Today’s Mary, Queen of Scots, not-dead-yet cartoon (I’m alive!): today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro:
(#1) The two ingredients of this preposterous pun: It’s alive! and endive (punning on alive)
Archive for May, 2023
It’s endive!
May 21, 2023
More new things
May 20, 2023My previous “New Things” posting (on 5/11) was about replacing household furnishings that were difficult, painful, or actively dangerous for me to use with more suitable items. As it happens, the replacements were well-designed aesthetically as well as functionally.
This morning, noting Target ads for melamine plates for picnic use — it’s the season — the colors of which offended her, my daughter Elizabeth was moved to suggest to me that I might think about replacing the thin apple-green plastic plates I’d been using, whose virtues were that they were super-lightweight (crucial for my seriously disabled hands), durable, microwave safe, and really cheap (they’re still available: Preserve® Plateware, in #5 plastic, recyclable too). Alas, cheap in both senses: inexpensive and of inferior quality. And I hate the color.
In my kitchen cabinets I have a full set of handsome stoneware plates and dishes that Jacques and I bought for everyday use, plus a full set of elegant china for when we had guests, but now it’s all way too heavy for me to handle, and far too breakable. I can deal with a bowl, because I can hook a thumb and forefinger on the rim and then carry it safely, but plates are out of my range.
Now Elizabeth had planted in my mind the idea of replacing the cheap greenies with something better — not melamine, because it doesn’t microwave safely — but something more aesthetically pleasing, and maybe even on sale, since it’s the picnic season.
Saturday morning ramble
May 20, 2023A rambling account of an excellent Saturday morning — which started at 1:30 am, after an especially fine 8½-hour sleep (more on that later) and eventually brought me to the realization that I was about to run out of some grocery staples (celery, carrots, salad greens, citrus fruit — mandarins or clementines) three days earlier than expected, so at 6 am I put an order in for these groceries from the local Safeway, via Instacart.
Now, I’d never grocery-shopped on a Saturday before — maybe they’d be out of a lot of things by this point in the week — but I forged ahead, and paid $2 for delivery within two hours (so as not to interfere with Elizabeth when she arrived to allot 119 doses of medicine into 28 compartments in 7 little plastic boxes for the week, a task my painful disabled hands can’t manage). Almost instantly, the Instacart shopper found everything on my shopping list, no substitutions, and passed the order on to a delivery person, who turned up at my door at, omigod, 6:40, while I was just beginning my second breakfast (when you get up at 1:30 and have breakfast at 2:30, you’re ready for another meal at 6:30). Next thing to magic.
mocsnsocks
May 19, 2023Return with me now to the patio scene from yesterday’s posting “The clitic t-shirt and its companion book”:
(#1) Previously commented on: my PUT YOUR CLITICS IN SECOND POSITION t-shirt, the Halpern & Zwicky book Approaching Second, and the beautiful still-blooming cymbidium orchids
But wait! There’s more! Look down at my feet, In shearling-lined moccasins. (I have other shoes, but I wear these most of the time, because they keep my poor feet warm and comfortable and because they are easy for me to slip on and off — my damaged hip makes reaching down painful, and reaching all the way to the ground impossible.) And without any socks. (I have very nice socks, but putting them on is difficult, painful, and time-consuming — that hip again — so I’ve taken to going sockless.)
I go sockless everywhere, but the only places I go are to medical appointments and to get the mail at the mailboxes in the back of my condo. Everything else is out because I need to whizz every 20 or 25 minutes. (Yes, it’s an odd life, but I’ve adapted to it.) And hardly anyone comes by except caregivers of one sort or another. So there aren’t many people who might look askance at the eccentricity of my footwear.
