The rains came and the Bay Area greened up, in that astonishing bright yellow-green of sudden growth. All sorts of plants are sprouting: just up the street from me, the calla lilies (planted in front of houses) and the miner’s lettuce (wild volunteers), both still in very early stages; they’ll bloom in February or March.
Archive for December, 2014
Winter greenery
December 22, 2014Chatty girls (again)
December 21, 2014Today’s Zits:
Once again, the strip turns on the overwhelming chattiness of teenage girls. Or so it seemed to Jeremy.
Snowy lanes
December 21, 2014For the Winter Solstice, a snowy parody starring Zippy:
(#1)
Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, taken into many strange places: Moe Howard of the Three Stooges, Skeeball, Fleer’s Dubble Bubble gum, a gondolier, William Blake’s poetry, a strip mall, Joe Biden (Vice President of the U.S.), and a laundromat.
Annals of euphemism
December 20, 2014A Clive Goddard cartoon from the January 2015 Funny Times:
On the left, a woman shopping for products to use during menstruation, euphemistically called sanitary products. On the right, an unsavory guy shopping for god-knows-what — but whatever it is, it’s unsanitary ‘unclean’.
Implied text
December 20, 2014A wordless cartoon from Maria Scrivan’s Half Full, caught in the January 2015 Funny Times:
There’s no text, but the implied text is the idiom breed like rabbits. Apparently, bunny slippers breed like proverbial rabbits.
Cartooning: the early days
December 20, 2014In the latest New Yorker (December 22&29), this cartoon by Mick Stevens, showing two cave people examining a cave drawing:
(#1)
Now, some discussion of the cartoonist, which will lead us back to the 2012 Nipplegate controversy on Facebook.
IPrC 14: My Hobby
December 19, 2014Just in: confirmation that Elizabeth Traugott and Arnold Zwicky’s abstract for a paper at the 14th International Pragmatics Conference in Antwerp next July has been accepted. The abstract (somewhat revised):
Fabulous creatures on television
December 19, 2014On ADS-L, an antedating for bunyip, a fabulous creature of the Australian aborigines, which I connected to a puppet character on American television, and that reminded Jon Lighter of the Flub-a-dub on Howdy Doody.
Calvin on art criticism
December 19, 2014On the 16th, Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes drifted into art criticism, in snow:
This snow sculpture transcends corporeal likeness to express deeper truths about the human condition!
There followed two more days of art talk from Calvin. On the 17th, “This scupture is about transience.”
(#1)
And yesterday: “I’ve moved into abstraction!”
(#2)
Well, yes, it is just snow.
Ambiguous sign
December 19, 2014Yesterday’s Mother Goose and Grimm:
Two readings for the sign: the intended one, as a NP, labeling the dog and so warning that it’s an attack dog (N + N compound, ‘dog for attack’); or, alas, as a (telegraphic) imperative sentence, urging the reader to attack the dog. To pick out the former, you need a bit more text, say DOG WILL ATTACK.