The 6/7 Zippy takes us to the Jersey Shore for some water ice in a squeeze cup:
(#1) At the Strollo’s Lighthouse Italian Ice shop in Long Branch NJ: Zippy (alarmed at climate change) speaking on the left, Claude Funston (who denies climate change) on the right
On the setting. On Strollo’s. On lemon as the vanilla of Italian ices. On the relevant C(ount) noun ice, the nominal Italian ice, and the compounds water ice and squeeze cup. On Italian ice and the family of similar confections.
Today’s Zippy starts with Zippy and Griffy at Universal Studios Hollywood, reflecting on what is worthwhile in our lives:
(#1)
Griffy inventories some of his passions, in high culture and popular culture (including sports and food):
Beethoven, Alice Neel, Miles Davis, Tiger Woods, Ernie Bushmiller (the Nancy cartoonist), tuna melt
And Zippy, being a cartoon character, follows with a catalogue of his own cartoon favorites:
Gerald McBoing Boing, Baby Huey, Yosemite Sam, Popeye the Sailor Man
Lots of stuff in these lists, but most of it is either in the cultural commons or treated in previous postings on this blog. The standout exception is the uncompromising portrait painter Alice Neel. She will lead us to a number of her subjects: the art critics Gregory Battcock and David Bourdon; the Greenwich Village eccentric Joe Gould; and the poet Frank O’Hara. It will end in naked men and some flagrant mansex, but I’ll warn you when this material looms.
Thanks to my reader RJP, this excellent June cartoon by Christian Talbot and Sophie Hodge:
(#1) It’s got penguins. In a same-sex wedding. Plus sharks (exhibiting penguin envy: those penguins are always so smartly dressed!). For Pride month.
Today’s Zippy takes us to a bit of now-vanished Camden NJ, the Elgin Diner Restaurant, and, next to it, a fantasy Chinese diner, an amalgam of two items of demotic culinary Americana: the classic diner (an Art Deco railcar where people meet to eat plain, familiar food); and the little Chinese (that is, American-Cantonese) restaurant:
(#1)
This will take us on the road to Ardmore PA, Wheeling WV, and Idaho Falls ID. For the trip, choose a diner classic — tuna melt, patty melt, club sandwich, meatloaf, macncheese — from column A; and a Chinese-restaurant classic — hot and sour soup, chow mein, garlic eggplant, General Tso’s chicken, sweet and sour pork — from column B. And then wok this way.
Yesterday on Facebook, current political events brought me to a name from the past:
Arnold Zwicky: Topics suddenly resurrected from the past: the Ceausescus. Because of the solid diplomacy accorded to them by the British royal family when the Romanians came on a state visit. If them, then anyone.
Bert Vaux: Interestingly I first read that as “the Caucasus”…
Dennis Preston: And I read “caduceus.”
John Lawler: It took me quite a while to resurrect čaušɛsku.
… stands guard in the San Fernando Valley, providing poodle thoughts for Zippy on his morning walk today:
(#1) Zipphorism: “Sometimes I feel like my thoughts are thinking me”
We are figments of our thoughts’ imagination; the topiary poodle tells us so.
From the annals of Cartoonland spelling bees, in my 5/31 posting “Ultimate spelling bee”, this Bob Eckstein cartoon:
(#1) The contestant offers BOOIESUZYKQHHHH as the spelling for the given pronunciation /búwisúzikyú/ (or something very close to that)
In creating this cartoon (hastily — if you’re doing a bunch of cartoons a day, you don’t have a lot of time for reflection), Eckstein pulled some pronounceable nonsense out of his head as the contest word. The result is an expression with recognizable parts, two of which, /súzi + kyú/ form a familiar name — Susie Q — while the other, /búwi/, might be heard as any of several names, but in Eckstein’s mind was just two nonsense syllables that bubbled up in the heat of the moment.
Following up on my posting yesterday, “Flirting with magenta” (about three plants with magenta flowers), Randy McDonald has sent me a piece from the site Speed River Journal: An urban naturalist’s progress: “Magenta spreen, a worthy spring green” on 5/29/19 by Van Waffle — about the plant often known as tree spinach:
(#1) Close-up of Chenopodium giganteum leaves (from Wikipedia)
A Bob Eckstein cartoon circulated today, on the occasion of an unprecedented event in the world of English spelling competitions:
(#1) FB note from Bob: “Can you use it in a sentence?”
Story in the New York Times today, “National Spelling Bee, at a Loss for Words, Crowns 8 Co-Champions” (octo-champs, as one of them said) by Daniel Victor.
