Today’s Zippy, covering a range of topics:
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(Note the pun in the title, on zero sum game.) Backgound on the diner guys, from a June 1998 piece “Clearing out the Oasis” by cartoonist Bill Griffith in Roadside Magazine:
Archive for November, 2013
The Zippy diner watch
November 15, 2013lionhead
November 15, 2013In the Beautiful Farmyard set, a card for the lionhead rabbit:
(This one is gray; they come in many colors.)
Lionhead rabbit is one of the newer breeds of domestic rabbits in the United States … The Lionhead rabbit has a wool mane encircling the head, reminiscent of a male lion, hence the name.
… The Lionhead rabbit originated in Belgium. It is reported to have been produced by breeders trying to breed a long coated dwarf rabbit by crossing a miniature Swiss Fox and a Belgian dwarf. This resulted in a genetic mutation causing wool to appear around the head and on the flanks. This gene has come to be known as the “mane” gene. (Wikipedia link)
“A cross between a Swiss Fox and a Belgian dwarf”: beautiful.
/fer/ avalanche
November 14, 2013A recent Pearls Before Swine:
This is a small word avalanche, based on the syllable /fer/.
In a word avalanche,
you pile up phonologically identical words or parts of words to make a gigantic expression that is almost impossible to parse (without the context that sets up the expression)
(Usually, the cartoonist is the object of Rat’s wrath, but this time it’s Pig.)
Town Diner
November 13, 2013Today’s Zippy, back on the diner track:
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The text of the strip veers Zippy-fashion through politics, art (Andrew Wyeth), and pop food (Mallomars), to culminate in an outrageous pun on “I never met a man I didn’t like” (attributed to Will Rogers).
Comics on comics
November 12, 2013Today’s Bizarro, punning and meta:
Carbon footprint, cartoon footprint. Plus the cartoon references,
Opinions
November 11, 2013Yesterday’s Dilbert:
In everyday reasoning, opinion and belief hold sway; evidence takes precedence only in certain special contexts — legal and scientific, in particular.
Which brings us to “I’m entitled to my opinion”.
Name that cellist
November 9, 2013Yesterday’s Pearls Before Swine has Pig misunderstanding more expressions — this time a name:
Yo mama (literally ‘your mother’) is of course the beginning of ritual insults, and can stand on its own as a all-purpose insult.
Yo mama and Yo-Yo Ma are both built from the syllables yo and ma, in that order, with one of them doubled. So they are formally very similar.
Posture photos
November 9, 2013From Chris Ambidge yesterday, an Ivy League nude posture photo — an image from an odd moment in American collegiate history. Here’s the photo with the naughty bits fuzzed over:
From Wikipedia:
The Ivy League nude posture photos were taken in the 1940s through the 1970s of all incoming freshmen at certain Ivy League and Seven Sisters colleges (as well as Swarthmore), ostensibly to gauge the rate and severity of rickets, scoliosis, and lordosis in the population. Harvard had its own such program by the 1980s. The larger project was run by William Herbert Sheldon and Earnest Albert Hooton, who may have been using the data to support their theory on body types and social hierarchy. What remained of the images were transferred to the Smithsonian and most were destroyed between 1995 and 2001.
Modern Diner
November 9, 2013Today’s Zippy, with yet another diner:
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That’s the Modern Diner in Pawtucket. Then there’s the allusion to the limerick beginning “There once was a man from Nantucket”.
Yellow vs. cardinal
November 8, 2013Yesterday was Duck Day in Palo Alto — people dressed in yellow all over the place, on the occasion of a football game between the Stanford Cardinal and the Oregon Ducks (which Stanford won, 26-20). Yellow isn’t all that common a color choice for a sports team color (probably because it’s sunny rather than intense and threatening), but Oregon is really, really yellow.