xkcd #1904 Research Risks (10/18/17):
(#1
Linguistics fares pretty well, both on being used by supervillains for world domination and on the possibility of research subjects breaking free and threatening the environment. I note the absence of Artificial Intelligence in this graph.
My morning name a while back was just Harry. Some possibiities:
Dirty Harry. The Trouble With Harry. Harry Truman. Harry Hamblin. Prince Harry. Harry Houdini. Harry Potter. Harry Reems. Harry Connick Jr. Harry the Horse. Harry Frankfurt. Harry Belafonte.
But none of these. I instantly connected to Harry B. Miller, Jr., my first cousin-in-law. And then discovered that he’d died back in 2013.
The One Big Happy from March 3rd:
Ruthie doesn’t know which expressions are conventionalized (and have to be reproduced exactly) and which are fresh creations (possibly metaphorical, but made up on the spot) — whose parts can be varied by substitution.
While putting together a brief note on the death (late in February) of linguist Dick Oehrle, I got the news of the death this morning of Morris Halle (who was Dick’s dissertation director, and mine too).
(Dick was about 6 years younger than me, Morris about 17 years older.)
Passed around on Facebook:
The 1929 Magritte original, often riffed on, went Ceci n’est pas une pipe ‘This is not a pipe’, a disavowal that sets up a contradiction between text and image. So here we have another Magrittean disavowal, as I’ve come to call the phenomenon; there’s a survey in my 8/19/17 posting “Magrittean disavowals”.
But they come in two species, and it’s not entirely clear which one the example above belongs to.
Yesterday was Sunday, and the morning name for the day was, appropriately, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (the movie, and the book on which it was based):
(#1)
(About a gay pornstar and his presentation in photographs. Not about language, also with talk about men’s bodies and mansex in plain terms, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
A fresh LucasFilm pornstar, in a recent ad:
(#1) Marlon’s top half; the image #1+2 in “Marketing Rico Marlon” on AZBlogX has the whole X-rated picture
Compare #1 with this p.r. photo:
(#2) A cropped version of #3 on AZBlogX
A bit of clever cartoon humor created by Michael Babich for the Google+ community UX/UI Design (and posted on Facebook):
A play on the icons used on computer platforms for various ways of displaying information, likening the shape of the icons to the shape of kinds of food (a hamburger, döner kebab on a vertical rotisserie, a bento box, a kebab on a stick, meatballs). And exploiting the ambiguity of the noun menu — in its older sense in a food context and in a metaphorical sense in computing.
One bit of language play (requiring some food knowledge) and one cartoon photograph (rather than drawing) on the Therapist cartoon meme, with the Easter Bunny folded in:
(#1) Poppin’ Fresh the Pillsbury Doughboy meets the Matzo Man
(#2) “I don’t know where the eggs come from, and I have no idea why I feel compelled to hide them.”
(About dance rather than language.)
After some time away from dancers, I returned earlier today with Israeli dancer Yoav Bosidan, and then Mike McKinley went on a run through several Ballet Boys, two of them projecting intense emotions through facial expressions: cheeky Alexander Fost and smouldering Ransom Wilkes-Davis (both Americans). He followed that up with the charming Emanuel Abruzzo (an Argentine dancer of presumably Italian, specifically Abruzzese, descent).