Archive for the ‘Geography’ Category

A morning in the home counties

November 29, 2018

That morning was November 11th, when the morning name was home counties.

A first stab, from Wikipedia:


(#1) The former administrative counties (1889—1965) surrounding London (names of those bordering London in boldface): 1. Buckinghamshire 2. Hertfordshire 3. Essex 4. Berkshire 5. Middlesex (now entirely absorbed within London) 6. Surrey 7. Kent 8. Sussex.

The home counties are the counties of England that surround London (although several of them do not border it). The counties generally included in the list are Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Kent, Surrey, and Sussex. Other counties more distant from London — such as Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Hampshire and Oxfordshire — are also sometimes regarded as home counties due to their proximity to London and their connection to the London regional economy.

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Posted in Geography, Morning names | 1 Comment »

Pride Time #5: on Barceloneta beach

March 30, 2018

(From June 2017. Underwear men, Catalonia, gay life, Barcelona beaches, art and architecture, and, eventually, food. First, underwear with my captions.)

The saints of Catalunya
Pretty in purple and pink

(#1)

Sant Jordi the savory in heat
Stretched out on rocks
Homage to Barceloneta
Between sail and fish

(#2)

Sant Joan the sweet
Celebrant of gay pride
Summer solstice confection
Of fruit and nuts

It’s all about Barcelona, the beach, and swim briefs.

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Posted in Art, Captions, Clothing, Gender and sexuality, Geography, Holidays, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language in advertising, Languages, Underwear | Leave a Comment »

Who views what

December 3, 2017

About the readership of this blog, examined through the very imperfect lens of WordPress statistics. Back in May 2016 AZBlog had accumulated 5 million spam comments (since late December 2008), and WP said I was getting about 1000 views a day. Then reported spam comments dropped to about 100,000 a year and reported views to 750-800 a day, leading me to wonder if I was doing something wrong, but friends convinced me that WP’s monitoring was simply screwed up.

And then, about two months ago, the views per day went back up to 1000-1200, reliably, so I stopped fretting. (Spam comments stayed down at the ca. 100,000/yr level, which I view as a blessing.)

More interesting is which postings get the most hits, and from which countries. Some of this is easily explicable — there’s a big market for sex — but some is bizarre; Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky tells me it’s probably bots ruling the netverse, and not much to do with me specifically.

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Posted in Geography, This blogging life | 1 Comment »

Rat and Pig in Santa Rosa

October 20, 2017

Yesterday’s Pearls Before Swine:

(#1) 10/19/17

My comment on Facebook: “A double doleful “Awww”. One for panel 3, one for panel 4.” Pig cries out for help in the third panel, Rat sympathetically stands with his friend in the fourth.

Then discussion took us to Lucy and Charlie Brown in Peanuts (and incidentally to Calvin and Hobbes in their eponymous strip), and so to Peanuts artist Charles Schulz, and so to Santa Rosa CA, where Schulz lived and worked from 1969 until his death in 2000, and so to the geographical and cultural regions of northern California (the North Coast / Redwood Empire, the Wine Country, and the North (San Francisco) Bay), in all of which Santa Rosa is by far the biggest town.

Santa Rosa is in the news because of the devastation there in the current spate of wildfires in northern California. The Charles Schulz Museum there was spared, but the family house (with all of its memorabilia) was completely incinerated. The cartoon in #1 is pretty clearly Pearls artist Stephan Pastis’s homage to Schulz in these terrible times.

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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Context, Geography, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Pragmatics, Sociocultural conventions | Leave a Comment »

King Copper

June 22, 2015

Today’s Zippy, skipping well ahead in the saga of Lazlo (the actor who plays Zippy) and, now, Connie (the actor who plays Zerbina), who are fleeing on the road:

(#1)

They are in Copper Harbor MI, in the U.P. (the Upper Peninsula). Complicated geography.

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Posted in Geography, Linguistics in the comics, Motels | Leave a Comment »