Archive for the ‘Language and food’ Category

Slices of pi(e)

March 15, 2025

π 🥧 π 🥧 π 🥧 for yesterday (mammoths lumber along majestically, and they are often regrettably late for appointments), 3/14, which was Pi Day in my country, and for some years now, also — delicious pun — Pie Day in many places (so inviting a cascade of formulaic word play: pie in the sky, a piece of the pie, easy as pie, even pie chart)

I’ll jump right into things with a charming and heartfelt Facebook message yesterday from my old friend Paula Stout, who many years ago lived in Palo Alto, but has since moved to the great American Southwest — on a ranch outside Greenville TX, east of Dallas-Fort Worth:

Happy Ecstatic Friday on Pi Day (3.14)

We were in town today, where every store treated the day as a celebration. They were giving away apple pies, chicken pot pies, [pizza pies,] and even eskimo pies. With big smiles, balloons and jubilation.

And it struck me that we are seeing history unfold.

1988 was the first “Pi Day” for a marketing campaign in SF, iirc. Before that, only we geeks and friends of the wonderful Kevin McHargue (who was born on this day) partied it up

And now, here we are. A national holiday of pies!

As David Mamet, renowned playwright, once noted, “We must have a pie. Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie.”

There’s enough stress brewing in the world, y’all, let us pray he is right and there is pie enough to combat it.

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Things fall apart

March 10, 2025

I had a plan for the day; its centerpiece was to be taking a shower, an elaborate, difficult, and often painful operation that takes about an hour from preparation to putting things away afterwards. But I wanted to get clean for two medical appointments on Wednesday. But I was about to run out of a large number of staples and so needed to refresh the supply, plus a sandwich for lunch today. So the plan was to put in a grocery order early in the day, take delivery around 8 or so, and then have time to take a shower before lunch. I had two postings already set up to be polished in the afternoon. A good day lay ahead.

But, oh my friends, it was not to be.

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The dandelion caper

March 9, 2025

This posting is in a genre I’ve come to think of as Kharkiv Opera: a pleasant, playful, or joyous event staged in the face of terrible times; from my 3/2/25 posting “Three men walk into bar”:

the Ukrainians have been managing to mount opera performances in an underground bomb shelter in the city of Kharkiv. They sing and dance and enjoy one another’s company.

Today’s pleasure is the enjoyment of the plants and flowers around us, something that has been with me since I was a child at my father’s knee (so, for 80 years now), and was shared with Ann Daingerfield Zwicky (who was a wildflower enthusiast) and my guy Jacques Transue (whose passion for gardening matched mine), and survives now in my little patio garden (with super easy-care plants on it that I can look at through French doors while I work at the computer) and in occasional short walks in my neighborhood (with my sturdy outdoor walker to rest in as needed, and with the company of a caregiver, who I can talk with about what we see, while we refer frequently to on-line sources in Spanish and English).

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Rabbits massed at the month’s border

February 27, 2025

It’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!

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The culinary artmanteau

February 1, 2025

🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to welcome the month of February, the month of Lincoln Darwin Day and of Valentine’s Day (this year, Mardi Gras doesn’t come until early in March)

It’s Rabbit Day, and what happens to be at the top of my posting queue has nothing to do with rabbits; it’s a Bizarro cartoon (from yesterday, 1/31) with a tasty culinary artmanteau:


(#1) The portmanteau Michelancho = Michelangelo (the 16th-century Italian artist Michelangelo Buonarotti, painter of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome) + ancho (the dried poblano chili / chile pepper) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)

(an alternative culinary artmanteau: (Michelangelo) Anchorotti  = ancho + Buonarotti)

(plus, I note that #1 is about Michelangelo the Ancho Honcho, the Man of La Mancho, also one of the lesser-known film Manchowiczes, etc.)

Now some brief notes on anchos, and then a surprise finale in which today’s rabbits get cooked with anchos, in the triumph of culinary artistry conejo en adobo with red chiles, which you can think of as Rabbit Michelancho.

