Spelling

Everyone knows Apple is popular in China -- so popular that people riot outside Apple's stores, or set up fake stores, or just crank out fake iPhones. On a recent trip to an electronics bazaar in Shanghai, we spotted a few of the most blatant of these knockoffs. Amusingly, the phones on display didn't look anything like actual iPhones -- instead, the manufacturers concentrated their piracy efforts on attempting to replicate the spelling of the names of popular devices and brands.

When Mickey Fruchter started teaching at the Neighborhood Music School in Boyle Heights in 1964, they didn't tell him how much he'd get paid. The violinist simply showed up, did his job and went home, figuring he'd get the going rate of between $4 and $6 an hour. "When I got my first paycheck, I freaked out," says Fruchter, who was 25 at the time. He was paid 75 cents for a half-hour lesson, or $1.50 an hour. For someone who played professionally and also taught at Cal State L.A., it didn't seem worth the trouble to work for small change.

Candy Spelling is already famous or infamous; it can be hard to tell these days. The wife of the late TV mogul Aaron Spelling, she's also owner of one of the most expensive homes in the country -- complete with a doll museum and three rooms devoted to gift wrap -- and mother to " Beverly Hills 90210" star Tori Spelling, with whom she's had a publicly tumultuous relationship for years. Now she enters that not-so-rarefied world of fringe celebrities on reality TV. Tonight at 10, she will be the anchor judge on the new Ryan Seacrest-produced E!

The "tea party" is back and is brewing trouble for the Republican establishment. After the GOP debacle in the 2012 election, when Republicans not only failed to win the presidency but blew a chance to take over the Senate, party leaders paused to consider what had gone wrong. The Republican National Committee issued a scathing report warning that the party was in "an ideological cul-de-sac" and resolved to act friendlier toward women, minorities and low-income voters. Strategist Karl Rove said the lesson was to nominate more moderate candidates and set about raising money to do just that.

Eight months ago when Candy Spelling, widow of legendary TV producer Aaron Spelling, put her 4.7-acre estate in Holmby Hills up for sale, the $150-million listing price raised more than a few eyebrows. The 56,500-square-foot mansion remains the most expensive residential listing in the U.S., and there's no price reduction in sight. FOR THE RECORD: Candy Spelling's mansion: In Saturday's Business section, an article on the Manor, the most expensive residential listing in the U.S. at $150 million, gave the impression that Sally Forster Jones of Coldwell Banker's Beverly Hills East office had one-third of the listing.

Re "A 'C' Change in Spelling Sought for the Koreas" (Sept. 15), about changing "Korea" to "Corea": The irony gods must be dying from laughter. South Korea and North Korea can get together peacefully to talk about spelling yet can't do the same when the topics actually get imperative -- topics like, oh, I don't know, the nuclear-warhead situation in North Korea. Well, if the talks for the spelling change do succeed and the talks for the nuke situation don't, causing a nuke to destroy the world, at least we will all die with good spelling consciences.

A movement to simplify English spelling has been going on for more than two centuries, but nothing major has ever come of it. "Reform efforts have all failed--partly because English spelling works so well, even though it's confounding," says Ronald Macaulay, a Pitzer College professor of linguistics. "Its strength is that it's written the same--irregularities and all--all over the English speaking world."

As an educator, I was pleased to read the letter from Dr. Stephen J. Wilson in the Times Valley Edition of March 28. He is to be commended for his strong interest in the education of young children. Because his strong concern about the teaching of "invented spelling" may reflect the concerns of many parents, it is an appropriate subject to examine. But I say "No! No! No! Teachers do not teach invented spelling. However they do recognize that children learn to write by inventing their own spelling."

Students in the Centralia School District will receive a minimum of 15 minutes of daily spelling instruction under a program starting this school year. "The ability to spell correctly increases a person's ability to communicate with clarity and fluency," said Assistant Supt. of Instruction Bobbi Mahler. "We want every child in our district to have that fundamental skill." Students will be tested each week to track their progress.

Less than a week before the May 29 article on problems with teaching children spelling in California schools appeared, I was in the principal's office of my daughter's school expressing my concerns on this same issue. My daughter attends a good school and has had wonderful teachers, but I fear she will never learn to spell. Spelling errors in her tests and written work have almost never been corrected in her five years in school. Clearly, children cannot learn to do anything properly without feedback on their errors.

