From cartoonist Bob Eckstein’s The Bob newsletter of 9/5 “Back to School BONUS EDITION”, in a section on “The Worst NFL Logos” (published in Run Your Pool), about the original Buffalo Bills logo:
The original Buffalo buffaloThe old water buffalo was so unassuming, so unexpected, you thought, watch out! What are they up to? It was the only sports logo with the outline of genitals. With the understated white dot for an eye, I contend it was sport’s funniest logo … ever. We lost that.
I wrote on Facebook a little while ago:
Just heard on a tv public service announcement from Santa Clara County: … Watch for walkers and vipers. (Ah, that must have been: bikers. Fortunately, vipers are sparse in the county.)
Follow-up: there seem to be plenty of Dodge Vipers in the county, also Pit Viper Sunglasses. And we have the Silicon Valley Vipers quadball team. According to the US Quadball site: “quadball is a mixed gender contact sport with a unique mix of elements from rugby, dodgeball, and tag”. (Until 2022 it was known as quidditch. Yes, that quidditch. Players must have a broomstick between their legs at all times. I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP.)
Logo of the Silicon Valley Vipers quadball team
Dan Piraro’s Bizarro from Sunday 7/30, in which Vikings with bunny-eared helmets demand horned helmets:
(#1) No more eating grasses, it’s time for Viking pillaging and plundering in an appropriately fierce costume (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 10 in this strip — see this Page)
Now, you’re thinking, I’m going to tell you that actual Vikings didn’t wear ornamental horned helmets, just to look fearsome; that instead they wore more effectively protective helmets of thick leather; and that the horned helmet thing is totally an invention of artists — or some disappointing shit like that. And I am.
It’s a good story, and it makes for amazingly impressive operatic scenes and a totally menacing muscle-hunk Marvel comics superhero (among other things), but all that horns stuff is fanciful.
From today’s (5/16) Stanford Report, a feature on the outgoing Stanford Tree, Grayson Armour, who cavorted on the football field of Stanford Stadium as the team’s mascot, the Tree, a costumed figure representing El Palo Alto, the redwood tree featured on the university’s logo; meanwhile, Armour was preparing himself for “a career in human spaceflight”. Kids these days!
From the Stanford Report:
(#1) Armour in Stanford StadiumMeet Grayson Armour, ’23: The former Stanford Tree grew up on a dairy farm in Illinois, where nightly views of the Milky Way inspired a fascination with distant horizons. He graduates in June with a bachelor’s degree in aerospace computational engineering and a master’s degree in aeronautics and astronautics, and plans to pursue a career in human spaceflight.
(#1)
Thanks to this year’s alignment of the Gregorian and Roman Catholic church calendars and the schedule of official US holidays, the month of February 2023 has two periods of presidential pleasure in it — festivals of Lincoln and license (food and sex) embracing first 2/12 (Lincoln Darwin Day), 2/13 (today, LDV Day), and 2/14 (Valentine’s Day), and then 2/20 ((US) Presidents Day) and 2/21 (Mardi Gras).
This is supremely a Mary, Queen of Scots, Not Dead Yet posting: a brief posting that I hope you’ll find both entertaining and informative, while showing that I’m Still Standing, despite a run of extremely unpleasant days, taken up almost entirely with writhing in pain and with sleep, the sleep of exhaustion and scary narcoleptic sleep. But here, a moment of sunshine.
Supplied by Mike Pope a few hours ago with this photo from real life:
(#1) MP writes: Documentation solves another design issue … An interesting variant on the Norman door
(MP is a regular source of material for this blog; WordPress tells me I have cited him in 30 postings so far. He is also — and this is absolutely relevant to his comment — a technical editor at Google. Explanation and documentation are his business.)
Return with me now to the middle of June, when I was impelled into the world of Zwicky logos, including not only ones for prominent Swiss commercial enterprises in grain, sewing thread, and real estate (the grain company is where it all started on 6/14), but also for beer (in Colorado), hair styling (also in Colorado), car repair (in Canton Aargau in Switzerland), and astronomical surveys (in California).
The original impulse came from Kyle Wohlmut, posting on Facebook on 6/14 “at Zwicky Areal”, with this photo taken from his commuter train:
(#1) KW > AZ (about the gnome in the logo): I don’t think that’s a very good likeness…
The logo in question:
(#2) The gnome is indeed not a good likeness of me
There ensued a confusion that turned out to have to do with the word Areal, but eventually it was established that the gnomic logo in #1 and #2 is for the Zwicky grain company (Schweizerische Schälmühle E. Zwicky AG), headquartered in a corner of Canton Thurgau; while the Zwicky sewing-thread company (now merged into the German company A&E Gütermann) and the real-estate company (Zwicky & Co AG, headquartered in the Zürich suburb of Wallisellen) base their logos on the Donald Brun silk-cat poster of the 1950s (which I’ve posted about repeatedly).
But Kyle’s note sent me on a search for Zwicky logos, which took me immediately to the 4 Noses Brewing Company in Broomfield CO, makers of Zwicky P (a Pilsner-style lager) and on to all the rest.
(Penis plush and dildos too, in detail, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
Breaking News for Penises: you can now purchase adorable soft-plush penis-simulacrum stuffed toys. Some for you to cuddle with. One that is, delightfully, a second-order simulacrum: a stuffed-toy simulacrum of a dildo, the dildo being a sex-toy simulacrum of a penis — and, even better, this one is a stuffed squeaky toy for dogs. Eventually, there will be a photo of Fido gently mouthing Peter Woofington, a gigantic plush play-dick in warm but unlikely flesh tones. With goofy crossed eyes.
As a bonus, you get two fabulous recordings of Billy Strayhorn’s jazz standard “Lush Life”: Ella Fitzgerald singing the words, John Coltrane transforming the music. Plus my confession that when I came across Peter I somehow missed the canine connection entirely and so fell to speculating about the anal life expectancy of a plush dick and to some alarm at the idea of taking into my body a dildo that squeaked (presumably with pleasure, but still).
Today’s Piccolo / Price Rhymes With Orange strip is a play on specific American tv commercials (with some gentle old-age mockery folded in), so will be baffling to any reader who doesn’t recognize the Kool-Aid Man mascot or know the wall-breaking “Oh Yeah!” tv ads featuring KAM:
(#1) There is, however, a hint to the reader in the “So not kool” (with kool instead of cool) in the title panel; note also the generational disparity reinforced by the GenX so there (see my 11/14/11 posting “GenX so“)
Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, requiring a boatload of popcultural knowledge to understand:
(#1) The easy part: these are three anthropomorphic peanuts, M, M, F from left to right, and they are sitting at a bar, with drinks in front of them (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)
Somehow the meeting of these three exemplifies the N1 + N2 compound N wingnut / wing-nut / wing nut (which has 4 senses in NOAD, plus a bunch more you can imagine). But how?
