A Victoria Roberts schadenfrog cartoon in the 5/5/25 New Yorker:
(#1) The surviving frog — call it Schadenfroggy — takes malicious pleasure in its companion having been flattened to death; it’s a cruel, cruel ranine world
Archive for the ‘Language and animals’ Category
Schadenfroggy
May 2, 2025
Suzerains of sheldrake
April 26, 2025Today’s (4/26) morning names: sheldrake (or Sheldrake) and suzerainty. I have no idea how the gorgeous big duck (or the parapsychologist) got into my head; suzerainty might have popped up because of its prominent medial /z/ — I am ever Z-alert — though I don’t recall having seen it in print recently (I don’t think I’ve ever heard it spoken), so it might have come to me just for its oddness. The workings of my mind are often mysterious.
(The music playing at the time — well into a performance of Handel’s Messiah — provides no obvious source for any of these words.)
Saint George and the superb fairy wren
April 23, 2025🗡 🐉 4/23 St. George’s Day, celebrating the dragon-slaying patron saint of England, who (according to tradition) died on this day in the year 303 — the most martial of the British fab four (David, Andrew, George, and Patrick); meanwhile, thanks to Ann Burlingham, today I also celebrate the superb fairy wren, a colorful little bird of southeastern Australia
The little bird first, then the sword-wielding saint of legend.
Hybrid portmanteaus
March 31, 2025🐅 🐅 🐅 three tigers for ultimate March, the day on which the tigers eat the lambs that the month proverbially goes out as; my posting for this morning begins with tigers, but only so I can slide into the real topic:
the hybrid portmanteau ‘a portmanteau (name) for a hybrid (creature)’ — as in the names liger (lion + tiger) ‘hybrid of a male lion with a tigress’ and tigon (tiger + lion) ‘hybrid of a male tiger with a lioness’, as opposed to unmixed names for hybrids, like mule ‘hybrid of a male donkey and female horse’ and hinny ‘hybrid of a male horse and a female donkey’. Hybrid portmanteaus are iconically satisfying: intimate name-melding (through the combination of word-parts) signifies intimate creature-melding (through mating).
From this beginning, I will rapidly descend to the hybrid portmanteau triceradoodle (the creature is a preposterous hybrid of a triceratops and a poodle) and eventually to the double hybrid portmanteau composite Gerberian Shepsky (an actual dog breed, a hybrid of a German shepherd and a Siberian husky)
Good morning, good morning
March 23, 2025I woke at 3:30 am, after 8 hours of good sleep, to the sound of Scott Ross playing Soler keyboard music on his power harpsichord — the Fandango and an assortment of sonatas — which filled me with delight and promised a good day to come. Eventually I worked my way to my computer, and found one odd surprise and one very sorrowful one.
Put a red apple in that mouth
March 22, 2025… and call it Cochon de lait rôti. Put a mouth on that green apple and call it Le fils de l’homme. Mash them together in a nightmare and you get today’s Bizarro strip, a Wayno Psychiatrist cartoon that’s a re-play of an earlier Bizarro, but with the dream figure of William Tell’s son (with an apple on his head) replaced by a roasted wild boar (with an apple in its mouth):
(#1) Surrealist René Magritte’s Son of Man on the therapist’s couch (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)
Two things here: apples in the mouths of roasted pigs (as in the patient’s nightmare); and the previous Bizarro strip (from 2022), with the same patient and the same therapist (a caricature of the artist Magritte), positioned differently in the strip, and suffering from dramatically different nightmares.
Morning name: barramundi
March 18, 2025Awakening at 3:51 am (to a performance of Richard Strauss’s comic opera Intermezzo, which has nothing to do with any of what follows, beyond evoking operatic singing), what was in my head was the word barramundi (pronounced boldly, with a big tongue-trilled R in it, so that it was simultaneously ponderous and ridiculous). I immediately recalled why the name of an Asian / Oceanic fish was calling to me: a recent Facebook posting by an American who was startled to find the fish on sale in a supermarket near them.
So: the fish, in the water and on the table. Then the name: metrically, a double trochee, of the back-accented type (Barbarina, ` ˘ ´ ˘ ) rather than the front-accented type (manicurist, ´ ˘ ` ˘ ) — which led me to operatic singing, not Strauss’s Intermezzo, but the marvels of Verdi’s Rigoletto, in particular the duet Si vendetta, whose title is, well, yes, a back-accented double trochee.
