Word: contestant
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When Jacques Bailly won the Scripps National Spelling Bee as a 14-year-old in 1980, his first reaction was relief. After spending two grueling days onstage with 100 other young contestants sounding out words like schottische, mahout and elucubrate (the winning word), he recalls just wanting the competition to be over. But nearly 30 years later, he's back again at the World Series of spelling as the contest's official pronouncer. At this year's finals, which kick off May 26 in Washington, D.C., Bailly will read each word and provide its definition, origin and context. TIME spoke...
...year's commando raid that rescued 15 guerilla-held hostages. Santos will step down at the end of the month to launch his own presidential bid but said he would pull out if Uribe is allowed to run. The reason? Opinion polls show that in a head-to-head contest, Santos would be trounced by his former boss...
Critics deride the Eurovision Song Contest as a cultural Chernobyl, an ostentatious talent show in which gaudiness and sex appeal have more currency than musical ability. During the May 16 final, watched by more than 100 million people worldwide, contestants once again called upon their decidedly nonmusical charms: the Greek entry ripped his shirt to expose a waxed chest, while the Albanian entry wore a pink tutu and stood on a wind machine. But in the end, Alexander Rybak, a boyish fiddle player from Norway, stormed to victory because he had the best song - and he didn't even have...
...Norwegian winner, Alexander Rybak, patronizingly told a press conference, "I think it's a little bit sad that they chose to have the protest today. They spent all their energy on that parade, while the biggest gay parade in the world [an allusion to the campy performances of the contest] was tonight." (See a recap of Eurovision through the years...
...Wandering past model rockets, orange cosmonaut suits emblazoned with red U.S.S.R. emblems and a diorama of happy cosmonaut mannequins sitting around a campfire next to a crashed space capsule waiting for pickup, Lynn Nordstrom of Albuquerque, N.M., and her two sons - in Moscow for the Eurovision song contest - say they are enjoying their visit. But "after looking at this, I'm afraid of the Egypt syndrome, where all you do is talk about how great you used to be," Nordstrom says. "The museum is terrific, but you need to look to the future. My whole youth was spent hearing about...