In the March Details magazine (pp. 137-8), the story “You’re So Vein” (by Kayleen Schaefer), with the subtitle “Gymgoers may have stopped shedding their shirts, but they’re still showing off their lean, fantastically fit physiques”. The story begins:
Fear not, gym dandies: just because it’s gauche to go topless to show off your physique in this post-Jersey Shore world, the fantastically fit are still engaging in a highly visible vain pursuit – namely, veins.
Cephalic vein at the gym:
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We’re in the mid-February crush of holidays: the Feast of Lupercalia (13th-15th), Valentine’s Day (14th), Presidents Day in the U.S. (16th, today), and the movable feast of Mardi Gras (17th this year). Lupercalia coincides with the ides of February; time to sacrifice goat and dog.
Today’s Calvin and Hobbes:
We accept the conceit that Hobbes is a tiger, with many tigerish properties, but a sentient tiger with the power of speech and an extensive knowledge of our culture. But now it turns out that tigers have a linguistic culture of their own, to fit with their tigerish nature.
The One Big Happy that came by me today:
Once again, Ruthie latches onto a word she’s familiar with that fits pretty well with the phonological input. In this case, the phonological distance is considerable (and the orthographic distance is smaller).
My “morning name” a few days ago: calabash. Probably primed by this soup entry on the menu at the Palo Alto restaurant Reposado:
SOPA DE CALABAZA DE TEMPORADA: Roasted butternut squash, chipotle, hoja santa crema, toasted pumpkin seeds
Following Spanish calabaza will lead us to two quite different sets of calabash plants and their products. Yes, I will eventually get to Calabasas CA and to “Good night, Mrs. Calabash”.
(Not much about language)
From Channel 1 Releasing, an ad for a Valentine Day’s special of porn:
Puns are a standard feature of Valentine Day’s greetings: here heart-on (referring to the heart-covered briefs) and hard-on (referring to their contents), differing in stop voicing.
Two recent Zippys, yesterday with the existential pleasures of an empty diner and today with a fantasized Zippy Mart, but both with ambiguities in their titles:
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The main content of these strips is familiar Zipsurrealism. Here I’m all about the titles.
Vatentine’s Day sets off an avalanche of greeting cards, from the sloppily sentimental through the joking — lots and lots of puns — to the off-color and the openly insulting. Just about any emotion you can imagine can be packaged into a Valentine’s Day card. Here’s one from a friend to me this year, with a pun (“Love you a bunch!”) and a penguin: “just a bit twee”, the sender wrote, but adding in mitigation that at least it had a penguin:
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And then we get this remarkable object, a veritable forest of sexual imagery:
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So what is this stuff?
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Useless hint #1: It’s from Australia.
Useless hint #2: It’s organic.
Useless hint #3: It’s vegetable rather than animal.
(Minimal linguistic interest, lots of male skin.)
From Michael Nieuwenhuizen, with a gasp, this cock-tease photo:
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I dreamt I went on the internet in my Dolce & Gabbana briefs.
Appreciative viewers then tried to idenfify the model. And obstacles appeared.