Arnold Zwicky's Blog

(Not much about language here, just weirdness.)

Today’s Zippy, with a bow to a novelty item of the 1960s and a modern piece of visionary Americana:

(#1)

This being a Zippy strip, of course there is a giant lava lamp (roughly 60 ft. high), complete with observation deck, in the middle of the little town of Soap Lake WA — but it’s still a vision (of local resident Brent Blake), a prospect not yet realized. It’s a spectral lamp, a companion to Zippy the heartburned spectral rutabaga and the overripe parsnip he longs for:

(#2)

On the lava lamp, from Wikipedia:

A lava lamp (or Astro lamp) is a decorative novelty item, invented in 1963 by British accountant Edward Craven Walker, the founder of the British lighting company Mathmos. The lamp consists of a wad of a special coloured wax mixture inside a glass vessel the remainder of which contains clear or translucent liquid; the vessel is then placed on a box containing an incandescent light bulb whose heat causes temporary reductions in the density and viscosity of the wax. The warmed wax rises through the surrounding liquid, cools, loses its buoyancy, and falls back to the bottom of the vessel in a cycle that is visually suggestive of pāhoehoe lava, hence the name. The lamps are designed in a variety of styles and colours.

This entry was posted on July 23, 2016 at 5:40 am and is filed under Linguistics in the comics, Pop culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.