Archive for March, 2023

POP POP

March 19, 2023

Phrasal Overlap Portmanteau time, starting with one from yesterday’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, which is (by accident) regrettably topical; and going on to a more complex one from cartoonist Leigh Rubin’s Rubes strip back in 2016 — complex because Rubin probably was thinking of the joke as a cute pun (I told you it was complex).

But first, yesterday’s Bizarro:


(#1) Drag queen meets legendary lumberjack: the POP RuPaul Bunyan = RuPaul + Paul Bunyan (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)

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In the air, three cruises of death

March 18, 2023

(A decidedly lubricious moment of entertainment, to spice up a Saturday; it’s about facial expressions, but men’s genitals figure prominently, so this is not for kids or the sexually modest)

This e-mail ad (cropped here) in my e-mail today (3/18) — an ad for a sale of Raging Stallion gay porn flicks, featuring characters from RS’s just-released Take Off, set in a fantasy world of airline personnel:

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The poutine checkup

March 17, 2023

Yesterday’s (3/16) Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, with poutine checkup as an outrageous pun on routine checkup — something for the celebratory days of mid-March, from Pi Day on the 14th through St Patrick’s Day today:


(#1) A regular checkup on the state of the patient’s poutine — the fries, cheese curds, and gravy of this Quebecois specialty (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 7 in this strip — see this Page)

Meanwhile, the patient is presented as stereotypically Canuck — among other things, wearing a tuque (that knitted wool watch cap) and earmuffs.

Wayno’s title for the cartoon: Say “eh” — evoking another piece of Canadianness, the discourse particle eh; see, from my 5/18/14 posting “… plus four”, this New Yorker cartoon by Benjamin Schwartz:


(#2) On the (mostly) Canadian discourse particle eh, used (roughly) to confirm the attention of the listener (but appearing here in a medical exam in the place of ah); Canadianness is signaled by the RCMP uniform

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ICH BIN EIN BINLINER

March 16, 2023

Passed around in various forms on the net recently, this truly distant, extremely imperfect, pun, partly in German, partly in English, which does, however, come with the signature of its putative maker (Ella Niemans, who, alas, I’ve been unable to find anything about — perhaps because her name might be a joke, playing on German niemand ‘nobody’):


(#1) A monstrously complex joke alluding to  US President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 speech at the Berlin Wall, in which he declared (in his American-accented German) Ich bin ein Berliner, asserting that he was figuratively, in spirit, a citizen of Berlin

So it’s about bin liners and it’s about the Kennedy speech. Complexities on both counts.

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Der Pinguin ist kaput

March 14, 2023

Today’s sad news, an outcome of dramatic high winds that battered and, eventually, smashed my plastic patio plant penguin, the 2-ft b&w sentinel that stood guard by my back door for some years, and before that watched over various very large potted plants.

I’m waiting for the winds to die down to assemble the pieces and put them in the trash.  Then, in a few days we’re supposed to have more rainstorms, floods, and mudslides.

It seems that I have only one photo of the decedent, one that doesn’t show them to best advantage.

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Alien jeans

March 13, 2023

Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, featuring the straight-leg denim favored by the spacefolk who visit us in the Nevada desert:


(#1) Levi’s 501® Originals, always the choice of the discerning visitors to Area 51 in Nevada (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page)

So: Area 501 is a goofy portmanteau of Area 51 and 501 (jeans).

Two parts: the Area 51 part, the 501 denim part.

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Bowls of gumbo

March 12, 2023

In the mail from bon appétit magazine this morning (Daylight Saving Day in the US), this hymn to the gumbo restaurants of New Orleans:


(#1) Artwork for the story, “The 8 Best Bowls of Gumbo in New Orleans: Pretty much everyone in this city has strong opinions about gumbo. Writer and New Orleans native Megan Braden-Perry shares her picks for the eight best versions you can find”, by Braden-Perry on 3/5/23

As it happens, I am a gumboiste, a gumbophile, known in years long ago at academic conferences in New Orleans for indulging in 7 or 8 different gumbos in a single day. As I wrote in my 8/17/22 posting “Knuckle macaroni”, about elbow macaroni, and then “knuckle dumplings”, that is, gnocchi:

for me gnocchi are like gumbo: there are a zillion variants, hugely different in their ingredients and preparations, some of them transcendent, some of them delightfully weird, some of them pedestrian, but all of them good, each in its own way.

