Archive for the ‘Penguins’ Category
August 10, 2025
Today’s Rhymes With Orange strip (by Hilary B. Price) turns on reanalysis + analogical coining, yielding a kind of pun that looks like a deliberate eggcorn — embodied in that rare and elusive creature, the pencilguin, cousin to the penguin, but very much resembling a pencil, specifically a Dixon Ticonderoga (maybe even with the HB medium soft (#2) lead American children tend to favor):
(#1) The pen of penguin is probably Welsh pen ‘head’ (the bodypart), but suppose we (mis)take it to be English pen ‘instrument for writing or drawing with ink’, a reanalysis encouraged by penguins having black bodies as dark as ink; then we can venture to create the analogical name pencilguin, for a penguin-like creature having a pencil-like body rather than a pen-like one
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Posted in Eggcorns, Furnishings and tools, Linguistics in the comics, Penguins | Leave a Comment »
May 14, 2025
The Batman from Batman Returns (1992), his suicide bombers — don’t feel bad if you don’t remember, the plot was extraordinarily busy (details below) — were penguins. Mind-controlled penguins.
And of course they inspired toys. That was over three decades ago, so the toys are now collectibles. Plastic surprises that the South Dakota Department of Propaganda satire/parody website (“Lies to Tell the Truth, Truth to Tell Lies”) has mocked, as Michael Palmer informed me this morning:
(#1) Batman Returns Penguin Commando action figures made by Kenner, marketed in 1991-92 (from the SDDP site)
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Posted in Movies and tv, Penguins, Toys and games | Leave a Comment »
April 25, 2025
🐧 🐧 🐧 whoop whoop whoop it’s World Penguin Day, 4/25, and I have been pleasantly besieged with penguiniana from friends; as my contribution to the day, I offer a t-shirt with a double strength gayguin on it;
The bird’s coloration is rainbow-gay, and then it’s waving a rainbow flag as well
And then there’s the reductive mid portmanteau gayguin (gay + penguin), like liger, brunch, or smog — but with a whole word, rather than an initial word-part, as its first contributor (see my 4/22/25 posting “The tin portmantax man” on types of portmanteaus)
Today was supposed to be a rest day, in between a Thursday visit from my caregiver J (in which we got lots of housework done) and weekend work on a ton of blog stuff that has piled up dramatically. And a chance to tell you about the improvements in many small but significant aspects of my medical state, which my pedicurist and my caregiver (who observe me closely) have commented on with some amazement and delight. But all that was blanked out by endless hassles in trying to fix business stuff, by emergency academic matters, and by really foul weather (including a long spell of low barometric pressure that made it hard to use my hands at all).
Despite my not being able to get around to doing any of the things I’d planned for the day, I found pleasure in other, unexpected activities. Apparently, unreasonable equanimity in the face of unpleasantness goes along with the mysterious improvements in my physical state (J thinks that the attitude shift caused the physical improvements, and he might be right). But now I really have to get dinner and go to bed. See you tomorrow.
Posted in Clothing, Gender and sexuality, My life, Penguins, Portmanteaus, Rainbow | 1 Comment »
November 26, 2024
From Chris Ambidge (one of the Wardens of the Spheniscid Zarchives) on Facebook this morning:
(#1) [CA > AZ:] Arnold! Have you considered … penguin slippers? Keeping Feathers McGraw underfoot might be the best way to make sure he doesn’t get into mischief
From the Coddies website:
Coddies® Wallace & Gromit Feathers McGraw slippers:
Silent but villainous, Feathers McGraw is the ultimate plush slipper icon!
Slip into the soft embrace of Wallace & Gromit’s Feathers McGraw himself with Coddies’ new plush slippers, designed to capture the essence of Aardman’s criminal mastermind. They fit like a glove – not unlike the red rubber glove perched atop Feathers’ head – a disguise so brilliant in its simplicity that it once outwitted Wallace and even the local law enforcement.
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Posted in Clothing, Compounds, Language and food, Language in advertising, Movies and tv, Names, Penguins, Shoes, Trade names | 1 Comment »
October 10, 2024
Max Vasilatos had warned me they were coming, but I didn’t know when. But today was their day, and they were a cheering relief from the deep dysfunction that a week of extravagant heat has visited upon me: from the Play Visions company in Woodlinville WA (but, yes, made in China), the Club Earth Penguin Parade — 6 nesting penguins (the biggest only 5 inches tall, so they fit in easily with almost any home decor):
(#1) An ad display of Les Six Antarctiques; can you tell which of the six is the Swiss penguin (known professionally as Arthur Honegger)? What gives him away as a Swissie and not a Frenchie like all the others?
