Archive for December, 2022

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The California fire ranger penguin Christmas card

December 17, 2022

In California, in the winter, in the mountains, when it snows, we fight forest fires with rangers acclimated  to fiercely cold weather: the CAL FIRE penguin patrol. But our ranger penguins are not only tough, they are also rilly rilly cute, iconic adorable-penguin cute (see some iconic examples in my 12/11 posting “The penguin Christmas card”). And now CAL FIRE is celebrating our ranger penguins with:


CAL FIRE’s Holiday Penguin Coloring Page! (link here)

This astonishing object came to me in holiday e-mail from Rod Williams and Ted Bush, with Rod’s note:”This is undoubtedly intended for you!”

Immensely cheering, arriving as was I trying to cope with — on the top of everything else — a terrible head cold, in a moment when respiratory ailments are spreading wildly. I’m supposed to isolate myself still further.

Posted in Holidays, Penguins | Leave a Comment »

Snoopy in a spiked collar

December 16, 2022

A very brief note on masculinity, today drawing on an old Peanuts cartoon (Jeff Bowles re-runs them for us every day):


A new collar, presumed to project aggressiveness via its fierce spikes, with aggressiveness then understood as a mark of masculinity — but Snoopy’s a happy dog, not a fierce dog, and that suits him

Two things.

Thing 1: spiked collars for dogs are not necessarily a sign of an aggressive dog, but are used to protect dogs from throat-biting attacks from predators and aggressive other dogs. Sweet dogs get spiked collars if they travel in bad neighborhoods. Guard dogs may get spiked collars so that they can ward off attacks on their charges.

Thing 2: whatever their bdsm origins might have been, spiked collars worn by people now seem to be primarily fashion statements, valued because they’re so noticeable. But, since they stand out, they also serve to call attention to the wearer’s collar, which is a sign of their bondage and/or submission; as a result, a spiked collar conveys not aggressiveness, but subservience.

Posted in Clothing, Gender and sexuality, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity | Leave a Comment »

The bag of clownfish

December 15, 2022

(Warning: a partial draft of this essay was accidentally posted an hour and a half ago. I know from bitter experience that trying to delete a posted draft and replace it with the final product unfolds into disaster, so I’m just treating this as an update of that earlier posting. Please bear with me.)

In today’s (12/15) Rhymes With Orange cartoon, a delightful exercise in cartoon understanding: to appreciate the point of the joke (set in a pet store and focused on tropical fish), you need to know something quite specific about modern American popular culture, having to do with circus acts.


(#1) Two young women — perhaps, we speculate, a couple, though that seems not to be relevant to the joke — have bought some (tropical) fish, in water in plastic bags (two in one bag, one in the other); the pet store clerk is now handing them a bag of clownfish as well: a bag jam-packed to the brim with brightly colored tiny fish

Why is that funny?

(more…)

Posted in Art, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, Understanding comics | 4 Comments »

An offer: Orba 1

December 14, 2022

This is really about my daily life, but it’s also an offer of a sweet little — fits in the palm of your hand, just 3 inches in diameter — musical device, to go to a good home. The device is an Orba (specifically, the Orba 1) sold by Artiphon (link here):


[from the Artiphon site:] Orba is a handheld synth, looper, and MIDI controller that lets anyone make music immediately. With Orba’s integrated looper you can layer Drum, Bass, Chord, and Lead parts to create beats and songs on the fly. Play through the built-in speaker or use the ⅛” jack to connect headphones or amplifiers. Pair wirelessly to the Orba app to customize your instrument and share your creations with friends.

(more…)

Posted in Music, My life, Offers | 1 Comment »

Pronouncing my name

December 13, 2022

A little posting, something I can get done in the time I have. I should explain that since 7 pm yesterday, I have slept 14 hours (and it’s not yet 2 pm). I don’t feel feverish, don’t have a fever, do have periodic crippling joint pain and muscle cramps in my hands and arms, but mostly narcolepsy rules; as the days roll on, it is, however, becoming less ferocious and more bearable.

Meanwhile, in my waking moments, while I practice muscle relaxation, I’ve had time to think about stuff. Thoughts that have expanded today’s intended Big Posting, on name mockery and Benedict Cumberbatch, into something even more ambitious. And random thoughts inspired by stuff that’s come in my mail, including an old topic: what (American) English speakers do with the somewhat challenging pronunciation of my family name, especially that word-initial consonant cluster [zw].

