On this blog, a Bob Richmond comment on my 7/29 posting “Many a pickle packs a pucker”, with an old dirty joke that turns on the line “I stuck my dick in the pickle slicer” — with Bob noting, “I’m sure Arnold can provide an appropriate grammatical analysis”. The hinge of the joke is a pun on pickle slicer, which is ambiguous between ‘a device for slicing pickles’ and ‘someone who slices pickles (esp. as a job)’. You don’t need a syntactician to tell you that, but what I can tell you is that this isn’t some isolated fact about the expression pickle slicer, but is part of a much larger pattern that a linguist like me can bring to explicit awareness for you, so that you can appreciate something of the system of English that you (in some sense) know, but only tacitly, implicitly.
Archive for July, 2022
The pickle slicer joke The pickle slicer joke
July 31, 2022The Bagels of the Damned
July 31, 2022🐆 🐆 🐆 (goodbye, July). A cartoon ad for New Yorker Bagels, offering “22 flavors of fresh hand-rolled bagels” made daily in New York City:
(#1) Going straight to bagel hell on the Circle Line Tour of the Damned
22 flavors? you ask, suspiciously, wondering what could lie beyond plain, sesame, poppyseed, onion, salt, and maybe garlic, made with white high-gluten bread flour. Well, there are other flours: whole wheat, pumpernickel, quinoa eek multigrain. And bagels with other stuff in them or on them: blueberry, apple cinnamon, cinnamon raisin, Kalamata olive. Bageloid and bagel-adjacent food items that depart from the bagel pier, with Charon at the helm, to veer into the murky waters of doughnuts, sweet breads, cakes, quiches, and pizza. Bound for that mournful bourne, the scorched and reeking landscape of the Bagels of the Damned.
Many a pickle packs a pucker
July 29, 2022O pickle, my love / What a beautiful pickle you are!
Blame it on Nancy Friedman (@Fritinancy on Twitter), who took us down to the pickle plant in Santa Barbara on 7/18, citing these 5 delights, with their label descriptions:
Unbeetables (pickled beets with unbeatable heat) – pun on unbeatable
Carriots of Fire (pickled carrots to light your torch) – punning allusion to the film Chariots of Fire
¡Ay Cukarambas! (dill-icious spicy dill pickle spears) – complex portmanteau of the American Spanish exclamation ¡ay caramba! and the noun cuke ‘cucumber’
Asparagusto (pickled asparagus with a kick) – portmanteau of asparagus and gusto
Bread & Buddhas (semi-sweet bread & butter pickles) – pun on bread and butter (pickles)
(#1)
Pickles are automatically phallicity territory, and the Pacific Pickle Works in Santa Barbara CA (website here) doesn’t shy away from their penis potential, augmenting it by references to phallic carrots, asparagus spears, and unpickled cucumbers. If you have the eye for it, we all live in Penis Town.
The life she lived
July 29, 2022First, a Google Alert on 7/27, leading to a notice for a gallery retrospective of Jill Zwicky’s photography, that notice in turn leading to an extraordinary obituary for the artist — not so much a death notice as a loving celebration of her life.
The notice, in “Out and about in Petaluma” (in Sonoma County, north of San Francisco) by the Petaluma Argus-Courier staff on 7/26/22:
Vibe Gallery opens a retrospective: The Photography of Jill Zwicky, from July 19-Aug. 3. The reception on July 30 is from 5-8 p.m. to celebrate Zwicky’s life and work, a photographer who died in 2020. [AZ: no, I can’t postpone the appositive modifier of Zwicky like that, any more than you can; it should be: to celebrate the life and work of Zwicky, a photographer who died in 2020]. She was a graphic artist who took up photography later in life, focusing on photographing nature. There will be refreshments and live music by David and Reed Fromer at the reception. Come celebrate Zwicky’s life and support Vibe Gallery
Captionless Psychiatrist
July 28, 2022The captioning contest in The New Yorker‘s 8/1/22 issue:
(#1) Dog as Patient, Cat as Therapist, both presented very clearly as male — but still I understood it as a gender cartoon, with a penetratingly critical feminist pussy wielding an aggressive masculine persona (think Marlene Dietrich in a tuxedo, but with Susan Sontag’s sharp tongue) against the feckless hound pouring out his smug superiority towards “the little ladies”, as he calls them; I’m perfectly aware that very few other people would see things this way, and I expect the caption entries to be about the conventional natures of cats and dogs
So when I saw Johnson’s captionless Psychiatrist cartoon, I found it bitingly funny just as it stood. And wondered about CAJ.
