Thanks to Google Alert this morning, I discovered Zwicky le Chat, the mascot of the Parisian home furnishings shops Fleux’, first on a cushion:
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The brief item descriuption:
La tête de Zwicky, le chat mascotte de Fleux’, sur un coussin La Cerise sur le Gâteau!
The Cherry on the Cake!
… in two recent strips, first at Dippin’ Donuts and then at the Sugar Shack. Looks like sweet tooth days for our Pinhead. Both strips are strewed with allusions of all kinds, of course.
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Having just posted a Liam Francis Walsh cartoon (#2 here), I came across his announcement of first children’s book (published on May 31st):
An adventure in letters. From the publisher’s blurb on amazon:
A boy and his dog embark on a fishing journey.
Their first catch of the day: a big fat letter F.
Their second? A slippery I.
After an epic journey beneath the lake’s surface, they find what they came for– a FISH, along with some unanticipated menace from a few other letters.
This clever, wordless picture book, by a popular New Yorker cartoonist, is filled with charm and heart and will have no problem swimming its way into the hearts of young readers.
The Unshelved cartoon from the 12th, passed on by Betsy Herrington on Facebook:
The GN takes a truly extreme (One Right Way) position that like can be only a verb, a bizarre view that results in her seeing the library poster as being incorrectly punctuated. (Ok, when in doubt, blame it on the punctuation.) She doesn’t even recognize the preposition use (Which one of these things is not like the others?), not to mention the many uses of like that are set off intonationally in speech and consequently should be punctuated with a comma — no doubt she dismisses these as simply incorrect, “not English” — in particular, quotative like (I asked when she was going, and she was like, “In a minute”) and discourse particle, or discourse marker, like, as in the library’s poster.
Two recent cartoons with complex puns, both requiring serious cultural knowledge. A Mother Goose and Grimm, and a Liam Francis Walsh cartoon in the October 17th New Yorker:
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Another marcher in the great parade of brocabulary, from the October 17th New Yorker: broductivity (bro + productivity):
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(by Benjamin Schwartz)
So much for the self-satisfied fist bump.
From the NYT on the 7th, “The Rise of the ‘Bromosexual’ Friendship” by Jim Farber, beginning:
A recent ad for the Bravo TV show “Shahs of Sunset” finds two of its male stars lazing on lounge chairs at the beach. Amid a scene of scantily clad sun worshipers, the best friends Reza Farahan and Mike Shouhed gaze at different objects of desire: Mr. Farahan at musclebound guys, Mr. Shouhed at voluptuous women.
Their distinct lusts, which may have alienated gay and straight men from each other in the past, inspire the ultimate gesture of fraternal connection: a fist bump.
Used to be, gay guys were at best wary of straight guys, fearing verbal or physical assaults from them; and straight guys steered clear of gay guys, fearing that homosexuality was a contagious disease and that gay guys were sexual predators. In recent years, being gay has been increasingly normalized, depending on age, social class, education, race/ethnicity, religion, and place of residence. (Times readers are a pretty narrow sampling of the population, so everything in its Style sections, like this story, has to be viewed in context.) In any case, within certain geoups, it’s now common for a straight man to have one or more gay buddies and for a gay man to have one or more straight buddies.
(A men’s underwear posting, racy but not outrageous.)
The Daily Jocks offer from 6/24 (I have a huge underwear backlog), with the ad copy and my caption:
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Funky Trunks are back with brand new underwear and swimwear! Australian brand Funky Trunks always provided bright, bold designs and their new collection is no different. You will want to be seen in these, check out full range now!
Hot Wash and
Trunked Up, the
Hard funk boys for
The Aussie Swim ‘n’ Sex
Experience, patrol the
Changing room
Relentlessly
(For Virginia, on her Revolutionary Birthday.)
Virginia Transue writes on Facebook about a piece of public art currently on view in Auburn AL:
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The New Yorker has recently been on something of a run with the cartoon meme of the clown and his balloon animal. One (by Ken Krimstein) I haven’t chronicled before, from the October 3rd issue:
Man in hot air balloon, on the right, comes upon clown in giant balloon dog balloon, on the left. How else would a clown go ballooning? (Wordless, of course.)