They are deadly, those jaws. Deadly sins. Gay deadly sins. Decked out in Red …… Orange ….. Yellow …. Green … Blue .. Purple . Omigod Gay Pride!
From Jeff Shaumeyer on Facebook today: the Life of Sharks cartoon for 6/1/22, to inaugurate Gay Pride Month:
(#1) The current menu of Seven Deadly Sins: Pride, Greed, Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Wrath, Sloth; waiter, I’ll have Gay Gluttony for starters , Gay Lust for the main course, and Gay Sloth for afters
Two strips (so far) from Mother Goose and Grimm in which Grimmy gets taken (involuntarily) on a speech balloon ride through his favorite strips. A species of meta-comic, whose subject is the conventions of cartooning (in this case, conventions about the representation of speech and thought), and in which characters exhibit awareness that they are in fact in a comic strip.
Just a year ago, we had a Pearls Before Swine strip of this sort, and now MGG floats over Pearls (after Blondie, but before Shoe.)
First, some silly banter on Facebook that led to reminiscing about the roasted-eggplant chocolate-cream elephant-god chant
Baba ganoush ganache Ganesh! Baba ganoush ganache!
Which then plugged into the 4/3 Zippy strip I’ve been saving for an auspicious moment, in which Zippy and Zebrina order coffee together, sharing the onomatomanic chant:
double cup … sipper lid
A little study in N + N compounds in English, their great utility and versatility (they pack a lot of content into two-word expressions), and their consequent massive potential ambiguity (so that divining the intended meaning can require vast amounts of background knowledge and appreciating details of the context in which the compound is used). You can have (great) brevity, or you can have (great) clarity, but you can’t have both at once.
From the world of commerce, the compound dog spot (which many of us will not have encountered before, or will take to be a reference to the coat pattern of Dalmatian dogs). From the comic strips, two compounds that have conventional interpretations but can also be understood in fresh and unconventional ways: from One Big Happy, dancing school; from Bizarro, cowboy.
The 6/1 Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, a Desert Crawl cartoon in which the crawling man hallucinates a sexual oasis, where two saguaro cactuses offer to, umm, entertain him (Wayno’s title: “Prickly Playmates”):
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)
The Mother Goose and Grimm strip for 1/29
turns on an ambiguity in the VP, which is of the form:
want/need + NP1 + in NP2
The ambiguity appears more generally, in VPs of the form:
want/need + NP + PredicativeComplement
The ambiguity involves two different constituent structures for the VP, with concomitant differences in the argument structures, and indeed, in the semantics of the primary verbs of desire, want and need: desiring a thing — the much more common semantics, seen in Mother Goose’s assertion:
I want that dress in the window
— versus desiring a change of state (an inchoative ‘I want that dress to be in / get into the window’ or causative ‘I want that dress to be put into the window’ reading), presupposed by Grimmy’s objection:
But that dress is in the window
Knowing that the woolly mammoth is my primary totem animal, Anneli Meyer Korn has pointed me to this little slice of the University District in Seattle:
(#1) The Woolly Mammoth shoe store, 4303 University Way NE, Seattle, WA 98105: “Comfortable, high quality, good-looking shoes and excellent customer service”
And from Wikipedia, on the excellent qualities of Mammuthus primigenius, the original woolly mammoth:
The woolly mammoth coexisted with early humans, who used its bones and tusks for making art, tools, and dwellings, and hunted the species for food.
M. primigenius provided humans with comfort, offering up its huge bones to form into shelter, and beauty, in ivory carvings. Plus useful tools and life-sustaining meat. The Woolly Mammoth store’s shoes provide comfort and good looks, but can they be used as needles or stave off hunger? I thought not.
Still, those are damn fine shoes. Especially the Birkenstocks:
More from the annals of selective attention and confirmation bias, now in the journal Psychological Science.
The umbrella phenomenon is the Frequency Illusion: if your attention is drawn to some phenomenon, it’s likely to appear to you to be very frequent, all around you. Then in the special case of the Out-Group Illusion, in which your attention is drawn to a phenomenon associated with a group you don’t belong to (which then appears to you to be characteristic of that group and especially frequent there). Now in the even more special case of what I’ll call the Threat Illusion, in which your attention is keenly drawn to a phenomenon associated with an out-group you perceive as being threatening to you (which then appears to be not only characteristic of that group but extraordinarily frequent there).
A Frequency Illusion cartoon (under the more colorful label of Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, a name based on one example of the effect, the sudden omnipresence of the Baader-Meinhof Gang’s name):
(A few references to man-on-man sexual acts, which I have, contrary to my usual practice, reworded with technical terminology, rather than plain street talk, so as not to contaminate this whole posting for some readers. But the references remain.)
Today’s Zippy strip:
(#1) Ah, the peri-natal trauma: the film podfolk have robbed Lippy of the ability to experience pleasure
But as Bill Griffith fully realizes, it’s a pressing question: how do we come to be the way we are? Framing the answer in this preposterous fashion only points up the complexity and mystery of the question. And how it nags at us: could I have been otherwise?
The speech balloon as physical object, in a continuing series of Wayno / Piraro Bizarro cartoons on the theme. Previously on this blog, my 5/18/22 posting “Orienting your speech (balloon)”, in which speech balloons have front sides and back sides. And now the 5/19 cartoon, in which you can record what’s in a balloon by plugging into it. And the 5/21 cartoon, in which the speaker’s laryngitis manifests itself as an empty balloon; it’s the balloon that’s afflicted.
