The name of a business establishment in this cartoon by Adam Douglas Thompson in the January 13th New Yorker:
A wry, and potentially ominous, play on the central ambiguity in the noun nail; and implicitly a reflection on how business establishments are named: what products or services are provided at a place called NAILS?
David Bowie seems to have a considerable following in Russia, to judge from the Pinterest materials about him, for instance this album:
(#1) Дэвид Боуи: David Bowie in Cyrillic transiteration
Боуи gets the [wi] of Bowie just right, but to Latin-alphabet-oriented eyes that уи looks like YU [ju], so Боуи looks like Boyu: Boy oh Boyu!
The Epiphany Rhymes With Orange is an exercise in cartoon understanding:
(#1)
Without the title and the comment balloon (on the left), the cartoon is still compensible, and funny — this material adds some extra humorous depth — but none of it works at all unless you know the song.
(Plenty of raunchy sex and crude street talk — totally not for kids or the sexually modest.)
Continuing the Yo! theme for today, following “OY/YO at Stanford”.
… with today’s Daily Jocks ads, on the harness and jockstrap beat: DJX “back for 2020 with their brand new Circuit collection”, charged up with two raunchy shots of (my) verse inspired by the ads: the supremely unsubtle “Yo, Faggot!” and “Yo, Fucker!”
(Continuing the Yo! theme for today, following “King/Saint Melchior”. I note that these postings have absolutely nothing to do with the Star Wars character Yoda.)
From Stanford News, the piece “Saying hello to OY/YO at Cantor Arts Center: Deborah Kass’ bold sculpture welcomes guests from its new home at Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center” by Beth Giudicessi on 12/30/19 (mailed out today when the university reopened after the holiday break):
(#1) From the YO viewpointCantor Arts Center hopes its newest sculpture, OY/YO by artist Deborah Kass, acts as an extension of the museum’s new vision to present art and ideas in contemporary and inclusive ways. The piece was installed Dec. 20 and is now on view to the public.
The 6th of January, generally known as Epiphany, but this year in my house it’s Yo Day. For the Three Kings (especially Saint Melchior) who came to Bethlehem with their gifts, saying (I translate freely), “Yo, baby Jesus! We got some stuff for you!” For Deborah Kass’ statue OY/YO, a version of which was recently installed on the Stanford campus (as announced in today’s Stanford News). And for two raunchy shots of verse inspired by today’s Daily Jocks ad: the supremely unsubtle “Yo, Faggot!” and “Yo, Fucker!”.
One at a time, one at a time. This one is about the old guy with the gold.
Via the STRS (State Teachers Retirement System) Ohio health care program, a message from the Express Scripts prescription company about preferred pharmacies in my area, with several pages of information about the Express Scripts “Multi-language Interpreter Services”, offering translations of their literature into any of 22 languages. I was startled to see, in the middle of this list, Pennsylvania Dutch / Deitsch:
Mir hen free Iwwersetzer Services um die Frooge zu andwatte, die du vielleicht iwwer dei Gsundheit odder Drug Blan hoscht. …
And then I wondered about the selection of languages, which strikes me as very odd. Express Scripts presumably knows who it’s serving — in particular, the communities in its customer base that use languages other than English — but still I wonder.
(Flowers and music for diversion in difficult times.)
Ann Burlingham, towards the end of her recent visit to family in Australia, posted photos of a poinciana tree in gorgeous bloom. Among them:
(#1) Royal poinciana or flame tree, Delonix regia, in the pea / bean family (the legumes, or Fabaceae)
(Note: it’s been extraordinarily hot in Oz, and significant parts of the southeast are consumed in flames, but Ann — and Jason and Henry — were far from the fire zone when she photographed the poinciana.)
An American friend of Ann’s commented, “I had never seen or heard of it before!” I responded, “Maybe you’d never heard about the flowering tree, but surely you’ve heard the jazz ballad.” But no. It seems that unless you’re into jazz or are really old — the heyday of “Poinciana” was apparently the 1940s through the 60s — you don’t know the song. (I’ve been asking around, and mostly just get blank stares.)
Circulating on Facebook (and many other sites) recently, this penguinocalypse cartoon:
(#1)
I call this a cartoon because it’s a marriage of a quite specific text with a quite specific image, circulated as humor. In fact, I haven’t been able to find this text without this image, or this image without this text (right down to the illegible credit in the lower right-hand corner). Nor have I found any variants of this text, or any variants of this image. #1 is a unique artistic creation, just like the other cartoons I post about here — of the subtype in which the image is taken from some other source (in this case, it’s a photoshopped carnivore penguin) rather than drawn by the creator. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to discover who the creator was.
Liana Finck in the January 6th New Yorker, with a seasonal evolution cartoon:
(#1) Going back: devolution + home for the holidays
