Yesterday’s Zippy takes us to the Boston waterfront and a piece of remarkable antic public art:
(#1)
A chimera — a composite of parts of a Boston lobster (those claws!) and parts of Mickey Mouse (all the rest, but especially the ears), let’s portmanteau him Lobstickey Mouse — who stood for a couple of years by Faneuil Hall on the Boston waterfront.
Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro collabo goes (sort of) bilingual:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)
The Cyrillic label hints at сардинкы (transliteration in Latin letters: sardinky/i) ‘little sardines’, with a hard sign Ъ added to allow an allusion to one of those odd symbols. Meanwhile, the title tsardines is a portmanteau, of tsar and sardines, referring to the five tsars of Russia packed like sardines into the tin.
(Yes, full appreciation of the cartoon requires assembling a fair amount of knowledge of several kinds, starting with sardines and their customary packaging.)
(It starts with burrito-savoring, but immediately spreads to flagrantly carnal acts described in plain terms, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
An old ad campaign for Taco Bell’s beefy burritos, drastically pornphotoshopped so as to illustrate techniques for tackling those tasty tortilla tubes (10/12 hat tip to Chris Hansen):
(#1) Eat my burrito, dude!
Is this queer, or what? One shirtless guy takes tube lying on his side on a bed, the other eats it on his knees. Both have a hand wrapped firmly around the base of the object of their desire. Both have their eyes closed in the ecstasy of oral pleasure.
What do we call this act of sensual gratification? I’m going for burritio /bǝríšiò/: New Latin for ‘burrito-eating’, on loose analogy with fellatio /fǝléšiò/ ‘cock-sucking’, encouraged by the physical similarities between the two objects and between the two acts.
It’s been about ten days since the last POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) here — a 10/9/19 posting “Two old cartoon friends”, with doctors without border collies — so, on the theory that regular POPs are good for the mind and the spirit, today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro collabo, at the very gates of heaven:
pearly gates + gate-crasher
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.)
Appreciating the cartoon requires that you be familiar with the pop-culture story (whose source is the Christian Bible) of St. Peter at the pearly gates to heaven; that you be familiar with the belief (spread by an 1989 animated movie) that all dogs go to heaven; that you know the idiomatic synthetic compound gate-crasher; and that you know the idiomatic nouning plus-one. That’s a lot of cultural stuff.
… in recent mail: border-collie-bereft medicos (from Scott Hilburn on 8/12/14) and Egyptian spelling contests (from Rhymes With Orange today), bringing the return of two familiar cartoon themes:
(#1) The POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) from Doctors Without Borders + border collies
(#2) A spelling bee done with hieroglyphs
The 9/3 Pearls Before Swine:
(#1)
Great big themes:
anti-intellectualism: the distrust of, and rejection of, learning;
the ignorance of the young, elevated to a form of resolute stupidity;
mass hysteria: the amplification of irrational beliefs and behaviors in crowds
All packaged into dumbnado, with the libfix –nado, that entertaining pop-cultural product of the Sharknado movies.
From correspondent RJP, a link to a story on the My Modern Met site, “Adorable Egg Holder Transforms Your Produce into a Pack of Penguins” by Sara Barnes on 8/23/19:
(#1) Egguins: portmanteau in name, portmanteau in function
Music, cartoons, and language play, plus Slavic folklore, Seiji Ozawa and his expressive hair, pony cars, symphony trumpeters, NPR, and Frankenstein’s monster. It starts with this wonderful cartoon by Jeffrey Curnow from the NPR site (hat tip to Virginia Transue):
(#1)
(Several shirtless people, in case that annoys or distresses you, but otherwise mostly about music.)
According to my calendar, today is both World Naked Gardening Day and World Accordion Day, which naturally led me to imagine a naked gardener playing the accordion. But my calendar turns out to be half wrong: World Accordion Day is fixed on May 6th; World Naked Gardening Day, on the other hand, is a movable feast, the first Saturday in May, which this year was the 4th.
However, the two occasions did coincide exactly in 2017, and at least one accordion-playing gardener squeezed nude for that occasion.
… and the monster that guides the elderly. Both pieces of outdoor art in Switzerland, the first in the town of Glarus (in my ancestral canton of Glarus), the second in the city of Zürich.
(#1) The Caring Hand in Glarus
