Today’s Zippy brings on scary clowns in Laff in the Dark tunnels:
(#1)
— and, worse, threatens to unleash Tom Cruise (and his Outsider Art).
Archive for the ‘Names’ Category
Taking a dark ride
July 21, 2017A blue period
July 16, 2017It’s about plants — the chaste tree, balloon flowers, bellflowers — moving from Palo Alto through the Swiss Alps and on to the Eastern European Wilds, the Carpathians. Mostly a portrait in blue, with digressions into purple, pink, and white. I start with Pablo Picasso’s self-portrait Blue of 1901, which inaugurated his Blue Period:
(#1) Picasso, very blue, at the age of 20
And a bow here to William H. Gass’s On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (1976), described by Brian Dillon in a 3/15/14 Guardian review of its reissue this way:
the entire book is a catalogue of sorts containing blue things, desires, concepts and usages
Brewster Rockit to the rescue
July 15, 2017[revised version]
From David Preston, yesterday’s Brewster Rockit comic strip, in a male character attempts to mansplain mansplaining to Pamela Mae Snap (aka Irritable Belle):
(#1) (Note strategic use of speech bubbles in the third panel.)
pretzel dog
July 13, 2017It’s about the N + N compound pretzel dog, and its many possible understandings: a dog that delivers pretzels, a dog that likes pretzels, a dog twisted into the shape of a pretzel (or merely contorted), a dog-like object made of pretzels, and so on.
If I tell you that the dog in pretzel dog is to be understood as short for hot dog ‘frankfurter’, you’ll come up with another set of possible understandings: a contorted hot dog, a hot dog with pretzel bits on it, a frankfurter-like object made of pretzels, and so on. But unless you’ve actually experienced something marketed as a pretzel dog (at a Sonic Drive-In or from the Auntie Anne’s company, say), you probably woudn’t think of interpreting pretzel as a reference to pretzel dough. But that’s where we’re going.
The running of the bulldogs
July 13, 2017In the latest series (“It’s Not Surprising”) of GEICO tv ads, “Running of the Bulldogs”, with its silly play on the running of the bulls. A screen shot:
(#1)
Description from iSpot.tv:
Men in white run for their lives through the streets of Spain. As one of them falls and begs for his life, the menace chasing them comes running around the corner — a herd of slobbering bulldogs. The fallen man braces for impact and gets a good licking.
That’s what bulldogs do: faced with people down on the street, they rush to lavish affection on them by licking their faces.
Toonies and their toons
July 12, 2017Yesterday a Zippy posting took us to the cartoony district of Dingburg, where the Pinheads are flagrantly cartoonish rather than “normal”. Now two more strips have followed, showing us more about toonies, as the bulbous-nosed denizens of the district are called. Turns out they’re avid fans of superhero action comics.
Neighborhood gardens, heavy on purple
July 12, 2017Walking around the neighborhood these days, in between heat waves, alone and with friends, mostly enjoying gardens and street plantings and identifying what we see. Most delightfully, this elaborate container garden in front of a house on Bryant St., just a block from mine:
(#1)
Two artists: Land, Chast
July 7, 2017R. (for Ronnie) Land and Roz Chast, two American artists, out of the Art mainstream. Both entertain, both pointedly observe the culture around them. But otherwise they’re quite different: male vs. female, centered in Atlanta vs. centered in NYC, mostly producing “underground art” in public places vs. mostly known through cartoons in tony publications, presumably Christian vs. definitely Jewish, deeply private and unforthcoming about his life vs. exposng much of her life and opinions in her art and in interviews.
The two of them recently brought to my attention, Land through a posting from 2012 of one of his works (Little Bunny Foo Foo art at Grant Central Pizza Restaurant in Atlanta), Chast through an exhibition of her work at the Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM) in San Francisco.
Fedora days
July 5, 2017Thanks to this Zippy strip, it’s been a fedora morning:
(#1)
Fedoras, trilbies, homburgs, and more.
