I’ve been assembling a bibliography of my papers on rock rhyme, half rhyme / half-rhyme, imperfect rhyme etc. and of other work springing from these. This is the first part, on 5 papers of mine.
Archive for September, 2018
AZ on imperfect rhyme
September 30, 2018Angerland in Cambridgeport
September 30, 2018Inspired by my 9/26 posting “Angerland”, with its One Big Happy play on Ireland as ire ‘anger’ + land, Nigel Fabb sent on this early 1980s view (apparently a favorite of locals for some years) of a building in Cambridge MA, more or less across the street from MIT’s main building:
(#1) The Metropolitan RAGE / IRE building on Mass. Ave. in Cambridgeport
Swine alive or dead
September 29, 2018From the American tv show Gunsmoke, in the episode “Fandango” (S12 E21, first aired 2/11/67), Marshal Matt Dillon (James Arness) to a man he’s taken into his custody for trial:
Mister, you’re going back pig or pork, now make up your mind!
The colorful alliterative figure pig or pork, a version of the formula alive or dead (more often encountered in the version dead or alive, with the monosyllable before the disyllable). And an excellent version it is.
(It appears to have been a creation of the Gunsmoke writers: I can find no occurrences that aren’t quotations of, comments on, or allusions to the “Fandango” cite.)
Calling off the dogs
September 28, 2018A week ago, I posted about this cartoon:
(#1) from the 9/21 posting “A transtlantic exercise in cartoon understanding”
Most of the posting was about the content of the cartoon. But then there’s the question of its source — there’s an artist’s signature, but what is it? — and that’s turned out to be quite a mystery.
Briefly noted 9/27/18: a remarkable name
September 27, 2018The Palo Alto Medical Foundation periodically revises the format for its on-line statements, including after visit summaries to its physicians and labs. As far as I can tell, every such software upgrade arrives with bugs, sometimes spectacular ones; this is, after, the way of software the world over.
So it was with recent after visit summaries, in which my name at the top was given as
Dr. Zwicky M. Zwicky
I have an idea about how this might have come about. Probably not verifable, since it involves decisions by two different people, neither of whom could easily be identified.
From vine to towering tree, in four steps
September 27, 2018Morning visit to Palo Alto’s Gamble Garden, to stave off catatonic despair at the news of the day. One bed cleared out to make space for a pollinator garden. Lots of plants at the ends of their seasons, winter plants not yet going. But tons of cheery autumn-blooming anemones. Monarch butterflies. And four especially notable plants: hyacinth beans, ‘Soft Caress’ mahonia, a mountain cabbage tree, and a cucumber tree (a species of magnolia).
Mike Lynch
September 27, 2018A cartoonist and cartoon enthusiast who hasn’t appeared on this blog before.
The barest of brief Wikipedia information:
Mike Lynch [born January 18, 1962, in Iowa City IA] is a cartoonist whose work can be seen in Reader’s Digest, The Wall Street Journal, Playboy and other mass media markets.
Lynch maintains a substantial blog on cartoons, with material of his own and compilations of other cartoonists. For example, a 9/24 posting on gag cartoons, from Dick Buchanan; a 9/21 posting on women cartoonists of the New Yorker, from Liza Donnelly; a 9/20 posting on cartoonists drawing on the wall at the Overlook Lounge in NYC.
Angerland
September 26, 2018The One Big Happy from 8/30, in which Ruthie hopes for semantic transparency in morphology:
Ruthie’s reading from a book, so she can see the LAND in IRELAND (in pronunciation, it’s reduced to unaccented /lǝnd/ and might not be so easily identifiable). So she hopes the IRE part will be another word she knows that will make sense in combination with LAND in the way that the first elements in, say, ICELAND and WOODLAND do.
And her dad helpfully explains IRE.
Inch by inch
September 25, 2018… every week or two, the succulents grow. A report on the turquoise planter on my patio, from a week ago (9/19). A synoptic view (thanks to Kim Darnell):
(#1)
Four conspicuous plants: the central Echeveria ‘Blue Curls’, with its tall flower stalk (up to the height of the doorknob last week, now 2 inches above it, with a base wider by an inch as well); the little silver rosette Echeveria, with its 2-foot+ flower stalk; the two sturdy Senecio (blue chalksticks) stems, with thin flower stems at their tips; and (in the upper right corner) a crassula stem still working up to budding (but now with several offsets, not visible in this photo, at its base).