Archive for the ‘Monsters’ Category

Godzilla, enlightened and confused

December 17, 2025

Aric Olnes’s Godzilla countdown to Christmas on Facebook, #5 (10 days to go) on 12/15:

Fighting to extract himself from the lights? Showing off his Christmas style? Swatting at the lights like those airplanes that sometimes bedevil him? Or just confounded, as so many of us have been, by the strings of lights? Enraged, delighted, or baffled? It’s the Christmas mystery of Godzilla.

AO’s series began on 12/12 (with 14 days to go); see my posting “Godzilla Santa #1”, showing a wonderfully benevolent Godzilla in a Santa cap, starring in a fable in which he rescues Santa’s workshop from Shimo the ice monster. Other items in the series show us a more traditional Godzilla, devouring trains and devastating city skylines, but for Christmas.

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Posted in Art, Holidays, Linguistics in the comics, Monsters | Leave a Comment »

Quiet Piggy

November 23, 2025

11 … 2 … 3 it’s Fibonacci day today; the omens foretell 5 in your future, and then 8, and then 13, and then 21, leaping upward in ever-greater jumps, in an elegant spiral of numbers (I used to be a mathematician, and still have a license to chatter enthusiastically about numbers and abstract patterns). This is today’s moment of wonder and delight, the only protection I can offer against what comes next.

A moral monster of great power, dripping corruption and careening into dementia, is the stuff of unbearable nightmare; we are all living in it. Even worse: behind this demonic figure stand cool-headed engineers of death and dominion. But today I talk about the figurehead of their plots, Our Overlord Grabpussy. In two of his recent forays with the press, which I report on here  from a New York Times story of 11/18 by Michael M. Grynbaum (which I believe to be the most accurate and detailed account of these two episodes — which I’ll call Saudi and Pedo); the NYT is behind a paywall for me, but three friends managed to get copies of the text for me.

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Posted in Events and occasions, Insults, Language and politics, Language in social life, Mathematics, Monsters, Morality, Music, Public and private | 2 Comments »

The egg crack’d from side to side

November 21, 2025


(#1) Alfred Tennyson,”The Lady of Shalott” (1832)

A Joe Dator cartoon in the latest (11/24/25) print issue of the New Yorker poses the question, “What if Humpty Dumpty had survived his fall?”

Humpty Dumpty is an egg. An egg contains a developing chicken embryo. The embryo will eventually mature, crack through the egg, and emerge as a chick. (There is even theme music for this scenario, Mussorgsky’s “Ballad of the Unhatched Chicks / the Chicks in their Shells”, from “Pictures at an Exhibition”.)

JD shows the first moment of emergence, the chick’s head bursting through the chest of a dismayed Humpty Dumpty, who is toppling backwards in his chair — a scene that will be viscerally painful for modern audiences familiar with the 1979 movie Alien, with its famously grotesque Chestbuster scene, but will in any case evoke a fatal heart attack :


(#2) Humpty Dumpty and his female companion at table, when the mortal wound opens up; it will crack him from side to side

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Posted in Comic conventions, Gender and sexuality, Language and animals, Language and medicine, Linguistics in the comics, Monsters, Movies and tv, Music, Poetry | 5 Comments »