A Roz Chast cartoon in the latest (2/1/21) New Yorker:
Questions asked often enough that they border on clichés. They’re frequently asked questions — but they’re not Frequently Asked Questions, Frequently Asked Questions being an idiomatic expression usually reduced to an alphabetic abbreviation, the noun FAQ.
Today’s morning name, but it comes with crucial context. The Don’t ask! in question is not the neutral use of the negative imperative, advising the addressee not to ask someone about something (Don’t ask them about the ducks in the kitchen; that just makes them crazy), but instead is a formula of Yiddish-influenced English, normally used only by (American) Jews (or gentiles culturally close to this community), when someone has in fact just asked about the matter in question (the tsuris / tsores ‘troubles’); the speaker doesn’t go on to avoid this sensitive matter, but instead embraces it, launching into kvetching ‘complaining’ about it.
The formula Don’t ask! then serves as an announcement — a kind of alarm bell, if you will — that the speaker is about to go off on a (perhaps extended) kvetch.
… in today’s comics feed, both connecting to earlier postings on this blog: a Rhymes With Orange on an ambiguity in the verbing to dust; and a Zippy on Magritte’s painting The Son of Man.
(#1)
(#2)
Having recently posted on colognes / men’s fragrances (especially those with homoerotic ad campaigns), I’ve been inundated with offers for more colognes along these lines. Today’s haul included some remarkable cock tease advertising for the fragrance Fierce, from Abercrombie & Fitch.
(Given the subject, this posting isn’t recommended for kids or the sexually modest.)
Artist Tom Taylor’s portrait of B&E on the occasion:
(#1)
As puppets on the tv show Sesame Street, B&E haven’t aged at all in 51 years; but the characters B&E are human, so of course they have changed and developed over time. They were kids in 1969 (when Sesame Street started, 51 years before 2020, when Taylor drew this portrait); became a (closeted) gay couple about 15 years later (when writer Mark Saltzman, a partnered gay man, joined the show’s staff); and then came out and explored a new life as macho queers — there are many varieties of homomasculinity — with Ernie taking a more dominant role in the relationship (the t role, in my writing on role differentiation in couples; see the Page on b/t roles on my blog); note Ernie’s proprietary hand on Bert’s shoulder when they pose as a couple.
(Very much about men’s bodies as sexual objects, so clearly not for everyone.)
Today’s Daily Jocks sale ad, carefully posed and quite steamily direct, also with an anatomical feature I don’t recall having seen in real life: a blood vessel running down the outside of the model’s leg, quite prominently visible on the surface of his leg (presumably because the model has so little bodyfat to conceal it):
Yesterday on Gina Zwicky’s Twitter account (@GinaGoesOutside):
(#1) Gina Z: I thought this was a death cap and excitedly sent pictures to my friends. it is a false death cap. I have been juked by a mushroom and now I must go
Three things: Gina Z; true and false death caps; the informal, slangy verb juke‘deceive, outmaneuver’.
The One Big Happy cartoon from 1/6, recently up in my comics feed:
Ruthie and Joe are engaged in picking up elements of culture — American commercial culture, to be specific — beginning this particular bit of learning by reproducing material they’ve heard on tv, without much appreciation for what it means.
This is in line with kids’ learning of other bits of culture — song lyrics, joke routines, patterns of swearing and insulting, greeting and leave-taking routines, and much much more. At the same time that kids are picking up new words at a great rate, they are also incorporating those words into ways of performing the verbal bits of social life. (Meanwhile, they’re learning gestures, facial expressions, the physical elements of dances, games, and sports, and the rest of a vast universe of nonverbal behavior, which then has to be coordinated with verbal behavior.)
And much of this has to be picked up “on the fly”, from observing what people around you do, without being explicitly instructed — a fact that guarantees that their first efforts at performing these bits of culture will be decidedly imperfect and will have to be honed by practice.
Leachman, who died on the 26th at the age of 94, pretty much defined what it means to be a member of what I’ve called the Acting Corps, a bank of reliable actors with large numbers of acting credits (there’s a Page of links, on this blog here): her professional debut was in 1948 — I was 8 at the time — and she has nearly 300 credited roles on IMDb (a list that doesn’t cover all of her acting work).
Leachman in three of her roles: as Frau Blucher in Young Frankenstein; as Barbara June “Maw Maw” Thompson in Raising Hope; as the title character in the sitcom Phyllis (a spin-off of The Mary Tyler Moore Show)
Some of the principal ingredients for chocolate torrone — for some years when Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky was a child, the standard dessert for her birthday, which is coming up next month. Then yesterday, under the header “Chocolate Torrone”, this innocent question from EDZ:
I don’t suppose you remember what cookbook the torrone I used to have for my birthday was in?
I didn’t, and it took me many hours of searching to discover the answer and find the actual, enormously detailed, recipe (which I will reproduce below); as a bonus, I unearthed an account of the very first time EDZ’s mother Ann made a chocolate torrone, back in 1970. (So: a moment of sweet nostalgia to go along with memories of delicious food.)