Sometime after the Kings' season ends - and that might not be for a while - it wouldn't be surprising to hear that center Anze Kopitar had been hampered by an injury from mid-March onward. A sore shoulder, maybe. An abdominal pull. Or some other type of dreaded upper-body infirmity whose nature was more closely guarded than most national security secrets. When asked, he repeatedly said he was fine, or as fine as anyone could be during a second straight bruising playoff series.

Monday, April 15, the day of the Boston Marathon bombings and the federal income tax filing deadline, was the saddest day online in five years. At least that's what the makers of the "hedonometer" computer program suggest. Scientists at the University of Vermont and MITRE Corp. have been crunching millions of messages from Twitter in an effort to quantify the public mood. Their results went public Tuesday at hedonometer.org In February, the gang at the University of Vermont and MITRE made headlines when it declared the happiest and saddest cities in the U.S., based on geo-tagged tweets from cellphones: Napa, Calif., and Beaumont, Texas.

Wouldn't this be fun to hear at this year's National Spelling Bee: "May I have the definition please?" "No, you should already know it. " Well, things might not get that drastic, but for the first time in its 86-year history, the National Spelling Bee will require contestants to know what the words mean as well as how to spell them. To qualify for the semifinals and finals, spellers will be judged on a cumulative score that incorporates live spelling, computer-based spelling questions and computer-based vocabulary questions, organizers announced Tuesday.

To bee, or not to bee, has now become a tougher question to answer -- even for whiz kid spellers. The Scripps National Spelling Bee has announced that it is changing the format of its annual competition and adding multiple-choice vocabulary tests to the annual event. To qualify for the semifinals and championship round, spellers will be judged on a cumulative score that incorporates live spelling, computer-based spelling questions and computer-based vocabulary questions, organizers announced on Tuesday.

My husband loves words like "leister. " It's a seven-letter word, conferring a 50-point bonus on a Scrabble player, that's made up of common letters in the game's universe of tiles. So are its anagrams "sterile" and "retiles," of course, but you can add an "s" to leister, if there happens to be a spare one on the board. But what does it mean?* At such questions, most tournament-level Scrabble players will do what my husband does -- shrug. Who cares what it means? That's not what Scrabble is about.

The calendar says it's spring, but that doesn't mean snow season has ended, based on a blizzard warning from the National Weather Service for parts of Colorado. The temperatures in the Denver area was expected to reach the high 60s on Monday but drop rapidly in the evening. By the early hours of Tuesday, it will be cold enough to turn rain into snow, with accumulations of two to four inches expected, the weather service said. “The National Weather Service in Pueblo has issued a blizzard warning ... which is in effect from 3 a.m. to 6 p.m. MDT Tuesday,” the service said  on its website.

Crossword puzzles, hangman and other word games are great fun--and helpful ways to practice spelling skills, build vocabulary and improve your powers of deductive reasoning. Since English words aren't always spelled the way they sound, activities that give you practice in visualizing how words are spelled correctly can also help you increase your verbal proficiency.

By correctly spelling "dilapidated," 13-year-old Lise Pham became the Garden Grove Unified School District's top speller and advances to the county competition in April. Lise, an eighth-grader at McGarvin Intermediate School in Westminster, placed ninth in the same competition last year and this year beat out 6,800 other students in her ascent to the top speller position.

From passed out on a floor to the Final Four - it has been a pulse-rate ride for Carl Hall. "Oh man, it's been a long journey for me," Hall said. Wichita State's senior forward, who overcame a heart condition that sidelined him for two years, has become the inspirational leader on the Shockers' surprising four-game run through the NCAA basketball tournament. Hall introduced himself nationally at the Salt Lake City sub-regional as an undersized 6-foot-8 forward taking on Steven Adams, a 7-footer from Pittsburgh.

Tori Spelling stranded on the side of the road? Does a mother of four even have time to get stranded on the side of the road? Apparently, the answer is yes. "4 kids. 1 dog. 1 car leaking gas broken down on the side of the road= not a great road trip," Spelling posted to Twitter on Wednesday, along with the above photo of herself with kids Liam, 5, Stella, 4, and Hattie, 1, arm around new baby Finn, who was born in August. Oh, and don't forget the dog.  It's not clear if hubby Dean McDermott was along for the ride, so we're not sure who took this classic photo of a frustrating family moment.