Once upon a time, I was a pretty smart kid.

Before I became a complete idiot, and tried to make myself sound smarter than I really am by babbling to all of you, I was a pretty accomplished student - that is up until about the 9th grade. In middle school alone, I finished 2nd in a spelling bee in the 7th, and actually won the school’s geography bee the same year. Ok, I won the geography bee because the dumbass I was up against couldn’t figure out the difference between Australia and Austria, but who cares? I won a 50 dollar gift certificate, and got to take a test for the National Geography Bee (which I never heard back from anybody about, but hey, that’s life.).

So, a few years back, it was pleasantly shocking to see that the National Spelling Bee was actually hitting the airwaves on ESPN. Not since the World Series of Poker did something seem so out of place, but entertaining at the same time. This year, the Spelling Bee moved from its home on ESPN, and went prime time on ABC. Yes, ABC must be scrambling when the Spelling Bee gets prime time coverage, but it is more entertaining than that “Extreme Home Makeover” crap spewed on us every week.

But when watching the Spelling Bee, I don’t watch it for the thrill of competition, or even to see if I can spell the words or not. I watch the spelling bee to see how bad these 12 and 13 year old kids freak out when they hear a word that they don’t have a lick of an idea how to spell. But somehow, these kids pull these words out of their rears and advance to the next round. It is classic to watch kids squint, bite their nails, and go into convulsions over how to spell words that I can’t spell for the life of me.

I watched one year as some kid who couldn’t figure out how to spell a word fainted and fell down. But he got back up, and spelled the word correctly. I think he finished in the top two or three that year. It was the intellectual equivalent of Terrell Owens playing in Super Bowl 39 with a bad ankle and it hooked me for years to come.

It is hilarious to watch the children ask “What’s the country of origin”, and “use it in a sentence”. Do they honestly believe that knowing where the word came from is gonna help them spell a word? Trying to watch them write word down with their finger is another hilarious moment. How are you going to remember the word if you wrote it down on invisible paper with a trembling finger a few seconds before? Odds are, if you are doing this, you are not making it to the next round.

This year didn’t provide the fainting and freak outs and screaming of the past. I think ABC probably edited out the good stuff. It still provided a good hour’s worth of entertainment for me; it was that or some new Ultimate Game Show deal with Ricki Lake. I’m sorry, I will take watching 12 and 13 year olds spell over Ricki Lake any day of the week.

So, next year when it’s on, skip the poker players with their tacky jewelry and sunglasses, and skip Ricki Lake, and watch a kid trying to spell “supercalifragilisticexpedialdocius” and almost go into a nervous breakdown in the process…

It is quite satisfying.