All in the 4/24/17 New Yorker: Beijing street food on the cover, a William Haefeli cartoon, and a Tom Chitty cartoon.
Archive for the ‘Categorization and Labeling’ Category
Seahorse on a stick, GBF, and the Describe-A-Muffin Task
April 21, 2017The Jargon Matrix
April 12, 2017Yesterday’s Dilbert takes us into a dark world of language, the Jargon Matrix:
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The Matrix, but with jargon from the world of technology businesses.
Annals of normalization: on the Santa Claus watch
April 7, 2017From HuffPo on the 4th, this advance announcement about a Christmas book, “Santa Claus Will Be A Gay Black Man In A New Children’s Book: He’ll also be married to a white man”, by Curtis M. Wong:
Get ready to see Santa Claus in a new (and refreshingly diverse) light this holiday season, courtesy of a forthcoming parody children’s book.
On March 28, publisher Harper Design announced plans to release Santa’s Husband, which re-casts Kris Kringle as a black man in an interracial, same-sex relationship. Slated for an October release, the book will follow Santa’s life in the North Pole, except in this version, he’ll have a white husband who fills in for him at shopping malls around the world.
Another phenomenally bad idea
March 29, 2017(Mostly about food, but there’s a mansex interlude, so be warned.)
A couple days ago it was (thanks to Margalit Fox) the hologram-bunny (a hollusion) that comes to life to decorate homes and parties. I’m not quite sure why the idea struck so many people (including Margalit and me) as disturbing, but it was. Now comes an edible counterpart, but this time I think I understand the source of the unease that it arouses.
Reported by Kim Darnell, this is Delighted By (sometimes: delighted by) dessert hummus. On the grocery shelf:
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It comes in four flavors: Brownie Batter, Snickerdoodle, Orange Dreamsickle, Vanilla Bean.
Thing is, hummus is a savory food, and these flavors are all sweet (apparently, achingly so).
Playing for laughs
February 22, 2017… or, playing over the top, and in fact doing this knowingly while winking at the audience, so that you might want to say: camping it up. I refer to the Netflix version of A Series of Unfortunate Events, in which Neil Patrick Harris (NPH) plays the villain for laughs, while Patrick Warburton plays the author-narrator, Lemony Snicket, ditto, and a bunch of others — notably Joan Cusack, K. Todd Freeman, and Alfre Woodard — join them.
ON in the comics
February 20, 2017A Zippy I’ve been saving since it came out on 11/25:
Another piece of what’s turning into a very large project on the English words normal (Adj), normality (N), and normalize (V) — plus related vocabulary — and the conceptual (and sociocultural) categories associated with them. The Zippy involves only long-standing senses of normal and normality — what I’ll call O (for old (senses of)) N (for the three normal-related words) — plus the Adjs abnormal and deviant. (The contrast is between ON and what I’ve called IN, for innovative senses of the words.)
Annals of adorable
February 10, 2017All about Neil Patrick Harris and David Burtka, an adorable couple who are fools for kissing, in public or anywhere. NPH and DB standing side by side, working together for rainbow causes:
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And then kissing at their wedding:
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And then, being totally adorable together in the video “Why Am I the One?”, which you can view here.
finger foods
February 7, 2017This morning’s Pinterest mail offered an album of finger food images: gorgeous stuff. Then I discovered that I’d mentioned finger foods in passing several times (in connection with appetizers and snacks), and once a bit more seriously, but hadn’t discussed them in any detail. Time to remedy that.
Poppin’ Fresh in a pink dress
January 22, 2017(It starts with dough and cross-dressing and eventually touches on several sexy topics. So: definitely racy, but probably not enough to frighten the horses in the street.)
Today’s Rhymes With Orange portrays the kinky side of the Pillsbury Doughboy, Poppin’ Fresh (the advertising icon and mascot of the Pillsbury Company):
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The Doughboy cross-dressing in an adorable pink skirt — a fluted cupcake liner, from the set on the kitchen counter.
Now: some remarks on cupcakes; a note on sexual undercurrents in the Poppin’ Fresh ads; and extensive discussion of sentient, speaking figures (often anthropomorphic, as here) in advertising, cartoons, or fictions of other kinds, figures that are in fact foodstuffs.
Something I missed on NCOD
November 12, 2016National Coming Out Day was largely a day of personal remembrance for me this year — see my posting here — so I missed a bit of significant lgbt news, with a local twist even. It came to me circuitously, via the (closed) Facebook group Our Bastard Language, in a posting by Lauren Hall, originally on October 11th (NCOD itself), where Lauren reported the Think Different poster she’d seen on Market St. in San Francisco that day. One shot among many available (this one just a bit off Market, but in a famous spot):
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A variant of Apple’s Think Different ad campaign of some years back, with a silhouette of Squire GrabPussy (as the President-Elect was then) instead of a semicircular bite out of the apple, and with the bands of the Pride Flag instead of Apple’s rainbow colors:
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