Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro offers a pun using the available resources sparingly: piñata coladas — piña coladas as made by (anthropomorphized) piñatas:
Helpfully, with a recipe (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)
Posted in Language and animals, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Toys and games | 1 Comment »
(bodily unpleasantness, much of it in street language, so likely to be offensive to many readers)
🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for terminal August; send in the rabbits of September, and we can marvel (with Stephen Sondheim) Isn’t it rich? / Isn’t it queer? — that we should come to this time of the year
Yes, this is getting out a day late, but I have an excuse. It’s both painful to hear about — involving 12 hours of excruciating pain for me — and deeply revolting — well, literally shitty — so I’m having trouble framing the story for you. Then, as a kind of ghastly sideshow, various pieces of essential software (Facebook is mostly to blame) simply stopped working as they should, making it impossible for me to make my blog postings available through FB. All together, giving the Lost Blogging Day of 8/31.
Posted in Events and occasions, Language and food, Language and medicine, Language and the body, My life, Stories | Leave a Comment »
On Facebook (substantially edited down): Horton Copperpot on 8/26, with this lead-in to a longer piece:
— HC: We all know AI slop. TikTok is branching out into a bunch of areas, including shopping and “short dramas”, which is a bit different from the original medium. It’s AI-generated soap operas that seem to follow between 3 and 5 script matrices, with some variation in focus, setting and language. The main feature is the ability to monetize them with high efficiency, much like most “free” video games on your phone. Several of them pop up in Facebook Reelz as ads for several “short drama” platforms, with some of the feature “dramas” shared between them. I found several that cross these platforms, mostly Horatio-Alger-type fantasy plots, plus a few cheap romance novelettes.
I got interested in them a while ago, not for the “drama” or visual appeal but more for the recurring plot lines that indicate laziness and greed. The other aspect that intrigued me was just how bad the AI was in keeping track of the details.
Posted in Academic life, AI, Categorization and Labeling, Compliments, Plays, Pragmatics, Social interactions, Social life, Stories | Leave a Comment »
8/31 e-mail from me to Li Li, “senior executive director at Palo Alto Commons and The Avant” (lightly edited):
Talking with you briefly about your path from China to Palo Alto brought back a gigantic flood of memories of my teaching at what was then the Beijing Language Institute in 1985 (under a program of country exchanges of college professors — I was exchanged by Fang Li of BLI, and then sponsored his time a bit later at Stanford).
Posted in Chinese, My life, Social class, Stereotyping, Teaching | Leave a Comment »
🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit for September, in the middle of another run of AZ-connected birthdays (not of famous people, however admirable; but of (still living) people who are important to me): 8/27 Ken Rudolph of soc.motss (85); 8/30 Ellen Sulkis James, a long-ago companion of mine on the staff of the Reading (PA) Eagle (86); 8/31 Benita Bendon Campbell, dear friend since Princeton in the 1960s and my connection to the late Ann Daingerfield (Zwicky) (90); 9/2 Mike Jankulak of soc.motss (57); and 9/6, yes, me (86)
9/1 came to me with a morning name: The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys — from what experiential or mental source I know not. But with a shiver of delight.
Posted in Events and occasions, Friendship, Morning names, Music, My life | Leave a Comment »
You are currently browsing the Arnold Zwicky's Blog blog archives for September, 2026.
