In the November 21st New Yorker, this trio of food products that aim towards cigarhood but fall short:
The play is on the American idiom (attested since the 1930s) close but no cigar (with several variants), used to say that someone has come close to success but doesn’t quite reach the goal, and so fails to win the prize for success — fails to win the metaphorical cigar. In Chitty’s cartoon, cigarhood is, absurdly, the actual goal of repurposing food.
Noted today in the section of Palo Alto’s Gamble Gardens devoted to plants from arid areas — the Mediterranean, Chile, South Africa, Australia — with climates like our local climate: a very attractive ground cover, with thin, leathery, silver and green leaves. Not in bloom, but still pleasant to look at. Identified as Dymondia margaretae, and if that’s not a taxonomic name derived from a personal name, I’ll hang up my onomastic hat.
The plant, and then the person. And a background story that’s part misfortune, part good fortune.
(Hunky guy in underwear, somewhat suggestive caption, nothing to frighten the horses. But in case this isn’t what you want to see …)
The Daily Jocks ad from the 14th, with a caption added by me:
By himself in the
Darkened rainbow
Sex room,
Cromo reflected on the
Secret of his
Crotch, found it was a
Flash piece of
Top-notch meat.
In the spirit of yesterday’s posting on a Psalm 73 text in two settings from the Denson Sacred Harp, on the occasion of Helmet GrabPussy’s election as POTUS, a revisiting of another biblical text on striking down the prideful, powerful, and rich, and raising up the meek, humble, and poor.
Previously, a 1/15/12 posting “Evensong”, about the Magnificat from the Anglican Evensong service and an entertaining and spirited burlesque of (part of) it by J. Keene Daingerfield (Sr.) (Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky’s great-grandfather), with its stirring climactic phrase, “Away, you rich, you son of a bitch”. A text now worth revisiting.
The xkcd (#1759) from the 14th:
It’s a hoot. Tons of play with names and with Americans’ knowledge of the geography, real and imaginary, of the British Isles (including at least the east coast of Ireland).
One of several shapenote songs sung by the Palo Alto / Peninsula Sacred Harp group this Sunday afternoon in defiance of the election of Helmet GrabPussy as POTUS. In this Psalm 73 hymn text by Isaac Watts (1719), the prideful rich get their comeuppance, deliciously:
(#1)
Today’s Zits, featuring a capillamentary derangement:
(#1)
hoodie hair is a “distant” N + N compound, one where the semantic relationship between the two Ns (here, the head N hair ‘head of hair’ and the modifying N hoodie, referring to a garment with a hood, a piece of built-in headgear) is not one from a small list of standard patterns, but instead roams further afield. The pattern is the elaborately specific:
headgear-name + hair / head ‘hair disarranged or molded from wearing a piece of headgear’
A Harry Bliss cartoon from the November 14th New Yorker:
(#1)
Four things, related in complex ways. One, the (very common) deflection of physical symptoms to psychological states (“You have knots in your lower back” > “You have lots of anxiety in your lower back”), here carried to an absurd degree of specificity, with knots or musculuar tension being attributed to homophobia.
Two, the physical intimacy of massage, here between two men.
Three, the formal composition of the drawing, with the masseur at right angles to his client and all those vertcal lines, broken by the angled branch on the scroll, which connects the bodies of the two men.
Four, the word homophobia, to which some have objected, on the grounds that it’s contrary to etymology: –phobia from the Greek ‘fear’ root, but homophobes, it is claimed, are not so much fearful of homosexuality as averse to it.
(An assortment of linguistic points along the way, but a lot of stuff about the gay porn flick BuckleRoos (2004), with explicit discussion of men’s bodies and male-male sex, plus images at the borderline — seven definitely over the line are on AZBlog X, in a posting entitled “Watching the BuckleBoys” — so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
My Saturday morning playtime viewing was this favorite video — 2 discs, plus a 2005 documentary about its creation, eXposed: The Making of a Legend — which moved me to write a metered (but not rhyming) caption for one scene in the flick: part 2, scene 2, involving a rancher and two Mormon missionaries:
Late-breaking news in the
Beefland Raunch Bulletin:
Cowboy Screws Mormon
On Park Picnic Tabletop
Any guy with the buckle is magically hot;
He can take what he wants, not a man can resist.Both the boys on the mission know nothing of sex,
But ol’ Jed leads the way to ecstatic abandon.Now he’s fucking a boy on the top of a bench;
We are watching a Mormon get screwed by a rancher.
The Doonesbury in today’s comics feed, a dialogue between Zipper Harris (with the spiky hair) and his buddy and, back in college, roommate and (football) teammate Jeff Redfern:
Four panels of laconic exchanges to set up the relationship between the guys. Then the kicker, about what Zipper wants.