Come sit for a spell and 'bee' a part of the fun, excitement

Can you sit a spell?

If you haven’t witnessed adults wearing costumes while attempting to spell words you have never heard of, then you haven’t been to the annual adult spelling bee.

This is your official invitation.

This is not just the 8th annual adult spelling bee — it’s a spell-a-bration!

The festivities kick off this Friday at 6:30 p.m. at the Sandpoint Events Center at PSB with all of the hype of a heavyweight title bout.

In one corner, defending champs D.A. Davidson is back with all-world speller Titina Z. In the other corner, perennial champs Keokee Publishing is back. And in the other corner, Century 21 is back after a one-year hiatus. In the fourth corner you will find several teams that haven’t broken through to win but are still in the hunt.

The spelling bee, which is called an adult spelling bee because adult beverages are served and occasionally a speller might cuss when he or she misses a word, mixes a costume contest with the toughest words ever assembled.

Pronouncers Keith Congleton and Kathy Hubbard have been scrubbing word lists from around the world to try to trip up Billie Jean, Titina, Forrest and other top spellers. It’s also fun to watch audience members try to spell the words. No doubt about it, this event is definitely more fun than a basic cable package.

There are also many silent auction items available — least of which would be lunch with the author of this column who is also the publisher of this paper. Minimum bid $20. No whiners.

If you are tempted to put together a team or would like to join a team, please contact us at the Bee. Teams have four spellers. The cost is $125. First place is $150 and the traveling trophy.

All of the money raised goes to adult literacy and the Newspapers in Education program.

We’ll have pizza, popcorn and all sorts of drinks available. You are guaranteed to laugh out loud at least once. Free admission.

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Have you signed up for Facebook? The Daily Bee is also on Facebook and we post breaking news, local information, random bad jokes, shopping tips and suggestions on where to go and what to do. We also give tickets away. Find us and join 2,764 other folks who are following our site.

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The advent of Facebook has been an opportunity for us to communicate on an ongoing basis with many of you. People are sending in news tips, wedding announcements, moose photos and about anything else you can imagine.

The reason I like Facebook communication is because it is not anonymous. We also receive tips from readers on our story weblogs at bonnercountydailybee.com but that information can be sent anonymously and it is hard to follow up on communications. I also like the fact that Facebook now spans the generations. I can talk with high schoolers and grandmas at almost the same time.

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I have gotten somewhat lazy by posting some of my bad jokes on Facebook and not in the Bee. I have also gotten pulled away from writing my column on a regular basis. I am constantly reminded that people in our area want to be engaged in their communities and that the Daily Bee has a unique position to do that.

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I’ll leave you with this bit of trivia.

The U.S. standard railroad gauge — distance between the rails — is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That’s an odd number, right?

Why was that gauge used? Because that’s the way they built them in England and English expatriots designed the US railroads. Why dod the English build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways and that’t the gauge they used.

Why did they use that gauge then. Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools they had used for building horse-drawn wagons, which used that spacing.

Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing? If they tried any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long-distance roads in England, because that’s the spacing of the wheel ruts.

So, who built the old rutted roads? Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe. The ruts in the roads were formed by Roman war chariots which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, there were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Therefore, the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot — otherwise just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses...

But wait, there is more. This is to pay you back for reading this column and to give you a takeaway.

Remember when the space shuttle was sitting on the launch pad and had two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank? Those rockets were called solid rocket boosters or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah.

The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit larger, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains and the SRBs had to fit through the tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than a railroad track and the railroad track, was we now have learned, is about as wide as two horses’ behinds.

Isn’t it unique that a major space shuttle design feature — and the space shuttle is the most advanced transportation system ever developed — was determined more than 2,000 year ago by the width of a horse’s behind?

David Keyes is publisher of the Daily Bee and will be emceeing the adult spelling bee this Friday at Panhandle State Bank.