So bon appétits celebration of New Orleans gumbos derailed my intended posting for the day.  Now, from Braden-Perry’s main text, plus her notes on two of the eight restaurants, with photos.

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Two afflictions and a nebulous dream world

March 10, 2023

The latest chapters in my medical history, providing some account of why I’ve mostly been absent from these precincts since, roughly, the 4th of March. (I tried to conceal the gravity of my situation, but there was only so much I could do, given that the worst affliction prevented me from using my hands and feet for anything without extravagant soul-destroying pain, some of which I had to endure anyway just to manage the very basics of daily living.)

This was clearly yet another auto-immune condition, no doubt triggered by the latest change in my medications for these afflictions (the final one for some time to come), so that I had reason to hope that it would afflict me for some period of time before passing away, as had the industrial-strength narcolepsy and the spontaneous tremors (reported on here in earlier postings.)

There was some relief available through what I understood at the time to be an independent affliction, a need for vast amounts of sleep (11 to 14 hours a day, in chunks throughout the day), which I understood to be the need for sleep that goes along with having an infection. Whatever this is — it continues unabated; I’ve had 11.5 hours of sleep already today, and it’s just just short of 11 am — it’s not even slightly like narcolepsy, and I finally realized yesterday that it’s also not the sleep of infection (my recent lab tests showed no indicator of an infection, and, now that I can use my hands again to take my daily vitals, I see that I have no fever).

In fact, I can curl up in my recliner chair, wrapped in a comforter for warmth, and quickly and easily fall into a restorative sleep that takes me away from the joint pains and the electric pain from my damaged right ulnar nerve, and so on, awaking refreshed after an hour or two. So the sleep is a kind of gift; I can wait for it if I need to — it doesn’t overwhelm me — and it’s an aid in difficult times. It does, however, eat up an awful lot of my day.

Meanwhile, back in the days of the actual immune affliction. when the sleeping was a welcome respite from the unmanageable pain, during the 4 days from 4 through 7 March: my dreams were entirely taken up with nebulous, unfocused, and constantly shifting wisps of recollection about a particular comic strip, a familiar strip, everyone’s great favorite. I wanted to search for an exemplary strip to post about, but nothing about it would stay clear in my mind long enough. But the strip was fabulous, everyone knew that, with an adorable, funny central character who also was tremendously clever and possessed of great moral clarity, somehow, some way that I just couldn’t quite get a handle on.

The above is probably about as much as I’m going to be willing to say about the afflictions right now, but I’d like to try to talk about that nebulous dream world over those four days. In a separate posting, to come as I try to get my life back together again.

 

They do not act that way

March 6, 2023

From my comics backlog, a One Big Happy strip that turns on the distinction (in the philosophy of language) between descriptive statements (about what is)  and normative statements (about what should be) and shows Ruthie and Joe’s mother exploiting normative statements for her own parental ends — using one to convey injunction or prohibition: saying that this should be the case implicating that you should — or must — act to make it so.


Oh yes, there’s also the third-person reference to her addressees, framing an injunction on them specifically as a kind of normative universal — a manipulation of address terms that the kids simply fail to comprehend (in the last two panels of the strip)

Joe and Ruthie are in fact tearing through the grocery story like wild animals. Ellen Lombard, their mother, asserts that her children do not act like that, meaning this statement normatively. Conveying, in fact, that not only should her children not act like that, but that they must stop acting like that.

An exchange of childish ritual taunts

March 5, 2023

Of the form

V1 ya, wouldn’t wanna / shouldn’t hafta V2 ya (where V1 and V2 rhyme)

In a One Big Happy strip from the backlog on my desktop:


(#1) Ruthie and the tough neighborhood kid James trade taunts, until Ruthie’s mother drags her away from the encounter

This is a competitive performance of verbal skills, designed to insult without wounding. James’s first move is a pre-existing model, and then they go on from there.

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