Welcome to the SSA gulag
March 1, 2025(not for kids or the sexually modest)
🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit for St Dafydd’s Day (pleasant), for fucking like bunnies in the spring (joyous), and (stake to the heart) for all of us little animals who will be hunted down and flayed in public by the new government of the country, on this second day of the Soviet States of America, under the thumb of the bitch goddess Putinitsa (née Drumpfitsa) Bonespur and her lieutenant Jed Vacuous; welcome to the gulag
(For Putinitsa’s wedding photo, see my 2/17/25 posting “The gopnik wedding”)
So much for lashing out against the evil queen. For the moment. Now to resume the previously scheduled program for today: to celebrate the new month with lewdness, in the spirit of lubricious rabbits: launch the raunch, that’s the ticket.
St Dafydd’s Eve
February 28, 2025🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for ultimate February; as I wrote yesterday, in “Rabbits massed at the month’s border”
[on 2/28] tigers pounce, to devour the month. And then on Saturday, the hordes of rabbits (bearing leeks and daffodils for St. Dafydd’s Day, purely as ornaments, since both are toxic to rabbits) that have been massing at the month’s borders will stream in and overwhelm us all
So it’s St Dafydd’s Eve, and I hoped to have finished a travesty of Keats’s The Eve of St Agnes (1820) made appropriate to my life (the creatures in the woolly fold will be woolly mammoths) and the date (tomorrow is Rabbit Day, a day for hares, even ones that limp).
Plus some comments on hordes massed at borders: from my childhood, hysterical tales of millions of Communist Chinese soldiers massed at the Mexican border, which managed to combined a Red Scare with two separate threads of xenophobia (no doubt the subconscious source of my image of rabbits massed at the month’s borders); and then from two weeks ago, an America-Firster alarm about, yes, “Chinese foreign nationals infiltrating our southern border”.
And some response to Hana Filip’s on-the-nose comment about yesterday’s posting:
What touched me about this blog post is the oscillation between happiness or satisfaction due to the “haze of domesticity” and deep, fundamental existential angst described in your message to Elizabeth [Daingerfield Zwicky]
With the next chapter in this oscillation, as described in this note to HF:
And again this morning — after a satisfying and restorative sleep I awaken to the cry “Verloren!” — Tamino’s “Zu Hilfe! zu Hilfe! sonst bin ich verloren, / Der listigen Schlange zum Opfer erkoren” that opens Die Zauberflöte — and then have to bring my blood pressure down with mind tricks. Here I am, battling serpents of death with magical music (I am, of course, the peasant Papageno with his magic bells rather than the noble Tamino with his magic flute) — and, yes, I understand that intellectualizing my anxiety is a way of contending with it, bringing it under control.
I intended to stitch all this together into a posting. But the unimaginably outrageous actions of Bluto Thinskin and his sidekick Jed Vacuous have consumed my day. I am undone.
But wait, there’s more. Just now, as I was starting to assemble my feelings of admiration and respect for Volodymyr Zelenskyy, my fears for his personal safety, and my concern for the fate of his country, I recalled a salient piece of personal information about VZ, that his natural presentation of himself is radically egalitarian; he treats everyone he interacts with as his equal, no one his inferior, no one his superior (though he has learned the skills of both military command and diplomacy as required by his roles in Ukraine) — like the Swiss, the Friends / Quakers, and, well, me, as sketched in my 2/19 note “A coat of arms”. Something else to put in that dream posting for 2/28. Or whenever.
Rabbits massed at the month’s border
February 27, 2025It’s penultimate February. Tomorrow, tigers pounce, to devour the month. And then on Saturday, the hordes of rabbits (bearing leeks and daffodils for St. Dafydd’s Day, purely as ornaments, since both are toxic to rabbits) that have been massing at the month’s borders will stream in and overwhelm us all. Sandra Boynton has a cartoon for Rabbit Days (of course she does, bunnies are adorable, and SB is an artist of the adorable), which she last posted on Facebook on 1/31, just before the last onslaught:
Boynton writes: The new month approaches, so I am once again sharing the highly scientific fact that if you say RABBIT RABBIT! as your very first words of the month, they will bring good luck all month long. Additional irrefutable fact is that in worrisome times, the more rabbits mentioned the better.
Sing out, Louise! Now is the time to loudly chant RABBIT RABBIT RABBIT — Marche is icumen in / Lhude sing rabette — as a mantra of protection, a prayer for salvation:
From the fury of the Muskmen free us, O ye rabbits!