Today’s xkcd has three characters unpacking initialisms and acronyms, in eccentric or ridiculous ways:
#1989
(Cheap, meaningless mansex. Not for everyone.)
From Roger Klorese today, a commercial sign from his posting past (thanks to timehop, which provides photos from your history):
(#1)
The (innocent) reference is to making your own stuffed toy, but then there’s a sexual verb stuff ‘screw, fuck’ and furry available to refer to (gay) bears (as well as to people in the furry subculture), and when you have people standing in line for the event, it sounds like a gangbang. Let’s all screw JoeBear!
The readings for today: from the Old Texts, Lewis Carroll; and two from the New Texts, P.G. Wodehouse and Rihanna.
What is so rare as a day in May?
Caught on the Our Bastard Language group on Facebook this morning, this Addison cartoon (by Mark Addison Kershaw):
(#1) Sexy springtime (in the northern hemisphere)
Birds are urgently trolling for sex on every street corner and mating shamelessly in the bushes. Plants are flagrantly displaying their female parts, meanwhile spraying the botanical counterpart of semen everywhere. It’s a jungle out there.
(Treat the title as a warning — or as an invitation, whichever suits you.)
Yesterday, the posting “He said “prickles””, on prick, prickle, dick, prickly, and pickle (with notes on pickles as phallic symbols) and various combinations of these words, including prickle as a portmanteau of prick and pickle. To which Chris Hansen commented:
I can’t tell whether you’ve ever referred to a work of art I remember seeing but can’t locate online. It was a pickle jar filled with penises, and it was named “Prickles” There was vinegar in it too.
Well, yes and no. I’ve posted on an artwork of this description, but it wasn’t entitled Prickles (though it could have been).
That will take me to Peter Piper, and also to actual pickled penises.
I turn now from deserts (the plants at Stanford’s cactus garden, in a series of recent postings) to desserts.
This is the first in a series of follow-ups to my 4/29 posting “All the dessert world is not either cake or pie”, about the categorization and name of a strawberry dish made by Stephanie Shih’s friend Darya Kavitskaya. Darya called it a pie, but Steph insisted it was better labeled as cake. On looking at a picture of the dish (#2 in that posting), I identified it as a strawberry clafoutis, a crustless dessert of strawberries baked in a thick custardy flan-like batter (#3 in that posting) — something distant from both canonical cake and canonical pie. Hence the title of that posting.
But now Darya has sent me the recipe, and I see that it’s not a clafoutis at all, but in fact a fruit pizza, with a sweet base crust and a strawberry topping.
Yesterday’s Matt cartoon by Matt Pritchett, alluding to the travails of Brexit:
(#1) Eskimo words for snow, leading to the the ur-snowclone Eskimo N
Reports from the desert lands of the Southwest that the palo verde trees are in gorgeous bloom there, in gaudy yellow display:
(#1) Note green branches; the trunks are green too
Just stunning. Unfortunately, the pollen is intensely allergenic, so the trees are mixed blessings.
In the May 7th New Yorker, a Waldomemic Roz Chast:
Chastian family dynamics, skirting the line between touching concern and neurotic overprotection.
