Archive for the ‘Music’ Category
August 1, 2024
đ đ đ rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate August (inaugurust?) — and đ¨đ đ¨đ đ¨đ for Swiss National Day (yes, I am wearing my Swiss-flag gym shorts): happy 733rd birthday, Helvetia! — Uri! Schwyz! Unterwalden! — plus the Zwicky family canton: Glarus! — imagine the bunnies of August bounding over the Alpine meadows of the three Urkantone from 1291
But now for something completely different. A cascade of puns on names in the joke form I’ll call WoF?, abbreviating Who’s on First?, after the exemplary Abbott and Costello comedy sketch. In a Pearls Before Swine strip of 7/31/22, revived on Facebook yesterday (another 7/31):
(#1) WoF? now transported from baseball to football — in the NFL, with the four wh-question words of the gridiron:Â Watt, Ware, Wynn, and Y.A. (while Pig takes the role of the calmly explanatory Abbott and Rat the role of the increasingly confused and enraged Costello)
I’ll take an amused look back on WoF? cartoons on this blog in a moment. But first some notes on the comedy sketch that’s the model for this strip — noting that the cartoons have to achieve their effects through static text and drawings, while the comedy sketch is performed in real time by human actors deploying a rich stock of vocal and gestural resources. So on the one hand, though you might think of the comic strip as just a frozen, stripped down version of the live sketch, you could also view the strip as a highly artful joining of text and image using minimal resources (inspired by the live sketch but not attempting to reproduce it), as the comic counterpart of a graphic novel.
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Posted in Chemistry, Holidays, Jokes, Language and sports, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, Names, Puns, Switzerland and Swiss things | 2 Comments »
July 31, 2024
A particularly elaborate example, which came to me yesterday on the Americana Music Society site on Facebook — on this site because it’s all about Johnny Cash. The story begins:
Few people know that before he was famous, the late Johnny Cash tried a chip full of salsa served backstage in Possumneck, Mississippi that changed his life. It was spicy and tangy and smoky and so good that he just couldn’t get it off of his mind. Unfortunately, there was no jar, no label.
Now, there have been rumors that Johnny had kind of an addictive personality. He would sometimes disappear for days on end. People attributed it to drugs or alcohol. The truth is that he would roam the country searching for the special hot sauce of his dreams. He heard rumors and whispers of the deadly condiment and followed them to countless dead ends. He stopped at every Tex Mex restaurant, truck stop, and Mexican grocery in the South without finding what he sought.
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Posted in Formulaic language, Jokes, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Puns, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
July 30, 2024
Yesterday’s (soft porn) Olympic photo from Queerly News on X:Â Noah Williams and Tom Daley, on the occasion of their together winning the silver in the Menâs Synchronized 10m Platform event at the 2024 Paris Olympics:
(#1) It’s a playful bro kiss by NW, at which TD (famous for his charming playfulness) feigns wide-eyed astonishment
TD is also famous as one of the world’s champion divers, a campaigner against bullying, a hot muscle twink, and a gay icon. Also for looking about 14 years old ever since he was 14 (he’s now 30). And as a good friend, to which I now turn — I’ll get back to the gay icon and the hot muscle twink in a moment, but first some Facebook discussion from yesterday about his friendship with NW. Discussion between two gay men, Michael Thomas and me:
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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Language and sports, Language and the body, Male art, Music | Leave a Comment »
July 26, 2024
Probal Dasgupta notes on Facebook the significance of 7/26:Â on 7/26/1887, L. L. Zamenhof (15 December 1859 â 14 April 1917) published (in Warsaw, under the pseudonym Doktoro Esperanto) his Dr. Esperanto’s International Language (Esperanto: Unua Libro), describing what has become the most widely used constructed international auxiliary language (PB is, among many things, an Esperantist).
So this is Esperanto Day — also, I note, the birthday of psycholinguist Eve Clark (an old friend and Stanford colleague, recently elected — wow! — to the British Academy: born 1942) and of Rolling Stone Mick Jagger (still rocking, even though he’s almost as old as I am: born 1943).
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Posted in Conlangs, Holidays, Linguists, Music, Names | Leave a Comment »
July 24, 2024
Now we sing, to the tune of “Drunken Sailor”:
What shall we do with the leftover pie dough? … …
Cut it into slabs and then you bake them.
Do that, and you get the yummy stuff that Ann Daingerfield Zwicky called piecrust crumblies (a family term whose origin was lost to her); she used that name, so I did too, and my guy Jacques, and probably Elizabeth (Daingerfield Zwicky) as well, so maybe now Opal (Armstrong Zwicky) too. Such things get passed around.
(Spelling note: I will use the solid spelling piecrust, but many writers use the separated spelling pie crust; these are stylistic variants, and are listed as such by, among other sources, NOAD.)
Now it turns out that there’s a term of culinary art for the stuff; food writers seem to call them piecrust treats —  a specialization of NOAD‘s
noun treat: an event or item that is out of the ordinary and gives great pleasure:Â he wanted to take her to the movies as a treat.
Whatever you call them, they’re just one possible answer to the question in my title, so let’s survey the uses of leftover piecrust dough.
