Year Summary for 2016

Books and rocks are just about the heaviest things one could imagine bringing back from a vacation, and yet books and rocks are exactly what we brought back from our latest trip to the opposite side of the planet. In fact, bringing back books and/or rocks from trips is fairly typical for us. What made … Continue reading The curse of the invariably heavy suitcases

I love the hemispherical profile and the slightly irregular shape.

Books and rocks are just about the heaviest things one could imagine bringing back from a vacation, and yet books and rocks are exactly what we brought back from our latest trip to the opposite side of the planet. In fact, bringing back books and/or rocks from trips is fairly typical for us. What made … Continue reading The curse of the invariably heavy suitcases

Now added to my small little bowl collection are these three, made by my neighbor Janie Bickersteth, whose website I helped set up.

Once upon a time, I knew that ‘opaque’ had something to do with whether you can see through something, but I thought it was a synonym of ‘transparent’, not an antonym. Since most things are not transparent, we don’t use ‘opaque’ nearly as much as ‘transparent’ to describe things; the opaqueness of material objects is … Continue reading Opaque

For the longest time, I understood how to use the word ‘painstakingly’ but I thought that the action embedded in the adverb was ‘staking one’s pain’ on something, which perhaps I thought meant something like ‘betting one’s life’ on something. Why did I think that? Phonology interfering with morphology. Once the two words ‘pains’ and … Continue reading Painstakingly

Much has been written, ironically, on the virtue of brevity. On the basis of word choice, I take exception to the advice (found on page 704 of An Introduction to Fiction) to cut “excess words”. It sounds terrible to me to use ‘excess’ with a countable noun.

Note that they are “extra gros (large)”, not “extra gross (disgusting)”.

The word ‘recipient’ sounds weird here because normally (I would think) a recipient is a person, and the instructions are obviously talking about a thing (a container or ‘receptacle’). The words ‘recipient’ and ‘receptacle’ are related but I think there’s good reason not to treat them as interchangeable. See also: ‘recipe’, ‘receipt’, ‘reception’, and ‘receiver’. … Continue reading Words related to ‘receive’

On the Singapore classical music station, I am hearing the phrase “as well as” used in place of “and” before the last item in a series. …an opera full of passion, sacrifice as well as beautiful arias… This misuse of “as well as” irks me at least as much as the host’s pronunciation of “genres” … Continue reading And another thing…

Good writing is self-effacing. Personally, when I’m critiquing fiction, I find it very, very difficult to evaluate things like character, plot, and pacing if there are a lot of distracting technical errors. One easily fixable error I often see is this one. Whenever I see this mistake, I feel as if I have been stabbed … Continue reading How to punctuate dialog

That’s the name of a folk song sung by Steve Seskin*. The chorus goes: The seconds turn to minutes The minutes into hours The hours into long, lonely days This waitin’ on you, darlin’ Is takin’ all my will power I keep countin’ all the moments you’re away One Mississippi, two Mississippi Without you, girl, … Continue reading One Mississippi

This morning on the AYE I saw a yellow truck belonging to a company called Buildables (not to be confused with Build-a-Bear). On the side, the truck said: We build walls and ceilings faster than the speed of this truck. I wanted to take a photo, but of course it was gone too fast. Just now … Continue reading Buildables

When I first saw five people sitting on a bench in a mall staring intently at their mobile phones, totally oblivious to their surroundings, I thought: Aha! Here’s an opportunity for me to comment about the idiocy of mobile phone culture—with phones in their hands, people seem incapable of paying attention to anything else. And … Continue reading Mobile phones make the wait more bearable

Update! A fellow member of the Singapore Writers’ Group says this car belongs to one of her neighbors. Small world island.

Loop sop. Thai marzipan? We saw these colorful thingies on the dessert page of the menu at Diandin Leluk and had to try them. Via smartphone, the internet told us what they’re made of (bean paste) and what they’re usually called (luk chup), and confirmed our intuition that they’re relatively rare among Thai dessert offerings … Continue reading Loop Sop (Luk Chup)

I wish I had a photo of the map with just the green, red and purple lines, but apparently I don’t. You’ll just have to take my word for it: The circle line totally didn’t even exist in 2008 when we moved to Singapore.

“Walk 10,000 steps a day! Here are 70 steps to get you started! Have some scorching Singapore sunshine and a healthy dose of humidity, too! Oh, you’re carrying groceries? Fantastic! You can build arm and leg muscles at the same time!” I live at Kent Vale at NUS. Since the word ‘vale’ means ‘valley’, and … Continue reading National University of Stairs

I walked down Orchard Road and took photos when I got to a bit of sidewalk that featured matching repeating pairs of these seven tropical fruits. Did you think that first one was a durian because of the texture and because durians are so famous in Singapore? That bean shape seems wrong for a durian, … Continue reading Tropical fruit sidewalk plaques

Books and rocks are just about the heaviest things one could imagine bringing back from a vacation, and yet books and rocks are exactly what we brought back from our latest trip to the opposite side of the planet. In fact, bringing back books and/or rocks from trips is fairly typical for us. What made … Continue reading The curse of the invariably heavy suitcases

It launched with 60 posts going back several years because I’ve always had content but never a site I was particularly happy with. Content will continue to get added retroactively. Enjoy!