“On the anniversary of Arthur Schopenhauer’s birth, David Bather Woods, a Schopenhauer expert at the University of Warwick, recommends five books on Schopenhauser.”
The typo was quoted on Facebook on 2/22 by Wendy Thrash, who explained the intervention of Schopenhauser:
“Because nobody wants to read about Schopenhauer.”
The pointer is to Five Books, a site with book recommendations from authorities; each recommendation is for five books on a specific subject, in this case David Bather Woods on Arthur Schopenhauer:
(#1)
Which inspired me to light verse:
Schopenhauser
Was a schnauzer
A bristly brute that
Played the flute
In my comics feed for the day, this One Big Happy from 6/15, featuring a Dad Tall Tale, DTT for short (here an elaborate poetic burlesque):
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The original: Joyce Kilmer’s famous (and famously sentimental) poem “Trees” — also famously parodied, most notably in Ogden Nash’s “Song of the Open Road”.
An excellent line of dactylic tetrameter — Navy flamingos and roseate spoonbills — featuring two strikingly pink birds, and these birds on fancifully patterned men’s swimwear and shorts. Then a bonus item that’s not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.
We begin with yesterday’s Daily Jocks ad, for the Elia beachwear company:
(#1) A not entirely human apparition on the beach, a superreal PlasticMan hunk, staring down fixedly at his big (artificially enhanced) package and at the wonderfully playful pink flamingos on his navy-blue swim briefs (note the typo flip fops, which I’ll get to in the bonus section)
Nick Veasey is a British photographer working primarily with images created from X-ray imaging. Some of his works are partial photomanipulations with Photoshop. He therefore works with digital artists to realise his creations.
Born in London in 1962, he worked in the advertising and design industries and pursued work in conventional still photography before being asked to X-ray a cola can for a television show. Veasey also X-rayed the shoes he was wearing on the day and upon showing the finished image to an art director was galvanised by the response it provoked.
(This is a new posting, intended as a reconstruction of and replacement for a “Catalectic trochaic tetrameter” posting of 3/1 that was somehow destroyed by WordPress, in such a way that if you try to access the posting under that name you are now automatically re-directed to my 3/1 “Guy gear” posting, which is intriguing but not the same thing at all. This “In the political news” posting quotes some sexual street talk but isn’t about men’s bodyparts or mansex, so I’m not warning anyone off. But it’s not all sunshine and roses.)
A Facebook dialogue from 2/29:
Gadi Niram: I don’t know what the deeper meaning might be here, but “Klobuchar and Buttigieg” has the same stress pattern as “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern”.
Arnold Zwicky: A line of catalectic trochaic tetrameter – SW SW SW S — incredibly common in folk verse of all kinds, and elsewhere. Including: “Lord what fools these mortals be”. Not to mention one reading of: “Captain of our fairy band”. And, from a recent posting of mine: “Lincoln Darwin Valentine”.
Today’s Zippy strip returns to the hypnotic pleasures of mantric repetition, a favorite theme of Bill Griffith’s:
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First, it’s parsed as
[ Cosmic Catnip ] [ alpine scratcher ] ‘alpine scratcher with Cosmic Catnip in it’
where Cosmic Catnip is a commercial brand of catnip and an alpine scratcher is a kind of slanted scratch toy for cats. Second, it is indeed a real thing. And third, the name is an excellent line of trochaic tetrameter, eminently usable as a meditative mantra when repeated, ideally at least three times.
The 5/27 Wayno-Piraro Bizarro strip, set in the Land of Dogs:
(#1) (If you wonder about the secret symbol in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there’s just one in this strip — see this Page.)
A dog food with Quibbles in its name is of course not going to agree with you, in one sense of agree with. So you can understand the cartoon, and see that the pun on agree with in it makes it amusing — and still miss the extra joke that Wayno and Piraro threw in for you.
The cartoon would have been funny if the dog food had been named just Quibbles. But Quibbles and Fits is a lot funnier, because it’s another pun, on the name of the (actual) dog food Kibbles and Bits. But of course you have to know about this particular commercial product to get that joke.
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