Following my orgy of disaster flicks on the SyFy channel (including Meteor Storm, reported on here), there came a wonderful Twilight Zone episode starring comic Ed Wynn in a touching dramatic role:
Wynn as the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland
Archive for April, 2016
Ed Wynn
April 24, 2016Meteor Storm
April 24, 2016About the 2010 film and the two lead actors, who were immediately familiar to me, though I couldn’t say from where. Ultimately, this posting is about “ordinary working actors” (the phrase is based on Chuck Fillmore’s notion of Ordinary Working Grammarians) — people who get into acting (often via odd routes), practice the craft in children’s theater, college theater, soap operas, commercials, modeling, regional theater and other stage productions, whatever, and then become part of a cadre of accomplished professionals, very few of whom become stars or celebrities, but still give pleasure to audiences and are often liminally recognizable.
(#1)
(Yes, the Golden Gate Bridge gets demolished, along with lots of really tall buildings.)
Out in front: the excellent faces of the two lead actors:
(#2)
(#3)
The gigantic metaphor
April 24, 2016Today’s Zippy, with a gigantic metaphor wheeling on the streets:
The Wienermobile is, of course, a real thing, considered on this blog in a 8/11/12 posting “Annals of phallicity: Wienermobile, banana slug split”.
Dr. Sauerkraut! Calling Dr. Sauerkraut!
The news for penises, snickerboy edition
April 23, 2016Premiering on TBS on the 11th, with the pilot and an episode “The Hotel”: the comedy series The Detour:
The principals: Jason Jones as Nate (the father), Natalie Zea as Robin (the mother), Ashley Gerasimovich as Delilah (the daughter), Liam Carroll as Jared (the son)
This posting is triggered by the character Jared, thanks to his voicing the question (in the pilot episode), “Why are we in Penisylvania?”
Jared is a Snickerboy, primed to find “dirty words” (like penis) and allusions to sex everywhere, and eager to snicker loudly over his findings. It’s a stage in American male development — I can’t speak for other times and places — that comes after simple gross-out humor (boogers and peeing and all that) and before beginning to come to terms with something resembling the realities of sex and girls. In the hormonal rush of middle school. Roughly 10 through 14, with the Terrible Twelves in the middle.
More on open secrecy
April 22, 2016In a Morning Names posting today, I drifted onto Ivor Novello and his widely known (sometimes even celebratory) but still quite secret homosexuality, and the similar situation of other celebrities — until a significant number of public persons came out and demonstrated for gay rights and until legal sanctions on homosexuality were lifted (quite recently) in the West.
My posting elicited several Facebook comments about other public persons, from several eras. Selected and edited here.
Joe Orlando: a cartoonist and his sea-monkeys
April 22, 2016The cartoonist’s art in a somewhat unexpected place: an ad for Sea-Monkeys from the 1960s, showing a Sea-Monkey family of three:
The ad turned up in the midst of a fascinating, intricate NYT Magazine piece by Jack Hitt on Sunday the 17th, “The Battle Over the Sea-Monkey Fortune: A former 1960s bondage-film actress is waging legal combat with a toy company for ownership of her husband’s mail-order aquatic-pet empire”. There’s a lot here, but some highlights:
Morning name: ivermectin
April 22, 2016My morning name on the 18th, a very useful medication. From Wikipedia:
Ivermectin [generic name; various brand names, e.g. Stromectol. Mectizan] is a medication that is effective against many types of parasites. It is used to treat head lice, scabies, river blindness, strongyloidiasis, and lymphatic filariasis, among others. It can be either applied to the skin or taken by mouth.
Ivermectin was discovered in 1975 and came into medical use in 1981. It is on the World Health Organization’s List of Essential Medicines, the most important medications needed in a basic health system. The wholesale cost is about US$0.12 for a course of treatment. In the United States it costs $25–50 [an economic/political side note, but an important one in light of the medication’s utility against some serious scourges].
More on the medication, then some flagrant silliness based on my understanding the name of the medication as a proper name Ivor MecTin, which will lead us to Ivor Novello and a gay world that was at once highly public and deeply secret.
New snowclone days
April 21, 2016Things have been quiet on the snowclone front on the net for a while. The Snowclones Database has been in abeyance (since 1/28/13), and little has been posted on Language Log or here. But then came my recent posting on the snowclone Think Of The Xs, and a bit before that, the introduction of a snowclone discussion on ADS-L. Dan Goncharoff on 4/12/16:
Discussion of Clinton e-mails led Obama to say, “there’s classified, and then there’s classified. Has anyone ever traced this formation back into history?
Tracing snowclones back in history turns out to involve all the complexities of tracing the history of some word or fixed expression, plus a lot more. More on this later.
But back to There’s X And Then There’s X. The major item here is a posting to ADS-L by Larry Horn on 10/8/12:
Jon Huertas
April 20, 2016(Acting and a fine shirtless man.)
Re-run today of a Castle episode — S3 Ep12 “Poof! You’re Dead” from 1/10/11 — prominently featuring supporting actor Jon Huertas, playing homicide detective Javier Esposito on Capt. Kate Beckett’s team. The show is an ensemble cop drama with plenty of comic and romantic touches, well directed and well acted.
Ethnic food week
April 20, 2016Two items: yesterday’s morning name (piperade), a Basque dish in the colors of the flag of the Basque country; and a recipe from the April 2016 issue of bon appétit magazine, Matzo-Kimchi Pancakes, or, as I like to think of it, in my crudely punning way, the Seoul of Passover (the first day of Passover is a couple of days away).