When I first began researching proverbs in Spanish, or dichos, I sent an e-mail to my family soliciting their favorites. I got a flood of responses, with a surprising amount of crossover. Which actually makes sense considering most of them probably originated with my grandmother in the first place. She didn't e-mail me any herself, but through a complicated family phone tree that stretched all the way from her home in Durango, Mexico to me here in Boston, I was reminded of a few more of her favorites. (And then there was the ever-so-helpful note from my cousin who jokingly asked, "You mean like when you "dicho" school?" Thanks, Jason.)

A few dicho-loving readers also wrote in, including one who described himself as fascinated by "cosas Latinas" (all things Latino).

So here's a random assortment of memorable dichos, along with their English translations or equivalents, that were omitted from the original story solely for the sake of space:

"No hay mal que por bien no venga." (There is no bad that doesn't come for good.)   This favorite of my grandmother's was also passed along by Mark Stephen Caponigro of New York. My cousin Laura (yes, there are a lot of us cousins) feels the the English equivalent of "Every cloud has a silver lining" is probably a bit too optimistic. But it's close. Mr. Caponigro offered: "You know it is not bad, if it turns out OK." And the more religious: "Even if it is really bad, the Big Guy Upstairs is going to make it turn out OK."

Reader Jack Hansen from Walla Walla, Wash., sent in what he suggests are words of caution directed at those contemplating crossing the border from Mexico into the US: "Lo más cerca de los Estados Unidos, lo más lejos del Dios." (The closer you are to the United States, the further you are from God.)

"Más vale malo por conocido que bueno por conocer." (Evil that you know is better than good that you haven't met.)

"Más vale pajaro en mano que cien volando." (A bird in the hand is better than a hundred flying.)

"De tal palo, tal astilla." (From such a stick, such a splinter.) Or, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

"Al que madruga dios lo ayuda." (God helps those who get up early.)

"Date a deseo y oleras a poleo." (Give yourself sparingly, and you'll smell like poleo – a type of mint.) Basically, absence makes the heart grow fonder.

"El flojo trabaja doble." (The lazy person works double.) So, do things right the first time!

"A tu burro le das palos." (You're hitting your own donkey.) Meaning, you're only hurting yourself.

"Como me ves te verás." (The way you see me you'll see yourself one day.) This is a retort used by viejitos (older folks) when muchachos (children) make fun of them.

I'd never heard this one, which comes from Venezuela, but I really like it. "No creo en brujas, pero vuelan, vuelan." (I don't believe in witches, but they do fly.) Or, I'm skeptical, but you never know...

Have a favorite dicho or something else you'd like to share? Please write us at Weekend Zone.

by Teresa Méndez

We knew audiophiles were passionate and detail-oriented. And we were not surprised that many of them weighed in double forte on our story last week on sound quality and digital formats.

The main message from nearly all of them: We’re glad someone’s paying attention.

"Nice to see the grievances of audio dorks like me getting public exposure," wrote Ethan Cheng, of Chicago.

"Thank you for the article on digital music formats," wrote Sam Grubb, of Salem, Ore. "I have resisted all the iPod type devices exactly because I have not been willing to sacrifice sound quality."

Then we got an earful on some arcane but important points. Following are excerpts from several astute e-mailers regarding, in particular, our misclassification of the WAV format – and touching on some other issues. We value the clarifications and appreciate that they took the time to write, and then helped us get in tune.

While the WAV format is lossless, it is not a compressed format. That is the key distinction between it and other lossless formats such as FLAC. Josh Burnett Natick, Mass.

I enjoyed your interesting article on music download quality. Overall it was accurate, but the sentence “The array of audio file formats includes Apple’s AAC and Dolby’s AC3, as well as WMA, OGG, FLAC, AVI, and others.” was a little wrong. AVI is a container format normally used for video – it can hold audio encoded in lots of formats (AC3, MP2, MP3, M4A, etc). Also FLAC is a lossless codec – it gives the full CD-quality audio. David Batley Exeter, Britain

A WAV pulled from a CD is not a bit-perfect copy of the master tape [as stated by one of your sources]. A master tape – the large reel of magnetic audio tape that was created in the original studio mix session and subsequently thrown in a vault – contains far more information and “richness” than the CD format can store. Even modern digital recordings, which result in digital files rather than master tapes, are almost always recorded in higher quality than what ends up on a CD. CD audio is 16-bit, 44.1KHz PCM, which is actually a big compromise in and of itself. (For comparison, the DVD-Audio format has up to 24-bit, 192KHz PCM.) The fact that the phrase “CD quality” has become synonymous with “perfect sound” is an enormous fallacy that causes people like me lots of grief. Ethan Cheng Chicago

If you’d like to advance the discussion even further, write to us at Weekend Zone.

by Clayton Collins

So, the Frog network, the WB, is gone, but there are more than a few tadpoles from that pond swimming around looking for a permanent home. Some shows have resurfaced on the new CW Network, a few are waiting in the wings, but the most curious is the tail, oops, tale of the WB Network sitcom reject, the pilot-now-gone-viral-video, “Nobody’s Watching.”

