This is a complicated background to a mishearing posting that has itself turned out to be more complex than I first imagined — a mishearing of the title word in the song “Cardinal” as recorded in 2024 by Kacey Musgraves. This posting is about the song; the titular bird, the northern cardinal; KM the singer-songwriter; KM’s wonderful performance of the song; and the song’s moving background story, inspired by the late country / folk singer John Prine. (more…)
Archive for the ‘Pop culture’ Category
The fabulously successful idiot plot
March 5, 2026I recently stumbled on the notion of an idiot plot on Facebook — a cultural category I had surely encountered before but must have forgotten about. In any case, I now had Wikipedia’s explanation, along with a notable example, the plot of the Astaire / Rogers musical comedy film Top Hat.
But … despite some evident absurdity, I find the film enormously enjoyable, and in fact it’s by far the most successful of the Astaire / Rogers movies. Musical films are clearly not bound by constraints of rationality or fidelity to fact — indeed, the narrative objects of culture are in general unconstrained by such considerations: consider the plots of most operas and American Western movies, both set in times and places that never existed and often don’t make sense: consider, specifically, Manon Lescaut and The Magic Flute; or Red River and Stagecoach. Masterpieces of their genres, truly wonderful, but preposterous and inaccurate in many ways. We don’t care. All this stuff happens in fictive worlds that are imaginative creations with their own conventions (not unlike the fictive worlds of science fantasy).
Now: background about idiot plots. And then an appreciation of Top Hat.
Two DEC-20 cartoons
December 20, 2025I am reminded by Amanda Walker that today is DEC-20 Day — it’s the date, kids — causing me to recall times working at research labs that used DEC-20s as their shared workhorse machines. This DEC-20 brought me two cartoons, the first a Zippy glancingly related to Christmas, the second a Bizarro directly about Christmas in popular culture.
Social value
December 1, 2025🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate the month of December and to begin a new work week
Another lesson from a visit a little while back from an old friend and colleague in linguistics in which three meals (deliveries from local restaurants) were a stand-out feature. I quietly insisted on doing the ordering, so as to offer my guest an array of pleasant surprises. I have since realized that what I was doing was displaying an ability of social value; in earlier years, I would have cooked the meals (I was genuinely good at that), but I’m long past being able to cook, and now (for complex reasons) I’m also unable to take guests out to dinner — but I can still play the role of host, by foraging takeout skillfully.
In a similar vein, though I can’t cook, I can produce new meals in my kitchen, using takeout, household staples, and a microwave [I realize this sounds like the description of a MacGyver episode, with our hero, oh, escaping from a prison using only leftover lasagna, plastic cutlery, and a thimble]; I can still play the role of cook, through my skill at assembling new dishes. As a boast: I Am the Great Assembler. (Totally over-the-top theme music here: Freddy Mercury singing “The Great Pretender”, in this YouTube video.)
“As the Mind Spins”
October 27, 2025The title (taking off on As the World Turns) of today’s (10/27/25) Zippy strip, in which Griffy and Zippy balance the pros against the cons for our planet:
(#1) Griffy sez: what makes the world go round isn’t love, but greed, lust, denial, and (of course) the conservation of angular momentum
But wait! We’ve seen this strip before.
The duck drops down
October 6, 2025Say the secret word, and a prop duck made in the image of Groucho Marx drops down, to riotous applause and blaring horns — and you get prize money. That was American tv’s You Bet Your Life from 1950 to 1961 (roughly, my teenage years). And then in a Pearls Before Swine comic strip from 2006:
(#1) Another self-referential strip by Stephan Pastis (it’s one of his specialties) — the secret word is the idiomatic (originally biblical) phrase (cast) pearls before swine — turning on shtick that disappeared from live tv about 65 years ago (but apparently lives on in pop-cultural consciousness, or at least in Pastis’s)
A seminar on raunchy play
September 23, 2025(entertaining, but totally not for kids or the sexually modest)
The seminar was called to order on 9/21 on Facebook by Michael Thomas, who introduced the key background element, the internet fridge. The participants were three gay men, long-time friends (our shared backgrounds and the relaxed, playful atmosphere are important here): speakers Michael Thomas and me, with Michael’s husband Aric Olnes in a non-speaking role. From the transcript (somewhat edited):
— MT: We [MT and AO] hooked our fridge up to the internet the other day. Here’s a question for the ages: do fridges watch porn while the doors are shut?
— AZ: But of course. And then they fall asleep and dream of abusing electric sheep. And you thought that was condensation on the fridge walls, didn’t you?
— MT > AZ: fridge spunk. just scrape it off for your coffee in the morning.
— AZ > MT: Absolutely. The best jizz there is.
There’s an enormous amount of stuff packed into this — some from the widespread sexual culture of modern America or from popular culture but also some from gay male sexual culture. I will now do some unpacking.
Cartoons for 9/1/25
September 1, 2025🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to bring September in (also to bring in the first fall month in the northern hemisphere) and, this year, to celebrate (US) Labor Day (recognizing the union movement and honoring workers) — so that I bring you (cartoon) rabbits in hard hats:
(#1) Lola and Bugs Bunny, in an HBO Max series from 2023, Bugs Bunny Builders: Hard Hat Time
Which takes me to September cartoons from the New Yorker, beginning with a scene-setting item from 2022:
Comic collages
August 18, 2025I’ve lost faith in these offers reaching an audience. But just in case, I have a variety of framed / mounted comic collages, free for the taking (at my downtown Palo Alto condo). In three sets.
First set: eleven pieces of Barry Kite’s Aberrant Art (roughly 10.5 x 15 in. images, with generous framing white space), described in my 11/30/16 posting “Poet in Search of His Moose”; in general,
The collages are parodic or surreal, and quite funny, combinations of elements from art history and from popular culture, with wry titles. Like Bill Griffiths on art in Zippy the Pinhead, Kite shows great affection for the culture that he ransacks to create absurdist, countercultural works.
Second set: two similar works by a collagist De la Nuez (bought at a long-ago Palo Alto art fair; I’ve lost all information about him)
Third set: a large collection of smaller collages, by my hand: comic homoerotic (mostly XXX-rated) collages
Come by and browse; set up a time by e-mail to: arnold dot zwicky at-sign gmail dot com
Lost in an uncrowd
August 1, 2025🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit for August — and 🇨🇭 Swiss National Day 🇨🇭 (I am of course wearing my Swiss flag gym shorts — with a bright red FAGGOT tank top, to be sure, but I am sporting the flag of my forefathers)
Today’s (Piccolo & Price) Rhymes With Orange strip depends on the viewer identifying the main character, the one who says he wants to go someplace busy and crowded, as a pop-cultural figure known for losing himself in crowds:
British Wally / American Waldo, uncomfortable out in the open, with only one other person close to him
My 8/3/13 posting “The Weinerfest rolls on” has a section on the Where’s Wally / Waldo? books, with this Wikipedia note:
The books consist of a series of detailed double-page spread illustrations depicting dozens or more people doing a variety of amusing things at a given location. Readers are challenged to find a character named Wally hidden in the group. Wally’s distinctive red-and-white-striped shirt, bobble hat, and glasses make him slightly easier to recognise, but many illustrations contain “red herrings” involving deceptive use of red-and-white striped objects.
So of course he’s uneasy, sitting in such an exposed spot.
Thanks to his distinctive garb, Waldo is a frequent subject of cartoons. My 2/17/18 posting “Tell them you haven’t seen him” has a sampling of 4 of them.