Archive for the ‘Morphology’ Category

surfdom

February 22, 2022

The Zippy strip for 2/20, in which Bill Griffith gets to goof on surf vs. serf:

(#1) Zippy’s title: “Serf City!!”, playing on the song title “Surf City”

panel 1: the serf wakes up in his cell and gets up — the idiomatic phrase surf’s up, roughly ‘the waves are good for surfing; let’s do it’, so figuratively ‘conditions are good for action; let’s get on with it’

panel 2: the serf surfing the net — the (metaphorical) verb surf ‘move from page to page or site to site on’

panel 3: the serf channel-surfing — the (similarly metaphorical) synthetic-compound verb channel-surf ‘change frequently from one television channel to another’

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Men’s Briefs: the locked gaze

February 20, 2022

(A little tribute to, among other things, man-on-man anal sex in the Cowboy position, and the facial expressions and gaze accompanying the act — so definitely not for kids or the sexually modest. There are fuzzed-up images below; the photos with the genitals untouched are in a parallel posting “The locked gaze” on AZBlogX today.)

A Falcon Studios e-mail ad yesterday:

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The cartoon marziportmandemic

February 16, 2022

Today’s Piccolo/Price Rhymes With Orange, with a perfect XYZ (= XY + YZ) portmanteau:

(#1)
marzipandemic
= /ˈmartsəˌpæn/ marzipan + /ˌpænˈdɛmɪk/ pandemic

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Metalico Cat

February 14, 2022

The 2/7 Wayno/Piraro Bizarro strip offers the complex portmanteau Metalico Cat = Metallico + Calico Cat (plus a cute title from Wayno: “The Shredder”):


(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)

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The portmanteau truck

January 31, 2022

🐯🐅🐯(tiger – tiger – tiger, rather than rabbit- rabbit – rabbit) anticipating by a bit the new month tomorrow (February, holding the promise that — in the Northern Hemisphere — winter will in fact come to an end) and also the (lunar) new year, the Year of the Tiger

Meanwhile, this morning’s e-mail brings me a Wayno/Piraro Bizarro with the excellent POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) portmanteau truck = portmanteau + tow truck, the truck in question being a brunch (breakfast + lunch) truck where you can get Tofurkey (tofu + turkey) with Dijonnaise (Dijon + mayonnaise) dressing and a cronut (croissant + doughnut), which you can eat with a spork (spoon + fork).

At the same time, a Daily Jocks ad that’s at once charming and raunchy, featuring a model wearing a garment I would call a moosinglet, a moose singlet, that is, a wrestling singlet in which the model is displaying a moose-knuckle, a penis (especially an erect one) that is visible though the wearer’s clothing.

And then portmanteau truck will lead us to portmanteau jam as a name for a POP chain.

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Eating like a Pygmalion

December 28, 2021

… Wayno’s portmanteauing title for yesterday’s (12/27) Wayno/Piraro Bizarro:


(#1) A play on Shaw / slaw (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)

Three things: one, plays on the Shaw of George Bernard Shaw (plenty of room for silliness here); two, on the wonders of (cole) slaw; and three, a note on the exclamation by George (which of course has nothing to do with GBS, but also nothing to with kings of Great Britain, since George I (from Hanover) didn’t ascent to the throne until 1714, while exclamations calling on a George go back at least to 1616).

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Bizarros of the Solstice, Festivus, and Christmas

December 25, 2021

Wayno/Piraro Bizarro cartoons for the 21st (Winter Solstice), 23rd (Festivus, for the airing of grievances), and 25th (Christmas Day). The first two are Christmas-related, but today’s is not (at least in any way I can see), so in a spirit of holiday orneriness, I’ll start with that one.

12/25: the Fritz Carlton:


(#1) Ritz on the fritz (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page.)

Fritz Carlton: an erratic portmanteau of on the fritz ‘not functioning’ and Ritz-Carlton the luxury hotel chain. (Note: the desk clerk is a supercilious Frenchman, an imagined present-day César Ritz.)

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The illusion of macrophallicity

December 8, 2021

(A posting about (among other things) big penises, gay porn, the male body, and man-man sex, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)

It begins with an ad for last week’s 2021 Cyber Week sale from the Falcon family of gay porn sites, reported on in my 12/2/21 XBlog posting “Johnny Torque and friends”. Illustration #1 there (JT in Naked Sword’s Frat House Cream), cropped for WordPress modesty, though what remains is nevertheless important, plus text from AZBlogX:


(#1) The photo from AZBlogX has been cropped exactly at the tip of Torque’s penis; this version is all that WordPress allows

Featuring the lean pornstar Johnny Torque in a pose engineering to make it appear that he has an extraordinarily long cock, reaching, when fully erect, almost all the way to the cleft between his pecs; actually, the shot was made from below, looking up, and his upper body was somewhat bent forward over his cock — actions that together make the tip of his cock look quite close to his chest.

This is the illusion of macrophallicity (noun macrophallicity ‘possession of a big dick’ < adj. macrophallic ‘having a big dick’ < noun macrophallus ‘big dick’; and note also the useful noun macrophallicism ‘veneration of big dicks’, denoting a characteristic preoccupation of American men).

To appreciate the illusion, consider the distance ∆g-c between your genital top (the top of your vulva if you’re a woman, the top of the base of your penis if you’re a man) and that spot on the lower border in #1 just a bit below the intermammary cleft, between your breasts / pecs. Torsos differ in length, of course, but mine is roughly the same as Johnny Torque’s, and ∆g-c for me is over a foot, which would give JT a truly world-class macrophallus. In fact, his cock is a standard porn cock, reported to be just over 7ʺ long.

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Fiberglass football

November 14, 2021

The Zippy strip of 11/8, in which our Pinhead confronts the hulking fiberglass figure of Football Man (looming in front of the Moreland Tire Co., whose products Football Man is presumably exalting:


(#1) Whatever Moreland products Football Man is hawking, he’s also exalting football as quintessentially American — so if Zippy is no fan of the game, he’s no American either — and as a (dark) metaphor for life (next up in the game of life: brain damage)

Having spent 29 years as a college professor in Columbus OH, I have a lot to say about football, very little of it pleasant, but this is probably not the time to air my grievances.

So put that aside, and ask the questions that almost every Zippy strip provokes: who are these guys? what is this place?

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Four cartoons on familiar themes

November 10, 2021

… in recent days, covering a wide territory: in chronological order,

—  from 10/31, a Mother Goose and Grimm Psychiatrist cartoon with a Halloween theme and some puns

— from the 11/1 New Yorker, a Desert Crawl cartoon by David Sipress

— from 11/3, a Zippy strip with Zippylicious repetition (onomatomania)

— from 11/9, a Rhymes With Orange with a notable POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau)

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