Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm, on a linguistic theme:
Aside from the meta character of the strip — the dogs know they are characters in a cartoon — there’s their avoidance of the word bitch, as unsuitable for the strip, because the strip is carried by “family newspapers”, where women and children (notoriously delicate and easily damaged by words) might come across bitch (even used to refer to a female dog, not to mention in the idiom son of a bitch).
Passed on by Facebook friends (especially Arthur Prokosch), this Dan Wasserman editorial cartoon in the Boston Globe on the 16th:
Here we are in Portmantexia, a land of words in –exit, –leave, and –out, a land that people want to abandon. The leading family in Portmantexia is the Exits, especially the recently prominent Brexit, towering above cousins Grexit, Crexit, the infant Trexit, the black sheep Texit, and the newborns Nexit and Frexit.
… over Herr Drumpf (the German candidate for POTUS)’s arrival in Scotland, just after the Brexit vote. Herr Drumpf’s tweet:
Just arrived in Scotland. Place is going wild over the vote. They took their country back, just like we will take America back. No games!
Problem: Scotland was very much in favor of Remain, and the Scots are indeed wild, but over what they see as betrayal of their earlier vote to remain in the UK, where they could continue getting the benefits of the UK’s membership in the EU. So the tweets were vicious. From the Barstool Sports site yesterday, by Feitelberg, “Donald Trump Was The Victim Of Some Vicious British Insults, Which Are Incredible And My New Favorite Thing”:
On the occasion of my posting a Bob Eckstein (“bob”) cartoon (#1 in 6/22/16, “Two tests in cartoon understanding”), the cartoonist has friended me on Facebook (earlier Eckstein from 5/30/15, “Earworms, snowmen, and parodies”). So now a few more of his cartoons, of several different types.
More offers from the Zwicky condos of Palo Alto. The offers come as packages: we’re ready to mail out a package for the cost of mailing and no more. If you want one of these collections, SEND E-MAIL to both me and Kim Darnell (who manages the mailing): arnold.zwicky@gmail.com and drdcrunk.gmail.com . With your postal address. PLEASE PLEASE don’t reply as a Facebook comment or message or a WordPress comment, since this offer is going out in multiple places.
Annals of lexical confusions and innovations. Two word problems from Ruthie in the cartoon One Big Happy (two recent strips), a word confusion and two innovations from the tv show Psych.
From the tv series Psych (S1 E11), psychic investigator Shawn Spencer (played by James Roday) to Head Det. Carlton Lassiter of the Santa Barbara Police Dept. (played by Timothy Osmundson), on attracting women:
Chicks dig the sternum bush.
Translation from the very playful ShawnSpeak: ‘Women like chest hair’. That is, unbutton your shirt and show some chest hair. Standard sternum ‘chest, breastbone’ plus bush ‘luxuriant growth of hair’, especially in vulgar slang bush ‘a woman’s public hair’.
(The character Shawn is a high-energy, high-id showoff, but engaging: a big goofy kid.)
From Sim Aberson on Facebook, this vintage crate label:
(#1)
(Crate labels on this blog: my posting of the 14th.) The heyday of crate labels was in the early 20th century, so gay ‘lighthearted’ and cock ‘rooster’ would be appropriate for the period, despite the way we’re inclined to read them now.
From the July 2016 issue of Funny Times, two cartoons that are real tests of understanding, the second more so than the first. From Bob Eckstein, a cartoon that is funny on the grounds of sheer silliness:
(#1)
And from J.C. Duffy, a cartoon that is just incomprehensible unless you have two pieces of (pop-)cultural information:
(#2)
I continue with the gigantic divestment / divestiture of belongings, designed to reduce the contents of two highly packed condos (including a truly gigantic library) to one relatively uncluttered one, preserving the things I think I’ll want to use in the scholarly life left to me (I am an old man).
The previous CD offer (now taken up) was here, and now, an offer of a collection of CDs (54 of them) of contemporary folk music. And separately, a small collection of operettas / light operas (Kálmán and Gilbert & Sullivan), in 8 albums; details below. Just pay for the shipping.
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