Archive for the ‘Holidays’ Category

Hats off to the vampires!

January 19, 2025

For yesterday, 1/18, in Bizarro, the 6th and I suppose last Waynoratu Nosferamanteau:


The male nosferatu (holding a wineglass of what is presumably blood, and chatting with his young female companion at some sort of vampiric meet-and-greet) seems to be wearing a Canadian toque (= tuque), with pom-pom, to warm his head during the cold dark nights in his coffin (yes, it’s very silly) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)

The nosferamanteau is Nosferatoque = Nosferatu + toque. As for the hat, from NOAD:

noun toque: [a] a woman’s small hat, typically having a narrow, closely turned-up brim. [b] historical a small cap or bonnet having a narrow brim or no brim. [c] Canadian a close-fitting knitted hat, often with a tassel or pom-pom on the crown. [variant of tuque] [d] a tall white hat with a full pouched crown, worn by chefs.

(The heart tattoo with A B O in it, for the blood types A B AB and O, is a nice touch.)

(more…)

That’s a lotta axolotl

January 5, 2025

🎁 🎁 🎁 three presents for 1/5, the 12th day of Christmas, Epiphany Eve (I am Melchior, King of Persia, an old graybeard bearing gold), as I struggle with the afflictions of my body (plus some extras, like ten days of near-deafness) and with a long litany of Things Gone Wrong, including the roof rats that have been eating away a wooden door on my patio (it’s winter, and they got cold and hungry, and seem to have imagined that things would be better inside my storage closet) and a prescription drug service whose erratic and incomprehensibly shifting software has consumed significant chunks of four of my days as I tried to get some prescriptions refilled on-line for mail delivery — I tell you this to explain that my absence from posting has been neither thoughtless indolence (stretched out on a plushy sofa while snacking on chocolate truffles) nor yet another near-death episode (with ambulances, emergency rooms, and surgeries), but just the confluence of a high level of everyday medical awfulness and the howling devils of daily life (les choses sont contre nous, et les bêtes aussi)

So let’s talk about axolotls. This from an elfshelfism that came my way back in December on Facebook, which I failed to save, but then it turns out to have surfaced in a posting on Threads on 12/13 — these things get passed around from hand to hand, like jokes and nursery rhymes — by charlesrathmann, who wrote

Elf on a shelf. eh? I give you:

(#1)

(more…)

Alaskan prime

January 1, 2025

🐇 🐇 🐇 three rabbits to inaugurate the month January and the year 2025

From Chris Waigl on Facebook yesterday. One fact that you need to know about CW is that she lives in Fairbanks AK (further facts, about CW and about Alaska, will become relevant as we go on):

Soft-spoken barista in a medium-loud café, as heard by me: … and would you like salmon on top of your cappuccino?

The barista said cinnamon, CW heard salmon. Phonologically similar, but from two different conceptual worlds. Why would CW even have entertained the possibility that the barista was offering salmon?

(more…)

From my e-mail: two male nudes

December 31, 2024

🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for ultimate December; it’s New Year’s Eve, so tomorrow’s rabbits will accompany the enfant terrible 2025, while my end-of-the-year e-mail brings me two male nudes, of very different resonances, to ride the wild tigers of 2024 off

First, on the soc-motss private group on Facebook on 12/26, for Hanukkah, a piece of digital art by Vadim Temkin that’s a playful sexual tease, like the Warwick Rowers calendar photos. Then, a male nude sculpture, in the Western tradition of heroic statuary, exhibited very publicly (in a prominent location on a college campus).

(more…)

Melchior

December 30, 2024

The 12 days of Christmas click by as we advance to Twelfth Night — Epiphany Eve — and then on 1/6 to Epiphany itself, the day of the Three Magi, or Three Kings, conventionally each the king of a distant land, each with a characteristic appearance, each with a name, and each with his gift for the Christ Child in Bethlehem. In one tradition, Melchior (alongside Caspar / Kaspar and Balthazar) is King of Persia, the oldest of the kings (a graybeard), and the giver of gold (rather than frankincense or myrrh).

