Today’s (4/14) Zippy strip has our Pinhead in conversation with a giant cement duck:
(#1) An anatine day in Southampton
From the thrillist site, “This Giant Duck on Long Island Has Serious Street Cred” by Jessica Sulima on 11/17/23:
(#2) The Big Duck at homeAn orange-yellow beak juts out unassumingly over Flanders Road [in Southampton] on Long Island. … The Big Duck … has been amusing passing motorists for almost a century. The historic roadside attraction is a symbol of postmodern architecture and a throwback to a time when marketing was a bit more whimsical.
“The Big Duck is a ‘big’ example of America’s long-lived and vibrant culture of advertising, which was born out of the political turmoil and commercial energy of the 19th century and scaled up for use on the roadside in the 20th century,” says David Brownlee, a professor of art history at the University of Pennsylvania.
Here’s how it came to be: In 1931, a Long Island duck farmer named Martin Maurer allegedly visited a roadside coffee shop shaped like a giant coffee pot and thought, I should do the same to advertise my Pekin ducks. So he enlisted the help of builders who constructed the building out of cement. They finished their creation off with two eyes made from Ford Model T tail lights that continue to glow red at night.
Producing a monstrous ad for Long Island duck.
I am of course now seized with hunger for Peking duck. From Wikipedia:
Peking duck is a dish from Beijing that has been prepared since the Imperial era. The meat is characterized by its thin, crispy skin, with authentic versions of the dish serving mostly the skin and little meat, sliced in front of the diners by the cook. … The meat is often eaten with spring onion, [julienned] cucumber, and sweet bean sauce [tianmian sauce], with [Mandarin] pancakes [chun bing] rolled around the fillings.
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