Archive for June, 2013

Website and blog changes

June 28, 2013

The world of AZ websites and blogs has altered, and will change further in coming days. Most of these changes are behind the scenes — access to all this material will continue to be possible by familiar means — but here’s what’s happened:

First, AZBlog is now

http://arnoldzwicky.org

but http://arnoldzwicky.wordpress.com

will work; it simply links to my new site. (Along the way, I have arranged to have ads removed from the site.)

My Stanford website — http://www.stanford.edu/~zwicky — remains, but in severely reduced form; all of its substantive content is now on the AZBlog About page — http://arnoldzwicky.org/about — and my Stanford site merely links to that About page. All of my .pdf files continue to be housed at Stanford, so a URL you currently have for one of these .pdf files will work exactly as before.

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McCoy

June 27, 2013

In yesterday’s mail, this cartoon card by Glenn McCoy:

  (#1)

Inside:

Arnold —
From the motssisi in
Ann Arbor
XOXO!
We miss you

(with signatures and messages from lots of people attending the motss.con in Ann Arbor last weekend). Very sweet.

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For June 26th

June 27, 2013

From several sources on Facebook, this impressive photo of San Francisco’s City Hall in rainbow mode, in honor of yesterday’s U.S. Supreme Court rulings on DOMA and California Prop 8:

And tomorrow is Stonewall Day, followed immediately by Pride Weekend in San Francisco.

Idiomatic meta-strips

June 26, 2013

In today’s crop of cartoons, an outrageous Pearls Before Swine and a silly Mother Goose and Grimm, both of them meta-strips and both playing with idioms:

(#1)

(#2)

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meet cute

June 26, 2013

Zippy continues his fixation on Barbara Stanwyck movies. Yesterday it was Stella Dallas (1937), today it’s Double Indemnity (1944):

(#1)

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Claude Smith

June 26, 2013

In my e-mail this morning:

Sebastopol, CA, May 31, 2013: RiskPress Gallery, in the West Sonoma County town of Sebastopol, hosts the work of artist Claude Smith in Words Fall Away – a solo exhibition that addresses the subject of written and spoken language, July 5-28, 2013.

  (#1)

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Stimulating and desensitizing

June 25, 2013

(Sexually explicit language to follow.)

An ad for MovieMountain and GameLink (sources of porn movies) today features a variety of products classified as lubes. Some are simple sexual lubricants, but others are designed to provide stimulation or its opposite, desensitization (depending on what the users want). Some of them are far from lubricants, but there seems to be no label for the category that includes lubricants, stimulating products, and desensitizing creams. (On the larger category of ADJUNCTS to sex, see this posting on gay sex toys.)

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Stella Dallas

June 25, 2013

(Not much about language.)

Today’s Zippy summarizes the 1937 movie Stella Dallas, with screenplay by Harry Wagstaff Gribble (a name that undoubtedly attracted the cartoonist Bill Griffith):

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terminal sire

June 25, 2013

On a postcard in the Beautiful Farmyard set (“100 gorgeous portraits of chickens, cows, ducks, owls, pigeons, pigs, rabbits, sheep & tractors”), a Suffolk sheep, identified as “the leading terminal sire breed in the UK”. Terminal sire is obviously a technical term in animal breeding, but its meaning wasn’t obvious to me. Turns out that the breeding practice in question comes in two steps, and a Suffolk ram plays a crucial role in the second, terminal, step.

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Coping with figurative language

June 25, 2013

Two recent cartoons on figurative language. Yesterday’s Pearls Before Swine:

(#1)

And today’s Dilbert:

(#2)

In #1, Pig takes the figurative saying “There are plenty of fish in the sea” literally, and comes up with a fish as a replacement (an unsatisfactory one) for his lost Pigita.

In #2, Dilbert’s pointy-headed boss produces a novel analogy — which Dilbert then brings to life.