Archive for the ‘Language and animals’ Category

The alpine chamois, aka isard

September 19, 2026

From a note about my late friend Steve Isard:

his family name before was Issersky or Isserski, altered on immigration [to Isard]

But the name Isard was not just picked out of a hat; isard is the name (in several languages) of an actual creature, an alpine goat, fleet of foot:


The Pyrenean chamois (Rupicapra pyrenaica) is a goat-antelope that lives in the Pyrenees and Cantabrian Mountains of Spain, France and Andorra, and the Apennine Mountains of central Italy (from Wikipedia) — named isard in Catalan, Occitan, and French

 

Sensuous pleasure

September 11, 2026

A little work of postcard art sent to me by Ann Burlingham as sexy, juicy fruit!:


Bright blackberry juice, crushed in the fingers, runs down the palm of the hand and then the arm

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Goat and beaver

September 4, 2026

Two absurdist anthropomorphized animal cartoons from the latest New Yorker (of 9/7/26, the Dolly Parton issue): Jared Nangle’s beaver resolutely doing what it’s programmed to do; and Joe Dator’s mountain goat trying to take a NYC cab to the nearest precipice.

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Edible primate

September 4, 2026

Today’s (9/4) Wayno / Piraro Bizarro offers an elegant but complex pun:


Model chip (the snack), pun chimp (the ape) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)

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Santa Maria! La Piña!

September 2, 2026

Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro offers a pun using the available resources sparingly: piñata coladas — piña coladas as made by (anthropomorphized) piñatas:


Helpfully, with a recipe (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)

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Dogbookman

August 26, 2026

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.

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A musical interlude

August 26, 2026

About 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.

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Billions of dollars in parrots

August 26, 2026

Little Poll Parrot
Sat in his garret
Eating toast and tea.
A little brown mouse
Jumped into the house
And stole it all away.

— nursery rhyme

If 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 …

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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).

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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)

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