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Posted in French, Language and the body, Music, My life, Penguins, Play, Toys | Leave a Comment »
October 9, 2024
… in one sense / use of yes: ‘yes, I select this one’. Which came up yesterday as I was ordering an Original Italian Sub from the Jersey Mike’s Subs in Mountain View CA, just south of Palo Alto (they’re a huge national chain, offering a wide range of submarine sandwiches that are, in my experience, excellent examples of their kind — and Grubhub delivers from them); it turns out that their on-line menu software involves this positive selection-X, which took me a moment to get used to, especially since I’d posted not long ago on associations of the letter X, which included the X of NO — of prohibitions, bans, and denials — but not the X of YES. Well, X is a symbol, it’s just stuff (as I say) and can accumulate any number of uses, even ones that look contradictory.
The Jersey Mike X is the X of election ballots: an alternative to a check-mark ✓ or a plus-sign + in a box or circle (or to filling in an oval) to indicate selecting an item. In a use that was initially confusing to me, since the JM X is in contrast with the JM +, which turns out to convey something like ‘this is one of the available choices’; I eventually figured out how JM deploys X and + through a certain amount of trial-and-error fiddling with the menus. Yes, I’ll illustrate all of this in a little while.
But first, one more groaner penguin-pun joke, on the occasion of my consuming, at lunch today, the last of my birthday McVitie’s Penguin bars.
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Posted in Dialects, It's Just Stuff, Jokes, Language and food, My life, Names, Penguins, Puns, Signage, Signs and symbols | 5 Comments »
September 8, 2024
(Well, yes, a birthday penis for me to enjoy, so this posting isn’t suitable for kids or the sexually modest)
This year’s birthday card for me from my old friend Vadim Temkin (old friend, but one generation younger than me), a digital artist whose work has often been featured on this blog — playful, clever, homosexy, and with a style of its own. He creates well-designed characters that don’t pretend to fool the eye, but live in a parallel reality — in the case of this year’s card, what looks like a world of slickly made plastic figures, from which comes the smiling Dick, who is completely naked except for a white collar and black bow tie where his rather large head attaches to his body, giving him the appearance of a bobblehead doll. (I don’t think Bobblehead Dick was Vadim’s intention, but it’s what I see, so I’m going with it.)
Meanwhile, his penis is on display, except that it’s awkwardly attached to his body; I’ve had to fuzz it out for WordPress modesty, but it’s an imperfection in the figure, and an annoying one, because of course the bobblehead’s penis — Bobblehead Dick’s dick — was a significant part of Vadim’s gift to me. Among other things:
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Posted in Art, Holidays, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Mammoths, My life, Penguins | Leave a Comment »
September 5, 2024
You imagine the scene: a dark and sleazy establishment serving drinks, but in the back room, hard-core habitués share bites of banned biscuits of every sort, while reveling in vices of the flesh.
Oh, not bar ‘an establishment where alcohol and sometimes other refreshments are served’, but bar ‘an amount of food formed into a regular narrow block’. On which turns a confession by Tim Brookes (of the Endangered Alphabets Project, based in Vermont; website here) on Facebook today:
Back in England, and straight away the old vices return …
In particular, the vice of McVitie’s Penguin biscuit bars.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Language and food, My life, Penguins | 1 Comment »
July 13, 2024
A surprise from my tiny family this morning, as my grandchild Opal presented me with two gifts: the children’s picture book The Pengrooms by Paul Castle (Paul Castle Studio, 2022), together with an adorable plushie toy of Pringle the Pengroom — Pringle, who is grooms with Finn (both sporting rainbow bow ties, in case you missed the same-sex theme). The cover of the book, showing the couple atop a wedding cake, with the publisher’s blurb:
(#1) Follow Pringle and Finn, two penguins with big hearts, as they deliver wedding cakes to their friends in the animal kingdom. Each cake tells a story, and each [same-sex] wedding offers a challenge that Pringle and Finn must face together. The Pengrooms is an enduring tale about love, diversity, and the importance of working as a team.
Pringle is larger than Finn — couples differ in many ways — but they’re equal partners as a team. The Pringle plushie:
(#2) Pringle, with a really big bow tie
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Posted in Books, Effeminacy, Gay voice, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and animals, Language and food, Penguins, Rainbow, Social interactions, Sociocultural Roles, Toys | Leave a Comment »
