he world of professional spelling garnered national attention this week, as well as controversy, when under-age spelling wunderkind Anurag Kashyap went first in the National Spelling League draft to the Anaheim Syllables. Kashyap is the youngest wordsmith to ever skip college and high school to go straight to the pros.

Pro spelling has had to face criticism from those who claim the major leagues have gone after younger and younger wordsmiths ever since the formation of the National Spelling League in 1998. Detractors claim the NSL is luring away some of America's brightest young minds from academic careers that could help them in the non-spelling world.

Mere mortal Kashyap was selected from among 150 other stellar spellers for a lead position on California's Anaheim Syllables, a major contender in the Eastern division of national spellers. In previous drafts, students as young as 15 have skipped completion of high school and college to enter professional league spelling, but Kashyap, a "spelling monster," according to sports writers, will be foregoing high school and college in entirety for a 3-year $18 million contract.

"People raise hell when an athlete, or even a mathlete skip college to go pro," said Kashyap's coach, Oxford Associate Professor of Spelling Chip Bustero, "but these are Anurag's prime spelling years. He's only got another few years of language mastery before the memory starts to go. Every year he puts off going pro he not only loses that salary, but all the lucrative endorsement deals. Nike is thinking about going into notebook and paper production—Anurag's just the kind of brainiac they're looking for to promote those products. And we're already in talks with Bic and Pilot. Whoever's got the deeper pockets can lock in a deal now, before he really puts professional spelling on the map."

However, opponents among the living argue that word jockeys like Kashyap not only lose college opportunities and training for careers outside the spelling world, but other prospects, like being a part of the 2008 Olympics spelling team. Spelling Coach to the American Olympic team Ruben Fartstarter expressed worry about the future of Olympic spelling if other star Englishologists like Kashyap lose eligibility.

"We were beginning to make real headway in the 2004 Olympiad. Then Hattie Page and Yukio Konichi both go for top dollar to the Seattle Suffixes and the Pittsburgh Homonyms, respectively. We're losing top talent and the word nerds of tomorrow aren't even going to college teams anymore. We were ranked third to England and Australia last time, which means we're only beating countries that don't speak English. Can you imagine a few under-scoring amateurs getting up on a stage in front of the whole world and misspelling 'misspell'? We'll look quite the fools."

The potential scandal comes at the worst time for the new professional sport, following accusations over the last few months that some of the sport's most notable stars have been taking spelling-enhancing drugs. The damaging allegations came in the form of a book by 19-year-old retired San Francisco Palindromes speller Anita Watt, I Before E Except After Steroids. Also in the book are damning accusations of excessive alcohol use and well-known spellers taking cocaine, even during the 2004 Olympics, including harrowing descriptions of all-night "speed-spelling" matches.

he White House faced embarrassment this week when their usual method of distracting the population with lesser problems backfired, leading them to unintentionally misdirect public attention back to the original problem. While the administration hoped to draw notice from earlier remarks misdirecting national awareness to the slave trade.

Popular theory is the White House misdirected media attention to the Middle Eastern slave trade to distract from the continuing aggression in "free" Iraq, and possibly some of the Nixon comparisons President Bush has endured over the course of the week; when Middle Eastern allies such as oil magnate/American investors Saudi Arabia took offense at the promise of sanctions, the White House sought to avert public outcry against the ally by launching a new attack—this one, accidentally, drawing notice back to the failing economy and bleak financial prospects for most Americans.

"It's a shame in this country that men and women can work all their lives and having nothing to show for it," said Condoleezza Rice, as a few aides standing by gave each other quizzical looks. "Especially in America, a country recognized world wide for having so much prosperity. And yet, we're losing quality jobs everywhere but the service industry. The president is most definitely angered by this, and is sorry he's passed so many economic policies to keep it in place."

Failing to recognize that the disparate situations between the rich and poor in the United States was the same initial social ill so many wars were started to draw attention away from, Rice continued to assault the very structure of American finance.

"America continues to make advances in industry, medicine, and of course, commerce—advantages only a handful of Americans will fully experience, since the system is built to allow only partial upward mobility, preserving a luxury status for a privileged few, who triple their earnings by sending skilled jobs overseas and cutting the bottom out from the working classes."