This is the baby of “Scrubs” creator Bill Lawrence and his buddy, Neil Goldman. After the WB threw it back, it popped up on YouTube, the Internet video site, over the summer and has become a huge hit. The two leads, Will and Derrick have flexed their, um, little frog legs? and moved on over into now familiar commercial parodies of Mentos and soda. Meanwhile, NBC has come a courtin’, handing over some small change and the duo has been hired to produce some webisodes of the pilot.

Not content to swim around in the vast digital pond of the Internet, the team this week launched its very own website, nobodyswatching.tv, hoping to use it to convince NBC to take the full frog rather than the small tales, and put the actual sitcom on the air as a regular series.

The website is kinda fun, full of reader commentaries about why the TV sitcom is in such dire straits (I have to agree there – promotional DVDs of yet another season of “I Love Lucy” just came round, and watching those makes you wonder where comedy has gone so wrong), other videos by Will and Derrick, and some other content.

It's hard to say if the show will end up at the Prince’s ball, but the tale is a cautionary one for both the networks who think they know what people will watch and for the creative types who think Hollywood will recognize a Prince when they see one.

In any event, at least they all seem to be on the same page for now. In a very “Blair Witch Project” style of blending of fiction and fact, in a fictional press release about their new website, the fictional Will and Derrick coyly made this observation about the real head of NBC entertainment: “We each got a very light kiss on the forehead from Kevin Reilly, so we already consider this experience a victory.”

Princes-in-waiting, if ever there were ones.

by Gloria Goodale

The other day my 10-year-old popped in at the igloo home of a friend and discovered that her friend’s Puffle had vanished. She had to call her right away to let her know.

My daughter and her friend inhabit the forms of animated penguins in an interactive online game called Club Penguin. Puffles – shaggy, big-eyed blobs – are the animated penguins’ animated pets. Players can adopt one and care for it by allocating points – which they win by playing fun little games within the game – to food and care. The little creatures visibly brighten when cared for. Neglected, they can run away.

Players can also waddle up to other players and address them (that is, their penguins) in print, choosing from pull-down menus of pre-typed phrases – “hi,” “let’s play,” “go away” – or by typing their own words, which appear in real time. That makes Club Penguin, which launched this past summer, a social-networking site for the 8-to-14 set (and training wheels, in effect, for the byzantine worlds of MySpace and Facebook.

I know this particular friend of my daughter’s. She lives right down the street, and visits often (in person, not as a penguin avatar) to join my daughter in noncomputer games. I don’t know the other penguins, and neither does my daughter, even though she might occasionally engage one or more in an online slide down a mountainside, or exchange innocuous greetings.

She also knows that she doesn’t know them – no matter how much they divulge, unsolicited, and as cute as they are in pastels. We’ve had the Internet talk about how anonymity clouds discernment, and she doesn’t even log on if neither my wife nor I can be in the actual (not virtual) room. There’s also a two-level “safe chat” function. One level disallows messaging. The other screens messages for suspect language (a tall task, and the site’s operators concede it’s not a failproof filter).

Parents need to know enough to select safe-chat areas of the Club. That should be an obvious part of knowing what tweens are doing online. The more stringent safe-chat areas, I’ve noticed, are never the ones marked “full.”

Oh, and there’s retail going on inside Club Penguin  too, even if it's facsimile spending. Besides “buying” Puffle chow and little beds and scratching posts, a player can accessorize his or her little penguin with clothes and sporting goods. It can be an incentive to play a lot of games and compile a lot of points, which serve as currency. But a player can only spend them if he or she joins: $15 a month (in legal tender) for the full Club experience.

My daughter and her friend have settled for the freebie version – for basic, unadorned penguins and basic blue Puffles. But message boards buzz with player chatter about whose parents went in for the membership and whose have declared it a waste of money. There are also boards online at which players trade “cheats” that can enhance point-gathering.

The real questions for parents: Do you want to set up your preteens with yet another training ground for the lesson that spending yields status, and can justify corner-cutting? And do you want them chatting with cute little penguins who might not be who they say they are?

Let us know where you stand on online gaming for tweens.

by Clayton Collins

Basketball for keeps.

That’s the essence of streetball, an extreme form of playground basketball that's thrown down by some of America's most charismatic young athletes.

If these hoopsters pulled any of their flashier trademark moves - think 720-degree dunk – during an ordinary game they'd probably be benched for selfish play. In streetball that's just the way it's done - 100 percent highlight reel and no apologies.

This week the And1 Mixtape Tour wraps up in New York - the city where this subculture sport was born - after a 25-city swing featuring exhibition games.

Crowds averaged 5,000 to 6,000 per venue, says Bill Lessard, publicist for streetball superstar Waliyy "Main Event" Dixon.

Streetball's not a feeder for future NBA stars, but neither is it simply a home for pro-game castoffs. "This thing is its own form of success," says Mr. Lessard. "Main Event," he points out, has built a huge following, scored product endorsements, and even landed a job as co-host - with Public Enemy rapper Chuck D - of "Sports Skool: Streetball," an instruction show broadcast on On Demand.

Because streetballers tend to exude the kind of high-performance joy that characterized the old Harlem Globetrotters, they can also inspire youths to add real creativity to their athleticism - and to see basketball in a whole new light.

Now that's a slam dunk.

by Clayton Collins