Dana’s first anticipated match. She’s rooting for the ARG. Good luck NGA!

I am watching Duke more than the game so can’t really follow too closely. ARG is dominating for sure with the first goal within 5 minutes into the game.

Asian pride baby!

First Half: KOR was well organized and impressive in technical. KOR scored the first goal within six minutes into the game.

Second Half: Another goal for KOR. The Asian boys had definitely stepped up their game.

Shakira humped the speaker (cue in at 3:30) on “She Wolf,” shook her booty on “Hips Don’t Lie” and torn up the stage with “Waka Waka.” Damn, that chick is HOT.

I was talking to my man Hoang last night and I couldn’t help laughing at these wise words:

Married women want to change their men; married men want their women to stay the same.

Why is divorce so expensive? Because it’s worth it.

Good luck to the underdog!

First Half: URU was actually very impressive against the powerhouse FRA. Even though FRA had the ball more, URU hustled hard to keep the ball away from the goal.

Second Half: No score on both side. FRA clearly dominated the attack, but URU did a great defend job for a 10-men game.

One of the School of Business professors, Lisa Delpy Neirotti, takes a group of students to World Cup to learn about the economic impact of the games on South Africa and study the way sports events can be used for social change. Watch the clip on ABC News.

The first game is finally here: the host team against my amigos. The choice is hard, but I have root for my amigos. So go Mexico. It’s not bad to spend my last vacation day watching the World Cup even though I wish I could extend my vacation for the next month.

First Half: Not a very exciting first half even though Mexico had more possession and control. I am sure Mexico will put at least one in for the second half.

Second Half: The pace was much better. RSA charged more and scored the first goal. MEX was able to put in one goal and leveled the playing field. Not a bad first game.

Twelve years into show biz with numerous forgettable releases, Quang Dung has yet to learn the art of crafting an album. He still throws together a handful of tracks and picks out a word for the album title.

His latest release, Toi, has no concept or any particular theme that goes into the album. You could just put Toi on random and the listening experience would still be the same: just a bunch of tracks with various songwriters and arrangements that have no connection whatsoever.

If you play the album in random, however, you might not get to hear Quang Dung’s highly irritating pronunciation on the opening track, Bao Chan’s “Roi Dau Yeu Ve.” His “x” in particular is like sharp needles poking into your ears. By the time he gets to “xa xoi, xa xoi da xa xoi roi,” the piercing sound is just unbearable. So it might be not a bad thing to skip this track altogether.

While we’re at it, let’s also skip Anh Bang’s “Anh Con No Em” and Hoang Trong Thuy’s “Doan Khuc Cuoi Cho Em.” For some reasons, these two tunes had been covered again and again by countless of singers in the past year. The royalty fees must be on sale or none at all. In all fairness, I wouldn’t mind hearing another cover if Quang Dung could bring something fresh to the tune. In this case, neither the production nor the interpretation stands out.

Quang Dung once again offers the same safety formula he had used since his debut. Toi is just another predictable work that demonstrates nothing but his creative limitation. It’s a damn shame that Quang Dung can’t seem get beyond his comfort zone.

One of the game’s hottest MILFs drops her 10th-solo Kim Nguu. The title, which named according to her Zodiac sign (Taurus), has nothing to do with the lollipop tunes on the album. It just goes to show how much Hien Thuc had invested in this CD.

The leadoff track, “Yeu Dau Theo Gio Bay,” kicks off with some nursery rhymes like “cay cay” and “bay bay.” Although Hien Thuc added some emotion to her singing, the lackluster production and the annoying rap murdered the song. “Nuoc Mat Pha Le” is even worse. It sounds like millions of other Chinese-infected tunes that spread like bird flu over the Vietnamese music scene.

From my personal experience, if an album released in Vietnam with a track in English, 99 percent of the time that CD ended up being mediocre. This one is no exception and the dead-boring “Never Say Goodbye” is a proof. Kim Nguu is apparent that Hien Thuc is in no competition with Hoang Thuy Linh in the pop-r&b-dance territory.

Richard Williams’s The Blue Moment is not just another study of Miles Davis’s monumental Kind of Blue, but the chapter that delves into each of the album’s masterpiece alone is worth the price of the book. Williams’s meticulous yet comprehensible analysis makes the music easy to understand even to none-jazz fans. His take on “So What” is an illustrative example:

Davis’s solo begins against an apparently inadvertent but superbly appropriate crash from Cobb’s cymbal—perhaps the most famous cymbal crash in all of jazz history—as the drummer switches from brushes to sticks; hanging and decaying over the first two bars of the improvisation, the shimmering sound provides a perfect platform for the trumpeter, who prowls the scale like a cat picking its way between windowsill ornaments, his peerless lyricism in full bloom.

All you have to do is play “So What” and you can hear what exactly he is talking about. But that’s not all. The Blue Moment also shows the success of Davis’s sidemen like John Coltrane, Bill Evans and Cannonball Adderley who had learned and drawn inspiration from Kind of Blue and moved beyond it. From the Velvet Underground to James Brown to the Soft Machine, the Miles Davis’s influence could be heard. The Blue Moment is definitely a joy to read from start to finish, but if you just want to learn about Kind of Blue, the title chapter is a must-read.