It’s been a while since I featured male dancers. And now, BR, a young (now 23) dancer with the National Ballet of Canada (in Toronto), seen here in a wonderful photo (by Karolina Kuras) on the NBC site:
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Rudisin is tall, lean, long-necked, and long-bodied, with a beautiful line in this shot. And of course with the muscled legs and arms required by his job.
An Avi Steinberg cartoon in the March 20th New Yorker, combining cavemen, clothing, and nipples:
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Cavemen: a cartoon meme. Clothing: one-shoulder garments for men. And of course men’s nipples. And then there’s Avi Steinberg, who’s a cartoonist+.
In the NYT Book Review on 3/5/1 7, under the heading “Walk on By” — subtitle (in print) “A tribute to the pleasures of aimless urban exploration, female style”, (on-line) “A Celebration of Women’s Pleasure in Wandering a City” — a review by Diane Johnson of Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London by Lauren Elkin (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016).
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The cover art captures well Elkin’s reconfiguring the identity of the flâneur, for nearly 200 years the exclusive property of men, as a female identity, the flâneuse. Still urban and modern and primarily European in outlook, but now available to women (of independent spirit).
Today’s Frazz, by Jef Mallett:
The substance of the strip is entertaining in itself, but here I’m interested in quotative (be) all, in
Mrs. Olsen was all, “I can’t …”
Research a few years back suggested that this quotative, which once was widespread among young speakers in the U.S., was receding fast, in favor of quotative (be) like. But here it is in the mouth of 8-year-old Caulfield (Frazz himself is 30). Well…
… of very different body types. Things saved up for some time, now to put them out.
Sage Brocklebank (Psych); Jordan Gavaris and Dylan Bruce (Orphan Black); John Wesley Shipp and Grant Gustin (The Flash).
For Pi Day, 3/14, from Chris Hansen, this 2005 Bizarro:
Not only the pi connection, but also a Dan Piraro piece of pie.
I set it off with my 3/11 posting on “Ejaculatory pop”, about the vivid ejaculatory V and N pop. On ADS-L the next day, Larry Horn cracked:
And it does add a whole new perspective on that hanky-panky between monkey and weasel in the neighborhood of that mulberry bush…
And then the discussion branched into dispute over what the right words were for the nursery rhyme/song “Pop Goes the Weasel” and what the words meant (everybody wants texts to tell coherent stories, and that applies even to nursery rhym — despite their frequent bizarrenesses). There’s a nice Wikipedia page on the subject, which is good on the variant words and on the interpretations, most of which are ingenious inventions.
In searching for sites on geographical linguistics earlier today, I was directed to a site on culinary linguistics — a whole book, in fact, which looks fascinating (especially as an adjunct to Dan Jurafsky’s 2014 Language of Food):
Culinary Linguistics: The chef’s special, ed. by Cornelia Gerhardt, Maximiliane Frobenius, & Susanne Ley (all at Saarland University), John Benjamins, 2013
Caught during a Prairie Home Companion re-run on the radio yesterday: a joke set-up for the burgers of Calais (referring to hamburgers), punning on Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais (his extraordinary bronze sculpture).
A recent One Big Happy, in which Joe faces a test question on the term collective noun:
Joe hopes that he can use what he knows about the verb collect and its derivatives to guess at what the grammatical term collective might mean. Ah, a mail carrier collects the mail (from a mailbox) and delivers it (to a mailbox), so mailbox must be a collective noun. BZZT!