It went past me briefly before I deleted it from my Facebook feed, but of course I caught the name; I’m primed for Z, and really primed for ZW:
ZIWI pet food
Archive for the ‘Language and food’ Category
On the ZW watch
July 17, 2025Making a mango crazy in bed
July 14, 2025My life has recently been extraordinarily difficult and extravagantly painful, but at the moment my fingers are up to a small amount of typing, so here’s an odd mishearing to amuse you. This posting is way gay and attentive to male bodies, and there’s a photo (hunky rather than raunchy, but it does involve ostentatious shirtlessness featuring prominent six-packs), so it will not be to everyone’s taste.
In a Facebook short reel that came past me this morning — I’m in need of distractions from the pain — we see two gay guys (both hunks in swimsuits, though of two very different body types), with gay guy A interviewing gay guy B:
What’s a bedroom move that makes a man go crazy? Show me with your hands.
The scene:
Day of the bed scorpions
July 11, 2025On Facebook yesterday, George V. Reilly passed on an assortment of Joe Dator cartoons that the artist is selling the originals of. From these, one instantly made me laugh out loud at its preposterousness:
(#1) Plagued by pests? Bring in a predator to kill them off! | Got bugs? Scorpions zap bugs! | Bed bug infestation? Bed scorpions will do the trick!| It’s just common sense, right? (cartoon from The American Bystander)
No, wait, wait! That’s not what we had in mind! Dator just took simple reasoning and followed it wherever it led, even to an absurd situation, like scorpions in a bed.
Two more. I expect bed scorpions to give me the willies for some time to come. Meanwhile, two more of Dator’s offerings, now from the world of dining out.
Who gets which order? The framing event is the everyday one of a server in a diner connecting each customer to the dish they ordered. The absurdity lies in neither customer being from our everyday world and each being most unlikely to be eating in a diner, and then in there being no establishment, anywhere, in which these two would be eating together:
(#2) The nominal odd couple, the Tower of London yeoman and the formicavore edentate — the beefeater and the anteater — united by the form of their names (indicating their presumable preferences in comestibles), but nothing else (unpublished cartoon)
Not my order! The framing event is again an everyday one, a server who’s gotten an order wrong. But, well, nobody expects the Great Wall of China:
(#3) Of course he should send it back — but you can’t help wondering what the service platter was like (published in the New Yorker on 12/23/24)
There are more, equally preposterous. But I vowed to stop at three.
(There’s a Page on this blog with links to my postings on Joe Dator cartoons.)
Stoop labor
July 6, 2025Earlier on this blog I’ve had occasion to celebrate the humane gravity of MSNBC commentator Jonathan Capehart, who happens to be both Black and gay. Now in JC talking about his 2025 book Yet Here I Am: Lessons From a Black Man’s Search for Home, an observation about the stoop labor historically done by Black folk in the American deep south (harvesting cotton, tobacco, and sugarcane):
“My cousin Rita and I are the first generation in our family to not have to pick cotton, and for people of a certain age, they will understand what that means,” Capehart said. “… It wasn’t until I was writing this book that I understood, when our parents were our age, they were working. They were working in the fields, picking cotton, picking tobacco. We did not have to do that.
So JC and his cousin Rita represent a shift in the fortunes of Black folk. Here’s JC informing us, explaining things, interviewing political and cultural figures, a figure of importance on national television — and a moving reporter on his own life history in that book. In what I see as the release of great abilities, drive, and insights that follow on opening up opportunity to everyone: excellent qualities that are in fact distributed widely across the population will flourish in new places (and since those who succeed first will have had to run through a lot of tough hoops, they will be seen to be especially talented).
Blend and chill, witches will
June 20, 2025The cold hags of summer cackle over a cauldron of fresh vegetables in this Roz Chast cartoon from the 6/23/25 New Yorker:
The Three Chilled Sisters crush and grind, crush and grind
Zapf, Zagat, and Zimmerman
June 16, 2025The morning names of 6/14, all Z names — well, I’m a Z-person, and I notice — all of which were in my mind from recent mentions on Facebook
of Zapf dingbats (named for the typeface designer Hermann Zapf)
of the Zagat restaurant guides (now taken over by Google)
and of the singer-songwriter Bobby Zimmerman of Hibbing MN (who became famous as a very young man in NYC under the name Bob Dylan and is more or less constantly in the news)
Saturday, Sunday, and Monday
June 15, 2025Three days heavy in events and occasions, including my beginning to work through the amazing pile of stuff I’ve accumulated here in Palo Alto, which has to be whittled down to what I can fit into my apartment in an assisted living facility; that’s a long way away, but the task is daunting and will take months (as it did when I moved out of the house in Columbus), and you will be hearing every so often about my puzzlements.
