A recent Joe Dator New Yorker cartoon:
What does it take to comprehend (and then enjoy) this cartoon? A Martian would need to know about texting and the language conventions available to texters. My 10-year-old grand-daughter would get that much, but would still be baffled by the cultural allusion.
Two recent deaths in the news. First, funny man Sid Caesar, who transformed the face of American comedy in the 1950s through Your Show of Shows. Tributes and recollections are everywhere, Second, and less well known, is filmmaker Gabriel Axel.
Yesterday’s Bizarro, in a truncated version:
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This is funny as it stands, but it takes a considerable amount of pop-cultural knowledge to comprehend. The keys are the reference to motels and to stabbing: Psycho.
Peter O’Toole died a few days ago, and there are tributes everywhere. Mostly for his most famous performance, in Lawrence of Arabia. But here I want to celebrate a comic performance that has given me pleasure for 40 years: in My Favorite Year (1982).
Today’s Zippy, on life inside the comics:
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Two things here: the movie The Day the Clown Cried and the comic strips of Nick Dallis.
In the past few days, Smallville re-runs have come to the point where the character Jimmy Olsen has become significant. From the Wikipedia entry on the character:
Jimmy is traditionally depicted as a bow tie-wearing, red-haired young man who works as a cub reporter and photographer for The Daily Planet, alongside Lois Lane and Clark Kent, whom he idolizes as career role models.
Jimmy Olsen, from Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen #36 (1959); art by Curt Swan:
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Jimmy is enthusiastic, sunny, and rather naive — a good foil to the many characters who have their dark sides and their secrets.
(Not about language, but about shirtless actors, mostly in underwear.)
An episode of Smallville that came by in reruns this morning featured hunky actor Alan Ritchson as Arthur Curry aka Aquaman, a superhero with an assortment of water-related superabilities. Later in the series comes Oliver Queen aka Green Arrow (played by Justin Hartley), yet another superhero. Superman (played by Tom Welling) along with Green Arrow and Aquaman:
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(All three men are tall: Hartley and Welling at 6′3″, Ritchson at 6′2″.)
From Ben Zimmer, two instances of ass-avoidance in the news.
In a set of notecards, a reproduction of a sensuous painting, The Soul of the Rose (1908) by John William Waterhouse:
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The woman is smelling the rose, but she’s close to kissing it, close to treating it as a romantic partner (in which case the rose is a symbol of the lover’s mouth). Other, more carnal, interpretations are available to modern audiences, for whom the rose can serve as a symbol of either the vagina or the anus.
(Not about language.)
Omitted from my last posting on more television hunks. the earlier history of Brian Krause (Leo in Charmed, 1998-2006). In his very early 20s, Krause did Return to the Blue Lagoon (1991), in which he appeared as a cute blondish curly-haired twink (in preposterous demi-costumes).