The thing is, I am Arnold Melchior Zwicky, son of Arnold Melchior Zwicky and grandson of Melchior Arnold Zwicky, the last of whom, oh yes, had brothers named Kaspar and Balthazar. I have the name, the age and the gray beard, but lack the kingdom and the gold. Yet for a brief period in January each year, I am Melchior as well as Arnold, I am resplendent, I am a king.

For this period, I rise above the fact that in my country all three parts of my name are seen as strange and foreign, none more than Melchior (for the rest of the year, when I have to clarify my middle initial, I say “M as in Michael”, leading many people to think that my middle name is in fact Michael, so they could call me Mike). Only this year did it occur to me that I should add Michael / Mike to my alter ego’s name Alexander / Alex Adams: ALEXANDER MICHAEL ADAMS, the weighty A. M. Adams, the amiable Alex “Mike” Adams, hookup name Alex, just Alex.

Now, two things. First , an alternative view of the royal Melchior, from a 2022 posting in which he’s depicted as, wow, not only young and virile but also as the (mythic) king of France. And then another 2022 posting that starts out being about okapis and somehow ends up with “M as in musk ox” for my middle initial (plus “O as in okapi” for the O of ARNOLD).

Meanwhile, Epiphany is coming and my royal robes need fluffing.

(more…)

On antepenultimate December

December 29, 2024

👴 👴 👴 three old men for antepenultimate December (3 days left), also the 5th of the 12 days of Christmas (five golden rings!) and the 5th of the 8 days of Hanukkah (so there’s still plenty of oil)

These have been difficult days — the latest rainstorm came in on a wave of low air pressure, felling me with joint pain and stopping up my ears so that I can barely hear (and I probably won’t be able to get help until sometime in the new year) — so I’m going to just randomly take stuff to post about and run with it, helter skelter.

First up: three seasonal presents from Ann Burlingham, in Pittsburgh, delivered to me yesterday by my grandchild Opal Armstrong Zwicky, who’s in town on break before their last semester at the University of Pittsburgh. In size, from the smallest to the largest:

(more…)

Aged anchovy salt

December 27, 2024

🎁 Boxing Day 🎁 — also St. Stephen, with his feets uneven — coming a day late, because life has been very difficult for me, and postings have piled up so high I’m not sure I can ever get to them, so I’ve picked something I know I can get done, so that this dark, rainy, and excruciatingly painful low-air-pressure day will not be a total loss

I bring you an e-mail message from Victor Steinbok on 12/25, about this ad for Spice Tribe (website here), a San Francisco-based on-line spice store dedicated to mindful cooking:


(#1) VS wrote: Facebook has offered another example of what I used to refer to as parenthetical ambiguity. Is it [aged anchovy] [salt] or [aged] [anchovy salt]. From a culinary perspective, the latter makes no sense (aging salt doesn’t change it). But that doesn’t mean there’s no built-in ambiguity.

(more…)

The magical holiday unicorn

December 25, 2024

… with a message of love:

(digital art by Dean Allemang; message from a Chinese fortune cookie, photo by Ned Deily)

Under the aegis of the magical unicorn and the rainbows of love, we exult in sappy holiday sentimentality, but with eyes wide open:

So if the unicorn comes along,
Gonna give you some love and affection,
I’d say get it while you can, honey,
Get it while you can

 

Flowers! Music!

December 25, 2024

🎄🕯 Christmukkah Day, with flowers and music

Flowers and music in a digital greeting card; winter flowers out my window; and then the gift of more music, jazz Beethoven.

(more…)

Three memic cartoons

December 24, 2024

🎄- 1: 12/24, Christmas Eve, and a cold rain’s a-fallin’. But along comes the New Yorker‘s 12/23/24 issue, the annual Cartoons and Puzzles issue, with a section on “cartoons about fine, good, and excellent dining to whet your appetite”, plus a full budget of cartoons sprinkled throughout the issue.

From all of which I’ve selected three memic cartoons:

–from the dining section, a comic turn on one of the great parody magnets of art

— then a Psychiatrist cartoon especially for the Christmas season

— and a Desert Island cartoon, which is at least about gift-giving

(more…)