Etc...

Darn right I still want it

From East Cleveland, Ohio, comes word that Catherine Wagner was inducted into the National Honor Society at Shaw High School May 21. That's nice, you say, but so what? Only that the ceremony took place 51 years late. As a member of the Class of 1953, she met all the qualifications for the society, but was denied admission on a technicality: She'd been caught exchanging a quick kiss with her boyfriend one day in a stairwell as they passed between classes. Now that we know her story, what about the boyfriend? Well, he and she are coming up on their 48th wedding anniversary.

When a truck on I-610 near Houston recently spilled 30,000 pounds of eggs, a clean-up crew was dispatched to the scene. So what did the workers decide to eat on their break? Scrambled eggs, naturally - only not from the road.

To win the finals of the National Spelling Bee, which culminates months of school, local, and regional competitions, requires knowing some pretty obscure words. Take this year's winner, David Tidmarsh, a public school eighth-grader from South Bend, Ind., who last week took home $12,000 in cash and other prizes for correctly spelling "autochthonous," meaning "indigenous." Tidmarsh outdueled 264 other contestants during this year's "Bee Week," the annual competition in Washington, D.C., featured in the critically acclaimed 2002 documentary, "Spellbound." To be eligible a student must be under 16 and not promoted beyond 8th grade. The word spelled correctly in winning the title each of the last 10 years:

xanthosis 1995
vivisepulture 1996
euonym 1997
chiaroscurist 1998
logorrhea 1999
demarche 2000
succedaneum 2001
prospicience 2002
pococurante 2003
autochthonous 2004 - www.spellingbee.com and Associated Press