This will turn into another News for Penises postings.
Today’s Bizarro shows a man in the throes of what we might call ulnarism:
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page.)
Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
The grief of ulnarism
February 19, 2016The Dog People of Easter Island
February 18, 2016One more Zippy strip in the Easter Island series I posted about yesterday, now with an origin story for the Dog People of Easter Island and a proposal to make money by developing the site commercially:
Background to the story in yesterday’s posting.
This would be a good time to end the series, I think.
A passion for pickles
February 17, 2016Note: this posting is about pickles (in the American sense: pickled cucumbers) and uses of the word pickle, especially in proper names; my main theme is that pickles and the word pickle tend to be intrinsically funny, inherently risible. I’ll be citing a whole bunch of uses, but I do not intend this posting to be a complete inventory of uses of the word, so if I don’t mention some example that you know or especially like, please add it in a comment, but don’t do this by accusing me of having failed or neglected to mention your example; that would just be gratuitously insulting.
It started with an entertaining piece by Winnie Hu in the NYT on the 15th: (on-line) “At United Pickle, Preserving the Standards of a Deli Staple”, (in print) “Family-Run Supplier Preserves Standards For a Briny Deli Staple”, beginning:
Not every cucumber has what it takes to be a pickle. As dozens of them tumbled from a steel hopper onto a conveyor belt in a Bronx factory, two workers enforced a strict pickle standard.
Bruised. Broken. Too curvy. Too short. Sorry, no exceptions.
The rejects — about one in 10 — were tossed into plastic bins, destined to become relish.
“You can’t just pickle any produce,” said Stephen Leibowitz, the self-described “chief pickle maven” of this operation, as he reached past the workers to personally pluck out an offending cucumber. “I can put in the best ingredients, and they still won’t turn out right.”
Mr. Leibowitz is the man to see if the pickles at your local deli, diner or burger joint have lost their crunch. Whether kosher dills, sours, half-sours or bread-and-butters, chances are they got their start on the production line at United Pickle, the largest family-owned supplier of pickles and pickled condiments in New York City.
Or as Mr. Leibowitz, 73, ever the pickle pitchman, put it, “If you’re in a pickle, call United Pickle.”
Kosher dill spears in preparation:
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Carl Barks on Easter Island
February 17, 2016Today’s Zippy is the third in a series mashing up the moai of Easter Island and the characters of Disney cartoonist Carl Barks. It then turns out that the moai do appear in the Orlando FL of Walt Disney World — but in chocolate. The cartoons:
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Mandrake
February 13, 2016Today’s Daily Jocks ad, for an offer featuring BCNÜ underwear (in this case an Atletico Sports Brief), showing the model alluringly posed on sheepskin:
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The same model, in a similar but darker pose, in a Grip Retro Brief:
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My caption:
Man-Dragon
He chose the name Mandrake,
His conventionally handsome veneer
Concealing a magical, dangerous
Creature, the taste of whose body drove
Men into delirium. Posing as an
Underwear model, he transformed
Men into beasts.
Calling shogun
February 13, 2016Today’s Bizarro comes with a fairly distant pun (which is better in print than in pronunciation):
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(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)
It all turns on shogun – shotgun, and that’s entertaining, but once again I’m interested in what you have to know to understand the cartoon and see why it’s funny.
Word play for the weekend
February 13, 2016Two recent items with word play in them: a Channel 1 Releasing (C1R) ad for a Valentine’s Day sale on gay porn with a groaner pun (gay porn ads are given to all kinds of language play); and yesterday’s Mother Goose and Grimm cartoon, turning on an ambiguity between literal and metaphorical uses of the word balloon.
Comic Asexual
February 10, 2016From the site Vulture: Devouring Culture on the 8th, “Archie Comic Reveals Jughead Is Asexual” by Abraham Riesman. The comic:
Morning names: wiles, Wiles
February 9, 2016Sunday’s morning name was the common noun wiles, but that led me to the adjective wily, the proper name Wile E. Coyote, and to people with the family name Wiles, in particular the mathematician Andrew Wiles and the gay pornstar Kevin Wiles. Actually, being who I am, I thought of Kevin first and then got to Andrew, but I’m going to take them in the other order here, because until I get to Kevin Wiles, there’s nothing especially racy here, but once I get to KW, we go deep into the world of men’s bodies and man-man sexual acts, and the posting turns into things that are definitely not for kids or the sexually modest. When I get to that point, I’ll raise a flag, and you can decide whether you want to bail out. That last section is certainly verbally X-rated, but though there are photos, the ones here aren’t visually X-rated; I posted the X-rated KW images (8 of them) on AZBlogX yesterday.
At the noodle bar
February 7, 2016The Saturday (February 6th) Rhymes With Orange:
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Ah, a noodle bar — one in which the customer picks a type of pasta and a type of sauce. There are in fact such places, though they seem not to be called noodle bars.