Today’s Bizarro takes us back to the early days of language:
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)
But then there’s the circularity. Caveman A announces that he has thought of a word W with a novel property. But then he characterizes this property by using W. How can Caveman B understand this characterization if he’s unfamiliar with W?
(Meanwhile, of course, Caveman A talks in Cavemanese.)
(on actors, writers, and artists, with not much on language)
… and Billy Mumy and Ferenc Molnár and Edith Barakovich. It starts with some tv I watched yesterday: “Long Distance Call”, episode 58 of the American tv series The Twilight Zone (originally aired on 3/31/61), notably featuring Lili Darvas and Billy Mumy:
(#1)
The set-up, from Wikipedia:
A boy named Billy communicates with his father’s mother using a toy telephone that she gave him on his birthday before she died. His parents become concerned when Billy spends all his time having “pretend” phone conversations with his deceased grandmother. He says that she tells him she is lonely and misses him.
The name of an old favorite dish at the Vietnames fusion restaurant Three Seasons in Palo Alto. Well, its old name — it’s now listed as “Grilled prawns and garlic noodles” — and I much prefer the old one, because “Tiger prawns and garlic noodles” is a perfect line of trochaic tetrameter:
SW SW SW SW
(the verse line of so much folk and popular music). In a fancy photographic presentation:
(#1)
So I took the tray of Freshly’s Chicken Livorno
(#1)
(noting that the film was rather puffed up) and put it into the microwave for two minutes.
And the entire house was filled with the reek of hot rotten chicken. A truly Great Pong. I threw the tray into a plastic bag and rushed it outdoors. Opened the front and back doors of the house all the way, to air the place out. It took quite a lot of time.
Not a good beginning for the Menorial Day holiday.
(Talk of men’s bodies and male-male sex, but nothing actually incendiary, and the explicit images are in my posting “Memorial Day military porn” on AZBlogX, not here.)
I start with yesterday’s Frazz, for the holiday:
(Hat tip to Robert Coren.) In my AZBlogX posting you can see the Channel 1 Releasing / Dirk Yates tribute to Immoral Day, in pornstar flesh (represented there by DJ, or D.J., Carlton in the 2008 flick Duty Weekend) offered for sale to celebrate American military men, democracy, and capitalism. As for capitalism, every American holiday, no matter how solemn its purpose, has been bent to serve commerce, and Memorial Day is no exception; plus, if there’s stuff to be sold, the gay porn studios are hard on the case.
In today’s New York Times, an obituary “Frank Modell, Longtime New Yorker Cartoonist, Dies at 98” by Sam Roberts:
Frank Modell, a classically trained artist who contributed more than 1,400 cartoons to The New Yorker — customarily, he said, “of angry men and sexy women and dogs” — during an illustrious era for the magazine, died on Friday at his home in Guilford, Conn. He was 98 [born 9/6/17].
Women and dogs and the occasional clown.
On (US) Memorial Day Eve, this Dan Thompson Brevity cartoon passed on by Betsy Herrington on Facebook:
(#1)
A distant pun, with the original and the pun differing both segmentally and prosodically, but all that is surmounted if you know the original: Humphrey Bogart (caricatured in #1, in trenchcoat and fedora) to Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca: “Here’s looking at you, kid”.
Via Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky, this Evolution of Woman cartoon from the Tainted Lips Tumblr account of a young woman named Tupa:
The drawing plays on the widespread use of flowers (as vaginal symbols) to represent women. Think Georgia O’Keeffe.
Today’s Zippy goes back to 1962 and Kookie comic book #1:
(#1)
— meanwhile, engaging in a battle of beatnik poetry with the character Bongo from Kookie.
(Another in a long line of Zippy strips on beatnik customs, including invented beatnik poetry.)
(Mostly about male art, not much about language. Sexy, but far from incendiary.)
It started with a mailing, weeks ago, from this aggregation site that keeps sending me ads (mostly lame) for gay porn (from an assortment of addresses), with this image, which it touted as a hot item I should pay for:
(#1)
This is a cool, and funny (and meant to be funny), piece of male photography showing a relationship between two hot (and very playful) boyfriends (Mikele on the left here, Leo on the right). Way sexy, but meant as art, not — primarily, anyway — as jack-off material. It’s part of a big portfolio staged mostly by Leo, material that I hope he will get published in book form. Maybe the aggregation site just gratuitously lifted this shot from the net, maybe they paid Leo for it (though I seriously doubt that), but what it is not is just amateur porn, which is what the (apparently Chinese) aggregation site was trying to sell it as.
Here: more of Leo, and some of the lovers together, a selection from Leo’s portfolio, available via his bahamvt Tumblr site, where @leotakespix says:
Just some nerd living in Rome. THIS IS MY ONLY ACCOUNT Exclusive cuddle buddy of @mikeletakespix. Open to partnerships with brands.
The man needs an agent. Seriously.