Germans do not have spelling bees (insert joke about how long they'd be up there spelling)

Julian, the photographer from Monday's spelling bee, has blogged about me in German. I fed the page into Google's translator to get this shaky English version.

As far as I can figure out, he has said I remind him of is this person, a writer who has created an online gallery of rejection letters she has received.

Julian also wondered about the relationship between the "bee" in "spelling bee" and the insect variety. No one had been able to properly explain it to him, which is unsurprising, as it's a quite obscure explanation. From Random House:

The sense of the word bee meaning 'a social gathering to perfom some task or engage in a contest' was coined right here in the good ol' U.S.A., and dates from the 18th century. The meaning emerged from the social nature of the insect, and came to be used more commonly than match for such activities.

Originally, there were spinning bees, husking bees, apple bees, and even raising bees for house raising. Bees involve a group of people in a community taking on a task that would be too hard to accomplish alone, or that is more pleasant to accomplish in the company of others. A friendly competitive atmosphere also helps work get done faster--who can nail the most planks on the barn roof? who can husk the largest number of ears of corn?--from which the competition we know of as a spelling bee emerged.

Update: My German friend Tilmann verifies the lack of spelling bees. "Nope," he writes, "after sixth grade, spelling and such no longer influence the grading process. You either have it or you don't -- most don't."