The title of a Sara Lautman cartoon in the New Yorker issue of 10/27/23:
(#1) The instrument emerges from the primordial ooze, climbs onto land, and ascends, eventually to stand upright at the pinnacle of evolution
Two things here: the musical instrument; and the cartoonist.
Following on yesterday’s posting “A Neanderthal breakthrough”, on a Rhymes With Orange cartoon about the cavewoman who invented the definite article (plus Caveman cartoons from Bizarro and Scott Hilburn), I recalled a Gary Larson Far Side cartoon that I’d been saving since 2021, a cartoon in which Cro-Magnons are viewed as step up from Neanderthals:
(#1) Dining at the Restaurant La Cave, back in the days when Neanderthals shared Europe with the upstart Cro-Magnons
Larson produced a huge number of Neanderthal cartoons in the 15 years of The Far Side, 6 more of which I’ll reproduce below. They’re all set in Caveman locales, with characters that are Cavemen in appearance and dress but otherwise are engaged in social relationships and cultural practices from late 20th-century America — in #1, the two men are vying for the attentions of a woman, the old-fashioned Neanderthal (rubbing sticks together to make fire) pitted against the slick new Cro-Magnon (using a cigarette lighter).
#1 is complex in its handling of the dual nature of its characters, who are simultaneously cavepeople and modern Americans. The larger setting is in a cave (with a cave painting of a deer on the wall), but, more specifically, two of the characters are sitting at a table at a little restaurant while the third brandishes that cigarette lighter.
An accidental find in preparing yesterday’s posting on Ray Troll’s 2011 political cartoon “Octopi Wall Street”: a whole vein of Ray Troll fish art, most of it silly or raunchy, full of bad puns and surprising references to fish (“The Da Vinci Cod”, featuring the Mona Lisa with a fish). Four examples from a great many…
In the 9/21 issue of the New Yorker, this Lila Ash cartoon “Evolution of Man”:
(#1) New Yorker description of the cartoon: The evolution of man from a fish to a human throwing their phone in the water, and swimming in to retrieve it.
Yet another variation on the Ascent of Man theme; there have been so many of these on this blog that there’s a Page cataloguing them, here.
The Wayno/Piraro Bizarro from yesterday, on running evolutionary errands:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)
Venture Fish crawls out onto land, no doubt to return after foraging there, then will venture onto land again, and in time its descendants will have become amphibians, and then, well, you know the story.
But why does Venture Fish go on land? It insists on doing this for some reason — the primary reason for the act — that is inscrutable to its aquatic companion, but Home Fish asks that Venture Fish meanwhile run an errand: fetch some things on the trip, thus supplying an additional, secondary reason for the act. Home Fish uses the format BACKGROUND CONDITION + REQUEST:
BACKGROUND CONDITION: If you’re going out / Since you’re already up / As long as you’re up / While you’re up / …
+ REQUEST: (could you / would you / why don’t you / please /…) VP-BSE
— made famous in the slogan for an early 1960s ad campaign:
as long as you’re up get me a Grant’s
Liana Finck in the January 6th New Yorker, with a seasonal evolution cartoon:
(#1) Going back: devolution + home for the holidays
Two sharp cartoons on human evolution, one from the viewpoint of gender (by Eduardo Saiz Alonso, apparently from several years ago), one from the viewpoint of climate change (by Kevin Kallaugher (KAL) in yesterday’s Economist):
Two bits of recent pumpkin news: the pumpkin as an artistic platform; and the evolutionary history of pumpkins.
It starts with pillowcases and pillowslips, moves to pillow-beres or pillow-biers, and from there to pillow bears, and also pillow-biters — the scourge of Australia, a continent famously “swarming with raving shirt-lifters and pillow-biters”. And from there to gay pillowcases and throw pillows. And on to facial expressions during, ahem, receptive anal intercourse. Get into bed, and before you know it, you’re getting fucked, ecstatically. The scene evolves:
(#1) Gay Evolution Pillow Case (designed by Joe Monica) from Cafe Press: the evolution of mincing (color me purple, honey)
(There will be seriously racy pictures of mansex. But even without them, after the first part, this posting is not for kids or the sexually modest.)
An adventure in plants, their appearance, and their taxonomic status.
It starts with a recent visit to the Gamble Garden in Palo Alto, where I encountered this pretty small shrub, in bloom, labeled Mahonia ‘Sweet Caress’ (photo from the net):
(#1)
At first glance, not at all like the mahonia shrub my father grew in our garden when I was a teenager: this plant has bamboo-like foliage, but the mahonia in our Wyomissing Hills PA garden had leaves that looked like holly leaves, and my dad referred to it as an Oregon grape holly: grape for the blue berries on the plant during the winter, holly for the prickly Ilex-like leaves, and Oregon for its origin in the shady forests of the Pacific Northwest.
Now it turns out that the holly-leaved mahonia of my youth and the bamboo-leaved mahonia in Gamble Garden are shade-loving evergreen plants with similar yellow flowers and blue berries, and are in fact both in the genus Mahonia, very closely related to barberries (in the genus Berberis). Both Mahonia and Berberis are in the barberry family (Berberidaceae) — with nothing much taxonomically to do with either hollies (in their own plant family, Aquifoliaceae) or bamboos (in the grass family, Poaceae).
