A Cyanide and Happiness cartoon passed on by Facebook friends:
Dog reduces linguist to tears. (Note: talking dog. In fact, dog that speaks English.)
Archive for October, 2016
Dog savages linguist
October 6, 2016Bozo’s ark
October 6, 2016Today’s Bizarro:
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.)
The cartoon combines two cartoon memes: Noah’s Ark (note the shepherd’s staff, or shepherd’s crook) and the meme of the clown and his balloon animals.
As a bonus, it’s a wordless cartoon.
A Euro-hunk
October 6, 2016That would be Goran Višnjić / Visnjic (pronunced roughly like VISH nyitch), one of four character actors in the tv series Crossing Lines who especially caught my eye. Here’s a display of the main cast from season 3 of the show, with three of the four:
(#1)
Starting at the lower left and moving clockwise, the three are #2 (Lara Rossi), #5 (Visnjic), and #7 (Donald Sutherland). And to justify the title of this posting, here’s Visnjic in one of his signature roles, in the Land of Shirtless Men, as the lead in the 2004 tv miniseries Spartacus:
(#2)
A conundrum
October 5, 2016From Kim Darnell, this puzzle, which she found on Tumblr (no one seems to know the ultimate source, as is usual in such things):
(#1)
You can see this as a puzzle, or you can see it as a wordless cartoon. In either case, it draws on a piece of popular culture, and if you don’t have that, you’re lost.
For Kim, the big point was phonological, but the cultural reference is crucial.
Unfetching cats
October 5, 2016Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm:
An instance of the No Word for X meme, here applied to cats’ deep resistance to obeying commands: there’s no word for ‘fetch’ in Cat.
Beefcake on screen
October 4, 2016(Little of academic or social significance, but mostly about shameless displays of the male body. Not, however, X-rated, either visually or verbally.)
A while back, links on Facebook to Hollywood Beefcake, a public group on Facebook featuring movie and tv actors dsplaying their bodies. Shots of, among others, Guy Madison, Randolph Scott, Gary Cooper, Hugh O’Brian, Robert Conrad, Johnny Weissmuller, Clint Eastwood, Tab Hunter, Marc Singer, Burt Reynolds, Lee Majors, Jeff Goldblum, Alexander Skarsgard, Matt Bomer, Ryan Phillipe, Shia LaBeouf, Danny Pino, and Chris Meloni. And Charlie Hunnam, who’s appeared on this blog before because he revels in sexy shirtless displays.
Then an appendix on three of the notable shirtless hunks on the television series Glee, who I don’t think had made it onto the Hollywood Beefcake site when I last checked it.
Message from a bug
October 3, 2016Today’s vintage Calvin and Hobbes:
(#1)
Now, this is funny on the face of it: Calvin’s fantasy of being a bug that sends typed messages by jumping on one key after another — realized by Calvin’s hitting the keys on his mother’s typewriter. Calvin’s fantasies are often his interpretations of his real-life actions. Or, looking a things the other way around, his real-life actions are sometimes realizations of his fantasies.
The strip is a lot funnier, however, if you know a little bit of literary history.
The Gray Lady goes bilingual
October 3, 2016From univision news:
The New York Times prints first editorial in Spanish, asks Latinos to vote
On Sunday [October 2nd] the paper published an editorial in Spanish and English asking Hispanics to register to vote. The idea came from two writers who wanted to highlight the importance of the Latino vote in November.
The old oaken desk
October 2, 2016More home decor, this time in a report on Peninsula Furniture Moving Day, which was two Sundays back. The basic strategy: take Jacques’s fold-up Scandinavian desk (of rosewood) from Ramona St. to a consignment shop in Sunnyvale; move the big oak desk from Staunton Ct. to Ramona, to replace Jacques’s desk there; move the big CD carousel (solid cherry, originally from Levenger) to Staunton Ct., from which it can be sold or donated. Later, move a small bookshelf from Staunton Ct. to replace the CD carousel; acquire a desk organizer and a swing-arm desk lamp for the oak desk; and finish removing the contents of my Stanford office (now given up) for recycling or for processing at Ramona St. The result was a gigantic task of sorting and storing, still in progess.
Meanwhile, here’s the oak desk (originally from the study in my Columbus OH house, now in my Ramona St. bedroom), with accessories:
(#1)
(Large “memory collages” on the wall, plus the Jacques and Arnold wedding-equivalent photo from 1996.)
Penguin irises
October 1, 2016Another home decor posting, this time with a combination of elements on the coffee table in my living room:
(#1)