I am reminded by Amanda Walker that today is DEC-20 Day — it’s the date, kids — causing me to recall times working at research labs that used DEC-20s as their shared workhorse machines. This DEC-20 brought me two cartoons, the first a Zippy glancingly related to Christmas, the second a Bizarro directly about Christmas in popular culture.
Archive for the ‘Diners’ Category
Two DEC-20 cartoons
December 20, 2025frill
June 20, 2024An old One Big Happy cartoon that’s been sitting on my desktop for some time: casual speech collides with dialectal variation to confound Ruthie’s grandfather (usually it’s Ruthie who misunderstands, but not this time):
(#1) What Ruthie has that her grandfather lacks is inside knowledge: experience with the speaker and how she talks
Ok, first the linguistics, then the frills. On the principle that a spoonful of linguistics helps the ruffles, sharks, and lizards go down.
More Kix on Route 66
May 21, 2024Passed along by two friends on Facebook recently, this Manchild Manor cartoon, deploying Kix breakfast cereal in a pun on the title (of the theme song for a tv show) “Get Your Kicks on Route 66”:
(#1) If you don’t know the song, this cartoon is incomprehensible
(I don’t know where or when this cartoon first appeared, and I couldn’t find it on the (sizable) Instagram page for the strip; I’ve appealed to the cartoonist, but in my experience, most artists view such queries as just a nuisance drag on their time, so they’re not inclined to reply. If he gets back to me, I’ll add his information to this posting.)
[Added on 5/22. Never assume. The cartoonist — Tim Thavirat, now living in San Diego CA after some time in Austin TX — has now replied, and even thanked me for sharing his work on my blog. This cartoon is from 10/25/18, early in the days of his cartoon page — a silly pun that tickled his fancy.]
Sandwich and pie at the Zipperverse Diner
January 12, 2024(The very last section of this posting, on the name Monty Crisco, gets right down to man-on-man sex in street language, so is out of bounds for kids and the sexually modest; the rest of the posting is quirky but not indecent)
The 1/4 Zippy the Pinhead strip takes us back to Zippy’s imagined perverse version of the (now-defunct) Miss Albany Diner in Albany NY — call it the Zipperverse Diner — and its blackboard menu above the counter:
(#1) The messages on the board are about the day’s offerings, but neither sandwiches nor pies are mentioned; meanwhile, Monte Cristo sandwiches are a not-uncommon diner offering, but Zippy maintains, perversely, that the sandwich name is correctly spelled Monty Crisco (and you don’t want to think about the ingredients or how you eat the thing); and Nesselrode pie is a bit of elegance far from any ordinary diner’s pie offerings, but Zippy supposes, perversely, that it’s on the board at the comic-strip diner, with a typo in it
Three things here: about the (actual) diner and its appearance in an earlier Zippy strip, with the same drawing but different text in Zippy’s speech balloons; about (actual) Monte Cristo sandwiches and Nesselrode pie; and about the name Monty Crisco.
Charlie’s Dog House Diner
July 29, 2023From the great book of diners of fanciful design (compare, more generally: restaurants of fanciful design and motels of fanciful design), from Tim Evanson: Charlie’s Dog House Diner, 2102 Brookpark Rd, Cleveland OH:
(#1) The facade, representing a doghouse, with dogs; but this is just one face of the diner, which is otherwise of more ordinary form
Now: on the compound noun dog house; on Charlie’s Dog House Diner; on what is no doubt the most famous dog house in pop culture, Snoopy’s from the Peanuts comic strip; and on diners that have taken dog house entirely for its name value, without any attempt to mimic or represent a dog house — taking the Dog House Diner in Encinitas CA as one exemplar of these. Hot dogs! Getcher hot dogs here!
Auguries in a diner
June 5, 2023Another brief posting. And yes, I am not dead yet, and my second breakfast — sriracha-spicy soy-salty Singapore-style rice noodles (which has shrimps and chunks of ham in it) with sliced mushrooms and a ton of chopped celery (wielding my excellent new kitchen angle knife!) in chicken broth — was yummy, and will make at least one more meal (several, if I decide to turn it into mostly-garbanzo soup, a sort of deranged Chinese posole).
Today’s Zippy strip finds our Pinhead musing poetically, à la Blake, on the symbolic potential of the diner:
It’s the initial quatrain of Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence”, as seen from a vinyl-covered counter stool
The original:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
Zippy theorizes, syncretically, on the comic strips
January 31, 2023🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for Ultimate January, as we leave the darkest period of the year in my hemisphere
The 7/24/22 Zippy strip:
(#1)
Zippy theorizes that comic-strip characters and their stories are an overlay of characters, personalities, settings, and tales from elsewhere in popular culture — in particular, from television shows. (Just to get some grip on these things in the real world, rather than ZippyWorld: Billy in The Family Circus has never marinated a duck breast.)
(Note: this is a Zippy strip, always liable to veer into surrealism and the injection of Zippreoccupations into things, so that not all the details are going to hang together coherently.)
Zippy offers these theories to Griffy from inside a sort of monument to pop-cultural syncretism, Davies’ Chuck Wagon Diner in Lakewood CO: something that was created as a reproduction of East Coast diner culture, but got crossed with the symbols of mythical cowboy culture, in the shape of a gigantic neon cowboy and a life-sized fiberglass horse. Located not in the dusty high plains of cowboy country, but on a commercial strip in a thoroughly built-up suburb of Denver. (I grant that you can at least see the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains from there.)
What I tell you three times is true
July 16, 2022Today’s Zippy strip takes us to triple Dinerland in Rockford MI (as it was before it closed in 2011), in a celebration of the rule of three — a narrative principle that favors trios of events or characters in all sorts of contexts:
(#1) The Three Musketeers (in the Dumas novel and the movies), the Three Little Pigs (vs. the Big Bad Wolf in the fable), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (the 1966 epic spaghetti Western), and the Three Stooges (the vaudeville and slapstick comedy team best known for their 190 short films)
The rule of three in a little while, but first, the diners of Rockford MI (a town of a few thousand people about 10 miles north of Grand Rapids).
Vincent Price and his sushi at the Boulevard
February 17, 2022Today’s Zippy strip has Griffy and Zippy inside the Boulevard Diner in Worcester MA while snow falls outside:
(#1) The two men exchange opinions about their two favorite things, which are definitely not raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens: Griffy’s (diners and snow) are more conventional, and are linked to their context; while Zippy’s (Vincent Price and sushi) are decidedly eccentric, and have no connection to the context or to each other
And now the time has come to speak of many things.
Il Castello del Formaggio
June 22, 2021The 6/21 Zippy strip takes us to Kenosha WI, on the highway between Chicago and Milwaukee, along the shore of Lake Michigan — to the location of Mars Cheese Castle, which is why Zippy is there:
(#1) Nothing directly to do with the two principal foci of this blog — language and linguistics, gender and sexuality — but plenty on food, pop culture (along the roadside), and absurdist comedy
As for my interests, Kenosha does have the headquarters of Jockey International — hail to men’s underwear! — and a local woolly mammoth skeleton in its museum — my totem animal! — and, best of all in mid-America’s Land of Cheese, an annual fall Cheese-A-Palooza festival (devoted to the grilled cheese sandwich and to mac and cheese). But best of all is Mars Cheese Castle.