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Posted in My life, Phonetics, Phonology, Spelling | 2 Comments »

Two Liz Climo cartoons

December 12, 2022

Very much a Mary, Queen of Scots Not Dead Yet posting, opening up a variety of themes, some of them deeply personal for me. But here I just present two delightful Liz Climo cartoons that moved me.

The first is recent, posted by Climo on Facebook on 11/29 and apparently at the moment available only on her FB page. The characters are Bunny and Bear, who have forged a mutually supportive friendship in part by surmounting the natural inclinations of bears to devour rabbits, and of rabbits to dig up the landscape for burrows (thus ruining the lawns that are Bear’s great pride).

The second is from a continuing series of cartoons involving the polar creatures Penguin and Polar Bear. The cartoons:


(#1) My title: One Trip — a delight for me, since my man Jacques was an extreme advocate of the One Trip, approaching Bear levels; as annoying as this was (I played the Bunny part in our One Trip drama), now that he’s been gone for 20 years, the cartoon slashed open a moment of real grief, in which his masculine pigheadedness now seems endearing


(#2) My title: Margarita Snowman — this one is to send to cartoonist Bob Eckstein, author of the marvelous The Illustrated History of the Snowman (2018); see the digression on the book in my 12/3 posting “In the mail: The sleep of reason produces snowmen”

Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Penguins | 1 Comment »

The penguin Christmas card

December 11, 2022

In the mail, from Mary Ballard, this penguin Christmas card (from Fantus Paper Products), featuring the conventional schematic cute penguin, which can be seen in many variants all over the place, not just at holiday time:


(#1) I get a penguin, because the penguin is one of my totem animals; but penguins, stereotypically from cold and snowy lands, are in general associated with holiday time in the Northern Hemisphere, so penguin Christmas cards are something of a thing

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Posted in Holidays, Music, Penguins, Portmanteaus | Leave a Comment »

make the naked pretzel

December 10, 2022

Today’s very brief Not Dead Yet posting, in an interim between narcoleptic episodes (which still crowd out most of my days): letting old episodes of the sitcom Cheers run past, soothingly, in the background, I heard the horndog Sam Malone character (played by Ted Danson) exult about the possibility of making the naked pretzel with a target woman. A colorful sexual metaphor with a modest number of cites on the net.

I note in passing that naked pretzel is also a name for an unsalted pretzel, and a number of firms sell them. Something to look out for if you’re trying to restrict your intake of salt.

And then we wander into the Sex On The Beach Dunes, the rich and complex nexus between sexual expressions and the names of cocktails. Because there is, of course, a Naked Pretzel cocktail. From the Smirnoff vodka folks:

I have surely posted somewhere about watermelons (with a round opening cut into them) as objects of sexual gratification for men; there might conceivably be some association here between the ingredients of the cocktail — the melon liqueur giving it its green color — and making the naked pretzel.

 

Posted in Language and food, Language of sex, Metaphor, Movies and tv, Slang | Leave a Comment »

Today’s verbing

December 9, 2022

From WIRED magazine’s Plaintext web column by Steven Levy today (with the notable verbing bold-faced):

This week the social media world took a pause from lookie-looing the operatic content-moderation train wreck that Elon Musk is conducting at Twitter, as the Oversight Board [of Meta] finally delivered its Cross Check report, delayed because of foot-dragging by Meta in providing information.

The verb lookie-loo (more commonly looky-loo), in this example roughly ‘stop to look at something out of curiosity’ (it can also mean roughly ‘view something for sale without intending to buy’), occurs here in its PRP (-ing) form lookie-looing, used in a nominal gerund phrase (which is the object of the preposition from). Finally, the verb lookie-loo here is transitive (with the NP the operatic content-moderation train wreck that Elon Musk is conducting at Twitter as its direct object); most occurrences of this verbing seem to be intransitive — examples to come below — though transitive uses are also attested.

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Posted in Conversion, Verbing | Leave a Comment »

That highfalutin sonofagun from Arizona

December 8, 2022

That would be “Ragtime Cowboy Joe”, in the western novelty tune from 1912 — with many variations in the wording in different performances, but all using the adjective highfalutin (in some spelling), which is why I bring it up here, as a follow-up to my 12/6 posting “highfalutin”, on that bit of characteristically American jocular slang.

My attention was drawn to highfalutin, scooting, shooting / rootin’ tootin’ RCJ by Benita Bendon Campbell, whose father danced with her to (a version of) the song when she was a small child, and who has his version firmly in her memory even now, over 75 years later. She offered to sing it for me, but now I have unearthed quite a range of recorded versions, from which I’ve selected one to subject you to.

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Posted in Music, Slang | 1 Comment »

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