(Firmly located in men’s crotches and inclined to silliness, though without the bodyparts illustrated and without the street talk — so clearly not to everyone’s taste)
From WOIO tv channel 19 in Shaker Heights OH (serving the Cleveland area as a CBS affiliate — covering news, weather, sports, and a ton of racy / raunchy content): a report on a guy whose impressive genital package turned out to be a huge stash of narcotics, inspiring me to some musical silliness on Facebook.
Tomorrow is 11/22; on my calendar this brings up a set of two deeply discordant anniversaries and the birthday of an admirable colleague and friend. And this year 11/22 is the date of Stanford’s preeminent sporting event, to add a note of passionate silliness to the whole business.
Today’s morning name (pure playfulness after a long night of uneasy sleep fragmented by joint pain): from the Cambridge French-English dictionary, the noun
pantoufle (fem.): slipper; a loose, soft kind of shoe for wearing indoors
(#1) An array of pantoufles (from the Cambridge dictionary)
Considered as a nonsense word, it’s silly-sounding in French, or when borrowed into English as /pæntúfǝl/, which sounds like a cousin of kerfuffle.
But then the things it denotes are often indulgences — playfully pleasurable in design, material, or color (as in #1), so that the word comes with an air of the ridiculous, both in sound and in meaning.
An air that carries over to uses of pantoufle as a name. Two of which I now explore: an imaginary rabbit Pantoufle, from the world of fiction; and me as Monsieur Pantoufles, the woolly moccasins guy. (more…)
Gretel Cunningham Young (of Columbus OH, where she grew up, with my daughter Elizabeth, many years ago) on Facebook yesterday:
— GY: My goal was to make a half-vegetarian, half-carnivorous quiche, so I ordered this divided pan
Noting her reference to carnivorous quiche, plus an odd quirk in way English vegetarian is used, I reacted to her statement with some alarm (my response in an expanded and improved form here):
— AZ: But I don’t think I want to get near a carnivorous (‘meat-eating’) quiche, lest I be devoured by it. vegetarian quiche has the adjective vegetarian ‘(of food or diet), plant-based, excluding meat’, not the noun vegetarian ‘(of people) a vegevore, someone who eats only plant-based food; a non-carnivore, someone who does not eat meat’. A quiche that’s a vegetarian would not be a threat to me (as a being made of meat), but it would nevertheless be creepy, in a cannibalistic sort of way. The meaty correspondent to vegetarian quiche ‘quiche for vegetarians’ would be quiche for carnivores.
An Ellis Rosen cartoon that came by on Facebook recently:
(#1) The hybrid creature the pomeranian-nimbus, being taken for a walk, on a leash, by its owner — so being presented as an extraordinary dog, a cloud canine; note that the woman’s dog recognizes the p-n as a dog, and appears to want to play with it (see the wagging tail)
(The name of the dog breed is standardly capitalized, because it’s a proper name denoting a creature originating in the geographical region of Pomerania, and I’ll use Pomeranian from here on.)
The compound Pomeranian-nimbus is a copulative N1 + N2 compound (like Swiss-American or hunter-gatherer), denoting a thing or things of both the N1 type and the N2 type. But in fact the creature is not just a mix of Pomeranian dog and nimbus cloud, but is actually a nimbus Pomeranian ‘Pomeranian dog that is (also) a nimbus cloud’ (your standard N + N compound in English is semantically modifier + head) — rather than a Pomeranian nimbus ‘nimbus cloud that is also, or at least resembles, a Pomeranian dog’. A nimbus Pomeranian, or, more compactly, a nimbopomeranian, a nimpom for short.
The linguist Bert Vaux (information below) has been playing with AI resources for some time; most recently he’s been using head shots of various people — the hot young Brad Pitt and the famously scowling Vladimir Lenin, for example — as elements in AI compositions, today producing this entertaining ad, in which VL goes places VL has never gone before:
(#1) The major contribution to this work is a genuine Bon Ami cleanser print ad from 1949 (which BV posted on Facebook along with #1; I’ll reproduce it below)
For this image I provided a musical text, a burlesque of a wonderful comic song:
You can do such a lot with V. Lenin,
You can use every part of him too.
For work or for pleasure, he’s a triumph he’s a treasure
Oh there’s nothing that V. Lenin cannot do
Yes, I will also reproduce the original of this text.
💥💥 today is (Double) Disaster Day: (political disaster) Abraham Lincoln assassinated in 1865, (maritime disaster) the steamship Titanic striking an iceberg in 1912 (to sink the next day); and so the theme of today’s Bizarro cartoon is death, personified
A Grim Reaper cartoon meme made into a silly pun joke (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page)
On Facebook on 3/23, Mike Pope passed along this book cover (from Raspberry Bow Press in 2024):
MP: Someone thought this was a good design for a book title
I had an immediate response:
Well, silliness provoked by my getting, yesterday, this excellent fortune cookie fortune:
You will be awarded
some great honor
Which I was then able to combine with a postcard from Ann Burlingham (sent on 3/4/24), showing, of course, a volcano — Frederic Church’s 1862 painting of Cotopaxi in Ecuador — adding the requisite woolly mammoths (on a US postage stamp), flanking the fortune, to complete the composition:
For which I have supplied some verse, filched from Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha (1855), with its famously jogging trochaic tetrameter:
Birthday greetings, especially in the form of animated e-cards, but in any case, from old friends, friends from two cohorts: my generation (now in our 80s or close to them) and the generation after mine, my daughter’s generation — people I could gently characterize as being in late middle age, but in fact this is the age of mature accomplishment and recognition. (I do have friends from two generations before mine, and some from three, but they’re not sending me presents.)
Two Jacquie Lawson animated e-cards to come; in between them, a reminiscence from 1974.
