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As Abraham Lincoln always said, "The trouble with quotes on the Internet is that you never know if they're accurate."

Well, no — barring a weird rift in time, he probably didn't say that. But when it comes to the quotations of other famous figures — and, it seems, even life offline — things occasionally get far murkier.

Just ask the U.S. Postal Service.

On Tuesday, the USPS unveiled a limited-edition stamp intended to honor the late poet Maya Angelou, featuring her beaming smile and a choice quotation to fill the frame. "A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer," reads the stamp, "it sings because it has a song."

A moving sentiment, to be sure, and one that gracefully dovetails with the title to Angelou's best-known work, her memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Perhaps for that reason, when that famous sentence gets uttered, Angelou's name often isn't far behind. Even President Obama reinforced the link in his opening remarks at the presentation of the 2013 National Medal of Arts and National Humanities Medal.

Cue the rain on the parade: On Monday, the day before the stamp's big reveal, The Washington Post confirmed that the quotation did not, in fact, originate with Maya Angelou. Rather, it was author Joan Walsh Anglund, whose 1967 book A Cup of Sun featured the line, only with the word "he" instead of "it."

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First lady Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey, among other distinguished presenters, attend the unveiling of the Maya Angelou Forever Stamp on Tuesday. Jacquelyn Martin/AP hide caption

itoggle caption Jacquelyn Martin/AP

First lady Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey, among other distinguished presenters, attend the unveiling of the Maya Angelou Forever Stamp on Tuesday.

Jacquelyn Martin/AP

USPS spokesman Mark Saunders responded to The Post, noting, "Had we known about this issue beforehand, we would have used one of [Angelou's] many other works. ... The sentence held great meaning for her and she is publicly identified with its popularity."

On Tuesday, David Partenheimer, another spokesman for the Postal Service, added: "The sentence was chosen to accompany her image on the stamp to reflect her passion for the written and spoken word."

Anglund, for her part, took the news amiably.

"It's an interesting connection, and interesting it would happen and already be printed and on her stamp," she told The Post. "I love her and all she's done, and I also love my own private thinking that also comes to the public because it comes from what I've been thinking and how I've been feeling."

The Internet, meanwhile, took the news as the Internet so frequently does — with a worldwide smirk and an armada of Photoshopped images. British newspaper The Telegraph compiled a few of the choicest nuggets, but for now, here's a personal favorite — and a caution that all would-be quoters might do well to remember:

That definitely isn't a Maya Angelou quote. pic.twitter.com/07QL8WnJCF

— Dave Itzkoff (@ditzkoff) April 7, 2015

Maya Angelou

USPS

Stamp

Most Americans don't have a clear picture of what everyday life is like in Iran for the obvious reason that that nation has been isolated from the West for more than three decades. Still, windows open occasionally. A few years ago, Asghar Farhadi's Oscar-winning Best Foreign Language film, A Separation, offered Western eyes a glimpse of a middle-class Iranian marriage under stress.

Now, following years in limbo due to distribution glitches, comes an earlier film by the same director — About Elly, a thriller perched right on the fault line between modern thinking and Islamic tradition.

Farhadi opens the film with the sound of pure joy: Seven adults and three kids shrieking at the top of their lungs as they head out on a weekend vacation.

They're coming through a tunnel somewhere between Tehran and the nearby Caspian Sea, and everyone's flushed with excitement, including Elly, the one stranger among them. She's a young teacher, who's been invited along by a woman who barely knows her, and who is not-too-subtly matchmaking for a recently divorced buddy.

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A Complex 'Separation' In Iran

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'A Separation': In Tehran, Houses And Hearts Divided

It's not clear that she's actually told either Elly or the divorced buddy this. But Elly's friendly, and the rest of the group has known each other since college, so there are smiles all around as the group muddles through misunderstandings about a beachfront cabin — no phone, no internet ... no beds — and settle in for games of volleyball and charades.

Through all this camaraderie, you get the sense that something's being left unsaid, but there's such good feeling among these folks, that it carries everyone along until the middle of the next day, when something happens — I shouldn't say what, exactly — and all their various ties that bind come into conflict with what amount to lies that blind. Little fibs really, nothing that seems crucial in the telling, but as the little white lies pile up, and people realize how many social taboos have been flouted during their weekend getaway, relationships are threatened. Then reputations.

Writer and director Asghar Farhadi first came to international attention with his wrenching A Separation, which dealt with the marital and — more intriguingly to Western eyes — the societal pressures that weigh on contemporary middle-class Iranians: Class and economic issues, and secular tensions with Islamic teachings.

Those also play a part in About Elly, which was made two years earlier. It's a more straightforward, less complicated movie — a younger man's film in some ways — but it's no less nuanced about how its characters reconcile the competing demands of their own modern expectations of life, and their society's less-than-flexible Islamic traditions.

"A little deception here and there," you can almost hear the characters thinking to themselves, "Who could it hurt, really?"

Everyone, as it turns out.

Supermarkets devote aisle-end displays to Spam and its familiar blue and yellow tin. A local Hormel subsidiary, CJ CheilJedang Corp., manufactures the product here, printing the logo on one side with characters from the Korean alphabet, known as Hangul.

It's relatively cheap, too: A 200-gram can costs about $3.

At that price, many Koreans view it as a tasty side dish, especially as processed foods go. "It's seen as a high-end luncheon meat," say Cho Hye-Jin, who works in Seoul. "Out of the variety of luncheon meats available in Korea, Spam is probably the best quality."

