A Tribe Called Quest’s debut is an archetypal of an old school hip-hop album. The beats are banging. The lyrics are witty. The deliveries are engaging. On top of all, no cuss words were needed. The album opens with “Push It Along” and the hook is just addictive. The jazz horn samples are just so savory to the ears. The beat on “Lucky of Lucien” is so damn tuneful and you gotta love the wordplay from Q-Tip, “If you go to jail, then who will pay the bail? / Deport you back to France on a ship with a sail / Escargot, Lucien, you eat snails.” And of course the classic, “Bonita Applebum—you gotta put me on” with rhymes like, “38-24-37 / You and me, hun, we’re a match made in Heaven.” We need to get back to the good old rhymes sans the misogyny.

Demented Donald was caught on camera dozing off in meetings during his Middle East state visit. Let’s face it. Demented Donald is not doing well. His health is in decline. Mental illness, dementia, and aging are catching up to him. Soon he won’t be able to hide anymore. Now’s the time to defend our democracy from an ailing authoritarian.

During his speech in Qatar, Demented Donald said, “We just apprehended, for example, the ISIS terrorist of the [WTF?] the one that caused all of the problems in Afghanistan.” Once again, Demented Donald said incomprehensible shit. It’s dementia, stupid.

Yesterday we attended our kids’ piano recital at their instructor’s studio, which is at the back of his house. We missed several recitals over the winter because we had skiing and snowboarding activities. The kids we started at the same time as ours and even the ones after ours had moved into classical music. Their performances were impressive.

I am not making a comparison. I am just making the realization. Xuân performed well, but he spent three months or more on one song. Đán didn’t have the courage to perform one song. He told me and his mom that he no longer wanted to perform. He just wanted to learn piano for his own enjoyment.

In the past, I told him that if he didn’t want to practice and want to perform, he should just quit and stop wasting our money. Piano private lessons aren’t cheap. Now I have come to term with it. If he doesn’t want to perform anymore, I am fine with self enjoyment over competition. My only hope is that he will continue to improve himself.

I have no expectations or dreams for my kids anymore. If they enjoy to do things with me, that’s cool. If not, I am not going to force them. I am tired of repeating myself. My words just go into one ear and right out the other. I don’t care what they do individually, but they have to participate when we do things together as a family. If we go somewhere as a family, they can’t say they don’t want to go. That’s not a choice until they move out on their own.

For some odd reasons, I never paid much attention to A Tribe Called Quest until recently, particularly its 1991 release, The Low End Theory. “Excursions” kicks off the album with a hypnotic baseline. Q-Tips rhymes virtuosically, “You could find the Abstract listening to hip-hop / My pops used to say, it reminded him of be-bop / I said, well daddy don’t you know that things go in cycles / The way that Bobby Brown is just ampin’ like Michael.” Ali Shaheed Muhammad has an ear for jazz and he brilliantly connects jazz and hip-hop together and his signature sound is more pronounced on the next track “Buggin’ Out.” The baselines hits even harder against hip-hop backbeat. Phife’s straightforward rap contrasts nicely with Q-Tip’s fluid flow. On “Jazz (We’ve Got),” the muted horn sample, reminiscent of the Miles Davis sound, flows over the beat like ghost. Now! That’s a classic jazz-hip-hop album.

After a few days of heavy rain, I needed to climb up to the roof to clean the gutters. I always dreaded going up to the roof and I didn’t go up last summer.

This morning, the weather was cleared; therefore, I decided to go up. Sure enough one of the gutters was clogged. I just had to clear it. I also hammered in the nails and tightened up the screws. The strong wind made them loose.

I wondered if anyone else was doing these. I haven’t seen any of my neighbors up on their roof to hammer in the nails.

At one point the sun hit me hard. I was sweating profusely. I was hoping I was not getting dehydrated.

Demented Donald claims that he came up the new word “equalize,” which has been around since 1599. Trump is definitely showing sign of dementia.

Khuê Phạm’s debut, Brothers and Ghosts, is a historical fiction loosely based on stories of her family. Set in Berlin, Sài Gòn, and California, the narratives flips between a young Vietnamese-German journalist who is searching for her identity, her father who left Việt Nam during the war to study medical in Germany, and her uncle who settled in California. The stories of the war in Việt Nam and the new life in a foreign land juxtapose from one chapter to the next, which is similar to Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai’s The Mountains Sing.

I would prefer reading the novel in its original text, but Ms. Phạm wrote Brothers and Ghosts in German. I had to read in English translation. Fortunately, Charles Hawley and Daryl Lindsey have done an excellent job of translating from German to English. The novel is engaging from start to finish. Furthermore, Vietnamese words have proper diacritics, which make a huge different for Vietnamese readers.

Type and Graphic Designer Dương Trần mentioned Vietnamese Typography in his HyperTalks 3.0. Dương gave an informative presentation and shared his own experience on designing Vietnamese diacritics.

Demented Donald forgot to sign executive order. He came. He ranted. He walked out. His staff had to remind him to sign it. What do we expect from an almost 80-year-old child?