Once you’re tired out from your new dance moves, take a break and go see Akeelah and the Bee. I saw it with my 7 1/2 year old son, Noah, this weekend and it was a fabulous movie. It was so much more than a movie about the Scripps Spelling Bee (even though I now know how to spell “xanthosis”). The plot of the movie centers around Akeelah, a girl from south/central LA who rises above her ghetto world and goes onto the National Spelling Bee. Along the way, she gets help from Laurence Fishbourne, a UCLA professor, who is her coach, and Javier, her new found Mexican friend from chi-chi Woodland Hills. When I asked Noah what he liked best about the movie - he said that it taught him if you try your best you can accomplish anything. Now how’s that for a good parent/child moment? And I must say that it was a delight to go to a family movie that was not animated.

And even more on the highbrow list is this article from the New York Times Sunday magazine. The prediction is that within a few years, there will be a virtual library on the World Wide Web that will include every book every published and all available at anyone’s fingertips. The most interesting part was the discussion of how all the books will be linked together rather than individual entities on book shelves. A la Wikipedia, this virtual library could be open source so that anyone can “tag” sections of books that will then link them to other books and so on and so forth. How cool is that?