The t-shirt I put on this morning, taken from the top of a big pile I rotate through, happened to be the “Every Time You Masturbate, God Kills a Kitten” number, which is of course a joke — but one that taps uneasily into attitudes about masturbation. And then it turned out that the history of the slogan (with a different graphic from the one on my t-shirt) has been nailed down. The original computer graphic:
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Three language-related cartoons for the day: a Zits with terms of venery; a Rhymes With Orange with an absurd portmanteau; and a One Big Happy in which Ruthie runs afoul of synonyms and homonyms:
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Today’s Zippy is a fantasy on the great film noir Kiss Me Deadly, which might not have been enough to move me to post it here, but there was the excellent technical term anhedonic in there…
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Today’s Zippy takes place in the Brunswick Diner in Brunswick ME, with a side trip to bowling balls; meanwhile, the Pinheads and the Roundheads each regard the other (somewhat surreptitiously) as exotic creatures:
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Lots of stuff about names to come, taking us from Brunswick ME to Brunswick stew with a lot of stops in between.
Passed on recently on Facebook, this Wondermark cartoon from 6/25/15, “Throw Back the Dead Man’s Coin” (#1135), with two of David Malki’s top-hatted characters who are deeply contemptuous of their social inferiors (as evidenced in other strips), one of whom is given (as here) to arguing for the sake of argument:
This strip introduced the Earthworm Bucket metaphor that was then the basis for a series of four strips (#1136-9) that I posted about here in “Disruptive conversation” of 7/8/15, about (among other things) the troll of arguing for the sake of argument.
(Cartoonist David Malki has given names to his recurring characters — like the black-hatted asshole in this strip — but I don’t know this one’s name.)
Meanwhile, the strip gives some freshness to the figure labored metaphor.
Today, Zippy once again confronts his diner essence at Zip’s in Dayville CT:
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I say “once again”, because this is the seventh Zippy to depict or mention Zip’s since it first appeared in the strip on 5/10/98.
Alerted by Terry Castle on Pinterest, the work (surreal, nightmarish, harsh, often scabrous) of Roland Topor.
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Les Bestioles (ca. 1973)
From Wikipedia:
Roland Topor (January 7, 1938 – April 16, 1997) was a French illustrator, painter, writer, filmmaker and actor, known for the surreal nature of his work. He was of Polish-Jewish origin and spent the early years of his life in Savoy where his family hid him from the Nazi peril.
Roland Topor wrote the novel The Tenant (Le Locataire chimérique, 1964), which was adapted to film by Roman Polanski in 1976. The Tenant is the story of a Parisian of Polish descent, a chilling exploration of alienation and identity, asking disturbing questions about how we define ourselves. The later novel Joko’s Anniversary (1969), another fable about loss of identity, is a vicious satire on social conformity.
Today’s Zippy, with some western Massachusetts silliness, notably the possibly risible name of Belchertown MA:
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Note the “burping contest in Belchertown”, which plays on the name Belcher in Belchertown, treating it as if it were an agentive in –er based on eructational belch ‘burp’.
Yesterday’s Rhymes With Orange::
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Two things here. One, the fact that English has both riffle through and rifle through, with different histories, but with very similar pronunciations (riffle with /ɪ/, rifle with /aj/) and very similar meanings. But both endure. In the case of the cartoon, I would have said riffle, but it all turns on the starling’s intentions in going through that underwear drawer.
And two, how we are to understand invasive. And that takes us into a great morass of uses for this word and for the word alien, the starling being an alien species in North America, in the technical sense that it is not a species native to the continent, but was introduced from abroad.
Today’s Dilbert has the pointy-headed boss talking to Dilbert about listening to his gut instincts:
The covert punch line is prefigured in the first panel, with the word analysis. Then in the third panel, Dilbert (recognizing that his boss’s gut instinct can’t literally be telling him anything, since it can’t literally speak) slyly suggests, via his question, that his boss’s gut is figuratively speaking through an orifice closer than his mouth, namely his anus — that is, that the boss is, as we say in vulgar slang, talking out of his ass.