Awaiting the delivery of 4 Turkish hand towels (for use in bathroom and bedroom), to supplement my old 15 x 27″ stock, in white and yellow, as they gradually fray and shred and get retired as rags or trash. My helper Isaac asked how old they were, and was astounded to be told that Jacques and I bought them 40 years ago. The new ones:
Slightly larger (16 x 28″), in a color labeled silver grey
Things I probably should have known, but didn’t, and have just recently discovered: one linguistic (on a pronunciation in BrE), one botanical (on the identity of a plant growing on the street a block from my house).
The second installment on recent events in my life (yesterday’s posting “The passing domestic scene: biopsies”, covering 10/2 to the present, was the first).
Today’s story begins on the morning of 10/7. I was intently focused on a cute posting about a Bizarro cartoon — “The flannel frontier”, finally posted on 10/9 — when I became peripherally conscious of the sound of running water. Really loud running water. Had I left a faucet running?
I looked up from my keyboard, to witness waterfalls streaming from the ceiling in four places, drenching everything below them, pooling on the carpeting in the living room and surging in a wave into the little hallway to the bathroom.
In today’s Bizarro cartoon, a hybrid portmanteau, a portmanteau name for one kind of hybrid referent, a referent with an assortment of features drawn from the referents of the contributing expressions; think of triceradoodle (referring to a hybrid of a triceratops and a poodle cross) = triceratops + doodle ‘a poodle cross’ (to be illustrated below):
(#1) Venus flytrap + bear trap = Venus bear trap: the appearance of a giant Venus flytrap leaf, with the bait of a foothold bear trap (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)
To come: details about the two contributing referents, the Venus flytrap and the (foothold) bear trap; then a factor that makes this portmanteau especially rich and satisfying, in contrast to the less complex (but far more preposterous) triceradoodle.
From Steven Levine on 8/19, this image from a Facebook group on thrift store finds, about a rectangle of needlepoint (probably intended to be a wall hanging) depicting penguins marching from left to right, through a rainbow, each emerging from the other side with its body, inside and out, in one of the colors of the gay pride flag; the rainbow makes them gay:
(#1) Steven of course thought of me, but appreciated that this would not be the time to be giving me penguiniana, so contented himself with letting me enjoy the strange spectacle
I’d never seen anything quite like it. Marching penguins, yes, of course. Penguins in the colors of the gay pride flag, of course. I’ve posted both. But the preposterous fantasy of penguins getting gay-transmuted by passing through a rainbow, absolutely not. And then to realize it not in drawing, painting, or trick photography, but in the unpretentious craft medium of needlepoint, where we expect earnest images (stylized birds) and slogans (BLESS THIS HOME), well, that’s wonderfully goofy.
(Towards the end, some coarse sexual slang referring to fellatio, which some readers will want to avoid)
After years of service on my bed, the delightful images quilt was sent off on Saturday for dry-cleaning and some stitching repair, and I got to contemplate the other three t-shirt quilts, which had been quietly stored away on a closet shelf that was inaccessible to me, but had been brought down to my level as part of the great project of dispossession. I decided that all four (made by friends as a gift to me) would have to move with me — a triumph of sentiment over practicality — and picked the queer quilt, the really in-your-face one, as its replacement on my bed.
Now, more of the story, with pictures.
An object unearthed in my household investigations for dispossession: a woven wool rectangle, two-sided, showing a stylized blooming plant, and relatively small (10×19″, not counting its fringes) —
(#1) What I think of as the recto side
Two items of memorabilia unearthed in the back of a drawer in one of the three desks I am, very slowly and painfully, clearing out and consolidating into one small one. Behind each is a touching bit of personal history and a larger lesson from sociocultural history (mostly from the early 20th-century United States, but also from Switzerland). The neutral descriptions of these two objects, devoid of both historical context and personal and sociocultural meanings:
the watch: a men’s pocket watch
the microscope: a 20X pocket microscope
A joint photo of these memorabilia:
(#1) The watch and the microscope
Historical context: the watch is from 1944 or 1945, in any case from my grandfather Melchior Arnold Zwicky’s (1879-1965) retirement from the Textile Machine Works in Wyomissing PA, and it came to me in his 1965 will; the microscope came to me by mail order from the Edmund Scientific Company (in Barrington NJ) in about 1950.
Today’s Rhymes With Orange strip (by Hilary B. Price) turns on reanalysis + analogical coining, yielding a kind of pun that looks like a deliberate eggcorn — embodied in that rare and elusive creature, the pencilguin, cousin to the penguin, but very much resembling a pencil, specifically a Dixon Ticonderoga (maybe even with the HB medium soft (#2) lead American children tend to favor):
(#1) The pen of penguin is probably Welsh pen ‘head’ (the bodypart), but suppose we (mis)take it to be English pen ‘instrument for writing or drawing with ink’, a reanalysis encouraged by penguins having black bodies as dark as ink; then we can venture to create the analogical name pencilguin, for a penguin-like creature having a pencil-like body rather than a pen-like one
