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Penguins at play

October 10, 2024

Max Vasilatos had warned me they were coming, but I didn’t know when. But today was their day, and they were a cheering relief from the deep dysfunction that a week of extravagant heat has visited upon me: from the Play Visions company in Woodlinville WA (but, yes, made in China), the Club Earth Penguin Parade — 6 nesting penguins (the biggest only 5 inches tall, so they fit in easily with almost any home decor):


(#1) An ad display of Les Six Antarctiques; can you tell which of the six is the Swiss penguin (known professionally as Arthur Honegger)? What gives him away as a Swissie and not a Frenchie like all the others?

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Posted in French, Language and the body, Music, My life, Penguins, Play, Toys | Leave a Comment »

When X means yes

October 9, 2024

… in one sense / use of yes: ‘yes, I select this one’. Which came up yesterday as I was ordering an Original Italian Sub from the Jersey Mike’s Subs in Mountain View CA, just south of Palo Alto (they’re a huge national chain, offering a wide range of submarine sandwiches that are, in my experience, excellent examples of their kind — and Grubhub delivers from them); it turns out that their on-line menu software involves this positive selection-X, which took me a moment to get used to, especially since I’d posted not long ago on associations of the letter X, which included the X of NO — of prohibitions, bans, and denials — but not the X of YES. Well, X is a symbol, it’s just stuff (as I say) and can accumulate any number of uses, even ones that look contradictory.

The Jersey Mike X is the X of election ballots: an alternative to a check-mark ✓ or a plus-sign + in a box or circle (or to filling in an oval) to indicate selecting an item.  In a use that was initially confusing to me, since the JM X is in contrast with the JM +, which turns out to convey something like ‘this is one of the available choices’; I eventually figured out how JM deploys X and + through a certain amount of trial-and-error fiddling with the menus. Yes, I’ll illustrate all of this in a little while.

But first, one more groaner penguin-pun joke, on the occasion of my consuming, at lunch today, the last of my birthday McVitie’s Penguin bars.

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Posted in Dialects, It's Just Stuff, Jokes, Language and food, My life, Names, Penguins, Puns, Signage, Signs and symbols | 5 Comments »

Retreat into penguin puns and Generic Soup

October 8, 2024

This has been a remarkably awful day. When my caregiver L arrived at 10, I had no color in my face, couldn’t use my hands at all, and was suffering such extravagant joint pain I couldn’t walk. I was able to stutter out that the barometric pressure had nose-dived and I’d start to get better soon. Which happened, though I was pretty much done in by the experience. Meanwhile, the tv news brought me John Morales, veteran South Florida meteorologist, choking up in tears on-screen over the incoming bulletin that Hurricane Milton had advanced to Category 5: “This is just horrific”, he explained in despair, like nothing he had ever seen or imagined.

When I could function some, I retreated into my birthday present to myself: a McVitie’s Penguin bar, imported from the UK. Their virtue — beyond their being pleasant chocolate-covered chocolate biscuits — is that each one comes with a genuine penguin fact on the wrapper, plus a groaner penguin-pun joke, with a question on the wrapper and the answer just inside. Today’s joke to follow, below.

Then Lynne Murphy posted (from Brighton in Sussex) an excellent diversion on Facebook. She’s been writing on soups made from recipes, but announced today:

No recipe tonight, just SOUP

with a photo (also to follow below). Which inspired me to post about Generic Soup.

The rest of the day’s awfulness I’ll just skate over here, though I will admit to filling in my mail-in ballot for this fall’s US elections, as something I could focus on. It will go out in the mail tomorrow. (I don’t think that I’ve mentioned that California has six candidates for President and Vice-President: Libertarian, Green, Republican, Peace and Freedom, Democratic, American Independent.)

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Posted in Jokes, Language and food, Language and poitics, My life, Puns | Leave a Comment »

Tarzan of the Apex

October 7, 2024

From yesterday’s posting “Hot autumn morning”:

The torrid unpleasantness continues. Back on 10/2 the local temperature reached a brutal 102F; since then, it’s dropped into the 90s, but not by a whole lot. 96 yesterday, 96 today, 96 tomorrow, then maybe actual autumn.

In fact, yesterday in Palo Alto was 102 again, and today’s high is predicted to be 93, but relief is still predicted for tomorrow. Meanwhile, there’s a counteractive chill in today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, showing Tarzan and Cheeta(h) at the intensely cold summit of Mt. Everest, claiming the peak, the apex of the mountain, for the (see the flag) Banana Republic, the chimpanzee’s native land:


(#1) A pun on “Tarzan of the Apes” (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)

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Posted in Actors, Language and animals, Language and the body, Movies and tv, My life, Puns | Leave a Comment »

Hot autumn morning

October 6, 2024

The torrid unpleasantness continues. Back on 10/2 the local temperature reached a brutal 102F; since then, it’s dropped into the 90s, but not by a whole lot. 96 yesterday, 96 today, 96 tomorrow, then maybe actual autumn.

So as soon as there was enough light, I was out on my patio watering the plants, in the containers and in the garden strip, and spray-washing the ivy on the walls of the patio, all while it was still under 70F. When I came back inside and went to work at my computer, I got a treat: a two-act show by the local creatures, squirrels in Act 1, hummingbird in Act 2.

But to appreciate the show, you’ll need to sit through the prologue, a brief September song in three parts.

