On Facebook today, an astonished observation by Martyn Cornell:
It’s early September — must be time for selling Christmas confectionery in the supermarkets of Britain …
Providing us with this store display for Christmas versions of Cadbury’s Puds:
The original Cadbury Pud — a brand name — is a Cadbury milk chocolate bar with a truffle centre, hazelnut pieces, and crunchy puffed rice pieces
In this morning’s comics feed, two linguistic jokes from the Roman Empire (in a Rhymes With Orange and a Bizarro); maybe it’s just something in the air, but on the other hand, September 4th, 476, marks the end of the Western Roman Empire as a political entity and consequently (in some people’s view) the beginning of the Middle Ages. So let’s say goodbye to the boy emperor Romulus, aka Augustulus, and antiquity; and hello to the barbarians and, oh yes, medieval times!
Bye-bye, Imperial times
Took Romulus to the border, to see the Empire die
I’ll get to Augustulus in a while. But first the cartoons.
🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate September and a new season (autumn in the northern hemisphere, where I am); we bid a fond farewell to August and summer as we sail on to new times and new climes (time to think about mittens and down jackets!)
And time to turn the pages on the calendar — in my case, a Tom of Finland calendar that takes us from August’s sailor and leatherman paired in the bright sun on the water to September’s lumberjack and leatherman paired in a shady evergreen forest.
🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for ultimate August, the Roman Emperor’s last day in office, and (by some reckonings) summer’s end, as the tigers are about to be pushed off the scene by autumnally school-going rabbits, in the great cycle of life
Into this seasonal Sturm und Drang sweeps today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro (Wayno’s title: “The appetizer that’s fried in [the motor oil] 10W-40”), in which we witness the cheering of robots presented with a platter of the coiled metallic snacks they are so fond of:
(#1) The UN Pun Convention of 1962 requires that you groan here (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)
Yes, spring ‘a resilient device, typically a helical metal coil, that can be pressed or pulled but returns to its former shape when released, used chiefly to exert constant tension or absorb movement’ (NOAD), here punning on the spring of spring roll ‘an Asian snack consisting of rice paper filled with minced vegetables and usually meat, rolled into a cylinder and fried’ (NOAD again) — and that spring is in fact the name of the season between winter and summer (just in case you were imagining that spring rolls were so called because they leap, or spring, into your mouth, or because they were historically made along small streams, or springs).
(There will be nekkid guys and man-on-man sex, treated in street language, so this posting is not suitable for kids or the sexually modest)
Today is penultimate August (the first Emperor of Rome is about to leave the building); also the Friday before U.S. Labor Day (a day that for many people counts as the first of a 4-day holiday weekend marking the end of summer and oh yes, recognizing the labor movement); the day after we celebrate the beheading of John the Baptist (by Herod at the request of Salome, the story goes), popularly known as Head on a Platter Day; the birthday of one old friend from the late 1950s, Ellen Sulkis James; the day before the birthday of another such friend, Benita Bendon Campbell; and the occasion for the TitanMen firm to offer its annual Labor Gay sale, an occasion on which Men at Work on insertive man-on-man sex hawk gay porn (this year, we get the two stars of Breed Me Daddy), and for the GayEmpire firm to advertise its own Labor Gay sale (with an ad featuring the two stars of Hooking Up With Finn Harding). Something for everyone in there.
This year I’m going for the gay porn, mostly because it’s entertaining — there’s a lot that’s ridiculous in gay porn, so even videos I don’t find carnally moving can still be sources of pleasure — but partly because I’m in a light-hearted holiday mood, and partly because I want to lodge some accuracy in advertising complaints.
(Naked male bodies, some with full frontal nudity, but in fine art, so exempt from the WordPress ban on naughty bits — but still not suitable for kids or the sexually modest)
A 1977 linocut print by German graphic artist Roland Rudolf Berger, encountered on Pinterest yesterday, shows us Mid-August Man:
(#1) Berger’s Sommer (Summer)
According to Wikidata, Berger (born in 1942) is a German graphic artist whose work incorporates gay themes; his specialty is linocut prints made in his studio in Berlin. That’s pretty much all I’ve been able to discover about him, though art auction sites seem to do a profitable business in his prints.
