An exchange reported on Facebook this morning, by one of the participants, EF:
JK: It’s a matter of which came first, the horse or the egg.
EF: [stares at him] Do you realize what you just said?
JK: [long silence] This is going to end up in a Facebook post, isn’t it?
EF: Yes. Yes it is.
Meanwhile, don’t put the cart before the chicken.
It’s about the N + N compound pretzel dog, and its many possible understandings: a dog that delivers pretzels, a dog that likes pretzels, a dog twisted into the shape of a pretzel (or merely contorted), a dog-like object made of pretzels, and so on.
If I tell you that the dog in pretzel dog is to be understood as short for hot dog ‘frankfurter’, you’ll come up with another set of possible understandings: a contorted hot dog, a hot dog with pretzel bits on it, a frankfurter-like object made of pretzels, and so on. But unless you’ve actually experienced something marketed as a pretzel dog (at a Sonic Drive-In or from the Auntie Anne’s company, say), you probably woudn’t think of interpreting pretzel as a reference to pretzel dough. But that’s where we’re going.
In the latest series (“It’s Not Surprising”) of GEICO tv ads, “Running of the Bulldogs”, with its silly play on the running of the bulls. A screen shot:
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Description from iSpot.tv:
Men in white run for their lives through the streets of Spain. As one of them falls and begs for his life, the menace chasing them comes running around the corner — a herd of slobbering bulldogs. The fallen man braces for impact and gets a good licking.
That’s what bulldogs do: faced with people down on the street, they rush to lavish affection on them by licking their faces.
Yesterday a Zippy posting took us to the cartoony district of Dingburg, where the Pinheads are flagrantly cartoonish rather than “normal”. Now two more strips have followed, showing us more about toonies, as the bulbous-nosed denizens of the district are called. Turns out they’re avid fans of superhero action comics.
Walking around the neighborhood these days, in between heat waves, alone and with friends, mostly enjoying gardens and street plantings and identifying what we see. Most delightfully, this elaborate container garden in front of a house on Bryant St., just a block from mine:
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Yesterday’s Zippy:
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Themes here: cooking, masculinity, cartoonishness / cartooniness, the Disney cartoon character Goofy, funny laughs, office supplies.
Today’s Rhymes With Orange:
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In Magritte’s The Treachery of Images, the text disavows the image — see this recent posting on Magrittean Disavowals — so you have the choice of trusting the image (in which case, the text is false) or trusting the text (in which case, the image is counterfeit). Hilary Price’s buyer makes the second choice, so since he was looking for a picture of a pipe — don’t ask why, people’s desires are sometimes inscrutable — he’s returning what he believes to be a picture of a non-pipe.
Two recent One Big Happy strips, in which Ruthie wades into interpreting unfamiliar expressions (bulrush, Israelite) and interpreting one familiar expression (doggie bag) in a non-standard way.
Yesterday’s Mother Goose and Grimm, featuring the computer dogs (the bull terrier Grimm at the keyboard, the Boston terrier Ralph advising him):
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To understand this strip, you need to know about keyboard shortcuts on a Mac computer, in particular the combination
Command-Z: Undo the previous command. You can then press Command-Shift-Z to Redo, reversing the undo command.
⌘-Z undoes, or reverses, keyboard actions. In the cartoon, the dimwitted Ralph suggests using this computer key combination to reverse events in general — in this case, the falling of the lamp to the floor and the breaking that resulted from the fall. ⌘-Z will fix it!
If only.
