Pesky ‘with’

Dumex advertisement
at Block 610 bus stop

When I read this:

Dumex, proudly nurturing Singapore babies with global expertise and experience.

I thought, Wow, Singapore babies have global expertise and experience?

The preposition ‘with’ is ambiguous. It could mean ‘having’ (which is what I thought at first) or it could mean ‘using’ (which is what was intended).

Imitated

When I was working full-time at an enrichment centre, I made paper fortunetellers to amuse kids who are waiting for parents to pick them up or fill out registration paperwork or whatever. Sometimes I gave them away… it was easy to make new ones and it made kids so happy.

The ones I make now are slightly different from the ones I made when I was a kid, which start off with red/green/yellow/blue and inside have something gossipy inside about who you are going to marry or whatever.

My fortunetellers have sun/moon/stars/clouds on the outside, because these all have different numbers of letters and are all things in the sky and can be depicted easily using a pen or pencil (rather than colored crayons, markers or pencils).

The ‘fortunes’ are just faces: happy, sad, angry, surprised, sleeping, bored, silly and ‘idea’ (you’re a genius!).

Even though I’m not teaching anymore, I still carry a fortune-teller in my wallet, in case I run into a child who needs to be amused… don’t laugh, it happens!

For example, when my husband and I ran into some neighbors  at Haq-Insaf’s Eating Place, I was able to amuse their young daughter. After playing with my fortuneteller, she even made one of her own!

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Lots of stamps on a box. Like, really a lot.

Like, um… 54.

Wait, no, sorry—forgot to count the ones on the front.

more-stamps

…79 total.

Actually, that’s not all, either, because there’s a $5.35 sticker from the bar code machine, which could have been used for the whole amount, no? I mean, you know, I’m just saying.

I guess my in-laws really wanted to use up some stamps that were lying around. Cracks me up! This kind of thing probably also cracks up the postal workers. Possibly not in the same way.

The grass is always greener…

It baffles me how in the same world there can be tanning salons and spray-on tan AND people who carry umbrellas for sunshine and buy lotion to look whiter. Like this lotion, for example, from a brand you may have heard of.

healthy-white-lotion
“Healthy Whitening Solution: Bright is not belong to the sun only…, if you have the key [sic]”
This product is, naturally, not available via the Vaseline website for the US. No, you have to look on the Vaseline site that sells to Indonesia.

Chandni Chowk to China (2009)

For me, buying this movie was a bit like buying a German-Spanish dictionary, in that it made me a consumer of the product of two cultures, neither of them mine.

Lest you think that’s just an analogy, I hereby present my German-Spanish dictionary.

Chandni Chowk to China is a Hindi musical martial arts comedy.

Just let that sink in for a moment.

The main character is a superstitious Indian guy named Sidhu who works as a lowly vegetable cutter in a place called Chandni Chowk in Delhi. He has a lot of self-pity but not a lot of motivation to improve his station in life. (One day while cutting potatoes, he finds one that looks like the elephant-headed god Ganesha, and uses the coincidence as an excuse to neglect his duties, which earns him a kick in the pants from his foster father.)

His life changes when two Chinese guys somehow decide he’s a Chinese hero reincarnated and a Chinese fortune-teller friend convinces him to go to China. It’s wacky but kinda fun.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/chandni-chowk-to-china-2008/id312058686

See below for more about the movie, including SPOILERS.

Continue reading Chandni Chowk to China (2009)

The Gumball Rally (1976)

Okay, so I watched this AFTER I watched The Cannonball Run, which isn’t fair. This is the original coast-to-coast comedy road-race movie.

What was different about this first race was that it was more secret and people were eliminated more definitively.

“55 miles-an-hour is unsafe!”
“It’s boring.”
“THAT’S why it’s unsafe!”
“It’s fast enough to kill ya, but slow enough to make you THINK you’re safe.”

https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/the-gumball-rally/id316802188