Archive for the ‘Color’ Category
August 9, 2024
The New Yorker cover for the August 12th, 2024 issue is a great big Roz Chast cartoon. With the accompanying cover story, “Roz Chast’s “Flavor of the Week”: The artist’s enticing (and not so enticing) tweaks to one of summer’s enduring pleasures” by Françoise Muhly on 8/5/24:
(#1) Along with plain Vanilla, there are strangely modified real flavors, in it for the alliteration (Microchip Mint, First Avenue Fudge); actual food names not especially attractive in an ice cream (Lard Swirl, Hardtack, the potato variety Yukon Gold); and lots of totally non-food allusive names (Placebo, Bitcoin, Tumbleweed, Amnesia, Tsunami, and the noble gas Xenon)
For the cover of the August 12, 2024, issue, the cartoonist Roz Chast — who has delighted readers since 1978 with her opinionated and peculiar takes on life’s indignities — gives ice-cream makers some suggestions for new flavors. “There are a lot of things I like about ice-cream stores aside from the ice cream itself,” Chast said. “I like looking at the different colors and patterns of all the bins. I like comparing cones: wafer flat-bottom or pointy classic? And the names of the flavors: the more preposterous and baroque, the better.”
(There’s a Page on this blog with links to my postings about Roz Chast and her work)
Preposterous and baroque naming schemes run riot in several domains: famously, for colors, especially of paints and of fabrics; and then widely in the word of ice cream flavors, where many frozen-confection firms exult in their naming practices. I’ll comment on just three US companies, with three different approaches: Häagen-Dazs, Baskin-Robbins, and Ben & Jerry’s.
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Posted in Alliteration, Allusion, Art, Color, Language and food, Naming, Portmanteaus, Puns, Quotation, Rhyme, Taste, Trade names | 3 Comments »
June 11, 2024
That would be old original Z-Man, who is now (according to today’s Zippy the Pinhead strip) your flight-empowered guide into the pop-cultural past:
(#1) The first of (at least) three incarnations of Z-Man since he entered the Zippyverse in 2005
As a Z-person, I am especially attentive to words with Z in them (like whizz), especially names (like Buzz and Graz), especially names beginning with Z (like Zelda, Zorn, and Zorro). So Zippy and his superhero Z-Man characters catch my eye and get my attention, independently of the absurdist attractions of the strip (and, in the case of #1, without regard for my appreciation of the Marx Brothers, Ida Lupino, and Daffy Duck).
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Posted in Cartoon conventions, Color, Linguistics in the comics, Names, Spelling | Leave a Comment »
June 8, 2024
Briefly noted. Passed on by Evan Randall Smith on 6/6 on Facebook, this Liz Climo celebration of Pride month, featuring her congenial cartoon animals:
(#1) The color sequence — white, pink, light blue; brown, black; red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple — reproduces the bands of the Progress Pride flag
(There’s a Page on this blog on my postings about Climo’s work.)
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Posted in Color, Flags, Gender and sexuality, Linguistics in the comics, Rainbow | Leave a Comment »
June 1, 2024
🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit, busting out all over (as these prolific creatures are prone to do) for June
A follow-up to yesterday’s posting “Queens Pride”, about this digital composition:
(#1) Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, in the 7 ROY G. BIV, or Newtonian rainbow, colors, rather than the 6 Pride Flag colors — so the composition was probably not intended to celebrate the wonderful LGBTQ+ness of June; but let’s just disregard that
Well, QEII #7 is in purple, not violet. Then there’s #6, which should be indigo (a famously elusive color) but strays far from Newton’s rainbow band of that name, so provoking a Facebook exchange between Joel B. Levin (JBL) and me (AZ):
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Posted in Clothing, Color, Gender and sexuality, Rainbow | 7 Comments »
May 31, 2024
To mark the eve of Pride Month, this digital composition passed on by Steven Levine on Facebook today:
Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, in the 7 ROY G. BIV, or Newtonian rainbow, colors, rather than the 6 Pride Flag colors — so the composition was probably not intended to celebrate the wonderful LGBTQ+ness of June; but let’s just disregard that
