On the new release, Mot Khuc Song Hong, Le Minh Son offers his own sketches of Hanoi. After his failed attempt to sing in his last release, Le Minh Son has smartened up to know not to deliver the songs himself; therefore, he enlisted his veterans (Thanh Lam, Tung Duong and Ngoc Khue) as well as rookies (Hoang Quyen and Ha Linh) to help out with the vocals.

Tung Duong sets off the album with “Ha Noi Cua Toi Oi.” As always, Tung Duong delivers the tune with soul, power and individuality. Le Minh Son’s simple strumming guitar is a perfect complement to Tung Duong’s voice. The sensational, Miles-ballad trumpet solo heightens the vibe of the tune. Ngoc Khue continues with “Co Ve Pho,” in which she brings back her child-like signature in Ben Bo Ao Nha Minh. Again Le Minh Son’s accompanying guitar is marvelous along the distinctive sound of the Vietnamese flute. Although Hoang Quyen is new to me, I dig her dark, raspy vocals immediately on “Ret Dau Mua.” On here, Le Minh Son switches up his guitar for some Latin flavor. The best part is when he picks an obstinato in responding to Hoang Quyen’s upper register. The arrangements get more complex after the third track, yet they become less intriguing. Le Minh Son should have stayed with the simple acoustic throughout.

The Lam-Son collaboration used to be a match made in heaven, but now it’s a match made in hell. They should mesh well since Son likes his songs to be sings with authority and passion. Thanh Lam definitely has both. In fact, she is over-qualified. As a result, her vibrato on the big notes is unbearable, especially on “Truoc Giao Thua.” On the title track, Thanh Lam sounds like she’s in a trance and she uses vibrato like T-Pain uses Auto-Tune.

Ha Linh who is also new to me closes out the album with “Han Han.” The song sounds more like Ngoc Dai than Le Minh Son. Nevertheless, Mot Khuc Song Hong offers some refreshing new tunes instead of the endless covering of old tunes that currently dominating the Vietnamese pop scene.

Japan has packed up. It’s time for Spain vs. Portugal. It should be a great match.

Damn Portugal!

Why monkeys and apes don’t masturbate as much as human, Jesse Bering believes:

The answer for this cross-species difference, I’m convinced, lies in our uniquely evolved mental representational abilities—we alone have the power to conjure up at will erotic, orgasm-inducing scenes in our theater-like heads … internal, salacious fantasies completely disconnected from our immediate external realities.

And why men masturbate more than women:

And, perhaps not surprisingly, men seem to entertain more visitors in their heads than do women. In a 1990 study published in the Journal of Sex Research, evolutionary psychologists Bruce Ellis and Donald Symons found that 32 percent of men said that they’d had sexual encounters in their imagination with more than 1,000 different people, compared to only 8 percent of women. Men also reported rotating in from their imaginary rosters one imagined partner for another during the course of a single fantasy more often than women did.

A bunch of us, five couples and five kids, went camping over the weekend. All we did was BBQing, chit-chating, hanging out by the water, sleeping in the tent and watching the World Cup through my laptop. As you can see, Duke was having a wonderful time playing with the water. Here is an adorable rendition of “Hom Qua Em Di Chua Huong” by Susie, one of our friends’ daughter.

That’s it for the US boys. At least they made it to the second round. Better luck next time.

School of Business homepage and a handful secondary pages has been redesigned and brought into Vignette content management system to kick off the first phase of GW’s unified web presence. Eventually GW will have a consistent look and feel no matter where a user is on the site, but for now this is our first step. There will be more work done.

Two of my favorite World Cup team go against each other. It should be a great match even though they both will advance.

It’s about time the little guy starts to walk. Two nights before, Duke discovered that he could walk on the mattress instead of sleeping on it. Through walky talky, I could hear Duke and Dana laughed out loud instead of settling down to sleep. Yesterday he began to take some drunken steps while clapped his hands. He has been able to stand on his own for about a month now when he’s into something exciting and forgot to grab onto something.

Cu Dao still cries every morning at the daycare drop off. Fortunately, he only lasted for about fifteen to twenty minutes after I left. I came to pick him up last Wednesday and he was playing with his classmates until he spotted me. The teachers continue to be very patience with him. They also figure out his schedule or his eating and sleeping habits. Duke is getting into the groove of things except for the crying in the morning.

Cu Dao is very aware of his environment and he knows exactly what he wants. He would keep on pointing his finger until we give him what he has in mind. At meal time, he wouldn’t eat until he could get something on his hands to explore. The more complex the object the faster the meal gets done. He eats well and drink lots of milk. In fact, milk is currently his favorite food/drink. He could drink milk any time and under any circumstances. We are very glad that he loves milk.

Slovakia scored two goals and Italy is going home.

Now that the content entry for the new GW Business web site is locked down, I get a moment to move to a new MacBook Pro so I can hand my old one off to the student worker. I started Migration Assistant last night and everything seemed to work fine until I made some updates. The system went straight into Kernel Panic and no matter how many times I rebooted the laptop, the panic didn’t go way. I had to reinstall OS X from scratch again and do the good old manual migration. I wasted three hours last night for nothing.

I am now in the process of installing CS5 and Adobe makes my upload my photo ID in order to use the educational version. So I uploaded my photo ID, filled out a bunch of forms and this is what I get, “The eligibility verification process may take up to two business days after receipt of your eligibility documents.”