." I didn't know this word and the entire point of my doctoral thesis is getting a mouse to experience coryza! Obviously I know how I'm going to impress the pants off everybody at my next lab meeting. It was a shame the kid misspelled it, because he was then promptly beaten by child prodigy/idiot savant Evan O'Dorney.
In case anyone was wondering, Evan is not just a super, SUPER geeky kid. He is, in fact, TOTALLY AND FOR SURE autistic. His hobbies are fractal math and music, and I'm insanely jealous that at thirteen, he's a more accomplished pianist than I'll ever be, and I've been playing piano since I was six. He's currently attending some college-level conservatory of music because of his gifts condition. However, the kid has some obvious problems communicating. At the end of the Spelling Bee, Stuart Scott was interviewing him and trying to get him excited about his victory.
"What are you going to do now that you're the best speller in America, Evan?"
Evan, who always wears that same expressionless smile, replies, "People tell me that I should be happy, so I will be happy."
Stuart probes further, "Are you going to do anything in particular to celebrate?"
Evan replies, "I am going home and will continue my studies in math and piano." That, and he'll probably memorize the phone book or something super Rain Man-y like that.
Anyway, I'm so sad that there won't be another Spelling Bee for another year. I'll have to wait twelve whole months to see Dr. Bailly dryly making jokes about Latin root pronunciations, or the commentator saying asinine shit like, "He better really have a good handle on his German phonics here" and "Ethnic restaurant menus are worthy places to pick up a few extra words...epicurean habits can make the difference between a champion and just a finalist." Man, the Spelling Bee rules so hard.
I first started watching the Spelling Bee in 2003, when it came on while I was on a road trip with my buddies T-Bag and HippieSympathizer. We were supposed to be on the road to Las Vegas, but not even the lure of strippers, booze, and gambling could tear us away from the riveting Spelling Bee action. We got to Vegas a couple hours behind schedule. That year there was this Jamaican chick named Trudy competing, and she was awesome. She was very imperative but at the same time extremely courteous ("I require the word origin, please, Dr. Bailly?", "I will pronounce it 'gwee-shay', please, Dr. Bailly?"), and I was rooting for her bold, hot ass like crazy.
Anyway, after Trudy's stint bossing around official Bee pronouncer Dr. Jacques Bailly (who normally has the unremarkable job of associate professor of classics at UVM), I was hooked on the National Spelling Bee. Also, given my history as a speller so competetive that I actually once resorted to violence when outspelled by my nemesis in the fourth grade, I find the entire contest riveting and enjoyable. Now that I am almost two decades past eligibility for the Bee, I can finally relax and just enjoy the thrills of watching adolescent nerdlings spell impossibly difficult words.
When I got home last night, I was right in time for the final rounds, and immediately picked out my favorite. From the moment she took the stage, I knew I'd be supporting this little minx, Isabel Jacobson, of Madison, Wisconsin:
Isabel didn't take her loss nearly as hard as her parents did, however. Spelling Bee parents are right up there with stage and pageant moms in terms of relentless, highly dysfunctional child-pushing. You could see Isabel's mom looking PISSED that Isabel's Greek word origins were a little rusty, and you know that Isabel's getting an earful the entire plane ride back to Madison. Isabel's dad, meanwhile, just placed his face heavily into his hands, as though he were mourning the champion speller that he USED to call "daughter." For years to come, poor Isabel is going to be reminded of how she fucked up "cyanophycean," which is unnecessary because this overachieving vixen doesn't need any parental encouragement, as she'll berate herself for years and years to come, much the same way that I glower at my lab notebook every time I have to write "I humanely sacrificed 4 6-8 week old BALB/c mice by CO2 asphyxiation" in it. I predict that as soon as she gets to high school, Isabel's going to start favoring unflattering thrift store clothes, writing poetry about death, sporting some seriously bad baby dyke hair, and generally doing everything in her power to counter the trauma of being precocious and paraded around for it. Mark my words, it's only a matter of time before girlfriend starts listening to Morrissey and carrying around a copy of The Bell Jar with her everywhere she goes. And possibly experimenting with lesbianism by fingerbanging the androgynous goalkeeper of the girls' soccer team.
