Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993)

This post is part of a series of posts on books and movies about the legend of Robin Hood. It discusses the 2006 movie Robin Hood: Men in Tights.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/robin-hood-men-in-tights/id269854508

See also:

Continue reading Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993)

Robin Hood (2006)

This post is part of a series of posts on books and movies about the legend of Robin Hood. It discusses the 2006 television show.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/tv-season/robin-hood-series-1/id275354656

See also:

Continue reading Robin Hood (2006)

Atrium Book Sale

Singapore is not a great place for book bargains. However, I have had some luck with book sales that travel around and set up in shopping mall atriums. (Atria. Happy now, Firefox spellcheck?)

If I were the roadrunner, this would be the perfect trap for the coyote to set up. I would fall right in it.

atrium-book-sale
…and I did!
atrium-book-sale-2
Then I found this…

Now, no doubt I have some books that are pretty useless to me. In fact, you could say that at any given time, all my books except for about three of them are useless to me. Some, like the ones written in Thai, Greek, Korean, Arabic or Burmese, are likely to remain useless to me forever.

Still. Still, I ask you. Of what possible use is a book on ROCKHOUNDING IN IDAHO to anyone in Singapore? I mean, I love rocks—and books, obviously—and I fully understand the notion of armchair travel. And yet. This book. It cannot help me find rocks in Idaho as long as I am physically in Singapore.

Am I right? Seriously, this book is never going to sell…

I mean, for the same money, you’d clearly be better off with Daytrips from Washington, DC.

English as it is Broken… is broken.

The two English as it is Broken books shown above contain photos of signs and responses to people who’ve written in to a weekly column in The Straits Times with questions about English usage.

(For a listing of all four books and then some, see the earlier post, Books on Singapore English.)

The quality of the answers in the two books has been disparaged, but I think most of the explicit explanations are informative even if they are not expressed perfectly.

Below are an example answer I like and one I don’t.

Continue reading English as it is Broken… is broken.

Dengue warrior

It would be hard to overstate the extent to which I hate mosquitoes. Mosquitoes are deadly serious. But this banner is still funny.

For one thing, that warrior, with his Roman helmet, looks really out of place in Southeast Asia. The text at the bottom takes the cake, though.

It says:

SILENT WAR. FIGHT DENGUE. SAVE LIFE

Lists that aren’t parallel are a pet peeve of mine. Lists should be all nouns or all verbs. Here we’ve got a noun and two imperatives. Sigh.

Furthermore, that ‘life’ should be ‘lives’. The fact that it isn’t testifies to the frequency of singular/plural errors in Singapore.

And then finally, there’s no punctuation after the last item of the list!

I recommend:

WAGE WAR · FIGHT DENGUE · SAVE LIVES

Now I’m totally with you, out-of-place Roman centurion.