Archive for November, 2015

Foodnited States

November 20, 2015

Through Facebook friends, this entertaining Mental Floss piece, “All 50 States Reimagined as Food Puns” by Rebecca OConnell:

  (#1)

If you had to assign one piece of food to represent each state, which item would you pick? For the good people at Foodiggity [which can be followed on Instagram], the answer is whatever is punniest.

Armed with a set of state-shaped cookie cutters and a love of wordplay, the team set out to make each state out of a food. The series, called The Foodnited States of America, features all 50 states.

The project came about when Foodiggity founder Chris Durso’s young son suggested they make states out of food. Durso almost dismissed the idea, until his son added, “But what if they like had funny names like New Pork or New Jerky?” Durso understood the value of a good pun and took on the task of shoving mashed potatoes into metal shapes.

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In brief: phonological words

November 19, 2015

Heard — or, rather, misheard —  in a tv commercial for Oral-B electric toothbrushes (which can be viewed here):

(1) I’m never going back to Emanuel Brush.

when what the actor was saying was:

(2) I’m never going back to a manual brush.

Now, since I have [ǝ] (rather than [ɪ]) in the first syllable of the name Emanuel and the indefinite article a [ǝ] usually forms a phonological word with the word that follows it, (1) and (2) are in fact normally homophonous for me.

Yes, I don’t know anyone named Emanuel Brush, so I don’t know how the name came to me, in a toothbrush ad, no less.

Four from the New Yorker

November 19, 2015

In the November 16th New Yorker, four cartoons that made me consider, once again, what you need to know to understand what’s going on in a cartoon and what you need to know to understand why the cartoon is funny. Two cartoons by artists who have appeared on the blog before (Harry Bliss, Shannon Wheeler) and two by newcomers to this blog (Kaamran Hafeez and Tom Chitty). The cartoons:

(#1)

(#2)

(#3)

(#4)

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Rushing Sugar

November 19, 2015

The latest ad from the Daily Jocks company, with a caption:

  (#1)

The head-scratcher

He didn’t know
Where he was or
How he got there;
Last he remembered,
He was rocking to
“El Bimbo” at the
Blue Oyster Bar, in his
Pink and blue jockstrap,
With a really
Hot
Sweaty
Stud
Who called him
Sugar

Some notes:

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How can we help, caller?

November 18, 2015

Today’s Bizarro, with a hotline for the threatened:

(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)

Advice hotlines are a specialized form of conversation by telephone. The callers seek advice about something that is troubling them (sometimes desperately so), and the staffers try to guide the callers towards useful responses to their situation.

Of course, the idea of dinosaurs using telephones is wonderfully absurd.

 

Somewhere, looking like Bozo

November 18, 2015

Today’s Zippy, with another song burlesque from the ventriloquist’s dummy, last heard from singing “The House of the Writhing Pun”:

Yes, “Over the Rainbow”, taking shots at Donald Trump.

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Fischli & Weiss

November 18, 2015

In the front section of the November 16th New Yorker, under the heading “Winter Preview” (by Andrea Scott):

Conceptualism takes a comic turn at the Guggenheim with “Peter Fischli David Weiss: How to Work Better,” a career survey of the two Swiss artists, who met in Zurich in 1977 and collaborated until Weiss’s death, in 2012. Their first project was a series of irreverent photographs, featuring gherkins and sausages as dramatis personae; their most famous is the live-action film “The Way Things Go,” a spectacular chain reaction of unspectacular objects. For more than three decades, Fischli and Weiss uncovered hilarity, and pathos and mystery, in the workaday world. Don’t miss “Suddenly This Overview,” an installation of scores of small, unfired-clay sculptures whose subjects range from the Biblical to the cultural to the banal: the parting of the Red Sea, Mick Jagger and Brian Jones feeling satisfied after writing “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” a wedge of cheese. (Opens Feb. 5.)

(#1)

At the Carpet Shop from the 1979 sausage series

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The news for penises: omnibus edition

November 18, 2015

On AZBlogX, a series of five postings with penises as the unifying theme. All five are highly X-rated, not for the kiddies or the sexually modest.

11/17/15: Cockfest #1: the basic offer (link): offer of an erect penis to suck

11/17/15: Cockfest #2: jacking off together (link): two men jacking off together: competition or collaboration or both?; sickling or winging the foot in ballet

11/17/15: Cockfest #3: Josman boy on boy (link): two cartoons by gay cartoonist Josman, showing boy-on-boy action

11/17/15: Cockfest #4: penis-to-penis (link): on a still from the gay porn flick Splash (naked men kissing and sharing their erections)

11/17/15: Cockfest #5: cum guzzling (link): on the gay porn flick The Cum Guzzler Club, with comments on cum play

The House of the Writhing Pun

November 17, 2015

Yesterday’s Zippy, continuing a series about a ventriloquist’s dummy:

A burlesque of “The House of the Rising Sun”.

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Alaskan-cod-pieces

November 17, 2015

An entertaining photo that’s been floating around the Internet for some time:

(#1)

In speech, the intended parsing

(1) [ Alaskan cod ] [ pieces ]

is indistinguishable from the humorous parsing

(2) { Alaskan ] [ codpieces ]

In writing, the conventional spelling distinguishes the two and enforces parsing (1). But if you’re not aware of the item of apparel the codpiece (more on that to come), or if the possibility of an ambiguity hadn’t occurred to you, you might be tempted to the spelling codpieces instead of cod pieces.

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