After Isabel's departure, things got pretty fierce between the two final boys. They had to contend with some seriously hard words. The boy who ultimately took second place misspelled "coryza," which apparently means "the symptoms of an upper respiratory tract infection." I didn't know this word and the entire point of my doctoral thesis is getting a mouse to experience coryza! Obviously I know how I'm going to impress the pants off everybody at my next lab meeting. It was a shame the kid misspelled it, because he was then promptly beaten by child prodigy/idiot savant Evan O'Dorney.
"What are you going to do now that you're the best speller in America, Evan?"
Evan, who always wears that same expressionless smile, replies, "People tell me that I should be happy, so I will be happy."
Stuart probes further, "Are you going to do anything in particular to celebrate?"
Evan replies, "I am going home and will continue my studies in math and piano." That, and he'll probably memorize the phone book or something super Rain Man-y like that.
Anyway, I'm so sad that there won't be another Spelling Bee for another year. I'll have to wait twelve whole months to see Dr. Bailly dryly making jokes about Latin root pronunciations, or the commentator saying asinine shit like, "He better really have a good handle on his German phonics here" and "Ethnic restaurant menus are worthy places to pick up a few extra words...epicurean habits can make the difference between a champion and just a finalist." Man, the Spelling Bee rules so hard.
Labels: brainiacs, I LOVE IT, nerd alert, Razzification
Thursday, May 03, 2007
I know shit about math
So these two future tri-Lambdas watched ATL followed by Stand and Deliver, were subsequently inspired (probably by the AWESOME part in S&D where this real cholo type asks Edward James Olmos, "ay, what the hell is this cal-coo-lis, man?"), and decided to make a video parodying T.I.'s "What You Know" concerning their prowess at Mathletics. These douchebags call themselves the TI-84 and -E and dropped the video, entitled "What You Know About Math," on YouTube.
In fairness, for about three weeks in the sixth grade, I was a member of All Saints School (ASS)'s Mathcounts team, until it became apparent to everyone that I suck horribly at math. Also, I couldn't stand Mrs. Corey, the sixth grade teacher and Mathcounts coach. She wore horrible clothes (ie: acrylic sweater dresses with puffed sleeves, shoulder pads, and mock turtleneck...EW!) that were always covered with her nasty toddlers' sticky peanut butter handprints, judging by her astonishingly rank B.O. she eschewed deodorant, and she once busted me for reading The Grapes of Wrath while I was supposed to be paying attention to her worthless lecture about decimals or whatever. She actually told me that I was setting a terrible example for the other students as she prised Steinbeck's great American novel from my hands. To this day I am wracked with guilt for setting the horrible example of voluntarily reading Nobel-prize winning classics for my peers.
Anyway, it seems that my intolerance for Mrs. Corey and my insecurity about always being beaten at rapid-fire fraction solving by a dude who, six years later, I would be dating and having wild, stoned sex with on the grave of Ezra Meeker, founder of Puyallup and marker of the Oregon Trail, resulted in my angry departure from the ASS Mathcounts team. At the age of twelve, with our shared perversions years away in the distant future, I did not like him repeatedly beating me in long division contests. The fact that I smoked his ass in the Spelling and Geography Bees three years in a row did little to console me, so I abandoned any hopes of glory as a mathlete. Seeing these dudes in the video above just reaffirmed for me that had I doggedly pursued logarithmic glory, I'd be pledging the Omega Mu sorority in a huge way and these would be the types of guys available to me for fucking. LAME.
Thank God I don't know all about math. Besides, isn't that what calculators and Microsoft Excel are for? So nobody HAS to know about math. Fuck math!
