I’m watching this documentary called Spellbound right now. It’s following 8 kids competing in the National Spelling Bee. It’s moderately interesting, but the best part is this spaz named Harry who is hyperactive and talks like a musical robot now and then. The rest of the kids are average and boring. The only other funny part was when a former winner cracked a joke about winning not really helping his love life, but maybe even being a liability to such a thing. Here’s the thing about the Spelling Bee though. When a kid gets a word wrong, they play a ding sound. In the history of the world, this is the only place that a pleasant ding signifies that you’re wrong and you lose. Everyone else uses a buzzer. I hear the ding and think ‘good job, nerd’ but then the kid looks disappointed and I remember that the Spelling Bee is backwards and uses the ding. I feel like the spelling bee would have a lot more credibility in the world of game shows and contests if they would just conform to the standard buzz for an incorrect answer. We’ve been conditioned since the days of Pavlov to know that the ding of a bell is a good thing, but these guys just have to be different and try to break this conditioning. I don’t know what they’re trying to prove, but it’s high time they pack it in. But that’s enough about that, lets talk about this. This, referring to this photo, which I took a few days ago after work.
What is it you ask? Who really knows (I know). Where is it? Another mystery (not really, I see it every day driving to work). Not unlike Stonehenge, or those big heads on that one island, we may never fully know what this is (again, not true; it’s clear what this is if you saw it in real life). Pretty mysterious; maybe the History Channel will do an hour long special on it someday. What we do know is that it’s a photograph I dig (this is true).
| Exif information |
| Model | Canon EOS 20D
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| Original date | 2010:03:26 5:25PM
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| Exposure time | 1/2500 sec |
| Focal length | 50mm |
| F-Stop | f/1.8 |
| ISO speed | ISO-100
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| Exposure Bias | 0
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ALL PHOTOS ON THIS SITE ARE PROPERTY OF JEREMY JEWELL. ANY UNAUTHORIZED USAGE IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED UNLESS PERMISSION WAS EXPLICITLY GRANTED BY THE OWNER.
Here's the thing about spelling. I remember being able to spell much better, or at least make less careless mistakes when I was younger. Now I try to spell words and know I am doing it wrong, but cannot figure out how to spell it correctly, it drives me nuts. I wonder why this is? Is it just something that happens as you get older and have more things floating around in your head? Is it because my vocabulary is who knows how many times larger than it was back then, and therefore I have trouble remembering how to spell all those suckers. Or is it because we live in the day and age where spell check is built into everything?
ReplyDeleteAnd another thing, this goes out to my parents, teachers, and everyone else who ever told me to look up a word in the dictionary if I did not know how to spell it. I don't KNOW how to spell it so how am I supposed to look it up in the dictionary?! What if I needed to know how to spell aardvark? I'd be looking in the "Ar-" section, you know how many words there are in that section? Eleventy billion. And yes, that is a number, I'm an accountant, I'm an expert on counting things and knowing numbers and stuff like that!
As for your photo, it reminds me of old black and white Cold War movies where either Russians, Aliens, or Robots were attacking. There should be things in the air there and it would be perfect. Oh and of course everyone from that era knows that Aliens and Robots attacking all meant Russians. Did you know that Space Invaders from that one arcade game were the Russians? No? Well now you know.