Concluded Rice: "That seems to me a much more devastating problem affecting this nation than the 800,000 slaves reportedly trafficked through the fine countries of our allies, right?"

It was a classic clusterfuck as only this administration could manage, doing potential damage to four and a half years worth of social reform rollback and securing the position of the upper classes. Realizing their mistake the Saturday after the statement was made, the White House had little choice but to keep the misdirection rolling.

"The War on Terror is at its worst," said Press Secretary Scott McClellan, rushing into the press room Saturday morning, while most of the reporters were still pretty hung over for a long night's/morning's drinking. "We have elevated the terror level to 'fantastic,' which is uh… pretty bad. We've heard rumblings throughout the Middle East that Al Qaeda may be preparing for another strike on U.S. soil. And if intelligence hasn't picked up anything on that yet, they most certainly will within the next few hours."

Though the War on Terror is a subject that hasn't unified Americans with the same strength it originally did in late 2001, it seemed like the safest place to leave public scrutiny until everything had blown over, or at least until the next major summer blockbuster got everybody talking about Batman or alien monsters or something again.

Everyone I know in the conspiracy community and the Niluminati were, of course, stunned by the big bomb drop this week. And you can hardly blame us, it has to be the news everybody has been wanting to hear for years. Paris Hilton marrying Paris ???? That's insanity. Two people with the same first name can't marry each other. That's the whole reason our country has stood fast against gay marriage for so long. The notion of a Steve marrying a Steve… brr! I'm chilled to the bone just thinking about it.

Imagine all the potential disasters that would happen in that household. A man calls there, asking for Paris, and the husband flips out, yelling and screaming and threatening violence, only to find out the caller was his best friend, Buddy. Plus, think about how gross it is to get out of the shower and use your wife, Paris', monogrammed towel. Dammit! If only the two of us didn't share the same name. What I'm mainly worried about, though, is the next time I download a bootleg video of Paris having sex with someone, it better be the female one. That's all I'm saying.

I can understand her wanting to settle down, though. Her movie career is finally starting to take off, what with that Carl Jr.'s commercial getting her such fantastic acting notice. She's apparently broken ties once and for all with that troublemaker Nicole Richie, and it's about time. I'm hoping she'll do the wise thing for the next season of The Simple Life, and get a reliable new influence like Kelly Clarkson to co-star. And, this is neither here nor there, but they should have to work in a Denny's all season. I have a hunch that would be classic TV in the making.

I have additional worries about Paris Hilton settling down once and for all, even though I think it might be in her best interest. I hope she doesn't balloon up like Elle MacPherson once she's married. A lot of super-models just let themselves go and lose their classic toothpick shape. But with a husband sharing the same name, plus him not being famous and multi-talented like her, that has to cause some torment, which always causes heavy drinking, which causes great preservation of eternal thinness. So that's working for her.

Interesting about this "Deep Throat" thing, too. Some people may have guessed Paris Hilton was actually Deep Throat, but that was another video entirely, rest assured. Plus, I don't think she knows anything about Washington politics, part of that younger generation that thinks politics are queer. I was surprised by Felt's admission, I had always suspected Linda Lovelace, Misty Sugar, or White House Counsel John Dean. Actually, I really wanted it to be Jimmy Dean, just for a real twist, but that wasn't too likely. I'm not sure how an actor and sausage magnate would be privilege to such information, but as I said, it was more a fantasy than anything else.

We in the conspiracy-cracking business owe a real debt to Mark Felt, not only for expanding our sexual consciousness, but for helping to bring down a president and making us feel, at last, like we could break some of these conspiracies, if we stayed on them long enough. I was a young cub reporter at the time, and I wish Felt had had enough confidence to come to me with the story, instead of Joanne Woodward and Leonard Bernstein. They should give him the biggest tribute of all, since bringing down the president helped launch Woodward's acting career, and Bernstein spent the rest of his life recording the tales of the Watergate conspiracy in his successful series of Bernstein Bears books. What I couldn't have done with such information.

Let's just say it would have been me in that Paris Hilton video then, not some jackass with a camera.

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