Now, the composition supplies a number of tokens of the Queen Elizabeth II type, so I had to consider whether my title for this posting would be Queen’s Pride (one QEII type) or Queens’ Pride (many QEII tokens). This is a familiar sort of problem, cropping up annually when Mother’s / Mothers’ Day and Father’s / Fathers’ Day come around, and I’ve chosen the same solution for my title that I chose for those two commercial holidays: axe the damn apostrophe. It’s Queens Pride.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Art, Color, Homosexuality, Language play, Memes, Modification, Puns, Rainbow, Spelling | Leave a Comment »
April 1, 2024
🐇 🐇 🐇 three rabbits to inaugurate the new month, 🃏 🃏 🃏 three jokers for April Fool’s Day, and 🌼 🌼 🌼 three jaunes d’Avril. yellow flowers of April, all this as we turn on a dime from yesterday’s folk-custom bunnies of Easter to today’s monthly rabbits; for this intensely leporine occasion, a Maria Scrivan hare-pun cartoon:
(#1) (phonologically perfect) pun hare on model hair, taking advantage of I love what you’ve done with your hair as an common exemplar of the stock expression (I) love what you’ve done with X; a cartoon posted on Facebook by Probal Dasgupta, who reported, “Even I groaned at this one”
Things to talk about here: my use of turn on a dime just above; Easter + April Fool’s; the yellow flowers of April (which will bring us to Jane Avril — Fr. Avril ‘April’); and the stock expression (I) love what you’ve done with X.
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Posted in Art, Color, Constructions, Dancers, Formulaic language, French, Holidays, Language and animals, Language and plants, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Pragmatics, Puns, Signs and symbols, Speech acts, Stock expressions, Style and register, Syntax | 1 Comment »
March 17, 2024
(Part of this posting will dive right into gay porn for the day, with street-talk musings on man-on-man sex that’s totally off-limits for kids and the sexually modest; I’ll hold this part off until the end, so if you need to you can bail out then)
☘️ ☘️ ☘️ It’s St. Patrick’s Day, and in my e-mail: two Bob Eckstein cartoons for the day (on turning and wearing green for the day); and a Falcon Studios sale on gay porn, made holiday-appropriate by the mere addition of a shamrock, but which opens the topic of gay porn with actual St. Patrick’s day themes.
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Posted in Clothing, Color, Costumes, Facial expressions, Flags, Gay porn, Hats, Holidays, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language and plants, Language and religion, Language and the body, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Point of view, Signs and symbols | 2 Comments »
December 3, 2023
A sweet and cheering gift from my old friend Kathryn Burlingham in the mail yesterday: two waxed amaryllis bulbs from Holland Bulb Farms in Milwaukee WI, plants that should bloom in the later winter here, promising spring and Easter.
(#1) The solid-white variety Grateful Heart; you can see the wax coating on the bulb and the attached metal ring on which the plant sits
(#2) The variety Gingerbread, white with red stripes
Waxed amaryllises are a new thing for me, but apparently they’ve been around for some time (an invention of Dutch bulb growers, though I haven’t found any sources about the history of wax coating for flower bulbs).
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Posted in Color, Holidays, Language and plants, My life, Names | 2 Comments »
October 18, 2023
Male underwear models minimally covered by garments designed for the sweaty dance floor of a raunchy fantasy gay club, so certainly not to everyone’s taste. And then (in somewhat distant homage to Barbie the movie), the garments in a full range of shades of butch-faggy pink: huge jutting packages wrapped in deep pink (the Brutus jockstrap); muscular buttocks, yearning for a depth pronging, framed by dark pink camo (the Combat jockstrap); and much more.
All this in the 10/17 e-mail ad from Daily Jocks, displaying some of its pink homowear for, surprise, Halloween. This year, the gaybros are tricking in pink.
The full ad, broken into three sections for this posting (label the whole thing as image #1):
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Posted in Color, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Homosexuality, Masculinity, Underwear | 1 Comment »
August 13, 2023
From Josh Brown on Facebook yesterday, passing on an ad he’d gotten:
(#1) [JB:] Now THIS is targeted-Facebook-algorithm-marketing that I can get behind. My kingdom for a caftan!
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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Clothing, Color, Fashion, Homosexuality, Language in advertising, Lexical semantics, Movies and tv, Rainbow clothing | 2 Comments »
