The promised note on Albert Payson Terhune — with a name like that, he’d have to have been at least upper middle class, and he was, he was — and his dog books.
Archive for the ‘Language and animals’ Category
A musical interlude
August 26, 2026About my daily life, because I’m so backed up in things to do that I’m just picking little stuff out of a hat. (The incidental good news is that my lab tests were very pleasingly improved, and I’m now starting, eek, a very slow withdrawal from prednisone; think good thoughts about woolly mammoths for me.)
Meanwhile, I took an early break in my sleep last night, to search, I don’t really know why, for material on the dog books of my childhood.
I did indeed speed-read (and barely comprehend, though I got Midsummer Night’s Dream and King Lear for life) all of Shakespeare at the age if 9, of my own volition, but I also adored imaginative fiction for kids. Dr. Doolittle, Freddy the Pig, every Oz book there was. And books about noble dogs. My West Lawn PA companion for several years was a sweet mutt dog (part terrier, the rest mystery). Spot / Spotty (not an imaginative name, but fitting).
Out of this I will produce soon a posting on what we all called at the time LadADog (three syllables rushed into a ball). And Albert Payson Terhune. But that’s not what this posting is about. This posting is about the music that Apple was playing for me when I went on my computer dog search around 9:15 pm last night.
Billions of dollars in parrots
August 26, 2026Little Poll Parrot
Sat in his garret
Eating toast and tea.
A little brown mouse
Jumped into the house
And stole it all away.
— nursery rhymeIf you like the parrots and getting caught in the rain
If you like making love at midnight under the trees on the cape
Then I’m the love that you’ve looked for, write to me and escape
— The Parrot Song
Well, yes, tariffs (by Canada, against those levied by the Grabpussy administration of my country), not my misheard parrots. But I was taken by the idea of billions of dollars in parrots, bright parrots in the air.
And so was led down the psittacine path of associative memory. Some highlights on the path …
like a racehorse
August 2, 2026(talk on bodily functions and the vocabulary for them, sometimes in street language, so not to everyone’s taste; also more than you might want to hear about Arnold’s Wonderful Whizz World)
About my current medical regimen, which involves significantly large doses of the steroid prednisone, intended to treat serious kidney problems (resulting in fluid accumulations in several parts of my body, quite visibly in my feet and legs) while staying under the dosage that, historically, makes me (to put this in the plainest terms) crazy. It’s a balancing act.
Yesterday, when I was overloaded with household revisions (including a new computer and printer) and had little time to sip my green tea pleasantly, the tide turned: I began, as we say, pissing like a racehorse, really quite remarkable amounts (also, I have to say, enormously pleasurable). For years now, I’ve lived with urinals scattered everywhere, so I can take quick whizzes without disrupting whatever I’m working on (if I’m laser-focused on what I’m doing, I can go for an hour without a whizz, but that’s pretty much my limit).
You all look the same to me
July 29, 2026(or: they all look …) (or: … all look alike)
In the New Yorker‘s 7/20/26 issue, an Ivan Ehlers cartoon on this theme:
The cross-species effect: to a shark, every non-shark looks the same — looks, in particular, like the most salient non-shark, the shark’s major prey animal the seal; plus, everything is funnier in cartoon SharkWorld (just put a cocktail glass into a shark’s fins)
Two laughs-out-loud and a shiver of self-recognition
June 13, 2026Cartoons that especially moved me in the latest — 6/1/26 — issue of the New Yorker: two by artists who are old acquaintances on this blog (Drew Dernavich and Frank Cotham), trafficking here in their brands of absurdity (their gags made me laugh out loud); plus one by British cartoonist, illustrator, and writer Sara Akinterinwa (whose work, all recent, explores dating, relationships, identity, politics, and navigating adult life as a young woman of color) that gave me not a great laugh but a shiver of self-recognition: that’s not funny, that’s my life strategy!
Griffy grapples with Muffler Man on the masculinity mat
May 22, 2026Yesterday, in my posting “Sir, I bring you a token of my subservience”, a Zippy strip in which Griffy addresses a Muffler Man, offering the fiberglass giant a phallic offering to his superior masculinity. It turns out that this strip is a reworking of the text from an earlier strip on a similar theme. And there we have the two-strip set-up for today’s discussion:
(#1) [The 5/21/26] strip “Tired Out”, with, oh dear, the alpha male theme made explicit; it is, in any case, all about (hyper)masculinity vs. inferior masculinity
(#2) The 6/2/17 strip “Rubber Fire”, showing (hyper)masculine contempt for analytic academics (I am, of course, the very model of the modern analytic academic, so eat my shorts, brute boy)
Funeral flowers for Mr. Shimmer
May 2, 2026In this cartoon from the latest (5/4/26) New Yorker, Ms. Duck and Ms. Rabbit mourn their versatile paramour, Mr. Shimmer the duck-rabbit (or rabbit-duck); see my 8/24/25 posting “Shimmer is both a floor wax AND a dessert topping”, and reflect on versatile gay men, who are bottoms or tops, depending on how you approach them:
(#1) The widows weep for their bi-stable beloved; meanwhile, the famous illusion that lies at the very center of their world turns out to be a lifelong preoccupation of the cartoonist
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: