This is a brief return to posting on my blog, an experiment in re-learning how to use my computer, after a couple of months in a vale of great sicknesses (about which, more eventually); I am seriously damaged, but plucky.
This is in memory of the excellent Antonino Zichichi, who died on 2/9. First of all, for having a wonderful Z name, even more entertaining than Zwicky. For his groundbreaking research in nuclear physics. And for a lifetime devoted to causes benefitting the common good.
Today’s Zits comic strip sets up a baffling list of ridiculous and raunchy-sounding things Jeremy’s father wants for Christmas — a Wiggly Pickle! Kinky Beavers! — and resolves the puzzle in the final panel.
(#1) Fishing lures, kids, fishing lures; apparently all from the Reaction Innovations fishing lure supply company, and so known to a substantial number of fishing enthusiasts
I suspected what was going on when spinners and crickets turned up in the second panel. But it’s still a sweet set-up.
From the annals of eccentric wine naming, the remarkable
Vampire® Coffin & Cape Red Wine Trilogy
from Vampire Vineyards.
Today’s morning name (pure playfulness after a long night of uneasy sleep fragmented by joint pain): from the Cambridge French-English dictionary, the noun
pantoufle (fem.): slipper; a loose, soft kind of shoe for wearing indoors
(#1) An array of pantoufles (from the Cambridge dictionary)
Considered as a nonsense word, it’s silly-sounding in French, or when borrowed into English as /pæntúfǝl/, which sounds like a cousin of kerfuffle.
But then the things it denotes are often indulgences — playfully pleasurable in design, material, or color (as in #1), so that the word comes with an air of the ridiculous, both in sound and in meaning.
An air that carries over to uses of pantoufle as a name. Two of which I now explore: an imaginary rabbit Pantoufle, from the world of fiction; and me as Monsieur Pantoufles, the woolly moccasins guy. (more…)
On Facebook today, a report on a Google AI search on “Lynneguist hospital” that inspired the bot to satisfy the search term by giving Lynne Murphy a medical degree:
[LM:] Adding medical qualifications to my cv.
I mean, here’s the evidence.
Back on Thursday 11/6, amid the hour-long marathon of signing and notarizing documents, the jaunty house notary remarked, with surprise and delight, that she’d never had an A.Z. before, never in 25 years on the job. (There are a fair number worldwide, but, it seems, very few in the US — and there have apparently only ever been two Arnold Zwickys, the other being my father.) On a quick ramble through my memory, I found only three Americans:
In my mail yesterday, 10/20, a World Postcard Day postcard from my old friend and Stanford colleague Ryan Tamares, mailed from him (in Mountain View CA, a few miles from my place) on 9/22, to go through the World Postcard Day site in College Station TX on 10/1 (the day itself) and then wend its way to me (whether by intention or misadventure) as if had come by surface mail from the place in the card’s picture, Vienne en Isère, France (note: not the much better known Vienne en Autriche / Vienna in Austria / Wien in Österreich).
I’ll put off the occasion and its sponsoring organization to an appendix to the main posting, which is about the card itself: the town pictured in it, the shop in that town pictured in it, and its source.
[warning: female full frontal nudity at the end, plus a beheading, so not to everyone’s taste (note that this is an actual Penguin Books cover, and it counts as art; certainly it’s not intended as, shudder, pornography]
My morning name on awaking on 10/15 — almost surely the result of subliminal perceptions during sleep, through some story broadcast on KQED-FM during the night (I’m now doing talk rather than music during the night). From Wikipedia:
Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn [AZ: Tarahata is her birth surname, Hagedorn her (Filipino) husband’s surname; Hagedorn is a surname of Germanic origin (MHG hagedorn ‘hawthorn’)] (born May 29, 1949) is an American playwright, writer, poet, and multimedia performance artist.
Hagedorn is an of mixed descent. She was born in Manila, Philippines, to a mother of Scots-Irish, French, and Filipino descent and a father of Filipino, Spanish, and Chinese heritage. Moving to San Francisco, California, in 1963, Hagedorn received her education at the American Conservatory Theater training program. To further pursue playwriting and music, she moved to New York City in 1978.
In 1978, Joseph Papp produced Hagedorn’s first play, Mango Tango. Hagedorn’s other productions include Tenement Lover, Holy Food, and Teenytown. Her mixed media style often incorporates song, poetry, images, and spoken dialogue. From 1975 until 1985, she was the leader of a poet’s band — The West Coast Gangster Choir (in SF) and later The Gangster Choir (in New York).
… [And she wrote] the novel Dogeaters, which illuminates many different aspects of Filipino experience, focusing on the influence of America through radio, television, and movie theaters
An Ellis Rosen cartoon that came by on Facebook recently:
(#1) The hybrid creature the pomeranian-nimbus, being taken for a walk, on a leash, by its owner — so being presented as an extraordinary dog, a cloud canine; note that the woman’s dog recognizes the p-n as a dog, and appears to want to play with it (see the wagging tail)
(The name of the dog breed is standardly capitalized, because it’s a proper name denoting a creature originating in the geographical region of Pomerania, and I’ll use Pomeranian from here on.)
The compound Pomeranian-nimbus is a copulative N1 + N2 compound (like Swiss-American or hunter-gatherer), denoting a thing or things of both the N1 type and the N2 type. But in fact the creature is not just a mix of Pomeranian dog and nimbus cloud, but is actually a nimbus Pomeranian ‘Pomeranian dog that is (also) a nimbus cloud’ (your standard N + N compound in English is semantically modifier + head) — rather than a Pomeranian nimbus ‘nimbus cloud that is also, or at least resembles, a Pomeranian dog’. A nimbus Pomeranian, or, more compactly, a nimbopomeranian, a nimpom for short.
🏳️🌈 👨❤️👨 🏳️🌈 National Coming Out Day, and also J&A Day, Jacques and Arnold’s wedding-equivalent anniversary (some explanation of that cooccurrence in an appendix to this posting)
The 10/8 Wayno / Piraro Bizarro strip, posted here because it’s sweetly bizarre (true to the strip’s title), complex, and cleverly goofy (like the one in my 10/9/25 posting “The flannel frontier”); something to enjoy for a moment in the midst of terrible times:
(#1) A phonologically perfect pun (Caesar the salad punning on Caesar the emperor), the pun-like Holy Roman Empire (a German political entity) playing on Roman Empire (governed by the Caesars of Rome), and a phonologically imperfect pun (romaine the salad green punning on Roman) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)
(The two salad puns are Wayno’s; Holy Roman Empire as a pun-like play on Roman Empire is an invention of the Roman Catholic church in Germanic lands in the early Middle Ages.)
The cartoon shows a Caesar (with laurel leaves) appearing before his people, cradling a humongous bowl of salad and waving a pair of salad servers like a weapon (Julius Caesar is often portrayed in Western art as wielding a sword). Next to him, a soldier utters a variant of the ceremonial greeting Hail Caesar! — celebrating not Caesar, but his salad.