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Giggly banana couches and the buffoonish Oscar Mayer Wienermobile

January 28, 2025

The news for (symbolic) penises, following up on my previous posting about the years of the dragon and the snake in the Chinese zodiac (which ends with a promise of giggly banana couches and the buffoonish Oscar Mayer Wienermobile, a promise hereby fulfilled). It begins with a 1/18/25 posting on the Art Facebook page, with no source cited: a posting of a banana couch, passed on by a friend, who suggested that it would make suitable furniture for the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile:


(#1) This sofa is one of a set of AI banana couches from Designideahub, which seems to provide AI-generated design ideas (“your one-stop place for art, creativity, AI, design and product inspiration”)

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Goulash, couscous, and herring, oh my!

January 10, 2025

(1/5 through 1/9 were days of great anxiety for me, on both medical and personal fronts; I am at my wits’ end, and I’m also now hopelessly backed up on postings in preparation, probably never to recover. So I’m just posting whatever I can get done fairly easily in the moment.)

In Facebook / Meta / Zuckie’s Litter Box (just Zuckie for short) / whatever on 1/8, Marina Muilwijk posted this diagram from the Terrible Maps site, with a comment:


[Terrible Maps caption:] Europe Divided (again)
[MM’s comment:] See that bit where couscous and herring overlap? That’s where I live [in the Netherlands] (no, I haven’t tried having both in one dish).

Now the site is called Terrible Maps, and the maps are indeed dreadful (but often thought- or laugh-provoking); in this case, having the three regions pictured via circles in a Venn diagram is utterly inappropriate for culture areas, so the picture is absurd (couscous in Wales?).

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Give a frugal cartoonist a donut strip …

December 30, 2024

… and they’ll use the old cartoon artwork for another strip, with fresh text: a new, improved donut. Case in point: today’s (12/30, New Year’s Eve Eve) Zippy strip:


(#1) The big donut by the side of the road in York PA, advertising Maple Donuts, its store, and its coffee shop

But, but: we’ve been here before; #1 is a reworking of  the Zippy strip in my 12/1/17 posting “Maple Donuts, coffee shops, and unapologetic identities”, with the old artwork merely re-colored but with fresh speech balloons:

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On antepenultimate December

December 29, 2024

👴 👴 👴 three old men for antepenultimate December (3 days left), also the 5th of the 12 days of Christmas (five golden rings!) and the 5th of the 8 days of Hanukkah (so there’s still plenty of oil)

These have been difficult days — the latest rainstorm came in on a wave of low air pressure, felling me with joint pain and stopping up my ears so that I can barely hear (and I probably won’t be able to get help until sometime in the new year) — so I’m going to just randomly take stuff to post about and run with it, helter skelter.

First up: three seasonal presents from Ann Burlingham, in Pittsburgh, delivered to me yesterday by my grandchild Opal Armstrong Zwicky, who’s in town on break before their last semester at the University of Pittsburgh. In size, from the smallest to the largest:

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Aged anchovy salt

December 27, 2024

🎁 Boxing Day 🎁 — also St. Stephen, with his feets uneven — coming a day late, because life has been very difficult for me, and postings have piled up so high I’m not sure I can ever get to them, so I’ve picked something I know I can get done, so that this dark, rainy, and excruciatingly painful low-air-pressure day will not be a total loss

I bring you an e-mail message from Victor Steinbok on 12/25, about this ad for Spice Tribe (website here), a San Francisco-based on-line spice store dedicated to mindful cooking:


(#1) VS wrote: Facebook has offered another example of what I used to refer to as parenthetical ambiguity. Is it [aged anchovy] [salt] or [aged] [anchovy salt]. From a culinary perspective, the latter makes no sense (aging salt doesn’t change it). But that doesn’t mean there’s no built-in ambiguity.

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