Today’s Zits, with Jeremy and Pierce playing with their pizza:
The compound origami swan pizza — [ origami swan ] [ pizza ] (see comments below; never trust your memory) — is cute, as is the actual origami swan pizza, but here I’m focusing on Japanese-Italian fusion.
Today’s Zippy has Zippy and Griffy caught up in film noir:
A word on the expression film noir, then notes on films.
After my posting yesterday on Julia Child, Benita Bendon Campbell wrote me about Ann Daingerfield Zwicky, her, and Julia Child. Reproduced here with Bonnie’s permission:
My posting yesterday on the avoidance of fart in the NYT Science Times on Tuesday missed one place where the paper hasn’t shrunk from the word at all: in the title of the 2001 children’s book Walter the Farting Dog (by William Kotzwinkle and Glenn Murray), which was on the NYT bestseller list for at least 75 weeks, its title untouched by the Gray Lady’s modesty.
I should probably give up on slamming the NYT for its fussy modesty in dealing with taboo vocabulary, but this one struck me as particularly silly: from “Pardon Me! A Fearless Look at Our Bodies’ Mundane Functions” by James Gorman (a review of Robert R. Provine’s Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping and Beyond) in the Science Times on the 14th:
As you may have guessed, I am about to dip into the category listed in the subtitle as “beyond” yawning, laughing and hiccupping. It includes, among other behaviors, itching, crying, and the body’s two ways of expelling digestive gases, belching, and the other one.
The author, Robert R. Provine, would not be so reticent in describing the other one. In fact, Dr. Provine, a professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who has studied the behavior and physiology of laughing, yawning, tickling and other actions, denounces the priggishness that turns our attention away from intestinal gas, its origin and expulsion.
Oh god, the other one. Like the paper can’t print fart, a word that my 8-year-old grand-daughter and her friends use, and use appropriately. It goes along with poop and pee.
From Gregory Ward, at the end of a long chain of fowardings, this jape:
A little known fact…
The first testicular guard (“box”) was used in cricket in 1874
And the first helmet was used in 1974.
So, it took 100 years for men to realize that their brains were also worth protecting…
The text (just as it appears here) has been distributed all over the place on the net, many times. Here, someone has added visuals. Turns out it’s an old joke.
Today is Julia Child‘s 100th birthday, and I was moved to go back to my copy of Beck, Bertholle, and Child, Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961) — a first edition, much used, food-spattered, and annotated (by Ann Daingerfield Zwicky).
Yesterday from Chris Ambidge, a sizable collection of moose-knuckle photos from the Olympics, along the lines of those in “Olympic exposure” (here) and the earlier “Bulges” (here) (and an AZBlogX posting here). There’s not much more I can add to this topic, despite its entertainment value.
Fortunately for fans of such photos, there’s an entire website devoted to them (which provided Chris with the examples he sent me): Visible Penis Line, main page here, archive here. Enjoy.
Today’s Garfield:
Odie, Garfield’s naive foil in the strip, is a beagle. He and Garfield understand each other perfectly well. But poodle is something else.
(Hat tip to Paul Langman.)
A design by Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky, entitled “One Swimming Lesson”, because she did it while her daughter was having a (one) swimming lesson:
This is paisleyesque, though not of course as complex as printed paisley patterns.
Paisley came up here back in February, when I linked to the Wikipedia entry but didn’t quote any of it. Now some more content, taking the pattern back on the order of a millennium, and in the West back about 400 years. And then we get to Scotland.
