Archive for the ‘Movies and tv’ Category

Well, nobody’s perfect

May 1, 2025

🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit for the first of May, and hordes of aroused bunnies are streaming in the streets, aggressively singing “L’Internationale”

Meanwhile, I had a wonderful dream last night, starring — a dream first — my grand-child Opal Armstrong Zwicky, who in real life is just about to graduate from the University of Pittsburgh. In the dream,  Opal and another young woman wrote a zany hit musical show in both English and Spanish. During the flurry of production, I met the grandfather of Opal’s collaborator, a charming man with whom I developed a friendship. My clothing, in the dream as in real life, clearly conveys that I’m gay, so this man, not wanting to be leading me on, admitted, gently, “You know, I’m straight” — to which I replied, quoting one of the great films of all time, “Well, nobody’s perfect” — a line I use frequently in my postings, after I celebrate some good friend, woman or man, whose nature runs contrary to tight gender norms, explaining that they’re straight, but, well, nobody’s perfect.

The movie is Some Like It Hot, and it’s a French farce given a distinctly American twist, with mobsters and eccentric millionaires. I am astonished to see that I haven’t ever written it up on this blog. But now its day has come. It seems to afford no place for the Industrial Workers of the World, but, well, you can’t have everything.

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Today’s eccentric character

April 28, 2025

If this blog were the New Yorker, this posting would be a Talk of the Town piece (after the first one, which is an editorial), a sketch of some intriguing person. Today’s eccentric character on this blog (other than me) is Mark Saltveit. In brief, from Wikipedia, much extended:

Mark Saltveit (born 1961 [Harvard ’83]) is a Vermont-based [but Oregon native] stand-up comedian, palindromist and writer, known for being the first World Palindrome Champion [AZ: also chronicler of the San Francisco 49ers (that’s American football, for my readers around the world) and scholar of Daoism (aka Taoism); and, he now — 4/28 — tells me he’s also interested in ancient coins].


MS (photo from him)

In more detail, from his WiX site:

Staff writer, NinersNation.com (leading San Francisco 49ers website)
Professional standup comedian, since 1999
Editor, The Palindromist Magazine
The first ever World Palindrome Champion (2012-2017)
Editor, Taoish.org (a website of contemporary, secular Daoism)

But why, you wonder, am I writing about him today? Because he wrote me yesterday about the TG/TB (“That’s Good” / “That’s Bad”) joke routine that I first talked about here in a 7/22/19 posting “Oh that’s good” — citing an ancient Chinese forebear of the routine. So: TG/TB back in the mists of time, though it came up on this blog through the American tv show Hee Haw.

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The tin portmantax man

April 22, 2025

[4/25 disclaimer. In the constant upheavals of my life and the world around me, I’m now just picking random stuff to post about, from the 60 or 70 items in my ever-expanding queue — whatever catches my fancy at the moment. Don’t try to make sense of it as a whole.]

The Bizarro of 4/11, as US income tax day (4/15) was approaching; Wayno’s title: “Ax Deductions” (playing on tax deductions):


(#1) The ax-wielding Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz film confronts (with his characteristic facial expression) a special federal income tax form for metal filers, with an eccentric portmanteau name, Form 10-W40 (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)

To come: very briefly, the Tin Man in the film; the contributors to the portmanteau word 10-W40; this portmanteau in a partial taxonomy of types of portmanteau words (it’s a sharing right portmanteau).

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Afflicted with aphids

April 20, 2025

[4/25 disclaimer. In the constant upheavals of my life and the world around me, I’m now just picking random stuff to post about, from the 60 or 70 items in my ever-expanding queue — whatever catches my fancy at the moment. Don’t try to make sense of it as a whole.]

Regularly playing on MSNBC, the tv commercial “No Time to Wait”, featuring an earnest and friendly Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (now 78 years old) telling us

I have AFib (/éfɪb/ atrial fibrillation, the irregular heart rhythm)

which I heard as

I have aphids /éfɪdz/

(You can watch the commercial here.)


A screen shot from the commercial; Kareem is holding a basketball just in case you’ve forgotten who he is

It’s immensely pleasing to me that he’s still alive and is doing good things.

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The light hand and the hammer

April 6, 2025

On Easter egg quotations — the light hand — vs. ostentatious allusions — the hammer — in the Economist. From the issue of 3/15/25 in the Culture section, a review of Righting Wrongs, by lawyer Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch, with main headline

How to shame a dictator

(vague echoes of titles whisper in your head) and just one section head (in bold face)

The gripes of Roth

(clang clang clang and you groan at the outrageous pun).

