Also elegantly minimal. Yesterday’s (8/25) Wayno / Piraro Bizarro cartoon:
An Etch A Sketch drawing of an Escher drawing; /ɛšǝ(r)/ Escher (rhotic for me, not for most BrE speakers) vs. /ɛčǝ/ Etch A, so primarily, fricative vs. affricate at same point of articulation (as in sheep vs. cheap or wish vs. witch) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are only 2 — see this Page)
[personal digression. Yes, no postings at all yesterday. I was in the grip of excruciatingly painful constipation starting at 5 am, eventually taking me to a long day in urgent care. With a treatment that misfired spectacularly in several ways and resulted in astounding literally shitty mess. Everywhere. Not yet cleared (though I now can bear to sit in a chair), and requiring many long hours of grueling cleanup, some of which I need to call in actual staff for. I imagine that you don’t want to hear more detail than that. But I did get to meet and chat with a long series of fascinating people who helped me along the way, and to collect some remarkable life histories (this keeps me sane, and it helps to pass the time agreeably).]
But now, the components of the pun.
From Wikipedia:
Etch A Sketch is a brand of mechanical drawing toy manufactured by the Ohio Art Company, invented by André Cassagnes of France.
… An Etch A Sketch has a thick, flat gray screen in a red plastic frame. There are two white knobs on the front of the frame in the lower corners. Twisting the knobs moves a stylus that displaces aluminium powder on the back of the screen, leaving a solid line. The knobs create lineographic images. The left control moves the stylus horizontally, and the right one moves it vertically.
The Etch A Sketch was introduced near the peak of the Baby Boom on July 12, 1960, for $2.99 (equivalent to $33 in 2025). It went on to sell 600,000 units that year and is one of the best known toys of that era.
I’m pre-Boomer, but I was a great fan of the Etch A Sketch when it came out.
Then from my 5/6/18 posting “Said the rapper to the geek”, with a section on M.C. Escher’s art featuring:
mathematical objects and operations including impossible objects [the Escher cube in the cartoon], explorations of infinity, reflection, symmetry, perspective, truncated and stellated polyhedra, hyperbolic geometry, and tessellations
And from Wikipedia:
The impossible cube or irrational cube is an impossible object invented by M.C. Escher for his 1958 print Belvedere. It is a two-dimensional figure that superficially resembles a perspective drawing of a three-dimensional cube, with its features drawn inconsistently from the way they would appear in an actual cube.
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