This is a complicated background to a mishearing posting that has itself turned out to be more complex than I first imagined — a mishearing of the title word in the song “Cardinal” as recorded in 2024 by Kacey Musgraves. This posting is about the song; the titular bird, the northern cardinal; KM the singer-songwriter; KM’s wonderful performance of the song; and the song’s moving background story, inspired by the late country / folk singer John Prine. (more…)
Archive for the ‘Language and animals’ Category
After the rain, around the block
April 15, 2026Yesterday (4/14), my helper Isaac and I took a walk around the block (Ramona to Forest to Emerson to Homer and back to Ramona), taking advantage of the end of days of rain. Officially we were visiting the oregano plant on Emerson St. (see my 4/14 posting “Things I didn’t know”, in the section on “a labiate plant with fleshy leaves”), but we traversed a largely changed scene: the cat’s-claw creeper on the arbor over my entry was coming to the end of its 4 or so days of bloom; the calla lilies on Ramona St. had finished their days of blooming and dropped their flowers; the rose bushes in Forest Ave. that were all buds before the rain were now a solid mass of beautiful single white roses; there were big passion-flowers on Emerson St.; and the Chinese elms on Homer Ave., totally bare on our last walk, had fully leafed out in green, turning a whole block into a pleasantly shaded path.
And on the street strip on Forest, a bunch of bare 4-foot sticks had been transformed into a dense display of bright-white dogwood blossoms. Much like these:
The routine tasks of a vengeful God
March 28, 2026From the latest New Yorker issue, of 3/30/26, this cartoon by Daniel Kanhai:
The energetic angelic figure of Moses, with his rather dubious angelic assistant (his brother Aaron? his successor Joshua? just an angel off some random cloud, pressed involuntarily into the frog toss?), lobs jumbo frogs down onto the Egyptians, meting out punishment to them for their Pharaoh’s offenses against the Lord and the Lord’s chosen people, the Israelites
It’s the Biblical second Plague of Egypt — not the disastrous swarming frogs of the book of Exodus, overwhelming entire cities, doomed to die in great stinking heaps; but instead adorable, perky frogs from children’s books and the cartoons (surely they are a pretty green). Moses gets them by the barrel.
In any case, the incongruity of the appalling — literally Godawful — frogs from Exodus and the cute frogs in the New Yorker made me laugh out loud.
The illegal trade in baby seals
March 24, 2026Coming by me yesterday (3/23) on public radio, a feature on, as I heard it, the illegal trade in baby seals. (referring, apparently, to the seal hunt on Canada’s east coast, in which thousands of harp seal pups are clubbed to death for their fur) But the story was actually about baby eels (elvers). Mishearing strikes again.
Meanwhile, the actual story was alarming, but not as distressing as what I heard, since baby eels are astronomically less cute than baby seals.
Toys, potatoes, and dogs
February 26, 2026The Wayno / Piraro Bizarro strip for 2/25: Mr. and Mrs. Potatohead with their Potatohead dog:
The toy: Mr. Potatohead and his detachable-bodypart family; the potato: the russet; the dog: the Jack Russell terrier (note russet as a potato-pun on the dog name Russell) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)
To understand this cartoon, you need to recognize it as an instance of the potatohead cartoon meme, based on the toy. Now, some details.
Lizard warning
February 23, 2026Yes, yes, I am bombarded with blizzard warnings, for the terrifying storm now bringing NYC and the surrounding areas to a standstill. But, bafflingly, though I am fully aware that the warnings are about a blizzard, I keep hearing them as announcing a lizard warning — as if I must now beware of a rain of cold-stunned iguanas falling from the trees or an advancing army of marauding Komodo dragons.
Sadly, since we are now in the zone of terrifying creatures, I have to tell you that Gojira / Godzilla is a reptilian (or dinosaurian) monster, or kaiju, not a squamate one (all lizards are reptiles, but not all reptiles are lizards). You should indeed be alarmed by the news that Godzilla is on the rampage in your neighborhood — that means it’s slated for utter devastation — but such a bulletin is not, technically, a lizard warning. It would be a grievous usage error to race through the streets screaming the lizards are coming! the lizards are coming!
You know it’s good, because it’s free
February 13, 2026A step into greater complexity in my blog posting, after re-entry in two brief postings yesterday: “Zichichi” (here) and “Calvin Tompkins (here): two separate subjects, united by being cleverly stitched together in The Bob newsletters (from writer and cartoonist Bob Eckstein), about the 2026 Winter Olympics on television, with this cartoon from 2/7:
(Toon) The Bob at the Winter Olympics; BE says “The bob is here”, with this tag about the Olympics on tv:You know it’s good, because it’s free
This is subject 1, the excellent tag, which I would like to apply to this very blog of mine: you know it’s good because it’s free (and I have gone to some trouble to make it so; applaud here for me)
Meanwhile, Toon is BE’s wiener dog race version of the Olympics, in which the racing dogs are in hotdog buns, observed by an array of condiment bottles. On Facebook on 2/8:
BE: “I’m I’m watching the Puppy Bowl. It’s not the same. Gambling has ruined it, even though I’m admittedly part of the problem.
BE’s eccentric Puppy Bowl is subject 2, and it has nothing to do with the the tag.
Reptilian fruit couplet
December 24, 2025Accompanying this hazy snapshot posted on Facebook on 12/22 by John Wells —
Juicy scavenging on the green slopes of (I assume) Montserrat, in the Leeward Islands; the fully ripe fruits fall to the ground and ferment there, where the local iguanas can feed on them
— was his caption, the donée for a poem in trochaic tetrameter (with a couple leading unaccented syllables), the most common meter for folk poetry of all kinds in English:
An iguana feasts on fallen mangoes
Kinky Beavers and their kin
December 22, 2025Today’s Zits comic strip sets up a baffling list of ridiculous and raunchy-sounding things Jeremy’s father wants for Christmas — a Wiggly Pickle! Kinky Beavers! — and resolves the puzzle in the final panel.
(#1) Fishing lures, kids, fishing lures; apparently all from the Reaction Innovations fishing lure supply company, and so known to a substantial number of fishing enthusiasts
I suspected what was going on when spinners and crickets turned up in the second panel. But it’s still a sweet set-up.
Nairobi, gorillas. and gorilla suits
December 9, 2025Musings on three things — Nairobi, gorillas, and gorilla suts — en soi (as “just stuff:”) vs. those things serving as symbols, with various values / evoked associations, which are typically conventional: cultural meanings. With specific reference to these three things in the 1950s Ernie Kovacs comedy sketch The Nairobi Trio.