Three cartoons in my recent feeds: a One Big Happy with a Southernism that Ruthie’s unfamiliar with; a Rhymes With Orange with tuxidermy ( = tuxedo + taxidermy); and a Zippy with a war of plush cudgels (and the munitions industry that it supports). Nothing to do with the 1906 SF earthquake.
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Well, shut my mouth! A Southern idiom conveying surprise or astonishment. Examples from the McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs (2002):
Well, shut my mouth! I didn’t know you were in town!
Tom: The governor’s on the phone and wants to talk to you. Jane: Well, shut my mouth!
With the variant Well, hush my mouth!:
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These idioms are presumably based on the idiom shut your mouth! ‘shut up, be quiet!’, conveying surprise so great that it causes you to become unable to speak.
tuxidermy. Combines the tuxedo meme of the penguin world with taxidermy:
noun taxidermy: the art of preparing, stuffing, and mounting the skins of animals with lifelike effect. (NOAD)
The Hello Kitty War in Dingburg. An absurdist but bitter riff on the munitions industry and its dependence on maintaining a state of war. In Dingburg the weapons of war are plush Hello Kitty cudgels, wielded with the vicious intensity of a battle to the death: felines, er feelings, are running high. Seventeen years of conflict already, seventeen more to come.
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