From Tim Evanson on Zuckie’s Playroom this morning, this snapshot from the superhero archives:
It’s a come-on, promising surprises, offering to show the boy delightful things; homoeroticism shimmers beneath his words
The lexical background, from NOAD:
noun come-on: informal a gesture or remark that is intended to attract someone sexually: she was giving me the come-on.
And then the great homoerotic come-on to a boy in film:
Continuing Bizarro‘s theme from Monday through Wednesday, today’s Waynoratu Nosferamanteau — a Wayno punmanteau based on the film title Nosferatu — examines Transylvanian dentitions:
(#1) In the tradition of Nosferattoo, Nosferachoo, and Nosferatoon, a Nosferatooth X-ray; I must say that that’s a truly splendid vampiric X-ray (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)
(I was going to wait to see what Friday and Saturday would bring us on Bizarro before posting this strip, but it brings up an issue in visual symbolism, manifested in Wayno’s adaptation of the two-serpent caduceus (surmounting a tooth) to serve as a symbol of dentistry.)
It’s not only the worst week of the year (as I detailed in a posting yesterday), but in the Bizarro cartoon world, Wayno has made it Nosferatu Punmanteau Week (Nosferamanteau Week, for short), exploiting the success of the 2024 movie to commit a series of punmanteaus (puns based on a portmanteau, presented visually as well as linguistically — these are, after all, cartoons) of a special, self-incorporating, type: puns on the model Nosferatu that are portmanteaus of Nosferatu + W, where W is, so far this week : tattoo (in Nosferattoo), achoo (in Nosferachoo), and cartoon (in Nosferatoon). The Waynoratu Nosferamanteaus might well continue through the week. Wayno could even specialize in creature Nosferamanteaus, like the crested parrot Nosferacatoo and the bare-bottomed monkey Nosferaboon; we might even get a whole zoo.
While we wait: about the movie; about the three strips so far; and earlier punmanteau postings of mine.
On Susie Bright’s substack today, 1/14:
Today is the Clinically-Proven Worst Day of the Year
It’s not just you — January’s third week contains the Worst Day of the Year. You’re probably in pretty tough shape.
According to the brightest publicists and mathematical statisticians, today sucks. The Clinically Proven Worst Day of the Year is Blue Monday, also known as the start of the third week in January. Terrible Tuesday isn’t far behind. And WTF Wednesday . . . you’re not getting out of it until February 1st.
I can verify that I’m in pretty bad shape, just barely managing, with things going wrong left and right, and with my hands barely working (I lose control of them and drop stuff; and can’t manage to pick up and hold books of any size, which is a real problem for someone in my business). Meanwhile, I’m deaf in my left ear again, and there’s a rat on my patio.
I’m on my third caregiver in a week — I can’t tell you how time-consuming and exhausting it is to get acquainted with and break in a new caregiver, instead of freeing me up to do my work it eats up all my time — and the third one is now half an hour late, oh god is he even coming at all? (Answer: no. He has a family emergency, so caregiver #2 is coming back just for this day, though she has barely learned about my house and how it works and what help I need.)
And the wider world? The juggernaut of the incoming Grabpussy administration, Los Angeles neighborhoods in flames.
I despair.
But I already knew about the awfulness of this time of the year.
In today’s Zippy strip, the muu-muued Pinhead is at the arcade, celebrating the game of skee-ball in verse in which he identifies with — becomes one with — inanimate objects, the material elements of the game:
(#1) Zippy’s self-reflective poem, which I’ll title I Am Th’: three quatrains — of metered but unrhymed verse — that steadily build in complexity, to end in a self-reflective version of Zippy’s tag line Are we having fun yet?
Now: a few words on the poetry of I Am and then on to skee-ball, skee-ball machines, and the games of my childhood and adolescence.
