A downright observation from Jeff Kelly on the movie 21, which based on a true story, but complete bullshit:

If there’s anything we can learn from 21, it’s that Hollywood won’t give an Asian man a starring role unless it calls for someone who can do karate while getting berated by Chris Tucker.

In fact, 21 gives us perhaps the greatest whitewash in recent Hollywood history–a broad, sweeping stroke of Caucasian across the majority of the cast.

The real MIT Blackjack Team was almost totally Asian, but you’d never know that from the film. Even Kevin Spacey’s character was based in part on an Asian professor, who has been known to dress like a woman in order to sneak into casinos. Apparently, a transvestite Asian math genius isn’t as interesting as Spacey in the “just make sure the check clears” stage of his career.

But hey, at least they did cast a pair of Asians as members of the Blackjack Team. Naturally, in sticking with current Hollywood trends, they were made into goofy loser sidekick types, while the white kids handled all of the heavy intellectual lifting. Not since Mickey Rooney’s performance in Breakfast at Tiffany’s has Hollywood treated Asians with such respect and dignity.

Love the orange against the brown texture of New Concept web site. The navigation is very slick too.

Such a smooth criminal.

Give it a try.

The trailer alone caused a woman in tears. How cute! I gotta see the film. Waiting to take the kids to watch it this weekend.

NPR reports:

The cliché refers to newborn children as “bundles of joy,” but recent research indicates that bundles of anxiety, or even bundles of depression, might be more accurate.

I don’t care. I still want four.

Pop singer and former model Carla Bruni is impressing the French as a first lady.

Washington Post‘s Michael Alison Chandler reports:

Asian American students will outnumber white classmates for the first time in the freshman class at the region’s most prestigious public magnet school this fall, a milestone reached as the number of African Americans and Hispanics has remained low and the Fairfax County School Board prepares to review the school’s admission policy.

Way to go, Asian kids!

McCain hated the gooks and now bloggers too. What about a gook who blogs?

A little history of “American The Beautiful” from NPR:

America the Beautiful” didn’t start out as an American anthem. It was first a poem written in 1893 by a teacher, Katharine Lee Bates (1859-1929), after a visit to Pike’s Peak in Colorado. It first appeared in print in 1895. Since then, more than 60 musical settings have been made of its words.

The music we typically associate with those words is by Samuel Augustus Ward (1847-1903). It was originally a hymn called “Materna” and was composed before Katharine Lee Bates took her trip to Pike’s Peak. Even though Bates did not have the melody in her mind, the words fit the music perfectly, and it has become the version we know today.

Check out Ray Charles’s live, soulful rendition.