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Posted in Folklore, Language and food, Music, My life, Names, Parody, Spelling | 4 Comments »
July 12, 2024
(Charms of the male body, plus a striptease song, so not to everyone’s taste)
A Daily Jocks e-mail ad in my mailbox today, with this beautifully composed male figure:
[AMZ caption:] Let me entertain you … I’m very versatile
The actual ad copy (offering 35% off):
Missed out last time? Our once a year Long Johns sale is happening this weekend at DailyJocks.
These Helsinki Athletica Long Johns have SOLD OUT completely during the previous 3 seasons so don’t miss out!
Made from premium modal which forms to your skin for ultimate comfort, whilst showing off your best assets.
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Posted in Language and the body, Music, Performance, Phallicity, Shirtlessness, Underwear | 1 Comment »
July 12, 2024
A follow-up to my 7/10 posting “Their satanic majesties re-imagined”, which was
A chapter in the re-working of artistic materials, provoked by my searching for a model for the character Zn in the Bizarro cartoon I posted on yesterday, in âCu Co Ni & Zn!â, a strip depicting Waynoâs vision of a heavy-metals heavy-metal rock band
(#1) Wayno’s character Zn
… rather than a simple caricature of KFK [Kerry Fucking King — his self-chosen epithet — of the thrash metal band Slayer],
(#2) The actual KFK, complete with the sign of the horns
in Zn Wayno has created a fresh character, a re-worked, re-imagined â a nicer, more Wayno-friendly â rock star, as a kind of homage to the original. Discarding the originalâs less savory characteristics (rather than exaggerating them), and so salvaging a vision of what KFK could have been. A lot less Slayer and a lot more Led Zeppelin.
(Orthogonal to all this, my posting also looked at the details of Wayno’s cartooning style)
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Posted in Art, Cartoonists, Linguistics in the comics, Music | Leave a Comment »
July 10, 2024
A chapter in the re-working of artistic materials, provoked by my searching for a model for the character Zn in the Bizarro cartoon I posted on yesterday, in “Cu Co Ni & Zn!”, a strip depicting Wayno’s vision of a heavy-metals heavy-metal rock band:
(#1) [from this posting, with emphasis added:] Wayno could have picked some specific heavy metal band and caricatured them for this cartoon, but he hasnât done that here, at least not in any straightforward way: Zn is depicted as a heavy-metal acoustic guitarist whoâs bald, darkish-skinned, wears dark sunglasses, and has a droopy gray mustache, and Iâm pretty sure there is no such guy in real life.
I searched for several hours for candidates as the model for the character Zn in the real-life world of heavy-metal performance, but emerged empty-handed. Then David Preston commented on Facebook and made me re-think my search; maybe what Wayno was doing was not a simple caricature of someone from real life, but the creation of a fresh character, a re-worked, re-imagined character, as a kind of homage to the original. Relatable to the original, but significantly different from it. In which case, DP and I had a clear candidate for the source of Zn in #1.
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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Music, Performance | 1 Comment »
July 9, 2024
Yesterday’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro strip, set at a rock concert and turning on a straightforward pun heavy metals on the model heavy metal (band):
(#1) Cu on drums, Co on (electric) guitar, Ni on vocals, Zn on acoustic guitar. But then there are all the devilish details, in the text and the images (if youâre puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon â Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip â see this Page)
The details are devilish because there are so many of them, involving choices made by Wayno in putting the cartoon together: the name of the concert venue;Â the size of the band; the name of the band; the physical appearance of the band members, their clothing, and their instruments; and their stances and gestures in the performance depicted here. Some of these choices were conscious choices by Wayno, but most just flowed from his pen, as it were, governed (if governed at all) by unconscious crafting of the material.
My task here is to catalog what I think are some of the most notable of the choices Wayno made. Unfortunately, the more I look at the cartoon, the more I see; there seems to be no end of details to note. So I’ll start by listing some things that came to me just moments ago, in the writing up of this posting, then go on to a more systematic discussion.
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Posted in Art, Gesture, It's Just Stuff, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Names, Puns | Leave a Comment »
June 28, 2024
Passed on by Susan Fischer yesterday, this item from the We Love PUNS site:
(#1) Three things you need to know about or recognize to understand the pun joke here: Vladimir Putin (depicted here without a label); Ritz crackers (this is easy, because the name Ritz is on the package, as are images of the crackers); and, crucially, the model for the pun: the song title “Puttin’ on the Ritz”
Which gives us, oh groan, the pun Putin on the Ritz. Phonologically imperfect in the Putin part: pun /pĂştÇn/ for model puttin’ /pĂtÇn/. You can imagine other possibilities: poutine on / in the Ritz, pootin’ on / in the Ritz, button on the Ritz, and more with Ritz; still others involving tits, fritz, Rit (the commercial dye), and no doubt others.
It turns out that this is not the first appearance, on this blog, of Vlad the Invader with Ritz crackers. Nor the first pun involving Ritz. But first a lexical note on ritz, from NOAD:
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Posted in Idioms, Jokes, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, Portmanteaus, Puns, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
