From Joe Salmons on Facebook a few days ago, this arresting photo of celebratory alpenhorns indoors:
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Two things: the occasion and the instruments.
Archive for November, 2018
Wisc Swiss music
November 20, 2018Revisiting 22: now with berries and cherries
November 19, 2018My 10/9/18 posting “Fruit bars” featured my mother-in-law Monique’s recipe for apricot bars / squares/ crisp cookies. Dried apricots made into a chewy filling for cookies with crunchy top and bottom layers, cut into squares.
At the time, Kim Darnell (who’s done all the actual work in this enterprise) and I contemplated other dried fruits as a basis: figs, dates, prunes, mangos, etc. We have so far achieved: apricots, figs, and dried cherries and mixed berries, the last baked yesterday.
I’ve been moved to verse, of a sort, but nothing original — instead, a parody of a bit of Lewis Carroll’s epic nonsense verse “The Hunting of the Snark” (published in 1876, with grotesque illustrations by Henry Holiday: full text available here).
Revisiting 21: registering Mr. Banner
November 19, 2018The Wayno/Piraro Bizarro for 5/29/18:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)
Well, a green man would be voting for the Green Party.
But the strip is funnier if you recognize this particular green man as The Hulk, the alter ego of Dr. (Robert) Bruce Banner — in an exeptionally tractable and reasonable mood.
Gesneriana
November 19, 2018A tribute to the great Swiss natural historian — in fact, polymath — Conrad Gessner (in the biological literature, Gesner), whose name has popped up in my life three times recently: in connection with the striking plants known as gesneriads (among them, African violets); as an early chronicler of mountain climbing (specfically on Mount Pilatus in Switzerland); and as the source of the first description of the alphorn, or alpenhorn (the musical instrument).
Gessner and some of his subjects, as depicted in a set of commemorative stamps issued by the African nation of Guinea on the 500th anniversary of his birth:
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Gessner himself might have been archetypically Swiss, but the gesneriads are tropical plants, of Africa and South America.
Randy Blue purifies the air
November 18, 2018(Warning: eventually this posting devolves to references to, though not illustrations of, gay porn; a video of a guy dancing in nothing but his Calvins; and the decidedly raunchy, though not actually X-rated, lyrics of Beyoncé’s song “Blow”. So: rated “unhealthy for sensitive groups”, in particular, kids and the sexually modest.)
Day 11 in the smoke — not nearly as bad here on the SF peninsula as in SF itself (or, of course, closer to the Camp Fire around Paradise) — and today the local AQI (the American Lung Association’s Air Quality Index) has dipped to 129, merely “unhealthy for sensitive groups”, but I’m in several of the compromised groups, and life has been hellish for a long time. [A few hours later: up to 158, “Unhealthy”, period.]
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Aid arrived Thursday night, in the form of a Blue Pure 121 air purifier, which now stands majestically in the middle of the main area of my Ramona St. house, humming softly as it offers me clean air to breathe. Puckishly, I have named the machine Randy Blue (after a big gay porn company, itself puckishly named), so this posting will segue from pure air to raunch.
Teddy Bears’ Picnic Day
November 17, 2018On Facebook today, Anneli Meyer Korn posted this Bizarro cartoon from 11/17/14:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.)
I was moved to declare November 17th Teddy Bear Picnic Day, in honor of Anneli and her husband Peter, but it turns out that (by whatever obscure mechanism these things happen) July 10th is already taken for this occasion, according to the Days of the Year site.
Well, of course, if you don’t know the song, you won’t find the cartoon particularly funny. (Suppose that the teddy bear’s message were “I’m sorry, the teddy bears are conferencing at Davos today”. That would be absurd, and so to some degree humorous, but nowhere near as funny as “I’m sorry, today is the day the teddy bears have their picnic”.)
Reciprocity in the profane domain
November 16, 2018At the request of colleagues who are working on reciprocal and symmetric expressions in English, yesterday I scanned in a classic paper on the topic, which is also a classic paper in profane-domain linguistics (aka scatolinguistics ‘the linguistics of dirty talk’): Quang Phuc Dong’s “A note on conjoined Noun Phrases”. Having gone to the trouble, I’m reproducing the scans here so that they will be generally available through this blog.
Shake, shake, shake that death rattle
November 15, 2018Today’s Calvin and Hobbes re-play has the two protagonists engaged in a heavy game of Cowboys and Indians:
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A play on two senses of rattle, denoting either a sound or a thing that makes a sound.
Bite me, Count Bendix!
November 15, 2018Today’s Zippy, set in the Bendix Diner in Hasbrouck Heights NJ (in Bergen County, in the NJ suburbs of NYC, near Passaic), celebrates grilled or fried ham and cheese sandwiches:
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