Caught on the streets of Palo Alto yesterday, a food delivery truck from this company:
(#1)
The one I saw had a snappier slogan, something along the lines of “World’s Only Cooked-On-The-Road Pizza”. And then there was the name: as a Z-person, I’m keenly alert to words beginning with Z. In any case, our robot overlords are now making pizzas in trucks. Right here in Silicon Valley.
The latest xkcd cartoon, #1834 Lunch Order:
You say launch order, I say lunch order; let’s call the whole thing off
(Frank talk about the male body, but no sex in this particular posting. Use your judgment.)
Four body items that have come my way recently: bouncing penises and testicles (and other intimate views of the body) in a new computer game; mussels as vaginal symbols; axillary delights; and anal art.
This is Part I: Dangly Bits.
Another item from my blog backlog file, this time a delightful (and informative and perceptive) piece in the Economist’s special year-end issue (of 12/24/16), “Mankind in miniature: A simple, oddly modern, oddly mystical machine”, illustrated here:
(#1)
A hand-carved little man
The piece (unsigned, as is standard in the Economist) begins:
The clothespeg [AmE clothespin] has an ancient look. The simplest sort, with rounded head and body carved from a single piece of wood, might have come from an Egyptian tomb or a Mesoamerican midden. Their shape is vaguely anthropomorphic, like a forked mandrake root (“dolly peg” is the name in commerce), suggesting an offering to the gods of fertility, or of nature. It would be no surprise to find one in an Iron Age settlement, still attached to an Iron Age loincloth.
Odd, then, that the first such peg is not recorded until the early 19th century.
Once again, I return to the question of what you have to know to understand a comic strip or a cartoon, with two recent cartoons in my comics feed, a Rhymes With Orange and a Bizarro; in both, understanding requires that you supply a word that isn’t in the text of the cartoon:
(#1)
(#2)
From linguist friends on Facebook, this cartoon, of obvious linguistic interest:
(#1)
This is the strip Squirrel Girl, in the Marvel Comics universe.
[11/12/16: Update on the NYTMagazine/Wesley Morris matter. By the time I got around to looking for Morris’s excellent piece “Last Taboo” on-line, my searches were shunted to another Morris piece, “Uncommon Ground” (to appear in print tomorrow). I posted about this; Ned Deily discovered that though he had been able to get to “Last Taboo”, he was now also diverted away from it; and Ned unearthed the Wayback Machine evidence for the piece on-line earlier. At least one reader reported no problem with the links, and not long after I posted, things were fixed for everyone. Alarm no more.
Meanwhile, I tried to get in touch with Morris about the problem, but saw no way to do it. Ned, ever helpful, reported that the NYT had a page listing Morris’s articles for them, and on it there was an Email Author button. So there was; it doesn’t give you an address, but directs messages to Morris out of public view. Unfortunately, the software returned the message
We could not process your request, please try again later. Sorry for the inconvenience.
— 25 times over two days. My patience is now officially exhausted. To hell with it.
Score card: one software glitch fixed, one apparently still flourishing.]
Now, back to my previous posting.]
(Underwear ad, suggestive but not explicit text.)
From Daily Jocks yesterday, featuring Andrew Christian underwear. The image, the ad copy, my caption (inspired by the extraordinarily plastic-synthetic look of the model):
(#1)
Raunchy, cheeky, and playful, Andrew Christian always pushes underwear styles to the limit. Andrew Christian has developed into a hugely popular underwear brand that’s not afraid to show off the male form with crazy designs, bright colours and attention seeking styles.
Crafted from
Cutting-edge materials,
Cristiano29 is the latest,
Most life-like
Model in the
Andrew Christian M4M
PerfoHunk line,
Guaranteed to perform all
Sexual functions to your
Satisfaction.Enhanced model 29ST does
Pleasant small talk, 29DT
Dirty-talks to your
Personal
Specifications.
In today’s NYT Business news on-line, in hard copy tomorrow (Sunday): “A Warrior Against Junk Mail at Yahoo Looks Out for Mom, Too” (as told to Patricia R. Olsen), on Elizabeth Zwicky, 51, an anti-spam architect at Yahoo in Sunnyvale, Calif.
A very brief interview. Best quote:
Do you think your job will be obsolete one day?
No. Criminals have gotten better and better at designing spam. It may mutate, but it’s not going to stop. Spam is where evil meets advertising, and no one has ever gotten rid of either one.
