My right hip joint is now a metallic wonder, a titanium replacement in 2012 for the joint nature gave me, which had excruciatingly degenerated from osteoarthritis. I love the name titanium: it trips off the tongue, and as a proud gay man and an enthusiast of MND (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) in several of its incarnations, I choose to understand the name as a reference to Titania, Queen of the Fairies — silly faggot, titanium is for ur-deities.
Now to unpack all of this.
It’s mid-August, and still hot summer in Palo Alto, but the nights are now cool (quilt time is upon me) and it’s cool when I get up (around 3 am), moving me to put on a thick flannel shirt and gelling the coconut oil I use to treat my body (it becomes a thin clear liquid in the heat of the day, but the gel is what you want if you’re using it for skin and hair).
Briefly noted. From my 8/9/23 posting “The states of matter: coconut X”:
I discovered the melting point of coconut X several summers ago. My air-conditioning aims to cool things to 80 F, so when it gets hot outside, inside my condo the spreadable coconut fat ([a semi-solid cream] used for daily treatment of my feet, legs, hands, and arms) melts (at around 77 F) to to a free-flowing liquid that’s very hard to cope with.
So this morning I put the jar in the refrigerator (where it’s probably between 35 and 40 F) — and discovered another state of the substance, a very firm solid that is also almost impossible to deal with; I have to chip away chunks of the stuff with a pointed implement, chunks that alas, do not spread (though I can get small amounts of the liquid state by using the (roughly 97 F) body heat in my hands to melt a chunk).
That was on an early August day, in the dog days of summer. Today is March 20th, the first day of spring — the vernal equinox — here in the northern hemisphere. But also another day of record-breaking heat in the southern SF bay, set to soar once again to over 90F. When I went to oil my legs and feet at 6:30 am, it had already melted to a messy liquid. (I got up at 3:30 am to enjoy the cool and quiet of the night, and did in fact finish a posting then. After which I turned into a reptile stunned by the heat.) Tomorrow the temperature will drop by 20 degrees, and I’ll be able to walk in the neighborhood again. May it be so.
🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate August (inaugurust?) — and 🇨🇭 🇨🇭 🇨🇭 for Swiss National Day (yes, I am wearing my Swiss-flag gym shorts): happy 733rd birthday, Helvetia! — Uri! Schwyz! Unterwalden! — plus the Zwicky family canton: Glarus! — imagine the bunnies of August bounding over the Alpine meadows of the three Urkantone from 1291
But now for something completely different. A cascade of puns on names in the joke form I’ll call WoF?, abbreviating Who’s on First?, after the exemplary Abbott and Costello comedy sketch. In a Pearls Before Swine strip of 7/31/22, revived on Facebook yesterday (another 7/31):
(#1) WoF? now transported from baseball to football — in the NFL, with the four wh-question words of the gridiron: Watt, Ware, Wynn, and Y.A. (while Pig takes the role of the calmly explanatory Abbott and Rat the role of the increasingly confused and enraged Costello)
I’ll take an amused look back on WoF? cartoons on this blog in a moment. But first some notes on the comedy sketch that’s the model for this strip — noting that the cartoons have to achieve their effects through static text and drawings, while the comedy sketch is performed in real time by human actors deploying a rich stock of vocal and gestural resources. So on the one hand, though you might think of the comic strip as just a frozen, stripped down version of the live sketch, you could also view the strip as a highly artful joining of text and image using minimal resources (inspired by the live sketch but not attempting to reproduce it), as the comic counterpart of a graphic novel.
Of me. Done by Max Vasilatos after a visit to me on 1/2. To make clay forms of items of mine for bronze casts — still to come — and share holiday carrot cake and commiserate over the pains and inabilities of our poor afflicted bodies, notably the weather-induced agony of our metal hip joints. But the drawing:
(#1) In my bathrobe, sitting in my home office
As we slide into a US holiday weekend — leading to Labor Day, the first Monday in September, this year on the 2nd — my birthday (on the 6th) looms as well. Coming up is a prime-th birthday, the 79th, an auspicious number to my mind, just one short of the 80th, which many view (like the similarly vigesimal 20th, 40th, and 60th) as a landmark birthday, in this case the gateway into old age. But for the moment I’m prime, baby.
Selling avocados in Santo Domingo DR:
(#1)
H2O KT is a play on Sp. aguacate ‘avocado’, treating it as:
the chemical formula H2O for agua ‘water’ + ca, the letter K /ka/, + te, the letter T /te/
that is, as la formula química del aguacate ‘the chemical formula for the avocado’. The joke isn’t quite perfect: K is indeed a symbol for a chemical element, potassium, but there’s no element T (though there is Te, the metalloid tellurium). (There is a compound potassium telluride, K2Te, but I don’t know how it interacts with water.)
The joke will lead us to the demotivational industry (with a penguin interlude); to snark and Mad magazine; to color blindness; to egg and avocado dishes; and to a sexually suggestive cartoon and its gender ideology.
