You want minimalism? Look elsewhere. I love my stuff. This category includes posts about bills and coins, books (including books in languages I can’t read), rocks and minerals, small little bowls, embroidered patches, and animal figurines. Plus whatever turns up on Carousell and catches my eye.
I purchased this fine piece of analog pixel art (cross-stitch embroidery) from a Carousell seller named Jess and had it framed by the craftsmen at Barakkath Frame Maker in Chinatown. I’m delighted with it!
The Chinese characters are:
松鹤延年
sōng hè yán nián
pine crane prolong year
Pines and cranes are symbols of longevity. The flowers are a kind of peony (tree peonies, moutans, or mudan). They are medicinal as well as ornamental.
See close-up below.
Oral language is a blur. We don’t notice, unless we try to sing karaoke and realize we have no idea what the words to our favorite songs actually are, or—worse—that we’ve been singing them wrong with utter conviction for decades.
Eggcorns (plausible malapropisms) are words or phrases that exist thanks to this kind of ambiguity. Wrong song lyrics, in case you’re curious, are called mondegreens.
On classified ad sites like Carousell, language assumptions that pass unnoticed in speech are made visible. You can learn a lot about the local dialect by cataloging the unintentionally hilarious mistakes that local native English speakers make.
See below for examples.
Continue reading Carouspell: A collection of spelling mistakes in Carousell classified ads
I have not been able to identify the artist responsible for the Wrinkle in Time and Wind in the Door paperback covers that I remember from when I was a kid. The name of the artist is not anywhere on or in the paperbacks themselves, and the internet doesn’t seem to know!
Someday hopefully someone will recognize the artist’s work by the work itself, and publish a statement online somewhere. (Mysterious artist! Whoever you are! I am nostalgic for your art! Come forth!)
Update: The internet knows now! The late Richard Bober did the cover art for A Wrinkle in Time. Still not sure about Wind in the Door though.
The covers for A Swiftly Tilting Planet and Many Waters are by Rowena Morrill. And here’s her original sketch of Charles Wallace on the unicorn, which was not a thing I at all expected to be floating around on the internet. (Thanks, internet! You’re awesome.)
See below for other cover art for L’Engle books in my collection.
Continue reading Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Quartet: Various Awesome Covers!
I just recently bought ten books at an atrium sale, but that didn’t stop me from browsing the Junior Page atrium sale and buying these six.
The cashier asked me how long it was going to take me to read them, as if either I had a superpower or was biting off more than I could chew. I think most of the people shopping the sale were only buying one, two, or three books at a time. Tough to make back the rental fees at that rate, I would think.
And yet in Square 2, the shopping mall next door, there was ANOTHER atrium book sale running at the same time.
I do not need more books, but I love looking through the random collection of not-quite-current titles whenever I see an atrium sale. The serendipity of it is what appeals. I can’t not buy discounted books on topics I find interesting!
I bought:
This copy of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in Russian (ISBN 9785389077881) was a gift from Ilya Sergey (a colleague of my husband who does theoretical computery things) and his wife Lilia Anisimova (an illustrator who does computery things of an entirely different kind).
It is the latest addition to my collection of translations of Harry Potter books, which consists mostly of translations of book 3, but also includes some translations of book 1.
The title page of the Russian translation looks like this:
The text inside looks like this:
The book features a beautiful new cover illustration by Kazu Kibuishi. The spines of the books in the seven-book set form an image of Hogwarts, like so:
New versions in many languages now feature Kibuishi’s illustrations; only buy the Russian edition if you’re a crazy collector like me—or if you can actually read Russian.
I buy embroidered patches for places I visit. Here are the patches I bought this year (starting top left, going clockwise):
I now have coins that have a young portrait of the queen on them, coins that have a slightly older portrait of the queen on them, a full set of the current coins, and a handful of coins with special designs.
I collected the current coins, the current bills, a slightly older set of bills, a couple of older coins, a special $10 note, and a squashed penny from The Interislander ferry.
Below is a chart showing when changes were made to New Zealand’s bills and coins. (The change from a yellow line to a green one indicates the switch to decimal currency.) 
It seems like every government bank, bureau of printing and engraving, or monetary authority likes to taunt visitors with displays of cancelled bills no longer able to be used as money. Here’s the display at the Reserve Bank of New Zealand:
The iridescent marbles at the top left are magnetic hematite from Hettie’s Rock and Crystal Shop in Queenstown.
The polished green thing that looks like a miniature bookend is a piece of New Zealand greenstone (jade) that I bought at ReflectioNZ, a shop and cafe in Fox Glacier.
The ten rocks in between are rocks I picked up on the Fox Glacier trail we went on.
The rest are from the wharf area in Queenstown.
