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):
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(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
(The TitanMen TaXXX Day special offer ad for this year is heavy with massive erections from the 2017 gay porn flick Taxxx, so that’s off on AZBlogX. What’s here is packed with crude language about men’s bodies and mansex, definitely not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
The DVD cover, just barely penis-free, for Taxxx:
Maggie Larson cartoon in the New Yorker‘s 4/8/19 issue:
(#1) (Dried) fruits and nuts meeting and greeting, under the disco ball
A POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau): trail mixer = trail mix + mixer. Combining two elements very much grounded in particular sociocultural worlds (plus that disco ball glittering overhead).
Today’s mailing from bon appétit magazine leads with a hybrid food:
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(#2) Normally, you’d expect the hybrid food to come with a corresponding cute portmanteau name, but not this time
The title of this cartoon, which turned up yesterday in FB’s Our Bastard Language group:
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The captain is both a pirate and (as it turns out, once you figure out what the man intends to say) a grammar nazi, bent on correcting his crew’s inferior (as he sees it) English — hence the portmanteau grammar pirate. So the cartoon is, primarily, about (stereotypical) pirate talk (which will take us to the West Country of England), but also about peeving.
On the Japan Times site on February 9th, “Say ‘I love you’ a different way with Kourakuen’s chocolate ramen” by Patrick St. Michel”:
Alerted by NPR this morning and entertained by the band’s name, I checked out Mandolin Orange and really liked what I found.
(#1) Mandolin Orange recording “Wildfire” 11/2/16 at Paste Studios in NYC
And they’ll be playing at the Fillmore in SF next month:
