First encountered on Pinterest this morning, what is apparently a new rage in texties: jokes told by a cute husky pup (rather than, say, a llama, a penguin, an eel, or Ryan Gosling), for example this one:
(#1)
Archive for March, 2017
Friday cartoon 1: the husky pup meme
March 10, 2017pain in the X
March 9, 2017A recent One Big Happy:
Higher vs.lower, in several senses. The two families of pain in the idioms are high vs.low on the body and high vs. low in tone. (They’ve been around for about a hundred years, but apparently didn’t catch fire until the 1930s.)
Spring bulbs
March 9, 2017… and other flowers. The plants come into bloom on a schedule that’s some complex of day length and temperature. Locally we’ve been having stretches of late cold weather (“patchy morning frost in low-lying areas”, the weather forecasts will say), so some plants are on the late side. Out my front door: the calla lilies are just now opening up, and the Victorian box — Pittosporum — hasn’t yet come into fragrant bloom. (For enthusiasts of resembloid composites: calla lilies aren’t lilies (Lilium), and Victorian box isn’t any kind of box (Buxus); see my 3/17/12 St. Patrick’s Day posting.) But the first narcissus bloomed in January, and a visit with Juan Gomez to Palo Alto’s Gamble Garden on Tuesday confronted us with great swaths of blooming narcissus, of many cultivars, as well as tulips, grape hyacinths, and snowdrops.
In the West Wing
March 8, 2017Having fallen into the world of American politics in viewing the documentary I Am the Ambassador (about Rufus Gifford, until recently the US ambassador to Denmark), I went on to doing the whole 7-year run of the tv series The West Wing, which I am urging everyone to watch at least some of — as a canny depiction of American political life (Wikipedia tells us that it “received acclaim from critics, as well as praise from political science professors and former White House staffers”), as a gripping drama with an earnest moral core, and as a show worthy of praise for its snappy dialogue, inspired casting, and first-rate acting.
This posting is about just two of the actors, Mark Feuerstein and Jimmy Smits (both prominent in season 6 of the series, which I’ve just finished watching), solid members of what I’ve called the “acting corps“, the bank of accomplished and reliable actors (short of first-magnitude star rank) that make the stage, the movies, and television hum for our pleasure and enlightenment. I find them both attractive, as men and as actors — in particular, as embodiments of an “acting persona” (a more or less enduring persona that cuts across an actor’s roles).
Through Smits, that exploration will take us to another member of the acting corps, the admirable Marg Helgenberger. (I know, I know, you also want me to write about Allison Janney and Stockard Channing, among others, but there’s only so much I can do in one posting.)
“depriving healthcare for millions”
March 8, 2017Noted by Wilson Gray on ADS-L on Monday, from his reading on Facebook. Wilson commented:
Remember the days of yore when people wrote: “depriving millions of health-care”?
The implicit analysis here is that the ordinary argument structure (hereafter, argstr) for the verb deprive has a Direct Object referring to a POSSESSOR in an act of deprivation, and an Oblique Object (marked by the P of) referring to a POSSESSION in this act. In abbreviated form: deprive has the argstr:
(1) SU: AGENT, DO: POSSESSOR, OO(of): POSSESSION
with the semantics that AGENT causes POSSESSOR to come to no longer have POSSESSION.
But the Facebook sentence has an argstr with a Direct Object referring to a POSSESSION and an Oblique Object (marked by the P for) referring to a POSSESSOR:
(2) SU: AGENT, DO: POSSESSION, OO(for): POSSESSOR
with the same semantics as in (1).
Now, alternative argstrs for the same verb are very common; the question is which verbs have which structures. Wilson’s judgment (which I share) is that deprive is fine in structure (1) — deprive millions of health-care — but not in structure (2) — deprive health-care for millions. (Divest is similar to deprive here.)
Mixing it up
March 7, 2017Today’s Rhymes With Orange has Olive Oil and Balsamic Vinegar needing couples therapy, ’cause they just can’t get along — except when they’re together with a salad:
(#1)
A Pinter moment
March 6, 2017Watched at Palo Alto’s Aquarius Theatre (just four blocks from my house) yesterday:
Two great theatrical knights, and they are spectacular together.
Komodo dragon day
March 6, 2017Today’s Google Doodle is a tribute to the Komodo dragon:
The world’s most amiable-looking Komodo dragon; the actual animals are big, fierce, aggressive carnivores — but for a variety of reasons, they are in fact endangered. And they have been big in my consciousness ever since I first heard Bob and Ray’s routine about Dr. Darryl Dexter (billed as the great expert on the Komodo dragon), back when I was in high school (60 years ago).
No whey in hell
March 6, 2017On Pinterest this morning, along with a bunch of Gary Larson cartoons, this cartoon by Dan Thompson from some time ago:
(#1)
Ingredients: “Little Miss Muffet”; homophony (or near-homophony) of whey and way; the complex AmE idiom no way in hell. Bonus: Anne Taintor.
On the N + N compound watch
March 6, 2017Passed on by Ken Callicott, presumably from his browsing in supermarkets:
As I note from time to time, N + N compounds (like infant water) are always subject to multiple interpretations, even if we stick to interpretations that involve only the relatively small set of canonical semantic relations between the parts. Usually knowledge about the world and about the context in which a compound is used is sufficient to make one interpretation by far the most likely one. But that doesn’t stop mischievous people from seeking out possible but unlikely interpretations and making antic hay out of them. (And cartoons often show henighted people fixing on possible but unlikely interpretations.)