A new little succulent garden, some of whose plants I have approximately identified; and four pots of new coleus plants, to replace the ones that were frosted to death one bitter winter night a while ago (coleus plants are really frost-tender; otherwise, they’re bright and colorful and easy to grow).
Archive for April, 2018
New on the patio
April 26, 2018World Penguin Day
April 26, 2018An alert from Chris Ambidge for this holiday, with a Sandra Boynton cartoon:
Already on my calendar: Penguin Awareness Day: January 20th, in the middle of summer in Penguinland.
Now, also World Penguin Day, April 25th, in Penguinland autumn.
I wonder: is there a penguin holiday for every season?
At the t-room urinals
April 25, 2018About t-room mansex rituals performed at or around urinals: a chapter in the organization of social practices, but also about men’s bodies and sex between men, in very plain language, so very much not for kids or the sexually modest.
Inspiration for this posting: an exhibition Fenster Zum Klo [literally ‘window to the toilet’, an allusion to the film Taxi Zum Klo ‘taxi to the toilet’, about a gay man’s obsession with t-room sex]: Public Toilets, Private Affairs at Berlin’s Schwules Museum (der Schwule ‘queer’) last fall, closing February 5th. As reported in the Gay Star News on 11/29/17, in “Museum holds exhibition dedicated to gay sex in public toilets: The show is now running at Berlin’s Schwules Museum – and was sponsored by city’s official public transport service”.
(#1a)
(#1b)
Polydactyly
April 25, 2018My morning name a couple of days ago, but it came with a (mental) video that presented itself as offering ground-breaking insights into the structure of language but turned out to be a series of professional-grade photos of the feet (well, the right foot in each case) of former graduate students of mine. Not in any way erotic — I’m not especially given to podophilia — but, once I came to full consciousness and was no longer in the grip of my vivid dream, decidedly creepy.
One of the feet was that of a serious dancer; most were, oh let me say it anyway, pedestrian; but one was a sturdy male foot (belonging to a man I’ll refer to as PD) with extreme polydactyly: two perfect small toes between the big toe and the second toe, and one equally perfect small toe between each of the three remaining pairs. So ten toes in all, making a double-dactylic foot. (Cue: poetic meter.)
Apparently an extremely rare form of polydactyly (whether pedal or manual), not illustrated in anything I could find on the net.
(I don’t recall having seen PD’s feet, but I suspect that his toes are unremarkable)
No shoes, take 2
April 24, 2018From Billy Green on Facebook on the 17th, a re-do of NO SHOES / NO SHIRT / NO SERVICE by Dan Piraro in Bizarro: a first version from the late 1980s (found in the collection Too Bizarro, published in 1988), and then the Bizarro strip from the 15th:
POP POP
April 24, 2018Yesterday’s Zippy had a nutjob in a diner ranting:
Are you trying to lure me into a lexicographical, self-contradicting black hole of word play so heinous it defies logic?
And today, embedded within a thick matrix of allusions pointing in many directions:
a lexicographical, self-contradicting vortex so heinous, it defies Robert Mueller
(#1)
Spring flowers, common and exotic
April 23, 2018… at Palo Alto’s Gamble Garden this morning. In the common category: mock-orange, foxgloves, and bearded irises. On the more exotic side: Elegia capensis, the horsetail restio; and the Chilean bromeliad Puya coerulea.
Samuel Beckett’s sitcoms
April 23, 2018A literary cartoon by Tom Gauld that came to me (unsourced, but I recognized the style) on Facebook today:
Hybrids between the plays of Samuel Beckett and American tv sitcoms.
A war of initialism
April 23, 2018Today’s Zippy takes us to 449 S. Winchester Blvd. in San Jose CA (more or less next door to the Winchester Mystery House and across the street from Santana Row):
(#1) The title is an allusion to McDonald’s Happy Meal for kids
Two things: the location; and the goofy dispute over the meaning of the initialism B.L.T.
The novelist in the fortune cookie
April 22, 2018In the March 12th New Yorker, a Talk of the Town piece by Ian Parker on novelist Jay McInerney and his career writing fortune cookie fortunes: in print, “Pithy”; on-line, “When Jay McInerney writes your fortune: The novelist’s new line of fortune cookies are fit for a cynic: “If at first you don’t succeed, try Botox.””:
Caricature by Tom Bachtell