Oh my.
O tasty Tweety! O Tweety, my prey!
July 26, 2022… What a delicious Tweety you are!
The 7/24 Mother Goose and Grimm strip, with a police line-up of cartoon cats, for little Tweety to pick out the threatening pussy cat that he thought he saw:
(#1) The potential pussy predator perps on parade, left to right: 1 the Cat in the Hat (Dr. Seuss picture book), 2 Stimpy (Ren & Stimpy tv animation), 3 Sylvester (Looney Tunes film animation), 4 Catbert (Dilbert strip), 5 Attila (MGG strip — note self-reference), 6 Garfield (Garfield strip)
The number of domestic cats in cartoons is mind-boggling — there are tons of lists on the net — and then there are all those other cartoon felines: tigers, panthers, lions, leopards, and so on. Out of these thousands, the cops rounded up the six guys above — all male, as nearly all cartoon cats are, despite the general cultural default that dogs are male, cats female — as the miscreant. (It might be that male is the unmarked sex for anthropomorphic creatures in cartoons as for human beings in many contexts; females appear only when their sex is somehow especially relevant to the cartoon.) And that miscreant, the smirking Sylvester, is the only one of the six known as a predator on birds, though in real life, domestic cats are stunningly effective avian predators, killing billions of birds annually.
Codpiece swim trunks!
July 25, 2022(Obviously not to everyone’s taste: consider the title and #1 below.)
This morning’s genital surprise from Daily Jocks, the Alpha Swim Trunk for the alpha dog, the big dog on the beach:
(#1) [ad copy:] ALPHA SWIM TRUNK: Available in 3 colours [black, white, blue]. Like a little more coverage but still want to show off your assets? The Alpha Swim Trunk [from Elia beachwear] has you covered.
Obviously enhanced somehow, but nowhere I could find on the DJ site is there any information about how the Elia company achieves its codpiece swim trunks. Way past moose-knuckling and into massive hood-ornament territory.
I find codpieces entertaining, because they’re so earnestly blatant: pure display, giving no hint as to the size of the equipment within, in fact hinting that the codpiece is entirely compensatory. That huge bulge in #1 doesn’t look life a gigantic penis, it looks like a big pillow. Obviously, what it needs is some metal spikes, as singer Adam Lambert projects here:
The fairy fan-flower
July 25, 2022From Benita Bendon Campbell yesterday, a delightful plant, new to her, that had just come into her life. Her photo:
(#1) A white Scaevola aemula cultivar, in a hanging pot; the plant grows as a garden shrub, but hangs or drapes quite satisfyingly, as here
The scaevola plant was new to me as well; it was hard to believe that I’d never come across a plant whose common name is fairy fan-flower and has cultivars that are intensely purplish-blue:
Classic joke #444
July 22, 2022We might as well just give them numbers. (This particular joke is 2/3 of a devil.) From Verdant on my Twitter on 7/15/22, this old Shoe strip:
(#1) Body-location (of the tattoo) vs. event-location (of the tattooing); Verdant provides this as a comment on my 2/27/19 posting “Body-location, event-location”, where #444 appears in a One Big Happy strip and is traced back at least as far as the antique Joe Miller’s Jest Book
To which Verdant adds yes-I-said-yes Molly Bloom’s:
confession when I used to go to Father Corrigan he touched me father and what harm if he did where and I said on the canal bank like a fool but whereabouts on your person my child
Zippy, Elia, and Vilnissimo confront their stress
July 20, 2022(There will be a just barely not-naked moose-knuckled underwear model, plus references to male raunchy bits and man-on-man sex in plain terms, so, alas, not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
Three items on my computer screen this morning: today’s Zippy, in which the Pinhead totters from stress in a world of (historical) roadside seafood joints in New England, the last of which leads to today’s Daily Jocks swimwear ad for the Elia company; meanwhile, Zippy’s succumbing to stress leads to National Stress Awareness Day, and a Private Eye cartoon by Vilnissimo for the occasion (posted today on Facebook by John Wells).
(#1) Stressed-out Zippy shacking up with the shad, Chad going to the beach to spawn in Elia swimwear, Vilnissimo keenly aware of stress in Private Eye
