An e-mail announcement from Sonya Oskolskaya (СА Оскольская) on 10/21:
The Institute for Linguistic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences is pleased to announce the conference “Caritive Constructions in the Languages of the World”, to be held in Saint Petersburg, Russia on April 21–23, 2020.
The conference aims to bring together studies on caritive (a.k.a. abessive or privative) constructions in different languages.
Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro collabo:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)
I’m going in disregard everything in this strip except the B.Z.P.D., presumably an initialistic abbreviation for BiZarro Police Department — the police department in Bizarro’s world. Compare N.Y.P.D., L.A.P.D., and S.F.P.D., just to pick three similar initialisms prominently displayed in tv police dramas. However, this is the first time I’ve noticed the B.Z.P.D. in the Bizarro strip.
The police department in Bizarro’s world then led me to Bizarro World, the dark part of DC Comics’ world that is the mirror-image of Superman’s world.
A brief celebration of one of my favorite cartoons, on the occasion of a reproduction of it being installed in the Empire State Building. Rob Leighton’s Escher on high steel:
I’m trying to imagine the blueprints. Also, of course, how the workers got up there in the first place.
From Jack Hoeksema recently, a note about this 1650 painting in the National Gallery (London), “Allegory of Grammar”, by Laurent de La Hyre:
(#1) A young woman watering plants / Grammar, the first of the Seven Liberal Arts, personified, nurturing young minds
For LGBT History Month, some notes on a little piece of that history in linguistics, in the loose network of academic acquaintanceship that formed at the Linguistic Institute at UC Santa Cruz in the summer of 1991: OUT in Linguistics, OUTiL, OUTIL (the abbreviation pronounced /áwtǝl/, through some wags joked about its being French outil /uti/ ‘tool’, with the expected sexual slang use). A notice went out on the Institute mailing list for an informal social gathering of the new group, with a characterization that then varied, from occasion to occasion, in its list of invitees; a version from several years later:
The group is open to lesbian, gay, bisexual, dyke, queer, homosexual, trans, etc. linguists and their friends. The only requirement is that you be willing to be out to everyone on the list as lgbt(-friendly); it’s sort of like wearing a pink triangle.
This was at a Linguistic Institute, so no one was fussy about who counted as a linguist; if you wanted to hang out with rest of us for the summer, you were welcome. Just so with OUTiL; if you wanted to hang out with the rest of us for an hour or two, you were welcome. OUTiL, however, was primarily social, and that was an excellent thing, especially at the time.
In the 9/26 One Big Happy, Ruthie and Joe cope eggcornishly with the biblical name Iscariot (as in Judas Iscariot), attempting (as they so often do, quite reasonably) to make some sense of an unfamiliar and opaque name:
… with a pun
In this bon appétit story by Carey Polis on 10/11/19 (which came to me in e-mail from ba today): “I Put This Condiment on Everything When I Can’t Be Bothered to Make a Sauce: Brooklyn Delhi’s tomato achaar is a little spicy, a lot of awesome”:
(#1) Brooklyn Delhi tomato achaar (photo by Laura Murray, pun on Delhi / deli by the food company)
Today’s saintly tale, thanks to a reminder from Anonymous 4, advertising their wonderful album 11,000 Virgins: Chants for the Feast of St. Ursula (by Hildegard von Bingen).
(About gay porn as a genre, therefore matter-of-fact discussion of men’s bodies and mansex, though not in particularly graphic terms; the explicit stuff, with penises, is in a 9/21 posting “Costume fantasy porn” on AZBlogX. But probably not suitable for kids or the sexually modest; you can use the cast photo in #1 below as a gauge.)
Text from the Queer Me Now site on 8/18/19, about “Dominic Pacifico’s [2019] Sands Of Time Starring Taylor Reign, Casey Everett, Julian Grey & Zario Travezz”:
(#1) (l-to-r) Grey, Everett, Reign, Travezz, in scraps of shredded white cloth, in the desert sands of post-apocalyptic 2049: affectless in a barren land
Today’s Zippy strip returns to the hypnotic pleasures of mantric repetition, a favorite theme of Bill Griffith’s:
(#1)
First, it’s parsed as
[ Cosmic Catnip ] [ alpine scratcher ] ‘alpine scratcher with Cosmic Catnip in it’
where Cosmic Catnip is a commercial brand of catnip and an alpine scratcher is a kind of slanted scratch toy for cats. Second, it is indeed a real thing. And third, the name is an excellent line of trochaic tetrameter, eminently usable as a meditative mantra when repeated, ideally at least three times.