And now I’ll riff on these two allusions. But first, the background.

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Mollified about Monaghan

April 5, 2025

Sweet Gee (an alter ego of Gadi Niram’s) wrote on Facebook yesterday about a character in the delightful Hetty Wainthropp Investigates tv show, who I took to be the character played by the adorable Dominic Monaghan, but turned out to be Joe Peluso’s. I wrote:

Ah, I am mollified. I’d completely forgotten JP. Meanwhile, I know that mollify has to do, etymologically, with softening, but I couldn’t help thinking of it as Molly-fy ‘make into a Molly’, presumably by getting into drag.

Two clusters of things here: the Wainthropp show and DM; and the verb mollify and the noun molly / Molly.

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Falling on my head

April 2, 2025

Posted on Facebook by Bill Halstead today:

Come on, supervolcano! Giant Asteroids keep failing us…

about this American Geographical Society posting on 3/31:


(#1) USGS map

The new steam vent is part of a rhyolite lava flow, a type of thick, chunky slow-moving lava. Yellowstone National Park sits atop a supervolcano that provides the heat energy for its numerous geothermal attractions. The supervolcano is believed to be due for another major eruption in around 100,000 years, with the potential to produce devastating impacts across North America.

To understand Bill’s comment, you need to know about the news in this headline from The Guardian on 2/24/25:

Chance of giant asteroid hitting Earth in 2032 falls to 0.0017% 

Which is to say that the chance of this particular disaster is now negligible. But wait! The Yellowstone supervolcano might erupt. Cataclysmic disaster might yet be on the way.

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Vito Corleone and Jimmy Hoffa walk into a formula pun joke

April 1, 2025

🐇 🐇 🐇 three rabbits to inaugurate the cruelest month; today is not only April Fools Day, but also noted linguist Leonard Bloomfield’s birthday (in 1897), to be celebrated by a look at his work on Menomini / Menominee, an Algonquian / Algonkian language of Wisconsin

Revived on Facebook recently, this 3/31/22 Pearls Before Swine comic strip:


(#1) A Stephan Pastis specialty, the formula pun — or setup / payoff pun — joke

Two things here: the joke form, and the popular-culture knowledge needed to appreciate this specific strip.

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Candidiana

March 30, 2025

Penultimate March, and today’s song from Candide is Cunegonde’s aria “Glitter and be gay” (from Act 1, right before “You were dead, you know”, the title subject of my 3/27 posting on this blog), in which she confronts her, um, suitors with the defiant quatrain:

Enough! Enough!
I’ll take their diamond necklace
And show my noble stuff
By being gay and reckless!

(Oh, honey, I am so with you!)

Candide is a remarkable theater piece that provides almost as many quotations suitable for random occasions as the Alice books, but with a sensibility that is some sort of compound of Voltaire’s satirical novella and the New York City intellectual and artistic world of the 1950s. But it works.

Now: the work, my 3/27 posting, and two responses from old friends about the show.

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Slices of pi(e)

March 15, 2025

π 🥧 π 🥧 π 🥧 for yesterday (mammoths lumber along majestically, and they are often regrettably late for appointments), 3/14, which was Pi Day in my country, and for some years now, also — delicious pun — Pie Day in many places (so inviting a cascade of formulaic word play: pie in the sky, a piece of the pie, easy as pie, even pie chart)

I’ll jump right into things with a charming and heartfelt Facebook message yesterday from my old friend Paula Stout, who many years ago lived in Palo Alto, but has since moved to the great American Southwest — on a ranch outside Greenville TX, east of Dallas-Fort Worth:

Happy Ecstatic Friday on Pi Day (3.14)

We were in town today, where every store treated the day as a celebration. They were giving away apple pies, chicken pot pies, [pizza pies,] and even eskimo pies. With big smiles, balloons and jubilation.

And it struck me that we are seeing history unfold.

1988 was the first “Pi Day” for a marketing campaign in SF, iirc. Before that, only we geeks and friends of the wonderful Kevin McHargue (who was born on this day) partied it up

And now, here we are. A national holiday of pies!

As David Mamet, renowned playwright, once noted, “We must have a pie. Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie.”

There’s enough stress brewing in the world, y’all, let us pray he is right and there is pie enough to combat it.

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