Ridiculous. E-S-P-N. Ridiculous.

I initially thought all the spellin' goin' on was all a big conspiracy trying to keep a surprise from me since somebody's B-I-R-T-H-D-A-Y is tomorrow, and because I am two years old, I cannot string letters together into words to recognize the imminence of gifts.

However, my annual odometer turning over has instead taken a back seat to the broadcast of the National Spelling Bee on the Walt Disney family of networks tonight...on ABC, so that ESPN and ESPN2 can showcase College Softball and World Series of Poker action. This infuriates me as lord knows I was looking forward to some Ugly Betty. However, I could probably turn on the softball game and get the same effect.

Even more of a shame sadly, is that short of one of the Korean home-schooled kids shaming his family and commiting suicide on stage, there's no way this annual reading of the dictionary is going to provide anything more newsworthy as when that one kid passed out on stage , and had to use a stool for the rest of the competition, because a Spelling Bee was just too physically taxing for him.