[RAZZY EDIT: I just noticed a note in the description of this video on YouTube that I'm apparently supposed to contact these pizza-faced, pocket protector-wearing dweebs for PERMISSION to embed the video on my website. Are they fucking joking? Apparently, producing a "viral video" has gone to their heads and resulted in their socially inept asses making absurd and unreasonable demands. If they want to control its distribution, then TAKE IT OFF YOUTUBE, YOU FUCKING MATHLETIC MORONS! What are they going to do...send me a e-mail filled with mean equations about me (ie:TI-84 featuring -E>>>>Razzy)? Besides, even if they are champion mathletes, how dare they suggest I might not meet their nerd requirements for embedding their (publicly available) video? I can outgeek them in my sleep: I am getting a Ph.D in SCIENCE from an IVY LEAGUE SCHOOL, I can smote their ruin upon the mountainside at the game of Risk, I read both Eragon and its sequel, and I own all three extended edition Lord of the Rings DVDs. Checkmate, you little nerdlings!]
In fairness, for about three weeks in the sixth grade, I was a member of All Saints School (ASS)'s Mathcounts team, until it became apparent to everyone that I suck horribly at math. Also, I couldn't stand Mrs. Corey, the sixth grade teacher and Mathcounts coach. She wore horrible clothes (ie: acrylic sweater dresses with puffed sleeves, shoulder pads, and mock turtleneck...EW!) that were always covered with her nasty toddlers' sticky peanut butter handprints, judging by her astonishingly rank B.O. she eschewed deodorant, and she once busted me for reading The Grapes of Wrath while I was supposed to be paying attention to her worthless lecture about decimals or whatever. She actually told me that I was setting a terrible example for the other students as she prised Steinbeck's great American novel from my hands. To this day I am wracked with guilt for setting the horrible example of voluntarily reading Nobel-prize winning classics for my peers.
Anyway, it seems that my intolerance for Mrs. Corey and my insecurity about always being beaten at rapid-fire fraction solving by a dude who, six years later, I would be dating and having wild, stoned sex with on the grave of Ezra Meeker, founder of Puyallup and marker of the Oregon Trail, resulted in my angry departure from the ASS Mathcounts team. At the age of twelve, with our shared perversions years away in the distant future, I did not like him repeatedly beating me in long division contests. The fact that I smoked his ass in the Spelling and Geography Bees three years in a row did little to console me, so I abandoned any hopes of glory as a mathlete. Seeing these dudes in the video above just reaffirmed for me that had I doggedly pursued logarithmic glory, I'd be pledging the Omega Mu sorority in a huge way and these would be the types of guys available to me for fucking. LAME.
Thank God I don't know all about math. Besides, isn't that what calculators and Microsoft Excel are for? So nobody HAS to know about math. Fuck math!
[RAZZY EDIT: I just noticed a note in the description of this video on YouTube that I'm apparently supposed to contact these pizza-faced, pocket protector-wearing dweebs for PERMISSION to embed the video on my website. Are they fucking joking? Apparently, producing a "viral video" has gone to their heads and resulted in their socially inept asses making absurd and unreasonable demands. If they want to control its distribution, then TAKE IT OFF YOUTUBE, YOU FUCKING MATHLETIC MORONS! What are they going to do...send me a e-mail filled with mean equations about me (ie:TI-84 featuring -E>>>>Razzy)? Besides, even if they are champion mathletes, how dare they suggest I might not meet their nerd requirements for embedding their (publicly available) video? I can outgeek them in my sleep: I am getting a Ph.D in SCIENCE from an IVY LEAGUE SCHOOL, I can smote their ruin upon the mountainside at the game of Risk, I read both Eragon and its sequel, and I own all three extended edition Lord of the Rings DVDs. Checkmate, you little nerdlings!]
Labels: brainiacs, fuck math, media whores, Razzification, small penises, you're ugly
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]
