In the wake of rage against emoticons, Beckettian bafflement from cartoonist Benjamin Schwartz in the latest (June 23rd) New Yorker:
Author Archive
More on the emoticon watch
June 20, 2014More octothorpe wrangling
June 20, 2014In the previous round, this Mother Goose and Grimm (#4 here) on pound sign, hashtag, etc. And now a Zits on the subject, with a family argument, lined up by generation:
On the foodmanteau front
June 20, 2014Now from Taco Bell, a hybrid food with a hybrid (portmanteau) name. You can critique the food — a double-Mexican combo, of quesadilla and burrito — or the name (Quesarito, which strikes me as reasonably euphonious, unlike cronut or Flatizza), or both. (Links to foodmanteau postings, up to mid-2013, here.)
Not everyone has found the Quesarito tasty, however.
Nineveh
June 19, 2014It started fairly simply, with a BBC radio news report from Iraq (heard from I don’t know which source; BBC news comes to me from several places, including BBC3 more or less directly): a bulletin from the Assyrian city of Nineveh, which the news reader pronounced as
(1) /ˈnajn@vˌe/
instead of what I expected to be
(2) /ˈnɪn@və/
(where @ in the middle syllable represents a neutral unaccented vowel, ɪ or ə — usually transcribed ɪ, as in Wikipedia, though I sometimes hear ə).
I was, in fact, so astounded by the /aj/ in the first syllable of (1) that I failed to take notes on its source; I’d never heard anything but /ɪ/ in this syllable, and /aj/ is not even remotely like the vowel in the Assyrian pronunciation of the place name. Where would it come from?
MUFFIN SAUSAGES WITH EGGS
June 18, 2014That’s what was on the diner’s board giving the day’s breakfast specials a few days ago. How to interpret it?
Rage against the emoticon
June 17, 2014Today’s Bizarro:
Sometimes your patience just wears out.
Lateral flash thong
June 16, 2014(Mostly, but not entirely, about men’s underwear.)
On Facebook, a link passed on by Matthew Melmon to a June 13th posting on the Metro (U.K.) website, “Amazing news! Now you too can own this delightful swimming ‘sock’ “, showing a lateral flash thong on the ITV2 reality tv show TOWIE (The Only Way Is Essex):
(#1)
A remarkable garment indeed: how does it stay up? And who wears something like this in public (outside of outrageous precincts like TOWIE)?
Chuck Jones
June 15, 2014On Facebook, this Looney Tune pair offered by Roy Calfas:
(#1)
The War Between Bugs and Daffy. The creations of animator Chuck Jones.
Noir 1949
June 14, 2014The Zippy from the 11th takes Zippy back, in a Pontiac, to a cinematic 1949:
(#1)
The film noir movies in question (from that year) are, in order, The Big Steal and Cover Up. And the first features one of the major figures of film noir, the icon of masculinity Robert Mitchum:
Robert Charles Durman Mitchum (August 6, 1917 – July 1, 1997) was an American film actor, author, composer and singer. … Mitchum rose to prominence for his starring roles in several major works of the film noir style, and is considered a forerunner of the anti-heroes prevalent in film during the 1950s and 1960s. (Wikipedia link)