From a while back, this cartoon on the subject of transitory art:
It came from Aric Olnes, following up on a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon about transitory art, specifically Calvin on the aesthetics of melting snow art.
Archive for December, 2014
Starving artist
December 29, 2014Name that hero!
December 29, 2014Yesterday’s Rhymes With Orange:
Naming up is hard to do.
On the next try, they streamlined the name and got the prosody right.
Distant punning
December 29, 2014Yesterday’s Get Frazzy:
Hat tip from Alon Lischinsky, who found that the main pun, in the final panel, really worked only in writing: for him, “Ishmael can only be /ˈɪʃ.meɪ.əl/ or /ˈɪʃ.meɪl/, while fishmeal has /iː/ and secondary stress on the last syllable”. For me, too, but I am also a fan of distant imperfect puns, which can be set up through context.
Fictobiography
December 29, 2014Today’s Calvin and Hobbes, in which Calvin embarks on writing a book:
Extended discussion (with examples) of two types of fiction/biography crosses in “Memory and fictobiography” of 6/26/10:
(auto)biographical fiction, fiction with an (auto)biographical cast: biofiction for short
fictionalized (auto)biography, (auto)biography with a fictional cast: fictobiography for short
Calvin’s project is fictobiography, heavy on the ficto-.
The metaphorical knife
December 29, 2014Passed on via Chris Waigl, this New Yorker cartoon by Leo Cullum:
But still a pointed metaphor.
(I’m assembling a Page for Leo Cullum cartoons. Stay tuned.)
Santa jack
December 29, 2014(This posting has a fair amount of linguistic content, but also pretty much gay sexual content, in sometimes very plain language, plus an image at the edge of X-rated. If such material is offensive to you, or merely unwelcome, please pass on this posting.)
It starts with a bit of language play, turing on an ambiguity in the verb come: between the motion verb (as in Santa Claus came to our house on Wednesday night) and the orgasm verb (as in He came like a fountain).
The curious morphology of Canada
December 28, 2014Ann Burlingham writes from Canada to report two non-standard verb forms she found there:
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(#2)
And she asked: are Canadians regularizing verbs faster than USAns?
Well no, but she’s noticing the verb forms more when she’s away from home (western New York state): a version of the Local Color Illusion.
Set of three
December 27, 2014A crop of three comics for today, on three very different topics: a One Big Happy with an inventive reinterpretation of an expression; a Zits on the evolution of writing systems; and a Zippy with another Xmas parody:
(#1)
(#2)
(#3)
One by one:
Crick in the neck
December 27, 2014I’m suffering with one at the moment. And for (almost) everything, there’s a cartoon, in this case a Perk at Work strip by Jason Salas:
From OED3 (November 2010) on crick:
Sudden stiffness or immobility of the neck, back, or other part of the body, typically resulting from spasm of one or more muscles; an instance of this. [attested from the 15th century on]
The cartoon shows the characteristic immobility of someone with a serious crick: their neck is “frozen” in one position — in this case, hooked to one side. (In other cases, the neck is frozen in such a way that the sufferer appears to be looking upwards.)
The Xmas run
December 26, 2014Following on my Messiah posting, Robert Coren points us to the Xmas day Frazz:
Ouch: course – chorus. A cute imperfect pun.