Via Google Alerts, Zwicky news from Basel CH — about Marc-Olivier Z. Posted on 10/29/19 by European Seed Videos: “Marc-Olivier Zwicky, Head of Seedcare Europe, Africa and Middle East for Syngenta, talks with Shawn Brook at the Euroseeds 2019 Congress in Stockholm, Sweden from 13 to 15 October, 2019”. Thumbnail of MOZ:
(#1)
Born in Basel 2/18/83; played professional ice hockey (as a forward) for EHC (Eishockey Club) Basel in 2012-13 ; now an exec in Basel for Syngenta.
For the dead season, Grim Reaper cartoons from Will McPhail. For today, Halloween, the GR goes trick-or-treating in the city:
(#1) ReaperWeen in McPhailia
And for tomorrow, the Day of the Dead, a whole series about the GR searching for a fashion look; the title image:
(#2) The New Yorker‘s Daily Shouts column from 1/28/19, “Death finds a signature look” by Will McPhail — in which the GR tries five experiments in fashion before settling on his signature black hooded robe and scythe
(It starts with burrito-savoring, but immediately spreads to flagrantly carnal acts described in plain terms, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
An old ad campaign for Taco Bell’s beefy burritos, drastically pornphotoshopped so as to illustrate techniques for tackling those tasty tortilla tubes (10/12 hat tip to Chris Hansen):
(#1) Eat my burrito, dude!
Is this queer, or what? One shirtless guy takes tube lying on his side on a bed, the other eats it on his knees. Both have a hand wrapped firmly around the base of the object of their desire. Both have their eyes closed in the ecstasy of oral pleasure.
What do we call this act of sensual gratification? I’m going for burritio /bǝríšiò/: New Latin for ‘burrito-eating’, on loose analogy with fellatio /fǝléšiò/ ‘cock-sucking’, encouraged by the physical similarities between the two objects and between the two acts.
Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro collabo, with punctuation:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page. And stay tuned for a Bizarro, rather than Hindu-nationalist, interpretation of the initials BJP.)
Two linked things: the syntax of the sign on the hot dog cart; and the potential ambiguity of Sloppy Joe’s on the sign, as a possessive in standard spelling or as a plural in a very popular non-standard spelling.
Yesterday’s Zippy takes us to a historic diner in Albany NY and its notifications boards:
(#1) Note the parochial character of the messages: bulletins about the diner’s offerings
The real diner’s interior:
(#2) From the diner’s last day of service, posted 2/17/12 on the All Over Albany site
The Zippy of 10/26, on the wisdom of potato-chip owls, especially those offering fried pickles with ranch:
(#1) Wise Potato Chips, a local company in my childhood days in eastern Pennsylvania, though now all over the place; also now with a product whose name is a little festival of morphological beheadings
A Wayno cartoon from 4/11/16, an exercise in cartoon understanding:
(#1) “My name is Idaho Montoya. You peeled my father. Prepare to fry.”
(See the comments. It turns out that Wayno’s original was wordless, so this caption was added by some wag — who deserves credit.)
If you don’t get a crucial reference, the cartoon is just silly, two cartoon potatoes having a duel with potato peelers. So you need to recognize that the figures are anthropomorphized potatoes, and that the things they are wielding are potato peelers. Then there are potato references in each sentence of the challenge: Idaho, famously a source of potatoes in the US; peeling, a step in preparing potatoes for many sorts of dishes; and frying, one common method of cooking potatoes (in French fries, for instance).
You will probably also catch the groaner pun in Prepare to fry, based on the stock expression from popular adventure fiction, Prepare to die.
But otherwise, it’s just a bit of fanciful silliness. In fact, it’s rich and complex, if you’re in on the jokes.
An e-mail announcement from Sonya Oskolskaya (СА Оскольская) on 10/21:
The Institute for Linguistic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences is pleased to announce the conference “Caritive Constructions in the Languages of the World”, to be held in Saint Petersburg, Russia on April 21–23, 2020.
The conference aims to bring together studies on caritive (a.k.a. abessive or privative) constructions in different languages.
Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro collabo:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)
I’m going in disregard everything in this strip except the B.Z.P.D., presumably an initialistic abbreviation for BiZarro Police Department — the police department in Bizarro’s world. Compare N.Y.P.D., L.A.P.D., and S.F.P.D., just to pick three similar initialisms prominently displayed in tv police dramas. However, this is the first time I’ve noticed the B.Z.P.D. in the Bizarro strip.
The police department in Bizarro’s world then led me to Bizarro World, the dark part of DC Comics’ world that is the mirror-image of Superman’s world.
A brief celebration of one of my favorite cartoons, on the occasion of a reproduction of it being installed in the Empire State Building. Rob Leighton’s Escher on high steel:
I’m trying to imagine the blueprints. Also, of course, how the workers got up there in the first place.
