Steven Levine on Facebook on 8/23, reporting in from an enormously crowded Minnesota State Fair, posted this cartoon t-shirt from the fair, with a note of distress:
(#1) SL: I find this t-shirt design to be disturbing. Shades of Charlie the Tuna.
(To which I added: Eat me!) I’ll get to Charlie the vorarephilic horse mackerel (and the Ameglian Major Cow, too) in a little while. But first, on fun-food corn dogs and cob-canine corn dogs.
That is, the NASCARGOT races, as a Bizarro of 12/26/10 has it, reveling in the portmanteau of NASCAR and escargot (French ‘snail’) and showing us Dan Piraro’s goofy conception of snails in a NASCAR race:
(#1) The cartoon appeared as the middle panel of a Bizarro Sunday Punnies strip with three bits of word play in it, posted about (without further analysis) in my 12/26/10 posting “Punnies #11” (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)
Hat tip to Susan Fischer for dredging up this old cartoon on Facebook yesterday. Causing me to reflect on the fact that not all of my readers will be familiar with the American popcultural phenomenon that is NASCAR; there are people who wouldn’t be surprised to see that contestants in a race carry numbers, but would be baffled by all those ads on the snails’ shells. Indeed, DP has managed to transport the physical trappings of NASCAR vehicles to le monde des escargots. Motor sport meets malacology.
By some odd accident, today has turned out to be Holster Day — it’s also, unrelatedly, the (96th) birthday of the late Bill Bright, eminent linguist and great friend — as the first panel in a Bizarro cartoon from my 8/11 posting “Toto, Tonto, let’s call the whole thing off” washed up against Lee Falk’s depiction of his comic-strip hero the Phantom, which came by me on Facebook. What they share is well-filled holsters (flaunting their phallic attractions).
(#1) The Bizarro panel. Phallos the skeleton gunslinger of the Old West, illustrating a variant of the Concealed Carry joke: Is that a banana in your holster, or are you just happy to see me?
(#2) Falk’s Phantom. The double-holstered hero, brandishing one of his two handguns
Lightning posting: Downy fabric softener commercial on tv, heard out of the corner of my ear:
It brings mice into your laundry
I contemplated the other indoor plagues I have suffered here in Palo Alto: houseflies, clothes moths, Argentine ants. No cockroaches. Only the occasional silverfish or centipede. Rats and squirrels yearning to get indoors, but without success. No mice.
And now a fabric softener could bring mice upon me.
Briefly noted. Michael Covarrubias — an American, from Battle Creek MI, who lives and works in Turkey, and is now on holiday in Madrid — has been reporting on Facebook on the texture of the life around him in Madrid, taking photos with a keen eye for little bits of beauty, oddity, and humor. Today’s MC observations included a surprise: state-fair concession food from the farmlands of middle America. That edible and portable triumph of Americana, the corndog / corn dog: a hot dog coated with cornmeal batter and deep fried, on a stick. The Perrito Nebraska ‘little Nebraska dog’, an exotic specialty of the little restaurant La Españolita (I’m sorry; we’re all awash in diminutives).
As a bonus, it comes with some truly grotesque ad design that undercuts the natural goofy-phallic attractions of the corndog as art object.
On Pinterest this morning, this entertaining vintage ad, from the site Envisioning the American Dream (“A visual remix of the American Dream as pictured in Mid-Century media”), in “Unintentionally Gay Ads — Does He or Doesn’t He?” by Sally Edelstein on 6/12/13:
(#1) A 1944 ad for Wilson Wear pajamas and shorts; SE’s comment: Boxers, bedrooms and pajamas were a natural setting for a romp among “roomates”
What makes this one so funny (because unintentionally gay) is something the ad agency surely never considered. They wanted to advertise a Wilson Wear line by showing both the pajamas and the boxer shorts. So they depicted two guys in intimate menswear in the same pattern — suggesting that they’re boyfriends in His and His clothing, guys who are, as they say, in each other’s pants.
Me, I think it’s sweet.
… take 2. Previously on this blog (in my 5/11 posting “The gay handshake”), a quote from GoNakedMagazine and Travels, on the Medium site, “The Gay Handshake: 5 Reasons Why Blowjobs [Are] Good for Your Health” … with this wonderful photo of a handsome young Latino character enjoying an especially long and thick churro filled with vanilla cream:
(#1) Chavo con churro (Mexican nickname Chavo ‘kid’), as I’ve come to think of him, in a photo I’ve been unable to find the source of
And then in the last few days I’ve been blitzed with tv commercials for Subway footlong snacks to accompany their footlong subs. From the Subway newsroom:
Subway® Reveals Sidekicks, an Irresistible Collection of Footlong Cookies, Churros and Pretzels
Three beloved snacks — Subway’s chocolate chip cookies, Cinnabon® churros and Auntie Anne’s® pretzels — take on a new, iconic footlong form, exclusively at Subway restaurants starting January 22.
From the annals of remarkable commercial names, a delicious punmanteau name for a Phoenix AZ taco truck, which just flashed by, without remark, in the first sentence of the piece “Motor Mouth” by Aaron Timms in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine:
Keith Lee is sitting in the passenger seat of a car outside Juanderful Tacos in Phoenix.
Juanderful = Juan (a stereotypical Mexican name) + wonderful, so conveying something like ‘wonderfully Mexican’ or ‘wonderful in a typically Mexican way’.
(#1) The sprightly logo (you can imagine the patter: “Hi! I’ll be your carnitas tacos today! Enjoy my meat!”); the food truck has a website, here
Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro is a Psychiatrist cartoon with a stylized tunafish on the couch:
(#1) To understand this cartoon, you need to recognize that the patient’s not any old tuna, but Charlie, the celebrity mascot for the StarKist brand, whose widely advertised decades-long goal in life is to taste good (while — sorry, Charlie — his pursuit of good taste constantly frustrates this ambition, an experience that seems have led him to seek therapy) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page)
There’s a surprisingly rich history here (but one that might be specifically North American, so that the cartoon might be baffling to many of my readers). Summarized in this entry on the tv tropes site:
