Author Archive

Fixing things

July 9, 2017

Yesterday’s Mother Goose and Grimm, featuring the computer dogs (the bull terrier Grimm at the keyboard, the Boston terrier Ralph advising him):

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To understand this strip, you need to know about keyboard shortcuts on a Mac computer, in particular the combination

Command-Z: Undo the previous command. You can then press Command-Shift-Z to Redo, reversing the undo command.

⌘-Z undoes, or reverses, keyboard actions. In the cartoon, the dimwitted Ralph suggests using this computer key combination to reverse events in general — in this case, the falling of the lamp to the floor and the breaking that resulted from the fall. ⌘-Z will fix it!

If only.

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Words on a wall

July 8, 2017

The latest xkcd (#1860):

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That’s Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty on that wall, discoursing on semantics as in Through the Looking-Glass. The stand-in for the baffled Alice in the book is the aggressively disputatious Science Girl of xkcd.

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What will become of me?

July 7, 2017

(Mild warning: some distasteful aspects of the human body.)

Today’s Bizarro:

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(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbol in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there’s just one in this strip — see this Page.)

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Two artists: Land, Chast

July 7, 2017

R. (for Ronnie) Land and Roz Chast, two American artists, out of the Art mainstream. Both entertain, both pointedly observe the culture around them. But otherwise they’re quite different: male vs. female, centered in Atlanta vs. centered in NYC, mostly producing “underground art” in public places vs. mostly known through cartoons in tony publications, presumably Christian vs. definitely Jewish, deeply private and unforthcoming about his life vs. exposng much of her life and opinions in her art and in interviews.

The two of them recently brought to my attention, Land through a posting from 2012 of one of his works (Little Bunny Foo Foo art at Grant Central Pizza Restaurant in Atlanta), Chast through an exhibition of her work at the Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM) in San Francisco.

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Chast, Haefeli, Kaplan

July 6, 2017

Three cartoons from the latest issue (July 10th and 17th) of the New Yorker, by Roz Chast (heirloom hot dogs), William Haefeli (gay couple with dog and baby), and Bruce Eric Kaplan (a visit from Dr. Seuss).

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Coconuts and Trumpets

July 6, 2017

Notes from my (mostly unfabulous) gay life in Palo Alto CA: drinks yesterday with folks from QUEST (the Stanford LGBT staff group) at Coconuts, the Caribbean restaurant just up the street from my house (posted about here), wearing a notably gay t-shirt from Trumpets, a celebrated gay bar and restaurant in Washington DC in the 1990s. A shirt from 1995, a shirt not only past the age of consent, but one old enough to vote.

Coconuts is a pleasant unpretentious place, not at all gay-oriented — there are no such places in Palo Alto (for gay life, you travel 34 miles to San Francisco or 17 miles to San Jose) — and flourishing; Trumpets was a serious restaurant with an interesting menu, with a major gay bar in front, and it’s long gone, though for Pride month this year, there was a reunion celebration; a lot of people remembered it with great affection.

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A vintage hat

July 6, 2017

Following up on yesterday’s “Fedora days” posting, about hats — the fedora, trilby, pork pie, bowler, and homburg — Benita Bendon Campbell produced this wonderful photo:

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More news not for penises

July 5, 2017

Start with this little poem, “Spurring him on”, which seems to be heavily sexual:

Hotspur Cockspur:
Thorny, horny, over-
Heated prick.
Spiky, showy dandy,
Sharply tipped.

Actually, this is a continuation of my 2/4/16 posting “Some news not for penises”, which was about senses of cock that aren’t about penises, and it’s mostly about plants, a whole hell of a lot of plants, some of them with sharp thorns (like spurs) that will prick you, some of them with showy spikes (like a rooster’s comb), all of them with cock in one of their common names. So, what with the noun cock, the phallic spurs, and the phallic combs, the topic fairly drips with male sexuality — but this posting is not about men’s bodies or mansex. It’s mostly about birds and plants, plus some vintage dandies and Sir Henry Percy.

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Fedora days

July 5, 2017

Thanks to this Zippy strip, it’s been a fedora morning:

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Fedoras, trilbies, homburgs, and more.

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POP go the pheromones

July 4, 2017

Two recent cartoons in my feed that play with language: a POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) in Rhymes With Orange, an outrageous pun in Bizarro (a replay from 2009, first posted here on 2/15/14).

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