The big one is a cherished a treasure from my grandparents’ attic, the smaller matching one a miracle of chance I found years later, I’m not sure where.
Category: collecting
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 else catches my eye.
Horse tails and horse tales from Savannah, Georgia
I bought these long ago on a Girl Scout trip, a kind of pilgrimage to the place where Juliet Low started the organization. See below for what I remember from that trip.
Continue reading Horse tails and horse tales from Savannah, Georgia
Small little bowls from years past
In Singapore I have a large collection of small little bowls purchased during my travels. However, the collection began before I moved away from home for good. Here are some of the small little bowls that reside at my parents’ house, which all probably entered the collection before 2003. Sadly, I don’t know where they’re all from. See below for details on these and several others I found during my visit to Atlanta.
Spot the homophone (plus a lesson in contest statistics)
This advertisement (which was designed to be hung on a horizontal pole on a bus or a train) says:
West My Golden Ticket?
The idea for this jokey name is that the word “west” in Singlish has the exact same three sounds as the word “where’s” in Singlish.
Yep. They’re both pronounced “wes”.
Below is some explanation of what the advertisement wants you to do (spend money, duh) and how the math works.
Continue reading Spot the homophone (plus a lesson in contest statistics)
NUS E-Resource Discovery Day Book Sale 2017
I bought 16 books at the annual NUS E-Resource Discovery Day Book Sale today. The paperbacks were SG$1 and the hardcovers were SG$2. There were eight or ten tables, including some Chinese books and Japanese manga.
The book I’m most excited about in this batch is the one about Singlish (top left), called New Englishes: The Case of Singapore, published by NUS Press in 1988.
The runner up is the vintage hardcover titled An Introduction to the Study of Education, published in the US in 1951. The binding, the weight of the paper and the oddly familiar, comforting typography make it a distinctly pleasing physical object regardless of whatever it happens to say.
- New Englishes, by Joseph Foley
- An Introduction to the Study of Education, by George Willard Frasier
- A Parent’s Guide to Children’s Reading, by Nancy Larrick
- Tell Me Why?, by Octopus Publishing Group
- Organization Development (6th Edition), by Wendell L. French and Cecil H. Bell, Jr.
- Talking with Kids, by Alison Mulvaney
- Megacreativity, by Andrei G. Aleinikov
- The Chinese, by David Bonavia
- The Pagemaster, by Jordan Horowitz
- Arthurian Romances, by Chretien de Troyes
- The Language Web, by Jean Aitchison
- Vocabulary: Description, Acquisition and Pedagogy, by Edited by Norbert Schmitt and Michael McCarthy
- Getting the Best from People, by Martha I. Finney
- Hiring the Best, by Cathy Fyock
- Syntax of Scientific English, by Lee Kok Cheong
- Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (5th Edition)
Small little bowl from Uzbekistan
My husband brought this hand-painted ceramic bowl back for me from a trip he went on with his father.
Camel figurine from Mongolia
I really like the detail on this realistic camel carving from Mongolia. My husband brought it back for me from a trip he went on with his father.
Bills and coins from Kyrgystan, Uzbekistan, and Mongolia
My husband collected as many bills and coins as he could on his trip.
See below for photos.
Continue reading Bills and coins from Kyrgystan, Uzbekistan, and Mongolia
Lehigh mug is lihai.
The Mandarin expression 厉害 (lìhài) means ‘awesome’ or ‘powerful’, among other things.
I heard the expression several times while watching Kung Fu Yoga, so when I next looked at this mug, I saw it in a whole new light, even though I’ve had it for years.
I toured the New Jersey plant belonging to Lehigh Press (a Von Hoffmann company) at some point when I was working in the production department of Princeton University Press (2005–2008).
The place was full of huge, expensive German printing machines and stacks and stacks of different kinds of paper.
The company printed the book cover (but I think not the pages) for some of our titles. They also printed Harry Potter book covers!
Before we left, they gave us some company-brand swag stuff like this mug, plus samples of things they’d printed with fancy techniques.
Lehigh Press closed down in 2008.
It was home to the country’s largest vacuum collator, an assembly-line machine that uses suction force to stack sheets of printed paper or plastic film in order.
That was awesome.
Euros from Malta
You can spend any country’s Euros anywhere in the Eurozone, which means the coins spread around a bit. Still, in Spain, mostly you see Spanish Euro coins, and in Italy, mostly you see Italian ones, and so on.
Thus, if you were trying to collect all the different coins in circulation in the Eurozone countries, you’d have little hope of running across all the coins from the small Mediterranean island country of Malta, unless you or someone you knew actually went there.
Challenge accepted.
My husband Aquinas brought back a set of eight Maltese Euro coins for each of us when he went to Malta for a conference this month.
