Yes, I’m not dead yet, but I’ve had grave difficulties in getting even a tiny posting together. So here’s today’s (7/23) Mother Goose and Grimm cartoon, from the meta-cartoon world:
We’ve seen piles of cartoons in which speech balloons play a role as physical objects in the cartoon’s world: people point at their contents, they act as actual balloons carrying someone away, etc. Now it’s the artist’s signature.
(Some male body parts, depicted and discussed in plain, but not raunchy, terms. So not squarely in the Sex Zone, but not tasteful either. Caution advised for kids and the sexually modest.)
For me, it all started with a recent ad on Facebook for suit sets (sleeveless tank tops with bikini underpants) from the Fabmens company in a variety of intriguing patterns, including a (more or less) rainbow “color block” pattern seen here from the rear:
(#1) The design of the underpants strikingly accentuates the wearer’s ass / butt / bum cleft / crack / cleavage, in a way that in my queer fashion I (at least) find decidedly hot
Yesterday’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)
A pun so terrible it’s wonderful: derivative / the riveter. A distant pun phonologically, sharing the prosodic pattern WSWWW and the medial material /ǝrív…t/, plus the pairing of /d/ vs. /ð/ initially, but with the distant matching of /v/ vs. /r/ finally, and with a single word matched with a two-word sequence. As with notably imperfect puns in general, it’s probably understandable only if you recognize the model for the pun: Rosie the Riveter, the name of the figure on the left in the cartoon and of the figure in the “We Can Do It” patriotic poster from WWII.
🇫🇷🇫🇷🇫🇷 The One Big Happy strip from 5/28:
We all, from time to time, come across a word we haven’t experienced before (or didn’t register having experienced it), and just guess, often tacitly, at its approximate meaning as the world goes on around us. Little kids, having had much less linguistic experience, do this all the time; they pretty much have to.
To this end, they use similarities to words or parts of words they do know, and Ruthie is an especially analytic kid, keen on finding word-parts in unfamiliar material — plenty of examples in earlier OBH postings on this blog. In this case, the word is in fact straightforwardly analyzable into two familiar parts, and Ruthie gets that.
Oh, but what are those parts? Phonologically /pruf/ (a N spelled proof) and /rid/ (a BSE-form V spelled read). No problem with the second, but there are several Ns proof; the compound proofread is an idiom with one of those Ns in it, but not the one that Ruthie detects.
Like most publications about science news for a general public, the weekly New Scientist has a notable sense of humor: two cartoons about science in every issue (see below), bits of word play inserted all over the place, and the occasional wryly funny news brief, like this one (“Bleak, very bleak”) in the 29 May 2021 issue, p. 56 (a note in “The back pages / Feedback” section):
We are grateful, for some value of grateful, to Michael Zehse for drawing our attention to the music of Nænøĉÿbbœrğ VbëřřћōlöKäävsŧ. We discover, as the extensive use of röck döts [AZ: and other diacritics] was perhaps inviting us to conclude, that this is “an extremely underground band that plays a dank, bleak, light-void music commonly referred to as either ‘ambient cosmic extreme funeral drone doom metal’ or ‘post-noise’.”
Having begun listening to one track, 10^100 Gs of Artificial Gravity, from their album The Ultimate Fate of the Universe, we can’t confirm the accuracy of the first description, but the second seems pretty fair.
The “windy, staticy” tone was achieved by the two band members, researchers who describe themselves as having met while studying carnivorous Antarctic predators, loading a bass, an amp and a laptop onto a dog sled to sample at the precise geographic South Pole during a long winter. Whatever we think of the outcome, this is true dedication to art. Rëspëkt.
Today’s Zippy strip — anticipating Teddy Bear Picnic Day by just one day (yes, this is relevant) — has our Pinhead engaged with a fiberglass Doggie head from the Doggie Diner chain (1948-86 in San Francisco and Oakland):
(#1) Doggie is a repeating character in Zippy, and the two are usually quite loquacious with one other — in my 12/27/13 posting “Doggie Diner”, they are in fact in a relationship — but so far in this strip, Doggie hasn’t gotten past the basic canine woof
🐇🐇🐇 The Mother Goose and Grimm strip from 6/30, with an allusion to an item of culture (the catchphrase “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition”, quoting from sketches from the Monty Python tv shows and recordings) and perpetrating a (fairly absurd) pun on the phrase:
(#1) The bull terrier Grimm and the cat Attila confront punishment for their household misdeed
So the ostentatiously playful allusion to the Spanish Inquisition is motivated by the situation in the strip.
Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, with a pun on monitor; and a popular dad joke — even better, a Swiss dad joke, with a pun on plus — retold by Rachel Maddow on her MSNBC show yesterday:
The 6/21 Zippy strip takes us to Kenosha WI, on the highway between Chicago and Milwaukee, along the shore of Lake Michigan — to the location of Mars Cheese Castle, which is why Zippy is there:
(#1) Nothing directly to do with the two principal foci of this blog — language and linguistics, gender and sexuality — but plenty on food, pop culture (along the roadside), and absurdist comedy
As for my interests, Kenosha does have the headquarters of Jockey International — hail to men’s underwear! — and a local woolly mammoth skeleton in its museum — my totem animal! — and, best of all in mid-America’s Land of Cheese, an annual fall Cheese-A-Palooza festival (devoted to the grilled cheese sandwich and to mac and cheese). But best of all is Mars Cheese Castle.
From Nancy Friedman / Fritinancy on Twitter on 6/15:
This Sam Gross cartoon from many years ago [in the New Yorker issue of 8/11/02] suddenly popped into my head for no special reason other than that it’s completely perfect.
(#1) A cat tale of two worlds
On the one hand, there’s the world of cats, in which they hunt small animals, like mice and voles, and proudly bring their dead prey home for their human. And then there’s the world of human family relationships, in which for a special occasion you bring your aging mother a present, in a wrapped gift box, with a card expressing your love for her on this occasion.
The speaker in Gross’s cartoon is in both worlds, which are aligned with one another: it’s both a cat bringing its mousey prey home to its owner and also a loving child with a gift-wrapped present for Mom — with a card for her. Read the card! Read the card!