Cho and Park Jin-Hong, both construction consultants, say they most often see their peers consume Spam along with soju — a clear alcoholic beverage made with rice, potatoes or other starches. Park says Spam isn't a staple of his diet — "it's too salty" — but he does enjoy it.

Kim said he prefers a low-sodium version, one of two varieties (along with the original) sold in Korea. Customers here can also buy prepackaged Spam products, such as fried rice, in frozen-food aisles.

South Koreans aren't the only Asians who use Spam in traditional meals. In the Philippines, for example, it's sometime served in rellenong manok, a stuffed chicken dish. They're also not the first to adopt specialties introduced by the U.S. military.

Perhaps the most iconic Spam dish in South Korea is a spicy soup known as budae jjigae, or army stew. After the war, Koreans used U.S. Army rations — sometimes smuggled off military bases or donated by soldiers — to make the deep-red dish.

This concoction comes in many varieties. Restaurants use a mix of hot spices, noodles, Spam, sausage, beans, corn, green vegetables — even cheese. It's been called "pig stew," "soldier stew" and "Johnson's stew," the latter after our 36th president.

Chris Amoroso, an American, discovered budae jjigae a few years ago while teaching English here. He liked it so much that he created a video on YouTube explaining the dish's colorful history. "It's delicious," he tells viewers, sitting before a boiling pot.

"It is not a soup that one can eat often. It's so rich and probably not very healthy," he tells The Salt. "Americans should know that if they ever get a chance to go [to Korea], they should definitely try it."

While the soup is an ingrained part of the food culture here, seasonal gift boxes are still a big reason why Spam sales are so strong in South Korea. The gifts typically come in Spam-branded boxes, with as many as nine cans inside, along with other items, like cooking oil. Families exchange them during the traditional harvest holiday season, known as chuseok, in early fall, and the Lunar New Year. Bosses hand them out to employees.

These boxes represent more than half of Hormel's annual Spam sales on the peninsula, the company says — perhaps one reason for the slick advertisements promoting them in South Korea.

Later in the short video advertisement described above, the camera switches between enticing rice and noodle dishes, an elegant sandwich and multiple cans of Spam. One by one, the cans fill the gift box. The young woman returns and smiles into the camera. She later shyly tucks her hair behind an ear while looking down, as if pondering something special.

The music continues. "We have prepared the gift set with all our hearts," says the narrator. "Spam gift set — everyone knows what it's worth."

Gray, who lives in Seoul, believes he knows the product's value here, too.

"I always joke with guests who come to Korea, 'See, you could have packed a whole suitcase of Spam. You would have made a lot of friends."

Hae Ryun Kang contributed to this report.

Matt Stiles, who recently tried Spam in ramen noodles, is former data editor at NPR and currently a Seoul-based freelance journalist. You can share your Spam stories with @stiles or @NPRFood.

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Would you lead a more active lifestyle if it meant lower life insurance premiums? Insurer John Hancock and Vitality, a global wellness firm, are hoping the answer is yes. But there is a condition: They get to track your activity.

The practice is already employed in Australia, Europe, Singapore and South Africa, where Vitality is based.

The companies announced the new plan today, and posted a video on John Hancock's website.

Here's how the program works: Once you sign up, John Hancock sends you a Fitbit monitor as one way to track your fitness. You earn Vitality Points for your activities. As you accumulate points, your status rises – from Bronze to Silver to Gold to Platinum. The higher your status, the more you save each year on your life insurance premiums. The points also allow you benefits at stores like REI and Whole Foods as well as hotel chains like Hyatt.

The New York Times, which first reported on the announcement, notes that the most active customers can earn discounts of up to 15 percent on their premiums. The company in a news release says:

"For example, a 45 year old couple (of average health) buying Protection UL with Vitality life insurance policies of $500,000 each could potentially save more than $25,000 on their premiums by the time they reach 85, with additional savings if they live longer, assuming they reach gold status in all years."

But as The Times notes, if customers don't maintain their gold status for any reason, the premiums could increase by between 1.1 percent and 1.6 percent each year. Those who reach platinum status will see premiums fall by about 0.30 percent each year, the newspaper adds.

NPR's Chris Arnold tells our Newscast unit that privacy advocates worry that the plan will raise insurance costs for lower-income people juggling two jobs who don't have as much time to get to the gym.

John Hancock and Vitality say the information collected won't be sold – and would only be shared with those entities that administer the program, The Times reported, but some of it could be used to create new insurance products.

And for those uncomfortable with sharing some data, Michael Doughty, John Hancock's president, told The Times: "You do not have to send us any data you are not comfortable with. The trade-off is you won't get points for that."

The Times adds that the company hopes the program revitalizes life insurance sales in the U.S., which have stagnated for decades.

The concept of incentivizing behavior while new in life insurance in the U.S. is not new to other sectors of the insurance industry. As Julie Rovner, who is with our partner Kaiser Health News, reported last December, wellness programs already exist in many workplaces. And, she reported, "there's no real evidence as to whether these plans actually improve the health of employees." (You can see some of NPR's other coverage of wellness programs here and here.)

In the auto industry, Progressive offers its customers a mileage-based tracking device called Snapshot; those who opt-in case save up to 30 percent on their premiums. But as CNET notes "not just how many miles you drive but also how you're driving them could affect your insurance rates."

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John Hancock

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