Today’s Rhymes With Orange crosses the Godzilla cartoon meme with the Wise Man cartoon meme, all for a tasty dinner:
(#1) A pun on wise man sage / culinary herb sage
Two Godzillans, with a poultry truck to cook for dinner (most Godzillans eat their vehicles raw, but these two appear to be refined monsters), contemplate using a little wise man — a little sage — as seasoning. (The appropriate sense of little (‘small in size, amount, or degree’) follows from the sense of sage: a wise man small in size, a small amount of the herb.)
The ingredients of the pun. From NOAD:
noun-1 sage: 1 [a] an aromatic plant with grayish-green leaves that are used as a culinary herb, native to southern Europe and the Mediterranean. Salvia officinalis, family Labiatae.[b] used in names of aromatic plants of the mint family that resemble sage, e.g. wood sage. 2 (also white sage) either of two bushy North American plants with silvery-gray leaves. [a] an aromatic plant that is burned by some American Indian people for its cleansing properties and as an incense (Artemisia ludoviciana, family Compositae). [b] a plant of the goosefoot family (Krascheninnikovia lanata, family Chenopodiaceae). 3 short for sagebrush. ORIGIN Middle English: from Old French sauge, from Latin salvia ‘healing plant’, from salvus ‘safe’. [The overall themes: aromatic, silver-green leaves.]
noun sage-2: a profoundly wise man, especially one who features in ancient history or legend. adjective: having, showing, or indicating profound wisdom: they nodded in agreement with these sage remarks. ORIGIN Middle English (as an adjective): from Old French, from Latin sapere ‘be wise’.
Culinary note. Recipes for a classic American chicken pot pie are quite simple, with no herbs at all, occasionally with some thyme or parsley or both — but never, so far as I can tell, sage. Not that sage would be out of the question, if you’re fond of it. In any case, the premise of the cartoon requires sage, and in Cartoon Land the needs of the strip outweigh mere details of real-world fidelity; after all, we’re looking at talking, cooking, Japanese movie monsters here.
Godzilla and his ilk. Godzilla and his fictosaurian cousins lumber into this blog every so often. Most relevant to #1 is this dietary note from my 5/22/18 posting “(I just) can’t stop (it)”:
(#2) Gojira chomping on some Tokyo infrastructureGodzilla mostly consumes raw energy and great chunks of the urban landscape in the cities of the world (mostly Tokyo): trains, cars, buildings. and so on.
The Wise Man cartoon meme.(Wise Man, rather than Sage, Guru, Sadhu, or whatever, seems to be the standard name in the cartoon world for this category of gag cartoon.) An extraordinarily popular cartoon meme (quite a few in the New Yorker alone), involving two characters: the Sage (sitting cross-legged on a ledge at the top of, or along the side of, a high mountain) and the Seeker (who has climbed laboriously up the side of the mountain to seek the wisom of the Sage). Two representative cartoons from the New Yorker:
(#3) by Paul Noth
(#4) by Danny Shanahan
Two twists on the meme, also from the New Yorker:
(#5) by Kaamran Hafeez: the Seeker is a mountain lion
(#6) by Harry Bliss: the Sage is the Seeker’s mother
May 31, 2019 at 7:14 pm |
An earlier Wise Man cartoon on this blog: from my 6/24/16 posting “Bob Eckstein” — here — #2 there.