In today’s cartoon feed, a penguin Zits and a maze-rat Rhymes With Orange:
(#1) There’s cold, and then there’s penguin cold
(#2) Rats in a Japanese bento maze
Archive for November, 2017
Two memic moments
November 30, 2017The Pun of the Month® for November 2017
November 29, 2017This month’s winner — meriting the November trophy, the Silver Fook of St. Andrew’s Day — was committed by Stephanie Shih:
(#1) Steph in her tuturo, singing “I love it when I get to live out a pun. 
🎶tutu-ro tu tu ro“
A punmanteau, tutu + Totoro. Steph is in a tutu, wearing a Totoro jersey. If you know about Totoro as well as tutus, it’s a massive, satisfying November groan.
The Unusual Two
November 29, 2017In the tradition of Judi Dench and Vin Diesel (in a posting of 3/29/15 here), an unlikely pairing of actors in an episode of The Twilight Zone: Elizabeth Montgomery and Charles Bronson. Two gender icons of pop culture, early in their careers — a few years before Montgomery started her role as Samantha Stevens on the fantasy tv sitcom Bewitched, about the same time as Bronson broke through as Bernardo O’Reilly in the movie Western The Magnificent Seven.
Talking to the hand
November 29, 2017From Dennis Lewis on Facebook recently:
(#1)
The evolution of English: when this episode of “Match Game” was filmed 40 odd years ago, these were the top three responses to complete the phrase “talk to…” Today, of course, the $500 response would be “the hand.”
The idiom talk to the hand seems to have become current only in the 1990s, so in the 1970s nobody would have been likely to suggest the hand as the blank-filler on the Match Game.
Revisiting: Good Night, Salome
November 28, 2017Yesterday, the posting “The two Salome Zwickys of Zürich”, about the musical and medical careers of Salome Zwicky. I didn’t touch on the complex resonances associated with the name Salome there — so now some onomastic (and musical) musings.
The post-Thanksgiving news from 52 years ago
November 27, 2017News you can sing!
Passed on by Virginia Transue, this story from the Berkshire Eagle in Pittsfield MA:
52 years ago (Nov. 29, 1965) the Berkshire Eagle printed a little article about two young men being fined 25 bucks for dumping trash. Little did we know at the time that the incident, which ran on page 25, would become the basis for Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant. Here’s our original story from 1965:
(#1) The genesis of “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree”
Again, the rowers of Warwick
November 27, 2017Rebecca Wheeler alerted me to the appearance of this year’s Warwick Rowers‘ calendar, with this image, among others:
Playful decadence, with grapes
The two Salome Zwickys of Zürich
November 27, 2017Yesterday Google Alert led me to information about two women named Salome Zwicky in Zürich: the first to turn up was a soprano, performing in concerts in the Zürich area and on several recordings; the second was (Frau) Dr. med. Salome Zwicky (or Zwicky-Beck), Leiterin des SingStimmZentrums Zürich und Spezialärztin für Hals-, Nasen-, Ohren- Heilkunde und Phoniatrie (Stimm- und Sprachstörungen) — a specialist in disorders of speech and the (singing) voice, with a clinic in Schlieren (a few miles west of Zürich).
Zwicky is a very common surname in Switzerland, especially German-speaking Switzerland, but Salome is an unusual personal name, and the chances that there are two different Salome Zwickys in Zürich, one a singer and one a doctor specializing in (among other things) disorders of the singing voice, would be minuscule.
So: only one Salome Zwicky, who has managed to combine her musical and medical lives.
Guess I’ll go eat worms
November 26, 2017A follow-up to my posting on the 23rd, “Two Thanksgiving meals”, in which one of the meals had as its main dish vermicelli Singapore-style, with rice vermicelli as the base. So now I’m all about vermicelli.
Warming up to the pasta topic, let’s consider Zesty Anderson Davis consuming some string pasta made from wheat:
(#1) #2 in a 6/23/13 posting, showing Zesty AD sucking up worms (well, spaghetti) in a panoply of sexual imagery
(#2) Abasement, comfort food, or oral sex?
Pillowtalk
November 25, 2017It starts with pillowcases and pillowslips, moves to pillow-beres or pillow-biers, and from there to pillow bears, and also pillow-biters — the scourge of Australia, a continent famously “swarming with raving shirt-lifters and pillow-biters”. And from there to gay pillowcases and throw pillows. And on to facial expressions during, ahem, receptive anal intercourse. Get into bed, and before you know it, you’re getting fucked, ecstatically. The scene evolves:
(#1) Gay Evolution Pillow Case (designed by Joe Monica) from Cafe Press: the evolution of mincing (color me purple, honey)
(There will be seriously racy pictures of mansex. But even without them, after the first part, this posting is not for kids or the sexually modest.)