What to do in mid-August: Berger at the beach. Now, three Mid-August Men (cavorting naked at the beach) from Berger, plus an inscrutable couple — a naked guy greeting a clothed one, possibly also at the beach (though the setting is unclear):
That would be today’s holiday: Ferragosto! From Wikipedia:
Ferragosto is a public holiday celebrated on 15 August in all of Italy. It originates from Feriae Augusti, the festival of Emperor Augustus, who made 1 August a day of rest after weeks of hard work on the agricultural sector. [During the festivities, horse races were organized throughout the Empire and draft animals (oxen, donkeys and mules) were released from work and adorned with flowers.]
As the festivity was created for political reasons, the [Roman] Catholic Church decided to move the festivity to 15 August, which is the [feast day of the] Assumption of [the Blessed Virgin] Mary …
(#1) Imperial illustration from the Scuola Leonardo da Vinci website, “Ferragosto in Italy” on 8/13/21 (with holiday wishes in Latin and in Italian)
🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate August (inaugurust?) — and 🇨🇭 🇨🇭 🇨🇭 for Swiss National Day (yes, I am wearing my Swiss-flag gym shorts): happy 733rd birthday, Helvetia! — Uri! Schwyz! Unterwalden! — plus the Zwicky family canton: Glarus! — imagine the bunnies of August bounding over the Alpine meadows of the three Urkantone from 1291
But now for something completely different. A cascade of puns on names in the joke form I’ll call WoF?, abbreviating Who’s on First?, after the exemplary Abbott and Costello comedy sketch. In a Pearls Before Swine strip of 7/31/22, revived on Facebook yesterday (another 7/31):
(#1) WoF? now transported from baseball to football — in the NFL, with the four wh-question words of the gridiron: Watt, Ware, Wynn, and Y.A. (while Pig takes the role of the calmly explanatory Abbott and Rat the role of the increasingly confused and enraged Costello)
I’ll take an amused look back on WoF? cartoons on this blog in a moment. But first some notes on the comedy sketch that’s the model for this strip — noting that the cartoons have to achieve their effects through static text and drawings, while the comedy sketch is performed in real time by human actors deploying a rich stock of vocal and gestural resources. So on the one hand, though you might think of the comic strip as just a frozen, stripped down version of the live sketch, you could also view the strip as a highly artful joining of text and image using minimal resources (inspired by the live sketch but not attempting to reproduce it), as the comic counterpart of a graphic novel.
🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for ultimate July (also, it seems, National Avocado 🥑 Day, so you might consider feeding your tiger some guacamole); tomorrow the rabbits bound in to inaugurate August
Today the tigers bring us an artist from my home county: Kathy Aoki, an artist I posted about back in 2019, in (as she put it in a comment on this blog yesterday) the before time. With an extraordinary project so far spanning three years, mounting an exhibition in each of those years: Koons Ruins — a project that’s simultaneously funny and disturbing, deconstructing the masculine swagger of Jeff Koons by counterposing a monomaniac Koons-hating woman to it.
To give you the flavor of the project, just one item:
(#1) KA, Buried Bourgeois Bust, a glimpse of a decaying copy of the marble statue Bourgeois Bust – Jeff and Ilona by Jeff Koons (1991)
And its model:
(#2) The original statue (copies in a number of museums), celebrating Koons’s marriage to porn star Ilona Staller
Probal Dasgupta notes on Facebook the significance of 7/26: on 7/26/1887, L. L. Zamenhof (15 December 1859 – 14 April 1917) published (in Warsaw, under the pseudonym Doktoro Esperanto) his Dr. Esperanto’s International Language (Esperanto: Unua Libro), describing what has become the most widely used constructed international auxiliary language (PB is, among many things, an Esperantist).
So this is Esperanto Day — also, I note, the birthday of psycholinguist Eve Clark (an old friend and Stanford colleague, recently elected — wow! — to the British Academy: born 1942) and of Rolling Stone Mick Jagger (still rocking, even though he’s almost as old as I am: born 1943).