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Posted in Language and animals, Language and plants, My life, Names | Leave a Comment »

Once, twice, six times Marengo

October 5, 2024

My morning name from Thursday, 10/3: MARENGO. Which is:

1 an Italian place name
2 the name of a Napoleonic battle fought (near) there

And then from that:

3 the name of Napoleon’s horse
4 any one of various place names in Canada and the US
5 the French dish chicken Marengo
6 any of various colors in the black, dark blue, dark brown, and gray or blue-gray spectrum

As if that weren’t complex enough already, the name MARENGO brought with it a torrent of name associations, from MANDINGO to NINTENDO, which I’ll sample below.

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Posted in Color, History, Language and food, Morning names, Names, Semantics | 3 Comments »

vitals

October 3, 2024

Every morning and every evening I send a brief e-mail to Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky, to reassure her that I’m still functioning. In the G’MORNIN bulletins I report my sleep times and summarize my morning vitals — my morning vital signs (always blood pressure and pulse rate, occasionally more tests if they seem to be called for). It was only this morning that I realized that morning vitals ‘morning vital signs’ was an especially nice example of a subtype of what I’ve called beheadings. To go along with, from previous postings, examples like chewables  ‘chewable vitamins’ and squares ‘square meals’ (in three squares a day ‘three square meals a day’).

The relevant subentry in NOAD just says:

noun vitals: short for vital signs.

Well, yes, but short in a very specific way:

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Posted in Beheading, Conversion, Modifiers, My life, Nouning | 1 Comment »

Gavin Creel and his little wounded dude

October 2, 2024

In print in the NYT today, a story (by Michael Paulson) I’ll talk about here in its 9/30 on-line version, headed “Gavin Creel, Tony-Winning Musical Theater Actor, Dies at 48: He won the award playing a Yonkers feed store clerk in “Hello, Dolly!” and was also nominated for roles in “Thoroughly Modern Millie” and “Hair” and beginning:

Gavin Creel, a sly and charming musical theater actor who won a Tony Award as a wide-eyed adventure seeker in “Hello, Dolly!” and an Olivier Award as a preening missionary in “The Book of Mormon,” died on Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 48.

His death was confirmed by his partner [AZ: his male domestic partner], Alex Temple Ward, via a publicist, Matt Polk. The cause was metastatic melanotic peripheral nerve sheath sarcoma, a rare form of cancer, which Mr. Creel learned he had in July.

Mr. Creel was a well-liked member of the New York theater community whose death comes as a shock, given his age. He had been performing on Broadway for two decades, mostly in starring roles, and just last winter his physical and vocal agility, as well as his charisma and curiosity, were on display in a memoiristic show he wrote and performed Off Broadway called “Walk on Through: Confessions of a Museum Novice,” about learning to love the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The obit continues with a detailed account of his career, which springboarded from his amazing singing voice and his projection of energy and enthusiasm, wrapped up in a big smile. He was noted for working well with others, and as being supportive of other actors’ careers. In short, an immensely talented really nice guy. All of this is wonderful, and I’m sorry I never got a chance to see him perform live, but I’m here because he also talked publicly about his life as a gay man, and how gay men compose and manage their lives is one of my areas of academic (as well as personal) interest.

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Posted in Acting, Actors, Death notices, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality | 1 Comment »

Golden barrels

October 1, 2024

From a 9/16 visit to Stanford’s Arizona Garden — the “cactus garden” in local talk — engineered by my caregiver León Hernández Alvarez (who will be L from here on out), to investigate new things (for him) in the area — so many wonderful places open to the public for free — and to provide me with enjoyment (and useful exercise with my walker).

When we came around a corner of the path from the parking lot, and suddenly faced an alien-planet vista of huge astonishing plants of all sorts, as far as the eye could see in every direction, L gasped in surprise and delight. And close to the ground there were all manner of other plants, every one of them a novelty. Nothing labeled, no information supplied, but I could provide some facts from memory. Though mostly L was being carried away in delight by the visual excess: everywhere you looked, another bit of (mostly dangerous) living magic.

Then, around a corner there was a large garden island populated by cactuses I certainly recognized. “These are called barrel cactuses, for obvious reasons”, I said, but for a few moments he didn’t care what they were called, they were amazing, and in fact adorable. Some of them were arranged in what you could think of as family groups. They were golden-green, with huge spines all over them. Spines so big you could feel them individually, discover they were soft and flexible, but with spear-sharp tips.

Eventually, L looked them up on his phone and discovered that they were, specifically, golden barrel cactuses. From Mexico originally, but in the desert far from the Mexico City region he grew up in.

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Posted in Language and plants, My life, Names, Stanford, Taxonomic vs. common | 2 Comments »

Roll over, roll over

October 1, 2024

🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to bring in October, a month that embraces: Hangul Day (10/9), a linguistic holiday (celebrating the excellent Korean orthography); NCOD, National Coming Out Day (10/11), a gay holiday (also, not accidentally, the JHT-AMZ wedding-equivalent anniversary, from the time long before same-sex marriage); and Halloween (10/31), a strange religiocultural holiday — the three occasions together in this parody of the Gunpowder Treason rhyme:

Roll over, Roll over
The first of October
Hangul, coming out, and black cat;
I have no doubt
That coming out
Is something to celebrate at!

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Posted in Allusion, Books, Holidays, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Parody | Leave a Comment »

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