Archive for the ‘Holidays’ Category
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:
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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Language and animals, Language and food, Language and plants, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Music, My life, Signs and symbols, Toys | Leave a Comment »
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.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Compounds, Constituency, Holidays, Language and food, Parsing, Semantics of compounds, Taste | 8 Comments »
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
Posted in Art, Holidays, Music | 3 Comments »
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.
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Posted in Art, Holidays, Language and plants, Music, My life, Race and ethnicity, Seasons, Signs and symbols | 3 Comments »
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
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Posted in Art, Comic conventions, Holidays, Linguistics in the comics, Parody | Leave a Comment »
December 23, 2024
🎄- 2: 12/23, so it’s Festivus; the last day of Saturnalia; and now, according to a front page story in today’s New York Times (“In Some Parts, It’s Christmas Adam Before Eve: Churches Are Adding Day to the Holiday, With a Side of Ribs”), it’s Christmas Adam, the day before Christmas Eve (it’s a joke, son)
Meanwhile, today’s found mantra is Zesty Pickle — repeat as needed until you reach the desired state of tangy pungency. It came to me in a commercial for Chick-Fil-A’s classic chicken sandwich:
Crispy chicken, zesty pickle, it’s tough to top the original
But then the piquant phallicity of zesty pickles pushed me onto another path, into the tale of a fickle fly:
zesty pickle
frisky pepper
pesky stuck zipper!
… no plucky pickles past this point
(#1) The pickle-pepper tale
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Posted in Holidays, Language and food, Language and plants, Language in advertising, Mantras, Music, Phallicity | 3 Comments »
December 18, 2024
First came the (pickled) herring, the tasty bounty of chilly ocean waters, also the delight of Scandinavia. Then came the (boneless) bananas, the fragrant fruit of tropical plantations, also the pride of Ecuador. When they met, there was the inevitable slide into fishy fruit, into a strange amalgam of sweet and savory; a quickie, and ill-advised, union of south and north, hot climes and cold climes, New World and Old:
(#1) From a 1963 German cookbook: bananas wrapped in pickled herring (from the Historic Photographs site on Facebook, passed along on FB on 12/15 by Michael Palmer, under the slogan: Everything’s better with pickled herring on it!)
The pimento and parsley garnishes make bananas in pickled herring a red and green Christmas surprise.Well, I’d certainly be surprised. On the other hand, we once had a cat that adored herring, even pickled in wine sauce, and savaged bananas ravenously (as well as loaves of bread and corn on the cob), so it would have found #1 to be the very apotheosis of fine feline dining (with the useless pimento and parsley batted off onto the floor, of course).
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Posted in Holidays, Language and animals, Language and food | 2 Comments »
December 2, 2024
🎄 🎄 when I began this posting, it was penultimate November, and this year also Black Friday, when the anticipation of Christmas becomes a constant, unremitting dinging, accompanied by exhortations to SHOP NOW; I held to my long-standing practice of not leaving the house on Black Friday for any purpose other than retrieving my mail from the mailboxes in the condo parking lot
Meanwhile:
(#1)
A tale of the jim-jams, the most acute form of the jams (joint and muscle afflictions), a story that began on Friday 11/22 with the jams, reached utter jim-jam misery on Monday 11/25, and then slowly moderated since then; but also a tale of plans gone utterly awry (lyrics above from “Walk on the wild guardsman side”)
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Posted in Holidays, Jokes, Language and food, Language and medicine, Lexical semantics, My life | 6 Comments »
December 1, 2024
🐇 🐇 🐇 three rabbits to inaugurate the month of December; for the occasion, an assortment of non-holiday-related topics — though I have to point out that Saturnalia will be upon us in a couple of weeks, so get your ass in gear for the occasion — that have come by me recently: a rabbit stew for your pleasure
rabbit stew. From Wikipedia, some bare facts:
Rabbit stew, also referred to as hare stew when hare is used, is a stew prepared using rabbit meat as a main ingredient. Stuffat tal-Fenek, a variation of rabbit stew, is the national dish of Malta. Other traditional regional preparations of the dish exist, such as coniglio all’ischitana on the island of Ischia, German Hasenpfeffer and jugged hare in Great Britain and France. Hare stew dates back to at least the 14th century … Rabbit stew is a traditional dish of the Algonquin people and is also a part of the cuisine of the Greek islands. Hare stew was commercially manufactured and canned circa the early 1900s in western France and eastern Germany.
Rabbit stews are characteristically rich and flavorful. Yes, even the British jugged hare.
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Posted in Color, Flags, Furnishings and tools, Holidays, Language and animals, Language and food, My life | Leave a Comment »
November 28, 2024
The Wayno Bizarro for today, 11/28, is an exercise in cartoon understanding:
(#1) Wayno’s title: “Horrifyingly Tasty”; I would have suggested the more bloodthirsty “Eat Your Gods” (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)
But it’s all totally baffling unless you recognize the references to Charles Schulz’s comic strip Peanuts; you really have to know about Linus and the Great Pumpkin. (Meanwhile, your appreciation of the strip will be enriched if you know that today is US Thanksgiving, a harvest festival for which the traditional foods include pumpkin pie for dessert.)
And while we’re talking festivals, the cartoon is a festival of ambiguities in English, structural and lexical.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Common & proper, Grammatical categories, Holidays, Language and food, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Parsing, Understanding comics | 2 Comments »
