🐇 🐇 🐇 the rabbits of December take us to the hidden spot in the tropical jungle where ottomans rule among the palm trees, as depicted in this John McPherson Close to Home cartoon of 2/14/15:
(#1) A pun on Ottoman Empire, the Turkish realm, and ottoman, a kind of footstool
🐅 🐅 🐅 three tigers for Ultimate November, which is also St. Andrew’s Day, the national day of Scotland (a day for unicorns, thistles, and heather; and haggis, shortbread, and whisky)
The One Big Happy strip from 10/7, another in a series on boys and masculinity:
James and Joe, playing with their cars — and contemplating how to negotiate the shift away from the significantly homosocial world of childhood to the more complex heterosocial worlds of adolescence
Note that Monica signals her openness to further exchange with Joe — and that she picks Joe rather than James; if you know the strip’s characters, you will see that she has chosen wisely.
Adventures in appliances on Ramona St. Beginning the evening of Saturday 11/26 — yes, the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend in my country — when I opened the refrigerator to get things for dinner and the thing appeared to be stone-dead, for how long I couldn’t be sure. Infuriating, because the appliance was only a couple of years old; it’s an emergency replacement, installed during pandemic lockdown, for its predecessor, which experienced the mechanical equivalent of sudden total organ failure.
Now the sad story in some detail. I remind you that the chirping comatose refrigerator is happening right along with all the other challenges and afflictions of my life (not all of which I have yet posted about; the Land of Urinals posting, in particular, is still to come).
The appliance. In white, in the smaller of two available sizes.
From the Samsung site; freezer at the top, refrigerator at the bottom (with a Slide and Reach Pantry tray at the top, and crisper drawers at the bottom); my fridge opens from the other side, but that’s adjusted during installation
Alienizing, scapegoating, and cleansing (ASC) — what was intended as a very complex posting following on two occasions: the shootings at the Colorado Springs gay bar Club Q just before midnight on Saturday 11/19; and yesterday’s Harvey Milk Day, remembering the 11/27/1978 assassination of SF Supervisor Harvey Milk, killed because he was the driving force behind the city’s first gay rights bill.
Over the Club Q shootings I was consumed by fits of red-hot rage combined with body-wracking weeping sorrow, not to mention fear over where events are taking us. As I said yesterday in my posting “Lest we forget”, about Milk’s assassination,
I would say NEVER AGAIN — but it is far far too late for that.
The social mechanisms at work in these wrenching cases involving homosexuals — what I’ll call alienizing, scapegoating, and cleansing — reappear with other groups, in particular Jews and Blacks, leading to murderous assaults on the locations of supportive and protective community, on “safe spaces”. At, for example:
— the Pulse (gay, leaning Latino) nightclub in Orlando FL in June 2016
— the Tops Friendly Market (in a predominantly Black neighborhood) in Buffalo NY in July 2022
— the Tree of Life synagogue, in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood (about 40% Jewish) of Pittsburgh PA in October 2018
Meanwhile, my life is a mess. At the moment, much of every day is consumed by narcoleptic sleep, and my many disabilities cause me to take about five times as long to do everyday tasks as a fully able-bodied person would, so I’ve been having trouble finding the time to put the ASC posting together from the materials I’ve been assembling.
My solution is to post, as often as I can, collections of some of these materials, hoping that eventually I’ll be able to knit it together. (Some of these materials will be surprising to you. My first collection will probably be one that starts with Donald Sutherland screaming. Yes, it’s relevant.)
Today is the first Sunday in Advent, a joyous time in the Christian calendar. Today is also November 27th, which is Harvey Milk Day.
Harvey Milk (left) meeting with San Francisco Mayor George Moscone for the signing of the city’s gay rights bill, April 1977; for this act, Milk and Moscone were assassinated on 11/27/1978 by Supervisor Dan White, the lone member of the Board of Supervisors to vote against the bill.
I would say NEVER AGAIN — but it is far far too late for that.
Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro is a Psychiatrist cartoon — they’re a Bizarro specialty — that is incomprehensible if you don’t recognize the figure of the patient and know about this patient’s history with psychiatry (cardboard box??):
(#1) Incredibly, it’s also significant that this is today’s Bizarro, and that today is 11/26/22 (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page.)
Significant, in that your appreciation of the joke will be heightened some if you understand that today is a notable anniversary associated with the figures in the cartoon.
And your appreciation might be heightened a bit more if you recognize who the therapist in the cartoon is (based on).
All of this is so in-jokey arcane that the actual cartoon distributed by Cartoon Kingdom includes a bottom line explaining the significance of the date, which is then a key to unraveling everything else. But the patient, you have to recognize the patient.
Who is not just a character in a cartoon (in this cartoon, the way the therapist is), but a character from a specific comic strip, drawn in the style of that strip, so that the patient looks “cartoony” in a way the therapist does not.
(Just a bit about the ceremony of the BFB, which is of course date-specific. But only a hint; my day has been a complete shambles, prominently featuring long intervals of narcoleptic sleep. But a small bowl of pesto posole for lunch; its name alone rolls off the tongue.)
(Warning: two hunky men in nothing but jock straps, bonding over a banana, so not to everyone’s taste.)
On the spelling of this word with the letter E (rather than I) and its pronunciation with [ɛ] (rather than [ɪ]), both recently noticeable in my country because of the great increase in anti-Semitic rhetoric and actions here: worth systematic investigation.
Some news from my house, mostly to explain why there isn’t an actual posting today.
There is, first, affliction news, some of it good, some of it deeply annoying.
Yes, another Sick Day, but I press on with today’s very pointed Zippy strip:
(#1) It’s all about ogling
From NOAD (note the content of the examples chosen: men ogling women, the canonical ogling scenario):
verb ogle: [with object] stare at in a lecherous manner: he was ogling her breasts | [no object]: men who had turned up to ogle. ORIGIN late 17th century: probably from Low German or Dutch; compare with Low German oegeln, frequentative of oegen‘ look at’.
