I woke at 3:30 am, after 8 hours of good sleep, to the sound of Scott Ross playing Soler keyboard music on his power harpsichord — the Fandango and an assortment of sonatas — which filled me with delight and promised a good day to come. Eventually I worked my way to my computer, and found one odd surprise and one very sorrowful one.
Archive for the ‘Quotations’ Category
Good morning, good morning
March 23, 2025Put a red apple in that mouth
March 22, 2025… and call it Cochon de lait rôti. Put a mouth on that green apple and call it Le fils de l’homme. Mash them together in a nightmare and you get today’s Bizarro strip, a Wayno Psychiatrist cartoon that’s a re-play of an earlier Bizarro, but with the dream figure of William Tell’s son (with an apple on his head) replaced by a roasted wild boar (with an apple in its mouth):
(#1) Surrealist René Magritte’s Son of Man on the therapist’s couch (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)
Two things here: apples in the mouths of roasted pigs (as in the patient’s nightmare); and the previous Bizarro strip (from 2022), with the same patient and the same therapist (a caricature of the artist Magritte), positioned differently in the strip, and suffering from dramatically different nightmares.
Sounding the alarm
March 6, 2025Or: life in these Soviet States of America, under the bitch goddess Putinitsa. Please read the NYT opinion column by Masha Gessen from 2/28 (on-line), “Putin Is Ready to Carve Up the World. Tr**p Just Handed Him the Knife”, where MG writes:
I am reminded of reading about the lives of exiles in Paris in the 1930s. German Jews and Communists, who had run for their lives, watched as the world reshuffled itself. Political parties that used to be antifascist flipped overnight, assuming positions that ranged from appeasement to a full embrace. French and British leaders looked away as Hitler tested his strength outside Germany. As antifascism was marginalized, antisemitism became mainstream. Hitler’s victims were blamed for their own misfortune.
Most days now, I touch base with Russian or Belarusian friends in exile who are experiencing a terrifying sort of déjà vu. We are perhaps more shocked than our American friends are by the speed with which the very rich and powerful, like The Washington Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, have become enablers of Tr**pism, and how the air itself seems to change, until suddenly it’s Zelensky, with his cleareyed vision and firm principles, who seems like an anomaly.
Things have since gotten much worse for Zelenskyy.
Warnings
March 3, 2025Passed on by John McIntyre on Facebook yesterday, this Jim Benton cartoon:
(#1) It’s all the fault of the Cassandras; they should have made us believe them, they shouldn’t have let us not believe them
(There’s a Page on this blog about my postings on Jim Benton and his cartoons.)
Rabbits massed at the month’s border
February 27, 2025It’s penultimate February. Tomorrow, tigers pounce, to devour the month. And then on Saturday, the hordes of rabbits (bearing leeks and daffodils for St. Dafydd’s Day, purely as ornaments, since both are toxic to rabbits) that have been massing at the month’s borders will stream in and overwhelm us all. Sandra Boynton has a cartoon for Rabbit Days (of course she does, bunnies are adorable, and SB is an artist of the adorable), which she last posted on Facebook on 1/31, just before the last onslaught:
Boynton writes: The new month approaches, so I am once again sharing the highly scientific fact that if you say RABBIT RABBIT! as your very first words of the month, they will bring good luck all month long. Additional irrefutable fact is that in worrisome times, the more rabbits mentioned the better.
Sing out, Louise! Now is the time to loudly chant RABBIT RABBIT RABBIT — Marche is icumen in / Lhude sing rabette — as a mantra of protection, a prayer for salvation:
From the fury of the Muskmen free us, O ye rabbits!
The knuckle nick
February 23, 2025Or: who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?
A report from Monday 2/17, when in the morning, while getting breakfast, I must have knocked my right hand against something with a sharp edge to it and nicked it (without any pain, so I didn’t realize it had happened) — because, when I looked down at the first knuckle, a bright bead of blood had welled up and was about to run down my hand. I grabbed some kleenex, wrapped it around the wound, and went to the bathroom to get a bandaid to cover the wound until the blood had clotted. (Clotting takes a while because I take a blood thinner — for atrial fibrillation, which seems to have vanished — which also means I have tons of bruises where I knock up against things with one bodypart or another. Medical treatments, side effects, it’s a balancing act.)
The day ticked on. Late in the afternoon, checking my Facebook page before getting up to assemble some dinner, I looked down, and my right hand was entirely covered with blood, which was streaming onto the pad under my keyboard. Onto my mousepad. And onto the tabletop. Blood everywhere, Jesus fuck. I must have knocked the scab loose against something, again without any warning pain, it was so minor. (No, I had not lost sensation in my fingers, that would have been truly scary.)
A moment of raunchy doggerel
January 31, 2025(dirty verse — a raunchy burlesque of some scurrilous doggerel — so not for kids or the sexually modest)
This is what I wrote to cease my weeping at a moment this morning when a number of MSNBC commenters, who were variously black, Jewish, female, and queer, struggled not to break down in hurt, anger, and despair in reporting on Anaranjado Grabpussy’s apparently declaring a ban on federal celebrations of DEI occasions (Black History Month, Pride, etc.). Further inspired by someone ranting, I don’t know why, on Facebook about Dildo as if it were the name of a person, a character in some social drama.
Private Magritte’s disavowal
August 3, 2024It’s been a while since we contemplated a Magrittean disavowal, in the tradition of the Belgian surrealist’s paradoxical Ceci n’est pas une pipe, so today’s absurd Wayno / Piraro Bizarro strip is a welcome addition to the genre:
(#1) Surrealistic clandestine warfare (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)
The mantra ray
June 21, 2024Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro brings us a gigantic terrifying fish that flies underwater and, in their telling, repeats a meditative formula while doing so:
(#1) With mantra ‘a word or sound [in this case, the classic syllable om] repeated to aid concentration in meditation’ (NOAD) punning on manta (ray), the name of the fish (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)
mantra ray is one of those puns that are just lying around waiting, begging, to be exploited for a cartoon, so it’s no surprise that others have taken advantage of this comic resource before Wayno got to it; I’ll look at three of them below (one from a famous print cartoonist, two from webcomics).
A hell of a queen
June 15, 2024(Some readers will find some of the material in this posting distasteful, but there’s nothing visual or verbal in it to merit keeping the kids away from it.)
I’ll blame this on the luminous Minnie Driver, playing Queen Elizabeth I in season 2 of the Starz tv period drama The Serpent Queen.
(#1) MD in one of her fabulous QEI costumes; the character invites extravagance in costuming and makeup (further examples to come)
Through an accident of dates, QEI will take us to “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic” song and secret worlds hidden from everyday life (and, of course, gay bears). Then, through the excellent “hell of a queen” quotation, she will take us on a further wild ride to the Princeton Triangle Club in 1960 and, more generally, to queens in drag.
Buckle up.