Today’s Zippy takes us to a scenic lookout and its technology, the tower viewer:
(#1) Binoculars / Telescope on a stalk
Bill Griffith exploits the anthropoid appearance of the device to turn this one into a speaking, grinning, yellow-haired, cheeky, creepy being.
Yesterday, a posting on the story of a joke (Not Lady: Wife, NL:W for short) whose canonical form is
A: Who was that lady I saw you with last night?
B: That was no lady; that was my wife.
The vector for the spread of the joke seems to have been the vaudeville team Weber & Fields, who allegedly used it in their stage routines over a century ago. But I found no first-hand reports, so I appealed to the hounds of ADS-L for attestations. This netted a clear occurrence from 1859, but embedded in a long and complex back story (though again with the stage German accent of W&F). And an earlier British antecedent.
Then Larry Horn chimed in with some astute observations on the semantics and pragmatics of NL:W.
All will be reproduced here.
Noted in front of 325 Forest Ave. in Palo Alto, a small hedge of Salvia microphylla (small-leaved sage) ‘Hot Lips’ in bloom — covered in small labiate flowers, some bicolor, some all red, some all white, as in this photo from the net:
(#1)
Small-leaved (hence the species name microphylla), intensely scented, fashioned into a hedge. A pleasant plant, which it turns out was created by hybridization fairly recently.
Yesterday’s Zippy:
(#1)
Steak bomb as the name of a type of steak sandwich was new to me. Steak sandwiches in general are torpedo-shaped, hence bomboid, but the point of the name is probably to assert that it is in fact the/da bomb, the best: the best of all possible steak sandwiches, because it has everything.
The play of steak bomb vs. stink bomb then just makes the name more memorable.
When you explore something on the net, your searches come back to you in messages of all sorts. So when I looked around at rubber ducks / duckies — for a posting on the 9th — I set off duck alarms in several quarters, most impressively at amazon.com, which is now enticing me with a gigantic array of artificial quackers, in all sizes, colors, and types. I am especially taken with these little guys:
The lead-in tag to my recent posting on marmots:
That’s no beaver, that’s my marmot!
A take-off on a punchline to a vaudeville joke from long ago, a line that’s been played with many thousands of times in the last century. The No Lady: Wife (NL:W) formula, in two common instantiations in a two-man exchange:
1 A: Who was that lady I saw you with last night?
B: She was no lady. She was my wife.2 A: Who was that lady I saw you with last night?
B: That was no lady; that was my wife.
(Men and their underwear, plus suggestive mansexiness, so not for everybody.)
Today’s Daily Jocks sale ad for Marco Marco (in this case, the company’s Light Tetra Brief), with a caption of mine wrapped around it:
Tetras maricones,
Showy fish,
Flash their stuff at
Sandbars.
(#1)
Marco
Maricone
Tiled his crotch in
Triangle pastels,
Not only a
Shield, also an
Enticement.
That’s no beaver, that’s my marmot!
In a posting about, among other things, the advertising posters of Donald Brun, I appreciated this charming poster for the Alpine resort Davos, in the Swiss canton of Graubünden / Grisons:
(#1)
But in my naive North American way, I took the creature in the poster to be a beaver, while it turns out to be a cousin of the beavers (genus Castor), the Alpine marmot (Marmota marmota), which is something of an icon for the canton. Also much more closely related to the North America groundhog (Marmota monax) than to beavers.
Tuesday morning on KRCB (NPR station in Sonoma CA), a brief piece about the Quarryhill Botanical Garden there and a forthcoming Quarryhill lecture by Andrea Wulf, author of a recent book on Alexander von Humboldt. The garden was new to me, as was the book, and both are fascinating, but what mostly got my attention was the reporter’s pronunciation of quarry — with accented æ, to rhyme (in my variety of English) with Larry, Harry, carry, and marry.
