Author Archive
April 16, 2020
In a rambling on-line discussion involving Sally Thomason (Sarah Grey Thomason), someone mentioned Sally’s famous doodles, and I remarked that the penguin doodle she’d done for me had — pout — faded terribly in its frame over 30 years or so. So she committed to producing a new, bright (and, as it turned out, differently styled) version for me. Which arrived today, and now awaits my finding a frame for it. Spheniscid art day on Ramona St.!
The original penguin, improved by digital manipulations as much as I could:
(#1) Old Pingo; my recollection was that he was drawn in dark purple (purple being one of my colors), but the framed drawing now suggests black faded to dark gray
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Posted in Art, Linguists, Penguins | Leave a Comment »
April 16, 2020
The 4/13 Rhymes With Orange brings us the Grim Reaper and his cats (we know from Terry Pratchett that Death is fond of cats):
(#1)
We don’t know if this Grim Reaper is a general operator, reaping souls of many creatures, including mice; or whether this one is a specialist in mice — perhaps of a tribe, or race, of Grim Mousers; or of a professional guild of them. (See below, on the Death of Rats.)
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Posted in Books, Comic conventions, Eponyms, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Underwear | Leave a Comment »
April 12, 2020
As we all muddle through in these tough times, an old friend writes from Prince Edward Island (yes, that’s important), “Tasty as it is, I’m a little tired of eating my own cooking, I ordered a pizza and garlic fingers.” And those garlic fingers take us into the annals of regional food, in this case Atlantic Canada.
(#1) A pie of garlic fingers
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Posted in Language and food, Movies and tv, Names | Leave a Comment »
April 10, 2020
The second of two entertaining Easter egg postings on material that came in my mail today. Ee2020.1 (“Mussorgsky chicken with crocuses”) was sweet and playful; this one is raunchy and homoerotic (NOTE: warning for kids and the sexually modest). There’s a lot you can do with eggs.
The centerpiece is this remarkably homo-heavy ad for a Daily Jocks sale (involving extra price savings if you find an Easter egg in the catalogue for the sale); I’ve cropped details about the sale (but nothing crucial about the model):
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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Metaphor, Underwear | Leave a Comment »
April 10, 2020
The first of two entertaining Easter egg postings on material that came in my mail today. This one is sweet and playful; the other one is raunchy and homoerotic. There’s a lot you can do with eggs.
Ee2020.1 is a Jacquie Lawson animated ecard for Easter, illustrating the Mussorgsky piece “Ballet of (the) Chicks in their Shells” / “Ballet of (the) Unhatched Chicks” from Pictures at an Exhibition with chick after chick hatching, while one egg rolls about in struggle, with its chick finally emerging triumphantly among crocus flowers:
(#1) Eggs, chicks, and crocuses: all symbols of spring and (re)birth
(The sound track has an orchestral version of “Ballet”, with cheeping sound effects.)
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Posted in Art, Holidays, Language and food, Language and plants, Music, Signs and symbols | 5 Comments »
April 10, 2020
Yesterday’s Zippy has Our Pinhead imagining empathetically identifying with Grover Cleveland, Gwyneth Paltrow, Frank Zappa, Martin Van Buren, … and a (particular) squirrel:
(#1) The title of the set piece in Zippy’s dream — “Martin Van Buren, Feeding Nachos to a Hyperactive Squirrel” — uses a familiar syntactic template for describing scenes
This is the world of “Washington Crossing the Delaware” and “Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer”.
Meanwhile, Zippy engages in a mental exercise that has absorbed philosophers of consciousness for about 50 years, as distilled in the title of an influential paper by Thomas Nagel: “What Is It Like To Be a Bat?”
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Posted in Art, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Nonsense, Philosophy, Poetry | 1 Comment »
April 9, 2020
Today, my calendar tells me, is the 141st anniversary of the birth of my Swiss grandfather, Melchior Arnold Zwicky (I am Arnold Melchior Zwicky, Jr.). Born 4/9 in 1879 (and died in 1965 at the age of 86, an age I’m unlikely to achieve). So I muse on 1879, first on others who were born that year, and after that on two notable wars that were waged then.
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Posted in Holidays, My life, Names, Zwickys | 6 Comments »
April 8, 2020
The One Big Happy from 3/17, in which Ruthie and Joe perform some silly word play together, with Ruthie taking off on the word rattle on a spelling test for Joe:
(#1) Ruthie jokingly — note the expression on her face – interprets /rætǝl/ as Rat’ll ‘Rat will’ (with Auxiliary Reduction; see the previous posting on this blog, “It’s … it’s … it’s …”, about AuxRed)
Ruthie’s move, with a reference to Rat, provokes a grinning follow-up from Joe, who counters with a reference to Pig and some mildly naughty slang evoking U.S. black talk. They high-five in triumph. A sudden upwelling of urban street culture (and a pop-cutural cartoon allusion) in the midst of a spelling test. Their father patiently presses on.
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Posted in Gesture, Language and the body, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Slang, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
