In this morning’s crop of cartoons, a One Big Happy and a Bizarro:
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Archive for June, 2015
Two for Thursday
June 25, 2015The news for penises, including accidental ones
June 25, 2015First, a little more on sexual tube steak. Then a couple images of accidental penises.
Annals of advertising and poor taste
June 25, 2015A recent tv ad for the candy Skittles lies, for me, somewhere between absurdly silliy and just plain creepy. The premise is that there’s an epidemic of Skittles pox, which manifests itself in an outbreak of Skittles on the face. The unlikely ad copy:
Warning signs of a Skittles pox outbreak include Rainbow colors, increased dating prospects and loud “Mmmm” sounds from the afflicted. Contract the Rainbow. Taste the Rainbow.
The equivalent of a pustule in this infection is an individual Skittle — entirely edible, hence the enhanced dating prospects and the appreciative noises (and, for me, the creepiness).
Oh yes, it’s contagious.
(Earlier on Skittles, its “Share the rainbow … Taste the rainbow” campaign, and rainbow food composed of the candies, in this posting.)
A still from one ad:
and the video:
Aspects at 50
June 25, 2015Geoff Pullum’s column in the Lingua Franca blog (of the Chronicle of High Education) on the 22nd, “Revolutionary Methodological Preliminaries”, went back 50 years to a signal event in linguistics publishing. Geoff begins:
It is rather surprising that more has not been done this year (thus far, anyway) to commemorate a significant semicentenary: the 50th anniversary of what could reasonably be called the most influential linguistics book of the 20th century. [Aspects of the Theory of Syntax] was published by MIT Press in 1965 as “Special Technical Report 11” of the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT, and has recently been re-released with a new preface, but it doesn’t seem to have inspired any major conferences or other celebrations. Yet it gets more than 25,000 citations, according to Google Scholar, and it laid the foundation for 50 years of interdisciplinary research on how human minds could possibly create and manage the extraordinary complexity of language.
I was there for the occasion.
nutmeg, the verb
June 25, 2015From Steve Anderson a few days ago, this cute story (by Seth Rosenthal on June 20th) from the world of basketball, on player Boogie Cousins:
Hero child nutmegs DeMarcus Cousins, then scores in his face
This is Boogie’s “DeMarcus Cousins Elite Skills Camp,” and it’s the typical session in which campers get to attempt scoring on the 7′ basketball man. Cousins obviously isn’t trying very hard to start the exchange, but then the kid successfully puts the ball through his legs and Cousins spins around with what looks to me like a genuine effort to block the reverse finish … but it’s got juuuust the right arc to soar over his fingers and drop in! And the crowd goes wild!
Video in the story. Still shot of the aftermath:
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Ah, the verb nutmeg.
Editorial pun
June 24, 2015KAL’s editorial cartoons in The Economist are not especially given to word play, but in the current issue (June 20th, p, 9) he deploys a pun:
That’s arms the limbs of the body vs. arms ‘weapons and ammunition’, involved in arms races (arms expansion) as opposed to arms reduction. With a jab at Vladimir Putin as a bodybuilder.
A query on comic conventions
June 24, 2015A query from regular reader Andy Sleeper on the 15th, about conventions in the comics. Andy reported on two cases where he’d seen flanking punctuation used to indicate that what was inside the punctuation was spoken in a language other than English. Andy wondered (a) whether this was an established practice in comics, and (b) whether artists have tried to use other means to solve this problem in their work.
I have to confess that I don’t know the answer to either of these questions, though I’ve spent some time looking around. So now I throw the questions open to the world, hoping that someone will know things I don’t.
Hecho en México
June 24, 2015So it says on the hunky body of Mr. Mexico 2014, José Pablo Minor:
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(shown here in a body-display pose that emphasizes his torso, makes a V that points to his crotch, and stops just short of exposing that crotch. A cock-tease shot, plus a darkly handsome face.)
Briefly: bizarro word play
June 23, 2015Not from Bizarro, but from Dennis Corrigan’s True Love Knows No Boundaries: One hundred amazing, comical, and bizarre drawings; see website here:
(Passed on by a colleague and friend of his.)
A goofy pun on boil, as in bring s.th. to a boil ’cause s.th. to boil, to be boiled’ vs. the medical noun boil: from Wikipedia:
A boil, also called a furuncle, is a deep folliculitis, infection of the hair follicle. It is most commonly caused by infection by the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus, resulting in a painful swollen area on the skin caused by an accumulation of pus and dead tissue.
Briefly: A misreading
June 23, 2015Seen (in the NYT) out of the corner of my eye this morning:
The Iron
Dean’s Fatal
Flaw
When I gave it my full attention, I saw that the head was actually:
The Iran
Deal’s Fatal
Flaw
Later it occurred to me that my own mishearings were also mostly collected in contexts of less than full attention, as in overhearings in public settings while I was engaged in conversation myself.
When I focused my attention