Despicable Me 3 (2017)

Thankfully, the minions were relegated to the second subplot, and the plot and first subplot had interesting things to say about brotherhood and motherhood, respectively.

Despicable Me 3 was silly, very silly, but fun. The villain was a grown-up 80s child star resentful of his fall from favor in his teen years, and still embodied the fads and styles of his best years. I’m an old millennial, and I buy movie tickets… bring on more of this 80s nostalgia, I say!

https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/despicable-me-3/id1247589650

Atlanta (Sep/Oct 2017)

Photos from my visit with my family include 21 images of cars, food, and natural and man-made scenery around my neighborhood. See below!

Continue reading Atlanta (Sep/Oct 2017)

Tiny stone turtles

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.

Turn on headlights when raining

I saw this message displayed on a programmable sign over a highway, prefaced by the notation “Georgia Law”.

Obviously, the message is

Turn on [your] headlights when [it is] raining.

The intent is clear, but the syntax is awful.

Syntactically, the implied subject of both the verbs “turn” and “rain” is “you”, so technically the sentence means:

Turn on [your] headlights when [you are] raining.

I don’t have any particular suggestion for how to “improve” the sign. Signs aren’t written in normal syntax because of space constraints, so any alternate version would have to be really short. Writing “If it is raining, turn on your headlights” is obviously longer and not obviously better, because even when space is not limited, we expect signs to be written in a terse style that lacks pronouns.

Ah well. Pronouns in English are problematic anyway.

Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, USA

See below for 63 photos from a road trip my parents took me on from Atlanta to Nashville to Mammoth Cave (in Kentucky).

Continue reading Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, USA

Best Mad Libs story ever!

If you’ve never heard of Mad Libs, it’s basically a kind of kids’ activity book that helps you create silly stories. The booklet asks for examples of different kinds of words (parts of speech like “adjective” or more specific kinds of words like “color”). The words will be used in a specially written story, but you don’t know exactly how they will be used. After all the words have been written down, you copy them into the story and read it aloud to see how it sounds.

Every once in a while, I tell someone the story of the time my mom and I did a Mad Libs story that made us laugh like crazy. In fact, there’s already a blog post about it. See below for more on that story, which I rediscovered on my recent trip to Atlanta.

Continue reading Best Mad Libs story ever!

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

Passengers (2016)

My dad no doubt wished my mom and brother and I had chosen something different from Redbox, though I somewhat doubt the whole catalog had anything all four of us would have liked.

Passengers was kinda like Wall-E: a slow, lonely, quiet, sci-fi/romance movie with approximately two characters, and an embedded message that plants are more important than technology. It was also kinda like Titanic: a rich girl falls for a poor boy on a damaged ship.

My dad kept hoping aliens would show up. I don’t blame him; I think the main character’s major choice early on in the story was pretty unforgivable, and the ending would have been better off going in a different direction altogether.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/passengers-2016/id1179581806

I Wake Up Screaming aka Hot Spot (1941)

That hair! Those hats! Styles in America have changed…

My dad’s channel surfing on broadcast television landed us with this noir film, which oddly featured the tune of “Somewhere over the Rainbow” playing in the background of many scenes.

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.

Continue reading Small little bowls from years past