As if the video in Saturday’s post wasn’t endearing enough, here’s Norah Jones performing a modified version of “Don’t Know Why” on Sesame Street while sitting next to Elmo.

It’s kind of like Ernest & Bertram, but different.

We all know words that end with -ly are adverbs. Except when they aren’t.

Can you name a noun, verb, adjective, conjunction, and interjection that end in -ly?

(I wasn’t able to think of a pronoun or preposition, but if you can, post that too!)

How about a holiday, an insect, a country, and three characters from Shakespeare that end in -ly?

Can you name two former U.S. presidents with “ly” somewhere in their first names?

Post whatever you have in the comments below, and I’ll try to respond promptly!

UPDATE: Correct responses submitted by Erin (5), Kenneth W. Davis (4), and DeLisa (4). See comments for answers.

Via the original creators of Charlie the Unicorn, it is my great honor to be able to share the German re-dub of Charlie the Unicorn.

Discuss.

Well, as long as I’m already being blocked by the filter, I may as well share this with you.

It’s an eight-minute adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour starring Ernie and Bert from Sesame Street. What more needs to be said?

(Warning: Adult Language and Content)

This film was shown at Sundance in 2002 to great acclaim, but Sesame Workshop’s lawyers put the kibosh on it, and it was pulled from release.

For another fascinating story about Bert, check out the Bert Is Evil page of one of my all-time favorite websites, Snopes.com, to find out how Bert accidentally ended up at an anti-American protest rally in Bangladesh:

The Osama bin Laden poster – with the muppet – was displayed at rallies by pro-bin Laden protesters and appeared in photographs carried by news agencies such as Reuters and Associated Press.

The technology of today has an incredible potential to make the physical distances between us much less of a barrier. Other distances between us may take some more time.

There’s a good article in this week’s Economist about Mongolia’s dispute with China over which of the two peoples are the true heirs of Genghis Khan:

In a country of only 2.7m people scattered over an area four times the size of Germany, national heroes are few and far between. This makes it all the more galling that Genghis is claimed by China too. Unlike the Russians, the Chinese have got round their subjugation by the Mongols by insisting he was one of their own. Genghis’s grandson, Kublai Khan, founded China’s Yuan dynasty in the 13th century. That, in China’s view, makes Genghis himself an honorary Chinese emperor.

The dispute was apparently sparked by a new Genghis Khan theme park. Is it possible that Khan is viewed differently over there than he is over here?

Anyway, what drew me to this article was that it reminded me of a study published a few years ago, also concerned with the legacy of Genghis Khan:

An international group of geneticists studying Y-chromosome data have found that nearly 8 percent of the men living in the region of the former Mongol empire carry y-chromosomes that are nearly identical. That translates to 0.5 percent of the male population in the world, or roughly 16 million descendants living today.

16 million descendants. And that’s only men descended from Khan directly through the male line, father to son, for the past 800 years. The total number of Khan’s descendants living today is truly incalculable.

So, China and Mongolia should probably stop arguing over which of their people are the true heirs of Genghis Khan. My guess is, almost all of them are.