Today’s Doonesbury, with a musical allusion:
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Every little breeze seems to whisper “Louise.”
Birds in the trees seem to twitter “Louise.”
Each little rose
Tells me it knows I love you, love you.
Archive for June, 2016
What the wind says
June 9, 2016Tom Toro
June 9, 2016Caught in the May 9th New Yorker, this Tom Toro cartoon:
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A little slideshow on time adverbials and the times they refer to, understood figuratively.
Toro hasn’t appeared on this blog before, but he’s a prolific cartoonist with an ear for language and an inclination to play with classic cartoon memes (like the desert island or, as below, penguins and their discriminability).
Still solid, after 20 years
June 8, 2016(Warning: heavy technical linguistics.)
This morning a linguist working on auxiliary reduction in Scots dialects wrote to ask me about the 1997 Pullum & Zwicky LSA paper “Licensing of prosodic features by syntactic rules: The key to auxiliary reduction” (a paper Geoff and I are still proud of). The abstract is available on this blog, but the handout is not (though other handouts are there). A significant problem with word processing formats was the culprit, but (spurred by my correspondent’s query) Geoff managed to unearth a clean copy of the reading script for the paper, which includes everything from the handout and more. Now available for public consumption here.
Paleolithic reporting
June 6, 2016… and cartooning — telling a story through pictures in sequence — and story inflation.
Today’s Bizarro, with another variant of the caveman cartoon meme:
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)
In panel 1, at the top, Caveman 1 tells Caveman 2 the story of a hunt, exhibiting a trophy (which looks a lot like a squirrel). In panel 2, Caveman 2 reports the story in a painting that, um, expands some on the original account, now involving large horned mammals (well, if it’s not true, it’s a good story).
A Chomsky caricature
June 6, 2016Will Leben commenting in Facebook yesterday about the June 9th issue of the New York Review of Books, with a drawing of Noam Chomsky on the cover:
This meaty review [“A Case Against America” by Kenneth Roth, review of Noam Chomsky’s “Who Rules the World?”] rightly takes Chomsky to task for cherry-picking facts and for sometimes getting them wrong. Also included, the most hideous, cartoonish drawing of him in print.
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The review is critical of Chomsky, but (as several commenters have observed) not as critical as it might have been. As for the drawing, as I noted on Facebook:
The drawing is indeed cartoonish; it’s a caricature, by the NYRB‘s current resident caricarturist, James Ferguson (succeeding David Levine, who did many thousands of caricatures over the years), Caricatures aren’t portraits in any ordinary sense; they’re intentionally exaggerated and mean to evoke character or highlight notable characteristics of their subjects. Many are affectionate, like Al Hirschfield’s theatrical caricatures in the NYT; on the other hand, some political caricatures (like Thonas Nast’s) are savage. In the NYRB, getting a caricature, rather than a photo, is a sign that you’re a Person of Significance.
More participial urgency
June 5, 2016In today’s Doonesbury, a new (and younger) audience confronts a stylistic quirk of some television hews reporting:
This time the participles (PRP, PSP) are pretty much a side issue, though their sense of urgency — I would say, rather, “immediacy” — appears right away, in panel 2.
Jeff Hobbs
June 4, 2016In the June 2016 issue of Funny Times, a bit of language play, portmanteauing Oreos (referring to the brand of creme-filled chocolate cookie sandwiches) and areolas (referring to the rings of pigmented skin surrounding nipples):
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The artist, Jeff Hobbs, is new to this blog; he’s given to plays on words, however.
More sugar bombs
June 4, 2016Continuing a Calvin and Hobbes theme from March (3/19/16, “Sugar bombs”, with links to earlier postings on sugary cereals in real life):
In the earlier posting, Calvin was eating Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs. In today’s re-play of an old C&H, the brand name is Crunchy Sugar Bombs (it’s on the box). Presumably they’re sister Sugar Bomb varieties from the same manufacturer, along the lines of Fruity Pebbles and Cocoa Pebbles from Post Cereals in real life.
Then there’s the idea of a hyperactive child as a method of birth control.
Geek compounds
June 4, 2016Today’s Zippy, returning to Pancake Circus, to trade geek compounds:
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Three things: the expressions being traded, which start out in panel 1 as N + N compounds from the tech world, both Ns monosyllables, and then get a bit more varied, but still with accent on the initial syllable (the default accentuation for compounds); the final expression, FlapJax, certainly referring to flapjacks (a U.S. synonym for pancakes, as fits the Pancake Circus context) but possibly also to the fictional character Jax from the Mortal Combat games (in line with the tenchnogeek theme); and the re-use of the visual material from another Zippy cartoon, now with different text.
It was 13 years ago today…
June 3, 2016Well, Sunday, not actually today, and Sgt. Pepper’s Band has nothing to do with it. As I wrote here on the 1st:
Back in late January, I posted about a visit to the Gamble Garden in Palo Alto for a breakfast outdoors … That day was just after my man Jacques’s birthday (his 74th). Today is just before Jacques’s 2003 death day (on Sunday), so there’s a certain symmetry to these two plant postings.
Jacques was a plant person, roses especially, but also tree peonies and daylilies and tomatoes and lots more. He valued plants for their beauty, their scent, and their culinary usefulness, but was wary of plants whose attraction lies mostly in their quirkiness (like Kniphofia, or red hot poker, #1 in my recent Gamble Garden posting; and he detested the showy bird-of-paradise plant).
But the roses, oh the roses.