The moccasins. From my 11/23/22 posting “The news from my house”:
The magic slipper / moccasins from L.L. Bean. … the indoor / outdoor shearling-lined suede shoes (from the Wallin company) I mostly live in pretty much fell apart and had to be replaced. I geared up to replace them, did a Google search on them, got a page showing what were surely those very shoes, but from L.L. Bean, went to my LLB account and was immediately presented with the catalog page for those shoes, without having to search through the catalog; no magic there, but a good thing …
But, eerily, the page was already filled out with all the details of my Wallin shoes (which were a knockoff of LLB’s, and came to me as a present from my daughter): size, width, color, all just perfect. I have no idea how they worked that, but the whole transaction took, like 10 minutes from my Google search to the shipping information.
The shoes arrived late yesterday afternoon. They are perfect.
The shoe:
(#2) The LLB Wicked Moc
In the end, I didn’t throw away the old Wallin mocs, so I had them to wear in rain and when I had to step in messy places; ratty old shoes can be useful to have around.
This year’s wiener on wheels
May 19, 2023Coming on the heels of my 5/18 posting “A fellatio-adjacent pitch for The Wiener the World Awaited”, Oscar Mayer’s heralding their new wiener on wheels, the Frankmobile. Here’s the story from the Out Traveler website (for Out magazine), “Say Goodbye to America’s Favorite Wiener on Wheels: The unexpected move is part of the rollout of Oscar Mayer’s beefy new hot dog recipe” by Jordan Valinsky of CNN Business on 5/17:
(#1) THE ALL BEEF BEEF FRANK FRANKMOBILE, that’s what it says on the label
The clitic t-shirt and its companion book
May 18, 2023In my 5/10 posting “No clitic allowed”, a report on a PUT YOUR CLITICS IN SECOND POSITION t-shirt that I designed. It has now arrived, and I have modeled it, out in my little patio garden, among the blooming cymbidiums and in front of the ivy-covered wall, displaying a copy of:
Approaching Second: Second Position Clitics and Related Phenomena, ed. by Aaron L. Halpern & Arnold M. Zwicky (CSLI Publications, 1996)
Photo by Erick Barros:
The cymbidiums are rapidly reaching the end of their season, now that the days are actually hot. One of their flower stalks withers away every day and is chopped up to become compost on the garden. (The plants will then go into dormancy, meanwhile creating new rhizomes for next year’s blooms; during the hot dry season they will serve as handsome foliage plants — and require constant watering).
A fellatio-adjacent pitch for The Wiener the World Awaited
May 18, 2023(This posting will quickly move to men’s genitals and various sexual acts, described in street language, so it’s not appropriate for kids or the sexually modest)
Passed along today on Facebook by Michael Palmer, this wonderfully fellatio-adjacent pitch (dating from, I would guess, the 1950s) from Kahn’s, with the slogan “The wiener the world awaited”:
A super-brief note
May 18, 2023This very brief note will count as today’s Mary, Queen of Scots not-dead-yet posting, because if I can’t enthuse about hot guys in their underwear, I am surely dead. Today’s Daily Jocks mailing, with two adorably smiling fellows in just-super queer-colored briefs (Neon Pink Boy, on the left) and swimsuit (Hot Rainbow Lad, on the right):
The mailing is not, alas, asking for my opinion on these two fine fellows, but on DJ’s products (there’s a survey to take).
How do you throw a poetry slam?
May 18, 2023That is the question posed by today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro:
(#1) Dan and Wayno commit the (imperfect, but very close) pun Crime Scheme > Rhyme Scheme (/krajm/ > /rajm/, just lose the /k/) — the crime in question being a novel variety of match fixing (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)
I’ve been musing on how you would throw a poetry slam — knowingly offering an inferior rap, I guess, though that sounds like a hard thing to pull off.
Dream songs
May 17, 2023… in two movements — starting with a dream from April 21st as I described it to Ellen Kaisse (where her role as a talented amateur choral singer and friend of musicians was especially relevant). And then, having separately posted, on April 19th, about the newly appointed fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, focused on Elizabeth Traugott and Hazel Simmons-McDonald (distinguished as academic administrators as well as scholars), I turned to EK in her long-time role as an academic administrator at the University of Washington (as chair of Linguistics and then as a dean) and was moved to muse about women in linguistics who have demonstrated real talent as academic administrators.