On Facebook, Chris Hansen (looking forward to London Pride this weekend) reports this advert for Fortnum & Mason:
You wouldn’t expect the venerable F&M to get their apostrophes wrong (they are in fact Grocers to the Queen), and indeed this punctuational choice was entirely intentional.
(Vanishingly small linguistic interest.)
On AZBlogX, an entertaining photo (passed on by Michael Palmer on Facebook) of model Jordan Alexander (10/7/12) wielding a hotdog bun and mustard on what is either his dick or a hotdog held in his crotch (I have other photos of both scenarios). This has now been added to my Pages on phallicity posting (which now come divided into a subPage on wurst postings, for things like this, and a general subPage on the rest).
It’s been privet week at my house. Behind my back patio are two of my neighbors’ gardens, separated from my space by a high fence. One neighbor has a gigantic privet tree, probably Ligustrum lucidum, or broad-leaved privet; over the years it has seeded a great many saplings on my side of the fence. These provided a pleasant green screen — until they too became gigantic, so surgery was called for. Slowly, but relentlessly, I chopped them down and up. (I’ve been physically in bad shape for several months, so my anti-privet project was a tribute to my gradually returning powers. Considerable rejoicing.) All that remains are some stumps that will need professional attention.
Things to know about this plant: it’s fast-growing, tough, and appallingly invasive, and its pollen (now being produced in huge amounts) is fabulously allergenic. I have not been a happy gardener.
Today’s One Big Happy provides a sort of compendium of Ruthie’s missteps in English:
I think my favorite is panel 3: not a flight of fancy, but a duck on a park bench.
Continuing my project of bringing lists of postings and other resources from my private stash (in Word documents on my computer) to publicly available materials (notably, in html documents on this blog, especially in Pages), I’ve added a Page (under Lists) with information about postings on diners, indebted especially to Zippy the Pinhead. This blog takes me to some odd places.
As with other Pages, this one will be regularly updated as new material comes in. Soon to be added to the “Plants postings” list, one on privet / ligustrum (to which I turn out to be significantly allergic).
Four items from the front matter in today’s New York Times Magazine: the compound poolside memoirs; the euphemism go to Spain; the term binky ‘pacifier’; and citronella for warding off mosquitoes.
In the NYT yesterday, an obituary by William Yardley: “Charles Barsotti, Cartoonist With Humor Both Simple and Absurd, Dies at 80”.
Charles Barsotti, a cartoonist for The New Yorker whose jaded canines, outlaw snails and obtuse monarchs made readers laugh for more than 40 years, died on Monday at his home in Kansas City, Mo.
… Mr. Barsotti made pasta talk. He drew hot dogs planning cookouts. His lines were spare and clean, whether drawn or written
That last sentence makes reference to two of my favorite Barsotti cartoons, both of which happen to have a foodstuff talking on the phone; both have appeared on this blog.
The Bizarro of 3/20/14, which I seem to have missed when it came up in March, but caught yesterday reproduced in the July issue of Funny Times:
An ambiguity — Miss France as a (NP) title in a beauty pageant vs. Miss France as a VP remnant of a declarative S, conveying ‘I miss France’. This gross difference in syntax and semantics corresponds to a pragmatic difference, whether the expression is viewed as printed on a sash (as in beauty pageants) or as the equivalent of a t-shirt slogan — very different sociocultural contexts.
WHRB (Harvard’s student radio station) came along with a piece of pleasant Baroque music (for organ and strings) that was entirely unfamiliar to me, so I looked up at the identifying tag in iTunes. Which told me it was by Arne. Not my friend Arne Adolfsen (with his Norwegian-derived disyllabic personal name), but Thomas Arne (with his British, but presumably ultimately Scandinavian-derived, monosyllabic family name). I had just heard one of his six Concerti for Organ and Strings, probably #2 in G major.
A fascinating but little-known figure, who suffered musically by being overshadowed by Handel and personally by being Catholic (so he was barred from the usual sources of patronage) and also a renowned lecher.
