Archive for the ‘Parody’ Category
June 5, 2023
Another brief posting. And yes, I am not dead yet, and my second breakfast — sriracha-spicy soy-salty Singapore-style rice noodles (which has shrimps and chunks of ham in it) with sliced mushrooms and a ton of chopped celery (wielding my excellent new kitchen angle knife!) in chicken broth — was yummy, and will make at least one more meal (several, if I decide to turn it into mostly-garbanzo soup, a sort of deranged Chinese posole).
Today’s Zippy strip finds our Pinhead musing poetically, à la Blake, on the symbolic potential of the diner:
It’s the initial quatrain of Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence”, as seen from a vinyl-covered counter stool
The original:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
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Posted in Diners, Linguistics in the comics, Parody, Poetry, Signs and symbols | 1 Comment »
May 26, 2023
Very much a Mary, Queen of Scots, not dead yet posting — but in fact a wildly celebratory one. Explanations after the main event, in which eccentrically costumed (but neatly attired) enthusiastic young men have appeared at the front door to push their niche religious beliefs on the resident (who views them dubiously):
(#1) Offering the (good) word / the (good) news to the heathen — feel free to imagine the emphatic pronunciations that are often represented by initial caps on Good, Word, and News — in a goofy cross of dead-serious LDS evangelism and the jokey belief system of the Pastafarians (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)
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Posted in Language and medicine, Language and religion, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Parody, Puns, Toys and games | 1 Comment »
February 8, 2023
(all about men’s bodies and sex between men, in street language, so entirely not for kids and the sexually modest)
The social lives of Ruff Dudes, including fashion choices and sexual practices. Specifically, on Fuck Me socks and fuck machines. In the fulfillment of a promissory note from my 10/21/22 posting “Neon jocks”.
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Posted in Clothing, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language of sex, Masculinity, Parody | Leave a Comment »
January 27, 2023
Every so often the accidents of the calendar bring together remarkably contrasting occasions. This is a day of such cognitive dissonance. Weep with me. Gasp in pleasure and delight with me.
First, today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, marking the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp, in 1945, an event that serves as a symbol of the Holocaust — the Shoah — that wiped out around six million Jews (and a number of others) and caused untold suffering.
But then today is also the birthday of two people whose works have brought pleasure to millions: the astonishingly prolific composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (born in 1756) and the mathematician-turned-comic-writer Charles Lutwidge Dodson, who wrote the Alice books and a number of remarkable nonsense poems under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll (born in 1832).
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Posted in Books, Holidays, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, Nonsense, Parodies, Parody, Poetry | Leave a Comment »
December 21, 2022
Today’s Christmas card material (hat tip to Aric Olnes): identical-twin muscle-hunk sex-elves in seasonal costume, with some cookie-eating oral action as a bonus:
Twins Cory and Calvin Boling: TikTok stars, bodybuilders, fitness models, and trainers; born 10/18/97 in North Carolina, they advertise themselves on Instagram and Facebook as well as TikTok
Yes, indisputably homoerotic; I imagine them pole-dancing.
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Posted in Clothing, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Kinship, Language and the body, Movies and tv, Music, Parody | Leave a Comment »
November 1, 2022
🐇 🐇 🐇 (NOVEM! NOVEM! N-O-V spells VON! Von who? No, No, that’s Doctor Von Who! Doctor Von Who’s on first? Doctor Von Who’s on first of November, oh god this is where we came in)
Bob Eckstein’s charming cartoon-trope cartoon (a new cartoon for Halloween this year @AltaJournal, also posted yesterday on Facebook along with a trick-or-treating story; and note that National Pumpkin Day went by on 10/26):
(#1) Three cartoon memes (I will no longer attempt to distinguish memes from tropes, given the extraordinary variation in the usage of the two terms): Sisyphus, Desert Island, Seeker and Seer
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Posted in Comic conventions, Language and religion, Latin, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Parody | 1 Comment »
October 27, 2022
Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro strip, yet another in their long line of Psychiatrist cartoons (today with Dr. Sigmund Freud as the therapist and Baron Victor Frankenstein as the patient) — a conventional form that, in the hands of an ingenious cartoonist, can be used as the vehicle for almost any joke:
(#1) The Baron makes a Freudian slip; Wayno’s title: “Unexpected Insight” (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page.)
Doctor Doctor, this is no whim
I got a bad case of having created him
No pill’s gonna cure my ill
I got a bad case of having created him
Freudian slip, Frankensteinian slip: master, monster.
Yes, yes, a pile of bits and pieces jumbled together here (and full appreciation of the cartoon calls for lots of further background knowledge), so there’s plenty to talk about — and was, even before I introduced Robert Palmer into the mix. So grab your torches and pitchforks and let’s advance on this assemblage of oddly fitting parts.
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Posted in Comic conventions, Errors, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Parody, Pop culture, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
September 26, 2022
(Phallic preoccupations abound in this posting, sometimes in street language — I mean, look at the title above — so some readers may want to skip over it)
Passed on by a friend on Facebook yesterday, this German grocery-store snapshot plus a joking double-entendre intro in English (together making what appears to be a a fast-spreading meme):
(#1) Hähnchenschnitten Wiener Art ‘Viennese-style chicken cutlets’ from the (German) Vossko company, the name of the product including the German phrase Wiener Art ‘Viennese-style’ — that is, prepared like Wiener Schnitzel / Wienerschnitzel); meanwhile, the English-language intro alludes to wiener art, in the sense ‘penis art’, referring to artworks in which penises are significant elements (or, in an hugely extended sense, to any artworks in which human penises are visible) — the label wiener art involving the (mildly racy) AmE sexual slang term wiener ‘penis’
German Wiener Art ‘Viennese-style’ (a) leads to English Wiener art ‘Viennese art’ (b) and then to four AmE slang uses of wiener art: (c) ‘sausage / frankfurter art’; (d) ‘dachshund art’; (e) ‘penis art’; (f) ‘weenie art’. All will be illustrated below.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Art, Double entendres, German, Language and food, Language and the body, Metaphor, Metonymy, Parodies, Parody, Phallicity, Puns, Slang, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »
July 26, 2022
… What a delicious Tweety you are!
The 7/24 Mother Goose and Grimm strip, with a police line-up of cartoon cats, for little Tweety to pick out the threatening pussy cat that he thought he saw:
(#1) The potential pussy predator perps on parade, left to right: 1 the Cat in the Hat (Dr. Seuss picture book), 2 Stimpy (Ren & Stimpy tv animation), 3 Sylvester (Looney Tunes film animation), 4 Catbert (Dilbert strip), 5 Attila (MGG strip — note self-reference), 6 Garfield (Garfield strip)
The number of domestic cats in cartoons is mind-boggling — there are tons of lists on the net — and then there are all those other cartoon felines: tigers, panthers, lions, leopards, and so on. Out of these thousands, the cops rounded up the six guys above — all male, as nearly all cartoon cats are, despite the general cultural default that dogs are male, cats female — as the miscreant. (It might be that male is the unmarked sex for anthropomorphic creatures in cartoons as for human beings in many contexts; females appear only when their sex is somehow especially relevant to the cartoon.) And that miscreant, the smirking Sylvester, is the only one of the six known as a predator on birds, though in real life, domestic cats are stunningly effective avian predators, killing billions of birds annually.
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Posted in Alliteration, Books, Child language, Comic conventions, Constituency, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and animals, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Nonsense, Parody, Phonology, Poetry, Syntax, Understanding comics, Variation | 2 Comments »
