From Chris Waigl, this headline in the Alaska Dispatch News politics section:
No gas-line veto override vote in sight
The headline is entirely accurate and grammatically impeccable, but the combination of three negative-tinged elements in it — veto, override, syntactic negation with no — makes it hard to understand.
At breakfast on Saturday, my grand-daughter noticed the list of ice cream flavors available at the Peninsula Creamery, and was delighted to see Rocky Road as one of the choices. (Not that any of us ordered ice cream for breakfast.) That made me wonder about the name and its history.
The story starts in Oakland CA and eventually finds its way to the UK and on to Australia.
Three more cartoons from the May issue of Funny Times, cartoons that are in some way “political”: from Ted Rall, Tom Tomorrow, and Ruben Bolling:
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A cartoonist, with this cartoon in the May issue of Funny Times:
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This works pretty well as a pun in print — Oedipus Rex / Oedipus Rx — with the mother theme and the prescription theme combined. Apparently there are people who treat the abbreviation Rx as an initialism /ar ɛks/, a noun meaning ‘prescription’ (“an Rx for Viagra”), and for them Oedipus Rx works as a (moderately distant) pun in pronunciation as well.
Now: more on this, a note on the cartoonist, and a couple more punning cartoons from him.
Not a morning name or (thank goodness) an obit, but a brief appreciation of the actor (as a result of seeing her featured in an episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent), plus some reflections on tv sitcoms.
A Rhymes With Orange of 8/27/14, found in the May issue of Funny Times:
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Three things: on swim-up bars; on the compound swim-up bar; on understanding the cartoon.
Posted on Facebook by Leith Chu:
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Oh my: the verb pork, the verb pull, the verb rub, all available with sexual senses.
Today’s Zippy, set in the town of Prosaic:
With apologies to Milan Kundera, it’s the strip of laughter and forgetting: forgetting the catch-phrase, forgetting to rewire the CD remote, forgetting that Dingburg is only 12 miles away. Apparently Happy Boy interferes with memory.
(Note that there are three argument structures for forget here: forget NP, forget to VP, forget that S; remember and, for that matter, know have the same possibilities.)
In the NYT on the 17th an obit by Daniel Slotkin, “Ira Lewis, Actor and Playwright, Dies at 82”. Fascinating life in the theater, ending with this familial note:
Mr. Lewis, who lived in Westfield, N.J., is survived by two brothers, Marvin and Seymour.
Lovely: Ira, Marvin, and Seymour, three traditional American Jewish names. Times have changed. A couple of generations ago, such names went out of fashion, to be replaced by more generically “American” (gentile) names — for men, by a collection of Irish-derived names. So Ira, Marvin, and Seymour became Kevin, Sean, and Brady.
Today’s Zippy goes back to the world of Tod Browning’s Freaks:
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From “Pip and Flip Snow: the pinheads of Freaks” by J. Tithonus Pednaud on The Human Marvels site:
Best known for their heartwarming roles in the 1932 film Freaks, where they starred in scenes alongside fellow famous pinhead Schlitzie, the Snow sisters were well-known staples of the World Circus Sideshow at Coney.
Usually promoted professionally as Pip and Flip, Jenny Lee Snow and Elvira Snow were billed as Pip and Zip in Freaks.
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