(Warning: a vulgar term for the primary female sexual anatomy will end up playing a big role in this posting.)
Where this is going: to an alternative name for an American President (#45, aka TFG); and to an alternative name for a classic American novel (by J.D. Salinger) — both names being exocentric V + N compound nouns, the first in English, the second in French. (I’ll call them exoVerNs for short.)
Today’s Zippy strip is a triple riff on masspop culture — on bowling as recreation, on the Googie style of architecture, and on Polynesian-stye “Tiki” culture (architecture, food and drink, and entertainment) — enlivened by our Pinhead’s fascination with words (and the images they call up), here with: bowl, Java, lane, cocktail, alley, ball. Cocktail, with its combination of sexual associations (plus penumbral associations with mai tais and other Polynesian-associated drinks), gets a panel all to itself, so setting the tone for interpreting the rest:
(#1) As usual, the setting is taken from real life; those are drawings of Java Lanes in Long Beach CA (3800 E. Pacific Coast Highway) — but a Java Lanes from the past, since the place was demolished in 2004, almost 20 years ago, to be turned into condos
The historical setting, first from the bowling point of view, then from the architectural and Tiki-culture point of view:
More notes on the 1993 annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, at the Biltmore Hotel (now the Millennium Biltmore) in Los Angeles, at which I gave (on 1/9/93) my 1992 presidential address to the society, “Mapping the ordinary into the rare: Basic/derived reasoning in theory construction”.
The setting. The hotel is a landmark building of downtown Los Angeles (on Pershing Square).
(#1) The exterior, viewed from Pershing Square; you will have seen bits and pieces of the exterior and (especially) the interior in numerous movies and tv shows (Business Insider photo)
Yesterday’s (5/16) Zippy strip shows a Zippy-like Pinhead actor playing the Zippy role in the comics; Zippy strips often advance the unsettling view that characters in the comics are, or at least can be, just roles that are played by actors, who have lives of their own, outside the strips their characters appear in. But then (as here) these Zippy strips sometimes feature such actors as characters in the strips, hence as roles that can themselves be played by actors. And so on down the surrealistic rabbit-hole.
(#1)
So much for the content of the strip. My attention was immediately caught by the diner, Chips, that the Zippy-actor is studying his script in, and its arresting architecture, which cries out “L.A.!” So it is.
But a search for “Chips diner” pulls up as its first hit a set of 5 east-coast eating establishments, the Chip’s Family Restaurants located throughout Connecticut — equally offering old-fashioned diner fare, but architecturally crying out “New England!”
Today’s Zippy strip, with an unconventional sense of columnist:
(#1)
Not someone who writes a column for publication, but a collector of columns, the architectural features — like a philatelist, but with pillars.
But then the suffix –ist is extraordinarily multifunctional.
Plus, the bulge is male and the buttocks are female — well, of course, that’s just projection vs. concavity — though both are imperial.
That would be the Byzantine boxer shorts, recently listed on Etsy, from source TheOldNorth:
(#1) Front view: the Emperor Justinian, in a mosaic of his time
(#2) Rear view: the Empress Theodora, ditto
Saturday’s Zippy takes us to southeastern Pennsylvania, the land of my childhood:
(#1)
Not in escrow, but in Hellam Township, in York County PA. Specifically, in the Haines Shoe House. Which is a house in the form of a shoe (rather than a shop that sells shoes, or a storage place for shoes, or …).
Further notes on the 31st motss.con in Montréal (which came to an end with a stragglers’ breakfast on Monday); background in my 8/3 posting “The rainbow pillars of Montréal”. And further explorations of things Swiss, or at least things called Swiss, in particular that Canadian institution, the Swiss Chalet restaurant chain. Motssers on holiday in Québec, food: that means poutine, (by report) consumed often and by many during the con.
Brief visual background on the con’s location, the Gay Village of the city:
(#1) Aerial view of Rue Ste-Catherine E. in the Gay Village, with its overhead rainbow-colored balls (from Chris Ambidge)
Two items for this week: an unofficial day of judicial celebration in the U.S., rainbow architecture as part of Barcelona Pride.
