It’s St. George’s Day (honoring the patron saint of England, and a number of other places too); now Sandra Boynton notes that it’s also Shakespeare Day — traditionally celebrated as his birthday (in 1564), and clearly his death day (in 1616). For the Shakespearean occasion, she provides one of her visual puns:
2 bees oar not 2 bees: “To be, or not to be”
From the latest issue of the New Yorker (for 4/26 & 5/3 2021), two cartoons (by Benjamin Schwartz and Zach Kanin) that qualify the magazine to be, not only the Technology Issue, but also the Size Issue: body size in the Schwartz, penis size in the Kanin.
Three more cartoons from the Glen Baxter collection Almost Completely Baxter, all having to do with language in one way or another: the study of vowels as religious observance in the abbey of the fabled town of Brocklehampton; the tragedy of empty speech balloons; and smoke signals pressed into service to spread higher literary culture.
Tom Gauld cartoons from New Scientist magazine, in a 2020 collection:
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— with three cartoons that especially caught my interest. One on science vs. journalism over de-extinction (already posted on this blog); one on the agony of Science Hell, the scene of eternal scientific mansplaining; and one on the adverbial literally understood literally (which then provides the title for the 2020 book).
The 3/24 One Big Happy, in which Ruthie’s brother Joe (rebelling against school, after his discovery of appalling “chapter books” — all words, no pictures!) goes on a spree of –er words:
The extremely versatile N-forming derivational suffix –er, with N bases like arithmetic and V bases like read (including, in the last panel, the problematic base tidy up, a V of the form V + Prt)
(Underwear models doing their thing, seductively. Plus Michelangelo’s David and a naked Venus by Bouguereau. So not to everyone’s taste, but not over the line.)
Today’s Daily Jocks ad (for the Cellblock 13’s Cyclone 2.0 Singlet) reproduces poses of head and body from classical Greek sculpture, poses that previously appeared on this blog in another Daily Jocks ad, in my 6/20/20 posting “Ephebe with a big package” — the big package being, in both cases, the model’s genitals, covered but also ostentatiously on display.
Well, yes, it’s a big thing, or will be if it works, but the story here is about a proposal to revive — de-extinct seems to be the technical term — the woolly mammoth, à la Jurassic Park.
Dinosaurs, no; see the scientist in this wry cartoon by Tom Gauld (originally from New Scientist, then reprinted in You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack and in Department of Mind-Blowing Theories):
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But woolly mammoths, sort of and maybe. And on that there’s recent news from Harvard (where is Tom Lehrer when we need him?).
The 2/16 One Big Happy, in which Ruthie tries to make sense of an interaction between her grandmother and her Uncle Andy:
Several layers of indirection here, starting with
(1) You couldn’t pick up a phone?
instead of
(2) Couldn’t you pick up a phone?
(About the language of sex, with plenty of discussion of sexual acts, some of it in very plain terms, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
Sexual vocabulary day, inspired by my puzzling about the syntax of the item trade (in examples like He’s looking for trade to service and He’s trade), which led me to a 2004 e-mail exchange — yes, still relevant — with a colleague about this item and its sexual lexical cousin trick.
Ajaxx63 Rough Trade t-shirt, on offer on the DealByEthan (men’s fashion shopping) site
Today’s Zippy strip, with an unconventional sense of columnist:
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Not someone who writes a column for publication, but a collector of columns, the architectural features — like a philatelist, but with pillars.
But then the suffix –ist is extraordinarily multifunctional.
