Archive for the ‘Poetry’ Category
September 24, 2023
Today’s Piraro-only Bizarro (it’s a Sunday; Wayno’s doing other things) —
The gargantuan chalking project is, it seems, debilitating (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 11 in this strip — see this Page)
— is comprehensible only if you recognize the huge inert creature in it as the legendary prehistoric ape of a century of film, King Kong; and you recognize the fact that cops are drawing an outline around the creature in chalk as a sign that this is a scene of suspicious death. Kong is not just sleeping in the street, he’s dead; the cops are tracing Corpse Kong.
Two questions then occurred to me, and might well have occurred to others:
Q1: What do you call that chalk outline?
Q2: Just how big is / was King Kong?
Both questions have answers. Both answers are unsatisfying, but in different ways.
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Posted in Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Names, Poetry, Technical and ordinary language, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
September 17, 2023
Reported on Facebook by a friend, who treated it as a display of real Amurrican values, this sign on an aisle in a US supermarket:
Aisle 11: a text culminating in Guns Bibles Sweatpants
As always, I wanted to know what store this came from and when, but the sign came to me as something just being passed around on the web, and nobody involved in such transmissions (of images or text or both together) has any interest in knowing where they come from, so it’s pointless to ask. Since such memic items are very often inventions, or involve doctored photos, I was suspicious of this one: too good to be true?
Some rooting around eventually brought me to the relevant fact-checking Snopes site, but not before I’d fashioned the climax of Aisle 11 into a parody song.
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Posted in Parody, Poetry, Signage, Slogans | Leave a Comment »
September 13, 2023
Today’s morning music, playing (on the Apple Music that’s beamed into my bedroom during the night) when I arose at 3:40 am: from Anonymous 4’s 1865: Songs of Hope and Home from the American Civil War, “Aura Lee” (sung by Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek, with harmony and instrumental accompaniment by Bruce Molsky). An achingly lovely song — you can listen to the performance here — with a chorus that’s three lines of sentimental love song, topped by the transcendent line “And swallows in the air”, with its breath-taking image of the birds swooping in flight.
(#1) Photo by Keith Gough, as cover art for the demo video for “Swallows in Air”, from John Newell’s A Timbered Choir, settings (for voices and piano) of poems by Wendell Berry
The program: about the Civil War song song “Aura Lea / Lee”; about the 2015 Anonymous 4 album; and (briefly) about the Newell / Berry “Swallows in Air”.
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Posted in Movies and tv, Music, My life, Poetry, Pop culture | 2 Comments »
August 17, 2023
Brief notice: a Facebook posting with a loony AI-generated report — alas, now lost to me — on painter Pablo Picasso and rapper Eminem placed them together back in the 1600s, presumably along with some dinosaurs from those bygone days, and so generated a certain amount of harsh criticism, but also a strange breath of reality on reddit.com:
— r/Showerthoughts 6 mo. ago by -bobby-jackson-: Eminem was born while Pablo Picasso was still painting…
— Odd-Knee-9985 6 mo. ago: I mean, people think Picasso was some 1600’s painter, but he was actually very modern (1881-1973).
Not only very modern in the calendrical sense (that is, not a figure from the 17th century), but in fact one of the central figures in what came to be known as modernism in art; in a sense, in one context Picasso defined “modern”.
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Posted in Art, Music, Poetry | Leave a Comment »
June 13, 2023
(This posting manages to (barely) skirt male genitals and man-on-man sex, without (almost any) street speech or explicit images, but the topic is daddy fantasies in gay porn, so it will not be to everyone’s taste)
For Memorial Day (and other American patriotic holidays), ads for gay porn play to fantasies of military men, while for Fathers Day, coming up rapidly (this Sunday, 6/18), they play to daddy fantasies (see the Page on this blog about my postings on Daddy-Boy encounters and DILFs, on the sexualization and various ritualizations of the father-son roles). With luck, pretty much the same material can serve for both holidays, as in the case of Papi Kocic (with his heavily loaded porn name) in MEN.com’s Norse Fuckers, who did ad duty on Memorial Day (in an ad for a porn emporium’s Memorial Day sale; see my 5/29/23 posting “Hordes of Norsemen insert themselves into a national holiday”) playing a military leader; and now appears in a porn-sale ad for Fathers Day in his guise as a hot daddy:
(#1) The ad, with genitals concealed (for WordPress modesty) and ad copy suppressed (so we can focus on the image and the porn-purveyors’ sentiment “We ❤️ Hot Dads!”)
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Posted in Gay porn, Holidays, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language in advertising, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity, Movies and tv, Poetry | Leave a Comment »
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 18, 2023
That is the question posed by today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro:
(#1) Dan and Wayno commit the (imperfect, but very close) pun Crime Scheme > Rhyme Scheme (/krajm/ > /rajm/, just lose the /k/) — the crime in question being a novel variety of match fixing (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)
I’ve been musing on how you would throw a poetry slam — knowingly offering an inferior rap, I guess, though that sounds like a hard thing to pull off.
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Posted in Language and sports, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Poetry | Leave a Comment »
May 10, 2023
Today’s Zippy strip has Griffy carried to ecstatic chanting of a line of dactylic trimeter in celebration of a quirky gift from Zippy:
This is a return to a Zippy theme, but also my cautious return to posting on this blog, after some days in hell that I’ve been describing on my Facebook page; my last posting here was “Iddle-Do and Not Zarella”, back on 5/5/23, five days ago. Aside from some calamitous physical symptoms, I suddenly developed a very specific cognitive deficit: though still able to read and send e-mail, I lost all knowledge of how to post to WordPress.
With the help of friends, these abilities have been coming back in bits and pieces over the last two days. But I’m now able to edit text, insert images and add clickable links (see above). Not trying anything very ambitious, just getting my feet back in the water.
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Posted in Language play, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Poetry | 4 Comments »
April 30, 2023
🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for ultimate April, also Walpurgis Night / Eve, the first of two days marking what we might think of as “high spring” (in the northern hemisphere), turning to the last of the spring months; tomorrow, May 1st, is the more famous (it’s May Day and also the Celtic festival Beltane).
The capsule story, from Wikipedia:
Walpurgis Night, an abbreviation of Saint Walpurgis Night (from the German Sankt-Walpurgisnacht), also known as Saint Walpurga’s Eve (alternatively spelled Saint Walburga’s Eve), is the eve of the Christian feast day of Saint Walpurga, an 8th-century abbess in Francia, and is celebrated on the night of 30 April and the day of 1 May. This feast commemorates the canonization of Saint Walpurga and the movement of her relics to Eichstätt, both of which occurred on 1 May 870.
Saint Walpurga was hailed by the Christians of Germany for battling “pest [AZ: bubonic plague], rabies, and whooping cough, as well as against witchcraft”. Christians prayed to God through the intercession of Saint Walpurga in order to protect themselves from witchcraft, as Saint Walpurga was successful in converting the local populace to Christianity. In parts of Europe, people continue to light bonfires on Saint Walpurga’s Eve in order to ward off evil spirits and witches.
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Posted in Art, Holidays, Music, Poetry, Switzerland and Swiss things | Leave a Comment »
April 27, 2023
A bit of light verse that passed my eyes on Facebook and pleased me with its playful exploitation of ambiguity In English. (It went on to serve as the title of the poet’s first book):
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Posted in Ambiguity, Books, Humor, Poetry | Leave a Comment »
