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 ‘Signs and symbols’ Category
After the rain, around the block
April 15, 2026Yesterday (4/14), my helper Isaac and I took a walk around the block (Ramona to Forest to Emerson to Homer and back to Ramona), taking advantage of the end of days of rain. Officially we were visiting the oregano plant on Emerson St. (see my 4/14 posting “Things I didn’t know”, in the section on “a labiate plant with fleshy leaves”), but we traversed a largely changed scene: the cat’s-claw creeper on the arbor over my entry was coming to the end of its 4 or so days of bloom; the calla lilies on Ramona St. had finished their days of blooming and dropped their flowers; the rose bushes in Forest Ave. that were all buds before the rain were now a solid mass of beautiful single white roses; there were big passion-flowers on Emerson St.; and the Chinese elms on Homer Ave., totally bare on our last walk, had fully leafed out in green, turning a whole block into a pleasantly shaded path.
And on the street strip on Forest, a bunch of bare 4-foot sticks had been transformed into a dense display of bright-white dogwood blossoms. Much like these:
Long Island, duck!
April 14, 2026Today’s (4/14) Zippy strip has our Pinhead in conversation with a giant cement duck:
(#1) An anatine day in Southampton
On the sex toy watch
March 22, 2026(a posting that clearly will not to be to everyone’s taste)
From the Titan Men Store (an adjunct to the gay porn studio), among a huge variety of silicone sex toys currently on sale, this cute little item:
Penguins, iconic and indistinguishable
March 17, 2026On the heels of my 3/14 posting “Seeking a penguin caption” (in which the birds are ubiquitous), there come two penguin cartoons in the April 2026 issue of Funny Times: one by Bill DeMain in which the birds are iconic, one by Vaughan Tomlinson in which they are (memically) indistinguishable.
El Palo Alto
March 17, 2026In yesterday’s posting “The breakfast walk”, one notable feature of that walk was what is now the elegant Nobu Hotel Epiphany, which preserves (from the earlier Casa Olga hotel) the 6-story-tall mosaic mural of El Palo Alto, the coast redwood tree for which the city of Palo Alto is named:
(#1) The Casa Olga mural
(#2) The mural on the much-expanded Nobu Hotel Epihany
I remind you that this is a short distance from my house, but has just become part of the urban landscape, taken for granted — as indeed we take for granted the many actual coast redwoods growing companionably on our streets (reaching straight into the sky, towering over a hundred feet, easily hundreds of years old). (There’s one such tree only about 50 feet from my front door.)
And I remind you that the tree in #1 and #2 is not an abstract or imagined coast redwood, but a specific Sequoia sempervirens — El Palo Alto — that grows in a little urban forest park, alongside the railroad tracks (originally Southern Pacific, now Caltrain) at the border between Palo Alto (in Santa Clara County) and Menlo Park (in San Mateo County), only abut 7 blocks from my house.
Dancing Santas
December 10, 2025From Bob Eckstein’s The Bob substack on 1/7/23, this delightful troupe of dancing Santas, created for the monthly comedy newspaper the Funny Times to sell on t-shirts (this year’s offer came to me by e-mail yesterday:
(bob’s text) Funny Times is getting into the Holiday groove with my Dancing Santas. The perfect Secret Santa gift can be found here.
Nairobi, gorillas. and gorilla suits
December 9, 2025Musings on three things — Nairobi, gorillas, and gorilla suts — en soi (as “just stuff:”) vs. those things serving as symbols, with various values / evoked associations, which are typically conventional: cultural meanings. With specific reference to these three things in the 1950s Ernie Kovacs comedy sketch The Nairobi Trio.
Suck my suffix!
December 6, 2025(thoroughly raunchy Christmas porn, in verse of sorts; not for kids or the sexually modest)
Inspired by the appearance of gay porn actor Dean Young partnered with Joey Mills in Joey’s Surf Vacation (yesterday on this blog), I pulled out DY’s photos from the Christmas sextravaganza Cum All Ye Faithful (in which he’s a very naughty elf), and whipped out a few lines of raunchy verse (with a linguistic subtext for the academically inclined):
The angel of the Lord came down
December 2, 2025… And glory shone all around
So I sang this afternoon, immersed in the joy of the Christmas season, weeping with pleasure at being able to sing again (and exercise my lungs; my singing is supposed to be both pleasurable and therapeutic), after many weeks of being laid low. And so I write about the hymn tune Sherburne paired with the text of the Christmas carol “While shepherds watched their flocks”, from which comes the angel descending in a shimmer of glory.
Not what I intended to post about today — but the Ernie Kovacs Nairobi Trio comic routine has turned out to be vastly more complex than I originally thought, so I’m going for the fire-bright Christmas angel. Stay tuned for something later about three people in gorilla suits.