Archive for October, 2013

Jimmy Olsen

October 18, 2013

In the past few days, Smallville re-runs have come to the point where the character Jimmy Olsen has become significant. From the Wikipedia entry on the character:

Jimmy is traditionally depicted as a bow tie-wearing, red-haired young man who works as a cub reporter and photographer for The Daily Planet, alongside Lois Lane and Clark Kent, whom he idolizes as career role models.

Jimmy Olsen, from Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen #36 (1959); art by Curt Swan:

(#1)

Jimmy is enthusiastic, sunny, and rather naive — a good foil to the many characters who have their dark sides and their secrets.

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non sequitur

October 18, 2013

Today’s Zippy:

(#1)

The strip starts with the opposed figures Kool-Aid Man and Speedy Alka-Seltzer and then rambles incoherently through a giant pile of cultural references.

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Watch your words

October 18, 2013

Two recent news stories on word use, one from a South London school and one from Malaysia.

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Bake and you shall receive

October 17, 2013

Passed on by Terry Bartlett on Facebook, this ad for Diamond Walnuts. The video:

(10/3/13)

You always want him to be more thoughtful and romantic. This Diamond Toasted Walnut Truffle recipe will make him go above and beyond.

Bake and You Shall Receive

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The cat in the $!☆#ing hat

October 17, 2013

A Bent Pinky cartoon by Scott Metzger, sent to me by Tom Limoncelli:

(#1)

A play on The Cat in the Hat, with the nice final rhyme:

… a cake and a cup / … shut the fuck up!

(but with fuck disguised by obscenicons).

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Zippy on comic art (plus fudge)

October 17, 2013

Today’s Zippy, with Griffy and Zippy having another one of their Art Talks, with heavy similes:

(#1)

In the background, Oh Fudge Lucille’s Candies in Brants Beach NJ:

(#2)

Lucilles — note: no apostrophe — makes and sells fudge (among other things, like salt water taffy), but the name Oh Fudge alludes to the cutesy euphemism fudge for fuck.

lose X

October 17, 2013

Today’s Pearls Before Swine, with the penguins coping with the transitive verb lose:

The trope that penguins are indistinguishable (cartoon penguins certainly are), plus the ambiguity of transitive lose: ‘cease to have or be able to find (something)’ or ‘be deprived of (someone) through death’.

Logos

October 17, 2013

From the New York Times Magazine on Sunday the 13th, “Who Made That Android Logo?” by Pagan Kennedy:

Irina Blok may have drawn one of the most recognized logos in the world, but her association with the green Android has not made her famous.

… The Android logo was born three years earlier, when Blok worked as a designer at Google. As Google prepared to endorse the Android software platform for mobile devices, Blok and her design-team colleagues were told to create a look for the software — something that consumers could easily identify. The logo, she was told, should involve a robot, and so she studied sci-fi toys and space movies — anything that might help her create a character. In the end, she took inspiration from a distinctly human source: the pictograms of the universal man and woman that often appear on restroom doors. She drew a stripped-down robot with a tin-can-shaped torso and antennas on his head.

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Apostrophe in plural

October 16, 2013

A friend wrote me yesterday with this punctuational query (edited here to cloak some details):

I am teaching an online course … this semester …  The course material is mostly pre-written for me, but I’ve been going through it myself, of course.  One thing I noted is that acronyms [what I would call initialisms; see below] are sometimes made plural with the letter s, sometimes with apostrophe s.  I guess what bothers me most is the inconsistency.

I was looking through Language Log and your blog for the topic of plural acronyms with and without apostrophes, but came up blank.  Do you know of anything on current thoughts on this topic, or have any yourself?

MBA (Master in Business Administration) is an initialistic name of a degree; is its plural MBAs (no apostrophe) or MBA’s?

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Burlingham Books

October 16, 2013

Ann Burlingham recently posted this nice photo of her bookstore:

That’s Burlingham Books in the small town of Perry NY (2 South Main St. 14530), not far from Rochester, within striking distance of Buffalo.

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