(Warning: lots of off-color word play about male masturbation)
To celebrate American independence (year 246), the Fort Troff company (“Ruff Stuff for Pig Sluts”), purveyor of sex accessories, primarily to guys like me), offers this (parodic) slogan:
Yankee Doodle keep it up / Yank your doodle dandy
The verb yank ‘masturbate’ is only accidentally homophonous with the yank– of Yankee, but according to GDoS, the noun doodle ‘penis, esp. a child’s penis’ is attested from the 18th century on.
First, some silly banter on Facebook that led to reminiscing about the roasted-eggplant chocolate-cream elephant-god chant
Baba ganoush ganache Ganesh! Baba ganoush ganache!
Which then plugged into the 4/3 Zippy strip I’ve been saving for an auspicious moment, in which Zippy and Zebrina order coffee together, sharing the onomatomanic chant:
double cup … sipper lid
đ đ đ Despite yesterday’s incident of gun-jumping, premature social intercourse (“April is the most Abrahamic month”, here), this is the actual April 1st posting, and it’s drenched in cunicular sexiness — this month I really really really mean those rabbits — so it’s definitely out-of-bounds for kids and the sexually modest. I begin with two images — not in themselves salacious — and then get down and fluffy with a bit of amiably very dirty doggerel.
Seizing a moment of pleasure in yesterday’s deeply despairing hours: the little bit that I can still manage by way of cooking, which is really just assembly and using kitchen appliances (a rice cooker, the microwave), in a conscious imitative realization of the delightful verse by Maurice Sendak, “Chicken Soup with Rice” (1962):
Whoopee once
Whoopee twice
Whoopee spicy beef and celery soup
With rice
A Vicki Sawyer greeting card (on Sawyer’s animal art, see my 2/5/22 posting “The groundhog and the scallion”)Â from Ann Burlingham, Troublemaker (that’s what it says on her business card) — written on the 20th, postmarked in Pittsburgh on the 22nd, arrived in Palo Alto on the 26th — with a reproduction of Sawyer’s composition “Garden Prince”:
(#1) The Garden Prince wears a crown of carrots and a royal neckchain of peapods, which together serve both as symbols of his authority and as indicators of his tastes in food (also note the conventional simile like peas and carrots ‘getting along well together, being compatible’)
In #1, Ann “saw something akin to a Renaissance portrait. Crossed with Watership Down?” YES!
Sunday’s (2/20) Bizarro strip, rich in symbols, references, and allusions (“semiotically dense”, as I’ve started to say):
(#1)Â (If youâre puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon â Dan Piraro says there are 9 in this strip â see this Page.) One of Piraro’s secret symbols is a miniature space alien, which you can find in the upper righthand corner of the cartoon
First things first. What the strip is primarily about is an encounter between two space aliens and a gumball machine (a 25¢ machine, which means it’s a modern one), which the aliens recognize, because of its physical resemblance to them, as one of their kind. Eliminating everything except the encounter:
(#2)Â The encounter as a free-standing gag cartoon
One is a hardboiled, coke-addled Fed from the mean streets of the City, the other a sleek lutrine kid from the pristine snow slopes of Otter, Montana. They both have literary pretensions but sadly lack the schooling to tell a sonnet from a double dactyl or the skill to fashion either of them. After a chance encounter, they fall, enjambed, into the coils of a tragic desire. Inevitably, it ends in blood gushing onto dirty snow.
It’s a bad dream, a nightmare mash-up of a pulp noir fantasy, bad poetry, and cute images of animals disporting themselves in the snow. It comes with its own poem:
Start with the Zippy strip of 6/29; focus on the second panel:
(#1) A generic diner setting, plus Nancy‘s cartoonist Ernie Bushmiller’s three rocks, unaccountably numbered for reference (see my 9/22/17 posting “Three rocks”)
Double dactyls for boys
Snarfity-barfity, Grossout and Slapstick, those
Champions of ick, masters of pow:
Boys by the age of six, nix on the feminine,
Slam with the Stooges, shout it out loud
In the mail yesterday (in transit for a month from Italy), this neon purple penguin key ring — a pengring, portmanteau of penguin + ring — a little gift of friendship in difficult times, from Anna Thornton —Â morphologist Anna M. Thornton, Professor of Linguistics at UniversitĂ Degli Studi Dell’Aquila, Â the University of LâAquila, Italy:
(#1) AÂ hollow key ring, with the hollow good for holding the pendant penguin and so finding and wielding the keys on the ring, though this particular design is usually intended to make the pendant usable as a bottle opener; I don’t, however, think I’d want to risk scratching that handsome purple surface on a bottle cap (but then twist caps have widely replaced pry-off caps, so we all have less call for bottle openers)
And from this, excursions in many directions.
I note at the outset that the penguin is one of my totem animals; my house is a riot of penguiniana (and mammuthiana as well). Anna’s choice of penguin as gift creature was no accident.
(Or, Cheers: Does anybody know some work?)
A comment from me yesterday on my 8/7  posting “Melecio / Biaggi”, in which I noted the lifelong social stigma for sexworkers (Melecio / Biaggi being one such),
which I posted baffled comments on in my posting: thereâs a moral question here, lying in the nexus between matters of sexual morality and matters of economic morality. So I thought to appeal to a moral philosopher [Tim Scanlon of Harvard] to ask if the question had been considered in the literature in that field.
… I keep posing queries (arising from my postings) to academics who are old friends (Tim; the phonetician John Wells [at University College London] on âdifference illusionsâ, illusions that certain homophones are actually distinct in pronunciation [in my 8/9 posting “The khan con”]; and the [Stanford] linguist Paul Kiparsky on the metrics of chants [in my 7/18 posting “Between the glutes”])
Tim and John were intrigued by my queries, but had no literature to offer. Paul’s response was more complicated: over brunch, he and I together were able to recall a few items, so that I could write to their authors for assistance, and our conversation led me to realize that the topic was a great deal more complex than I had thought when I posed the query.
