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.

From The Economist‘s “Of sommeliers and stomachs“:

a group of researchers led by Joseph Kanner of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has discovered that pairing red wines like these with red meat appears to be more than just a matter of taste. If the two mix in the stomach, compounds in the wine thwart the formation of harmful chemicals that are released when meat is digested.

Enjoying Dao Duc Quan’s erotic nude work. (via KCA)

After a graduation speech delivered in partial Vietnamese by Cindy Vo and Hieu Vo to express their respect for their parents, the school officials in Terrebonne Parish are calling for speeches to be address in English only. Cindy Vo said: “Co len minh khong bang ai, co suon khong ai bang minh.” I am not sure what she is saying. Is it misquoted? Could someone rewrite it with proper accents? In any rate, it is fucking absurd not to be able to say a line in foreign language during a speech.