On 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.
Archive for the ‘Logos’ Category
Penguins, iconic and indistinguishable
March 17, 2026El 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.
I’m Chiquito Quesito …
September 2, 2025I’m Chiquito Quesito, and I’m here to say,
Cheese dip has to be made the Arkansas way
The jingle to go along with native Arksansan Bill Halstead’s reproducing (on 8/31) this silly dip pun he found on Facebook (from who knows what source):
(#1) The signage is for a dip in NOAD‘s sense 3a, wilfully misunderstood as about sense 2:noun dip: … 2 a thick sauce in which pieces of food are dunked before eating: tasty garlic dip. 3 [a] a brief downward slope followed by an upward one: the road’s precipitous dips and turns. [b] an act of sinking or dropping briefly before rising again: a dip in the share price.
And queso is short for chile con queso (‘chili with cheese’), which Wikipedia identifies as:
an appetizer or side dish of melted cheese and chili peppers, typically served in Tex-Mex restaurants as a dip for tortilla chips.
Now three further explorations: about dip signage; about dipspreads and dips in general, and varieties of queso in particular; and then some Facebook exchanges with Bill Halstead about cheese dip as a significant item in Arkansas’s food culture.
The out@in shirt
July 5, 2025From yesterday (for me, a long 4th of July work day, 6 am to 6 pm) on my Facebook page (somewhat edited):
In going through stuff in my closets, I came across a t-shirt (one that fits me, so I put it on) that has a logo on the front: a (portrait) rectangle with horizontal stripes of the rainbow flag in it and the word IN in white letters superimposed on the rainbow stripes. The back of the shirt identifies it as from out@in, which is presumably some sort of gay organization, but I don’t recognize the name or remember how I came to have the shirt.
My attempts to search for the organization and the logo came to nought, as did my attempts to scan the t-shirt logo into my scanning printer, so I appealed to readers to supply me with information about the organization and with a copy of the logo. (Given the precarity of my current life, I did not take well to people who, instead of giving me the information I sought, explained to me how I should have done the searches.)
Bite my punmanteau!
January 16, 2025Continuing Bizarro‘s theme from Monday through Wednesday, today’s Waynoratu Nosferamanteau — a Wayno punmanteau based on the film title Nosferatu — examines Transylvanian dentitions:
(#1) In the tradition of Nosferattoo, Nosferachoo, and Nosferatoon, a Nosferatooth X-ray; I must say that that’s a truly splendid vampiric X-ray (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)
(I was going to wait to see what Friday and Saturday would bring us on Bizarro before posting this strip, but it brings up an issue in visual symbolism, manifested in Wayno’s adaptation of the two-serpent caduceus (surmounting a tooth) to serve as a symbol of dentistry.)
boneless bananas
December 18, 2024The boneless bananas came to me on Facebook on 12/15 through Ruth Lawrence, who passed on this photo from the Give Me A Sign site on FB:
(#1) [RL’s comment:] I feel so reassured now
IMMIGRANTS EAT OUR DOGS
September 12, 2024So reads a sign — a genuine sign, not an achievement of digital image-making — reproduced widely on Facebook in the past two days:
(#1) The sign at the Wiener Circle / Wieners Circle / Wiener’s Circle, 2622 N. Clark St., Chicago IL 60614; two things about it — its’s a joke, a pun dogs (short for hot dogs ‘frankfurters’) on dogs ‘domestic canines’; and it’s a piece of political mockery
A mockery of Grabpussy, in the US Presidential debates on 9/10, who cited as fact preposterous on-line rumor stories, among them that Haitian immigrants in Springfield OH are preying on people’s pets, eating their dogs and cats — thus painting immigrants as dangerous invaders, monstrous inhuman beasts.
The NASCAR snail races
August 20, 2024That is, the NASCARGOT races, as a Bizarro of 12/26/10 has it, reveling in the portmanteau of NASCAR and escargot (French ‘snail’) and showing us Dan Piraro’s goofy conception of snails in a NASCAR race:
(#1) The cartoon appeared as the middle panel of a Bizarro Sunday Punnies strip with three bits of word play in it, posted about (without further analysis) in my 12/26/10 posting “Punnies #11” (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)
Hat tip to Susan Fischer for dredging up this old cartoon on Facebook yesterday. Causing me to reflect on the fact that not all of my readers will be familiar with the American popcultural phenomenon that is NASCAR; there are people who wouldn’t be surprised to see that contestants in a race carry numbers, but would be baffled by all those ads on the snails’ shells. Indeed, DP has managed to transport the physical trappings of NASCAR vehicles to le monde des escargots. Motor sport meets malacology.
A homo thesaurus
August 8, 2024An alert yesterday from Ernesto Cuba about the Homosaurus project: an LGBT thesaurus, with a portmanteau name
homosaurus = homo(sexual) + thesaurus — thesaurus from Ancient Greek, meaning ‘treasure, storehouse’
and a logo featuring a mascot apatosaurus (aka brontosaurus):
(#1) The Homosaurus mascot is a huge but herbivorous (hence unthreatening, user-friendly) dinosaur, and it comes with an accompanying Pride rainbow
— all these creatures with names incorporating the formative saur(us) (ultimately from Greek again, and meaning ‘lizard, reptile’ ), utterly unrelated to thesaurus but irresistible as a source of verbal and visual play, as in #1.
The Princeton rub tool
June 14, 2024(Even choosing my words carefully, a fair amount of this posting is going to be inappropriate for kids and the sexually modest; you’ll see why in a couple of seconds)
Two themes for today: tools, and their masculinity; and male-male frottage, especially one variant of the Princeton rub. Somewhat astoundingly, these two themes intersect in what I think of as the Princeton rub tool: a dual masturbation sleeve, a device to facilitate two guys getting off together face to face.