I guess because of the success of the 2024 movie A Complete Unknown (about Bob Dylan’s early career), the video of the crowning piece of the Dylan Nobel Prize ceremony popped up on Facebook recently: Patti Smith performing Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” as part of her accepting the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature on Dylan’s behalf. I post this because the performance is heart-breakingly wonderful (like many viewers, I was moved to tears), and because I want to celebrate Patti Smith, honor Bob Dylan and his remarkable poetry, and take delight in the fact that they’re still shining (well, we’re a generation — Dylan a bit younger than me and a bit older than my guy Jacques, Smith 6 years younger than me, but still 78, not a kid any more).
I’ll start at the pinnacle — Patti in Stockholm — and then fill in some bits of the background.
Heard on MSNBC on 1/9, a reporter on scene at the Palisades wildfire in Los Angeles, noting that looterers had become a problem — using, not the agent noun looter, based on the established verb loot, but the agent noun looterer, based on the innovative verb looter (a verbing of the noun looter). A looterer is someone engaged in lootering, which is a kind of looting.
The question is why the reporter went for the elaborate innovative noun looterer rather than the simpler established noun looter. In the context, it was clearly not a mistake, and the reporter repeated it. And then it turns out that the usage wasn’t her invention on the spot; the verb looter and its derived agent noun looterer are attested from others. Even with reference to the Los Angeles fires; from the iHeart podcasts about the fires:
2 days ago — That’s just the estimate. Speaker 2 (00:43): So the Los Angeles Police arrested a possible arson suspect … twenty looterers have been arrested
(1/5 through 1/9 were days of great anxiety for me, on both medical and personal fronts; I am at my wits’ end, and I’m also now hopelessly backed up on postings in preparation, probably never to recover. So I’m just posting whatever I can get done fairly easily in the moment.)
In Facebook / Meta / Zuckie’s Litter Box (just Zuckie for short) / whatever on 1/8, Marina Muilwijk posted this diagram from the Terrible Maps site, with a comment:
[Terrible Maps caption:] Europe Divided (again)
[MM’s comment:] See that bit where couscous and herring overlap? That’s where I live [in the Netherlands] (no, I haven’t tried having both in one dish).
Now the site is called Terrible Maps, and the maps are indeed dreadful (but often thought- or laugh-provoking); in this case, having the three regions pictured via circles in a Venn diagram is utterly inappropriate for culture areas, so the picture is absurd (couscous in Wales?).
I blame it all on Alex Grosu*, who e-mailed me this greeting on 1/2:
Happy New 2025! As a mathematician**, you might like what follows***:
1) 2025 itself is a square: 45 × 45 = 2025
3) It’s a product of 2 squares: 9² × 5² = 2025
4) It is the sum of 3 squares: 40²+ 20²+5² = 2025
5) It’s the sum of cubes, of all the whole numbers from 1 to 9: 1³+2³+3³+…+9³ = 2025
6) Also: 2025 = (1+2+3+…+9)²
It’s the year in mathematics.
1/6 it’s Epiphany and 2001 Insurrection Day, and there’s fresh news from the salamander hotline, a follow-up to my writing yesterday, in the posting “That’s a lotta axolotl”:
I have known about axolotls since the 1950s, when Mad magazine was responsible for potrzebie as a non sequitur nonsense word, ferschlugginer as a sort of all-purpose modifier of negative affect, … and axolotl as a nonsense reference.
Which elicited this comment from Robert Coren:
As you may not be surprised to learn, my thoughts also went to Mad magazine as soon as I saw the word. I particularly remember fragments of a parody of Wordsworth’s Daffodils …
I omit RC’s recollections, which are indeed fragmentary, after the first two lines (memory is a fickle thing); but the parody / burlesque (which I’d forgotten about) manages to be both clever (maintaining the form of the Wordsworth — 6-line verses of iambic tetrameter, with rhyme pattern ABABCC — and catching its spirit) and crude, just as a Mad parody ought to be.
(Rhymes for axolotl are not plentiful: the Mad parody uses bottle, twice, rejecting glottal, throttle, and wattle, and also AmE waddle, twaddle, toddle, swaddle, coddle, and model.)
