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 oegen‘ look at’.
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 you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — 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.
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(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, MARCIA + X and Y + 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.
… it has your words in it!
Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm strip goes all meta with speech and thought bubbles / balloons:
(#1) They’re physical objects, with words in them, and (like helium-filled balloons) they’ll rise in the air, taking their content — and, unless you fight against it, you too — with them. Aieee!
A recurrent theme on this blog, going back at least to my 10/8/13 posting “Speech balloons in Dingburg”, with a Zippy strip:
Personal background: I decided to declare today to be a Sick Day and have been doing only the minimal things of life, mostly dozing fitfully in my recliner chair, wrapped up in my bathrobe. (Meanwhile, workmen did serious work on the balcony above my patio, so I had them and their ladders and noisy tools all over my patio, but I just let this activity drift by on the fringes of my consciousness.)
Mingled in with my tortured dreams were actual useful thoughts about postings — I am pretty much incapable of not plying my craft, even in the most unlikely circumstances — including a really neat follow-up to my 11/7 posting “Centennial moments in NYC”, which has a section on the The New Yorker’s first cover illustration, a dandy peering at a butterfly through a monocle — the gentleman now referred to as “Eustace Tilley”, who serves as a kind of mascot for the magazine. Rea Irvin’s original Tilley cover is used every year on the issue closest to the anniversary date of February 21, sometimes with a newly drawn variation in its place.
So, I wondered, what was the 2022 cover like?
Wow! Kadir Nelson’s “High Style”, with Eustace as a proud Black woman in butterfly-ornamented apparel, including a mask for the pandemic.
And then I wondered when you crossed the line from a (new) interpretation, version, or variant of an original cultural item (like the Eustace Tilley image) and moved into the territory of an abstract form, format, or pattern (something you might think of as a meme or trope — Eustace as a vehicle for, or expression of, cultural content). And I even thought of a linguistic parallel to this distinction: in playful variation of a fixed expressions vs. a snowclone.
What follows now is not a posting elaborating on all of this — I’m guessing I have maybe half an hour before I’m poleaxed by exhaustion again — but just a teaser. Please be patient.
For reasons that don’t need to concern you, the full set of cartoons in The New Yorker‘s cartoon bank that have MEOW in their text. Only five of them, and they give me something to post on a day otherwise consumed by medical appointments, planning for medical appointments, and suffering from my afflictions. I post them here in roughly chronological order — three actually published in the magazine, two from material distributed in other ways by the magazine.
