Archive for April, 2018

Jessica Dragonette in the morning

April 8, 2018

My morning name on the 6th: Jessica Dragonette. Why her name came up, I have no clue. A photo from her heyday:

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Three weekend cartoons: POP goes the caveman couple, recursively

April 8, 2018

A Bizarro/Wayno (the POP), a Rhymes With Orange (the Caveman meme plus relations between the sexes), and a One Big Happy (the recursion):

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The cymbidium report 4/7/18

April 7, 2018

Good floral times on my front patio. Five shots, mostly of the cymbidium orchids (taken by Kim Darnell):

(#1) Showing 7 pots with flowers in bloom (some are clones of the same original), one with buds; there’s more

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Water source of questionable information

April 7, 2018

This New Scientist cartoon by Tom Gauld:

Five nominals of the form N1 of Mod N2. The first panel has the model for the other four: the metaphorical idiom family fount of all N2, where N2 refers to a kind of information. The last four are somewhat snide plays on this original. In effect, the cartoon supplies a template for generating fresh — in two senses —  metaphorical idiom families on the basis of an attested one.

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Family matters

April 6, 2018

(This posting was a couple of sentences from being finished when the Ramona Xfinity Internet Crash occurred, two days ago (service has finally been restored). This in the midst of the (overlapping) Ramona Respiratory Pestilence and the Ramona Gastroenterological Pestilence. It’s been an unfortunate week.)

A posting about my family, and, mostly, about the fragility of memory. But first, an ornament, a layered spiral design from Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky’s Instagram site yeserday:

(#1)

I prefer to see this as a fancy script Z, for Zwicky.

Then the story starts with a day Luc Vartan Baronian and I spent together back in late December, talking about linguistics and our lives. (Luc is a 2006 Stanford Ph.D.; now Associate Professor at Université du Québec à Chicoutimi; specializing in phonology and morphology, French varieties and creoles of the Americas, and Armenian studies.)

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More 1970s underwear

April 4, 2018

From Aric Olnes a while back, a 5/31/17 piece from Hint Magazine, “Weird & Wonderful Men’s Underwear Ads”:

Hilarious and ridiculous, sure, but some of these vintage men’s underwear ads are downright hunky — they just take a little adjusting…

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Mood swings

April 4, 2018

A vulgar but entertaining cartoon passed around on Facebook without attribution. Then I found this version with a source:

(Unfortunately, the source was PMSLweb (‘piss myself laughing’) The Internet Scavengers from 10/4/16 — a aggregation site for tasteless jokes. So we don’t actually know anything about the source.)

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Watercolor journeys

April 3, 2018

Yesterday morning, a visit to a specialized museum in the far south of Palo Alto: The Foster Watercolor Exhibitions of Wilderness Journals. Open to the public, free, with generous daytime hours.

Bonus: a free-standing mosque in the neighborhood which opened in 2015. I had been unaware of the Foster and also of the mosque.
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Research Risks and Name Dominoes

April 3, 2018

xkcd #1904 Research Risks (10/18/17):

(#1

Linguistics fares pretty well, both on being used by supervillains for world domination and on the possibility of research subjects breaking free and threatening the environment. I note the absence of Artificial Intelligence in this graph.

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Morning name: Harry

April 3, 2018

My morning name a while back was just Harry. Some possibiities:

Dirty Harry. The Trouble With Harry. Harry Truman. Harry Hamblin. Prince Harry. Harry Houdini. Harry Potter. Harry Reems. Harry Connick Jr. Harry the Horse. Harry Frankfurt. Harry Belafonte.

But none of these. I instantly connected to Harry B. Miller, Jr., my first cousin-in-law. And then discovered that he’d died back in 2013.

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