But now Saturday (yesterday), Sunday (today), and Monday (tomorrow). Pride Month continues throughout and that’s a Big Thing in my world. It’s been a long, hard ride, and now we’re facing another round of backlash and reversals, so this is a time for conspicuously joining together, all of us — and, at the same time, being as fabulous as we can.
Adventures in AZ-land
June 2, 2025That’s the land of maze and Shiraz and similar AZ things, those whose names have the letter-sequence AZ in them; Aslan is something entirely different (see below). I was taken to AZ-land yesterday on Facebook by Aric Olnes (who is, among other things, a floral artist), in one of a series of alphabetic flower photos from Casa Thomas / Olnes in Pioneer (Amador County) CA — where Aric and his husband Mike Thomas live these days — which come with lengthy alliterative captions, in this case for the letter A:
(#1) The photo, of a Pioneer Azalea; the caption:Astonishingly attractive Azaleas arrest acrimonious assumptions ascending aloft angelic amiability
(Look, Aric wasn’t aiming for elegance or poetic facility, just alliteration playfully carried to ridiculous lengths; otherwise, all it has to do is make some sense)
And my response, also on Facebook, taking things in a direction Aric probably didn’t anticipate:
— azaleas are from AZ-land, like azure, azimuths, and azithromycin, in a region that embraces Azerbaijan, the Azores, and Azusa [but not Anaheim or Cucamonga] — and is next to the Plaza Hotel, the Amazon River, and Jason Mraz‘s recording studio (among many many other things)
Nutritional mishearing
May 28, 2025I posted this query on Facebook yesterday:
— AZ: I’ve been regularly getting a tv spot ad for the Boost Max nutritional drink , ‘Here’s to Now: Boost Max’ (published 8/13/24), in which a young Black man says what I hear as “Here’s to bean meat soup every Thursday” (which puzzles me). Can anyone correct — or confirm — my impression?
You can view the ad, from ispot.tv, here.
Crucially, I failed to take into account the context the speaker is in; I really should know better.
J.R. Ross and his cowboy poetry
May 17, 2025In memoriam John Robert Ross (May 7, 1938 to May 13, 2025). The news of Haj’s death came in my morning e-mail on Wednesday 5/14, right next to a Bizarro cartoon with a cowboy joke / restaurant joke, turning on an absurd pun on ranch dressing that Haj (who was a walking library of jokes) would have appreciated, and so with a synchronicity that Haj would have delighted in.
J.R. Ross was an outsized figure in linguistics, whose ideas (beginning with his 1967 MIT dissertation, Constraints on Variables in Syntax) altered the field. Haj Ross was a literally outsized person physically, a large, blocky man (he really did play football for Yale as an undergraduate) with a big presence. And Haj, no surname needed, had an outsized personality — endlessly imaginative, enormously funny, astonishingly empathetic and gentle, “big and sparkly” (me on Facebook), with “an amazing facility for the intricacies of English” (John Beavers on FB) and “an innocent sense of wonder about language, poetry, and the world” (Susan Fischer on FB). And resolutely counter-cultural (often barefooted, and rarely standing on ceremony), also attuned to all the Zen-inflected frequencies on your radio dial.
He was a good friend of mine, and an inspiration to me, from 1963 on. So this posting is hard to write. I will collect myself and pick out some facts, some assortment of outrageous anecdotes, a small selection of his poetry and artwork, and even (since, like Haj, I’m hopelessly a linguist) a note about a neglected feature of his work on syntax that I think is important in the intellectual history of the field. I will do all that in another posting, I hope tomorrow.
Today I’ll start the way Haj often started his public presentations. With a joke, that Bizarro cartoon (remember the cartoon?). From which a Google AI Overview search then led me, goofily, into a strange dusty canyon of verse, Jim Ross’s self-published Pull Up a Chair: Cowboy Poetry. Truly, Haj would have loved that.