Archive for the ‘Mascots’ Category
August 30, 2025
🪛🔧🔨 penultimate August and (US) Labor Saturday; looking ahead, I see that Labor Day in 1940 was 9/2, but I wasn’t born until 9/6, so that was a long labor; meanwhile, from Benita Bendon Campbell today, an early birthday greeting to me:
The mammoth, the orchid, and the penguin, the emblems of my land, a BBC confection celebrating (as Bonnie observed) a friendship going back about 66 years
Meanwhile, these are birthday days for survivors from those days:Â Ellen Sulkis James (also going back ca. 66 years, to the Reading Eagle newspaper), who is 85 today; BBC (from Princeton), who is 89 tomorrow; and then, eventually, me.
Posted in Events and occasions, Holidays, Language and plants, Mammoths, Mascots, My life, Penguins | Leave a Comment »
January 28, 2025
The news for (symbolic) penises, following up on my previous posting about the years of the dragon and the snake in the Chinese zodiac (which ends with a promise of giggly banana couches and the buffoonish Oscar Mayer Wienermobile, a promise hereby fulfilled). It begins with a 1/18/25 posting on the Art Facebook page, with no source cited: a posting of a banana couch, passed on by a friend, who suggested that it would make suitable furniture for the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile:
(#1) This sofa is one of a set of AI banana couches from Designideahub, which seems to provide AI-generated design ideas (“your one-stop place for art, creativity, AI, design and product inspiration”)
(more…)
Posted in AI, Art, Language and food, Mascots, Phallicity, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »
August 8, 2024
An alert yesterday from Ernesto Cuba about the Homosaurus project: an LGBT thesaurus, with a portmanteau name
homosaurus =Â 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.
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Posted in Homosexuality, Language and animals, Logos, Mascots, Portmanteaus, Rainbow, Resources | 1 Comment »
April 20, 2024
Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro is a Psychiatrist cartoon with a stylized tunafish on the couch:
(#1) To understand this cartoon, you need to recognize that the patient’s not any old tuna, but Charlie, the celebrity mascot for the StarKist brand, whose widely advertised decades-long goal in life is to taste good (while — sorry, Charlie — his pursuit of good taste constantly frustrates this ambition, an experience that seems have led him to seek therapy) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page)
There’s a surprisingly rich history here (but one that might be specifically North American, so that the cartoon might be baffling to many of my readers). Summarized in this entry on the tv tropes site:
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Posted in Catchphrases, Language and animals, Language and food, Language in advertising, Linguistics in the comics, Mascots, Signs and symbols, Understanding comics | 2 Comments »
March 30, 2024
Thanks to a pointer from Jeff Bowles, this first panel from a Peanuts strip (dated by Charles Schulz as from 2/16/60), now a candidate for my on-line icon:
(#1) Schroeder at his toy piano, on which rests a somnolent Snoopy, emitting the cartoon Z of sleep (also the Zwicky initial); for further personal meaningfulness, I am a former pianist (still an enthusiast of the piano repertory), now an analyst of the comics (among other things)
(more…)
Posted in Art, Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Mammoths, Mascots, Music, My life, Penguins, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »
August 2, 2023
Another chapter in the annals of phallicity. From Owen Campbell on Facebook yesterday:
(#1) Owen sucking on an Otter Pop
Owen’s comment:
At my job, teenagers deliver freezies [AZ: freezies ‘Otter Pops’]
otter pops (often no longer understood as a brand name) are also known as freeze pops or ice pops; freezies might be a regional term, but I’ve been unable to get information about it in any of the likely lexicographic sources: the OED, GDoS, and DARE. For what it’s worth, Owen’s in Winnipeg MB.
Now, two things: about Otter Pops; and (very briefly) about Owen.
(more…)
Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Mascots, Phallicity, Trade names | 5 Comments »
July 30, 2023
On my posting earlier today, “The Bulldog CafĂ©, a lost monument of mimetic architecture”, this comment by Robert Southwick Richmond:
Mimetic vehicle design. Chicken Dinner candy bars were on the market 1923-62 – I don’t remember ever seeing one – but the delivery trucks were a laugh and a half. I remember seeing one in St. Louis in 1960.
Bob’s graphic didn’t post, but here’s a whole piece on the delivery trucks on the Issuu site, under the section “The Gentleman Racer: A Guide to Cars, Adventure, Style, and Culture” by Michael Satterfield:
“Chicken Dinner” was the name of a candy bar that was produced in the early ’20s by Sperry Candy, a company based out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The name came from the concept of  “a chicken in every pot” a slogan repopularized for the 1928 Republican  Presidential campaign. At some point, the company started building Chicken-Trucks that would be used to promote the candy and it seems also sold the candy like a modern-day ice-cream truck. Each was one unique and had its own version of a stylized chicken integrated into the bodywork.
(#1) A array of Chicken Dinner Candy Bar trucks
(#2) A very early truck
The flavor of the candy thankfully didn’t taste like a Chicken Dinner, instead, it was filled with nuts and covered in chocolate. It was described in ads as “An expensive, high-grade candy.”
(#3) An ad for the candy, showing the nuts and chocolae
It stayed in production for nearly 40 years before being discontinued in the 1960’s. It is also rumored to be a source of the phrase “Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner” from when a Chicken Dinner Candy Bar would be a prize at fair or carnival.
The candy made it until 1962 when the company was purchased by a competitor and the brand was discontinued.
Posted in Language and food, Language in advertising, Mascots, Signs and symbols | 2 Comments »
May 16, 2023
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”. Â Kids these days!
From the Stanford Report:
(#1) Armour in Stanford Stadium
Meet 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.
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Posted in Academic life, Logos, Mascots, Palo Alto, Stanford | Leave a Comment »
April 17, 2023
— a Wayno  / Piraro Bizarro cartoon from 10/20/21, “Written by Goober Louis Stevenson”, according to Wayno’s title:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)
A wonderfully goofy cross between two items of popular culture:
— the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, originally told as a literary tale, a caution about the dark duality of human nature and the danger of aspiring to divine power, but quickly folded into the popular consciousness in many forms
— and the figure of Mr. Peanut, the anthropomorphic mascot of the Planter’s Peanut Company
with the amiable and elegant commercial legume standing in for the evil and murderous Edward Hyde.
(more…)
Posted in Books, History, Language and ethnicity, Language and food, Language in advertising, Linguistics in the comics, Literature, Mascots, Movies and tv, Race and ethnicity, Stereotyping | 1 Comment »
