a spelling bee in any other form

It's Spelling Bee time again, and Josh had to point me to a Slate piece on the various kinds of orthographic and grammatical contests the world over. (As every linguist knows, English is uniquely tough on spellers, what with all those undocumented nouns slipping over our unprotected border and into the language.)

Cheap irony points:

Correction, May 30, 2007: The caption on the photograph accompanying the piece originally misspelled the name of 2006 spelling bee champion Katharine Close.