1) A wee CAMA shindig on Halloween night -- details there at Hanoi Grapevine the new Arts listings blog

2) (Almost) time to invest in North Korea? Apparently the wee man is into the Vietnam-economic-template -- however unlikely that is.

3) Language evolves: apparently Thuy Linh is now an adjective and a verb. "Don't be Thuy Linh", or "don't do a Thuy Linh..." Still not quite sure how that works... but anyway, the people who uploaded the sex-clip featuring Thuy Linh have been rounded up and arrested and "according to Vietnamese criminal law, the culprits would be fined some VND3-30 million (US$300-3,000), probation up to three years, and possibly three imprisonment depending on their involvement." Thuy Linh herself is in the clear (of course though her career is over) but she might have a new fiance...

4) No reason to mention football this Monday as the Minsk FC's season has gone completely pear shaped.

5) Apparently the Irish invented the words baloney, jazz and dude and many more. Well, according to that guy anyway. Can't vouch for it but a few make certain sense -- go leor becomes galore, uisce to whisky, Teddy de Burca Snr. points out Slan becoming so long, and so on.

RE jazz: OF ALL THE hundreds of American slang words that he [Cassidy, the author] has traced back to the Irish language, his favourite is jazz. Ironically, the name is associated with African-American music, though the earliest performers of "jazz" didn't like the word. Jazz comes from "teas", a noun for heat, passion and excitement. He's traced the use of "jazz" as a synonym for sex as far back as 1899. Musician Richard Holbrooke wrote in 1974: "I shall be glad to swear on oath before a notary public that 'jazz' as a sex word was not only used in San Francisco before the earthquake and fire, but that it was of such common use that it was a localism."

"Jazz was so full of jasm and gism ('teas ioma' - an abundance of heat and passion; figuratively semen) that no one could, or would, write it down. In 1913, it was a word you learned by ear - like jazz music."