đ đ đ the rabbits of December take us to the hidden spot in the tropical jungle where ottomans rule among the palm trees, as depicted in this John McPherson Close to Home cartoon of 2/14/15:
(#1) A pun on Ottoman Empire, the Turkish realm, and ottoman, a kind of footstool
đ Â đ Â đ Â three tigers for Ultimate November, which is also St. Andrew’s Day, the national day of Scotland (a day for unicorns, thistles, and heather; and haggis, shortbread, and whisky)
The One Big Happy strip from 10/7, another in a series on boys and masculinity:
James and Joe, playing with their cars — and contemplating how to negotiate the shift away from the significantly homosocial world of childhood to the more complex heterosocial worlds of adolescence
Note that Monica signals her openness to further exchange with Joe — and that she picks Joe rather than James; if you know the strip’s characters, you will see that she has chosen wisely.
Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro is a Psychiatrist cartoon — they’re a Bizarro specialty — that is incomprehensible if you don’t recognize the figure of the patient and know about this patient’s history with psychiatry (cardboard box??):
(#1) Incredibly, it’s also significant that this is today’s Bizarro, and that today is 11/26/22 (If youâre puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon â Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip â see this Page.)
Significant, in that your appreciation of the joke will be heightened some if you understand that today is a notable anniversary associated with the figures in the cartoon.
And your appreciation might be heightened a bit more if you recognize who the therapist in the cartoon is (based on).
All of this is so in-jokey arcane that the actual cartoon distributed by Cartoon Kingdom includes a bottom line explaining the significance of the date, which is then a key to unraveling everything else. But the patient, you have to recognize the patient.
Who is not just a character in a cartoon (in this cartoon, the way the therapist is), but a character from a specific comic strip, drawn in the style of that strip, so that the patient looks “cartoony” in a way the therapist does not.
Yes, another Sick Day, but I press on with today’s very pointed Zippy strip:
(#1) It’s all about ogling
From NOAD (note the content of the examples chosen: men ogling women, the canonical ogling scenario):
verb ogle: [with object] stare at in a lecherous manner: he was ogling her breasts | [no object]:  men who had turned up to ogle. ORIGIN late 17th century: probably from Low German or Dutch; compare with Low German oegeln, frequentative of oegenâ look atâ.
Yet another Sick Day for me, so this is a minimal posting — you’ll have to google up stuff on your own — but I was so taken by today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro that I wanted to share it with you (with a bit of commentary, of course):
Wayno’s antic title: “Wrapper’s Delight” (with a pun on wrap vs. rap that I’ve borrowed for the title of this posting); if youâre puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon â Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip â see this Page
My life continues to be mostly absorbed by the Respiratory Virus and what I’ve come to call the Sleep Monster, which has had me knocked out for five hours of today already. Bits of my waking time have been taken up by useful domestic things, like replacing my dead slipper / moccasins and assembling a pleasing Thanksgiving meal for myself (a bowl of very eccentric but satisfying posole — pork, white hominy, red, with idiosyncratic embellishments).
Otherwise, I’ve been consumed by fits of red-hot rage combined with body-wracking weeping sorrow over the shootings at Club Q in Colorado Springs; I hope to be able to post on that subject soon, but not now. In any case, before this news came to me, today’s Zippy strip came in, with a touching (and characteristically funny) memorial by cartoonist Bill Griffith to his cartoonist wife, Diane Noomin, who died back in September and then was memorialized in a service  by a bunch of unruly friends back on the 10th.
This is way too brief, but it’s the best I can do before my day runs out.
Just to note that these people are of my generation: Griffith is 4 years younger than me, Noomin was 7 years younger. For comparison: I’m essentially the same age as Nancy Pelosi, Anthony Fauci, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan, and only 2 years older than Joe Biden.
(more…)
(I am now afflicted by two separate medical conditions — neither of them life-threatening, but the two of them together absorbing most of my day — so this is a Mary, Queen of Scots Not Dead Yet posting. Real content, but a brief job of composition for me. I have not forgotten Zippy and his dots.)
Passed on to me by Jens Fiederer this morning, a Gary Larson Far Side cartoon I don’t recall having seen before:
(#1) Protective coloration saves lives
The Zippy strip of 9/10, in which our Pinhead, anticipating little balls of flash-frozen ice cream, embraces dot dot dot in two ways at once:
(#1) Ellipsis dots meet Dippin’ Dots at the carnival
Two very different uses of NOAD‘s noun dot-1 ‘a small round mark or spot’ (dot-2 is an archaic noun referring to a dowry):
That’s who the postcard was addressed to. The postcard announcing the annual holiday fair of the artifactory / The Artifactory in Palo Alto:
(#1) Arnold M Zwicky has been getting these announcements for a couple of decades, but I believe that this is the first time MARCIA M Zwicky got one and I didn’t (it’s possible that I didn’t notice for a couple of years, because COVID-19, but my replacement by MARCIA M is surely a recent thing)
I suspect that this address is incorrect — it should be MARCIA M M Zwicky, because her full name is MARCIA MARCIA MARCIA Zwicky. As in The Brady Bunch.
Back in the real world, there’s the question of where MARCIA came from, and for that I have no idea, beyond the possibility that the Artifactory’s address database somehow mingled two different addresses, MARCIAÂ + X and Y +Â M Zwicky.
In the world of consensus reality, there’s the Artifactory cooperative and the tv series The Brady Bunch (though I have to point out that we’re interested in the series for the (fictive) narrative in it, for the stories it tells). And then the fantasies and inventions I’ll spin out will use some other established fictive narratives: the story of the Three Magi and the tales of the Archangel Michael. With a side reference to the comics and graphic novels of Alison Bechdel.
In fact, Bechdel will serve as the entry point into the (real-world) story of the Artifactory cooperative.
Following on my 11/12 posting “Hold on to the bubble …”, about a Mother Goose and Grimm strip, on speech and thought bubbloons as physical objects, with words in them — and with a note that the MGG, Zippy, and (especially) Pearls Before Swine strips were given to this goofy physicalist conceptualization of speech / thought bubbloons: the discovery that I had squirreled away on my desktop (for eventual posting) two Zits strips in which Jeremy and his mother edit material in each other’s bubbloons. Just lovely.
