Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro offers a pun using the available resources sparingly: piñata coladas — piña coladas as made by (anthropomorphized) piñatas:
Helpfully, with a recipe (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)
Also elegantly minimal. Yesterday’s (8/25) Wayno / Piraro Bizarro cartoon:
An Etch A Sketch drawing of an Escher drawing; /ɛšǝ(r)/ Escher (rhotic for me, not for most BrE speakers) vs. /ɛčǝ/ Etch A, so primarily, fricative vs. affricate at same point of articulation (as in sheep vs. cheap or wish vs. witch) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are only 2 — see this Page)
Thoughts inspired by a comment by Robert Coren on my 3/6 posting “Checking out”, in which I responded darkly to the information from a grocery-delivery service that you can:
Add items until your shopper checks out
by understanding the intransitive phrasal verb check out in it not as the intended sense
To complete the procedure required in order to register one’s departure from a location or venue, esp. a hotel, at the end of a stay or visit. Also more generally: to leave, to depart. [OED‘s 1b for check out]
but as OED‘s 4a ‘to die’. RC offered a speculation on the etymology of the mortal sense of a different intransitive phrasal verb with out, peg out:
4a reminds me of a phrase that I encountered in Dorothy Sayers’ The Nine Tailors, where “peg out” is used as a colloquialism for “die”; I assume that (1) it comes from the process of being victorious in a cribbage game (which makes it a rather odd metaphor, actually), and (2) it was standard usage among some portion of the British population in the early 20th century.
Briefly noted. In the latest New Yorker issue (of 12/1/25), cartoonist Meredith Southland suggests a solution to the puzzle of what penguins are doing when they waddle around waving their wings in the air:
(#1) They are playing Charades! Well, life on the ice floes of Antarctic imagination offers few interesting diversions, but this communal game can occupy plenty of dark cold time
The all-time favorite penguin game, however, is Hide and Seek, a spheniscid take-off on Where’s Waldo? Sometimes known as Lost in the Crowd. Though ice-sliding and egg-rolling races are both tremendously popular. Never a dull South Polar moment.
Yesterday’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro shows us a budding balloon artist at the very beginning of his career, where he creates the simplest of balloon animals, before advancing to the balloon dog:
(#1) The raw material of balloon sculpture is cylindrical balloons, which can then be twisted and tied together; this trainee has the cylindrical balloons, but as yet has had no practice in manipulating them, so he offers for sale the unprocessed balloons, which the buyer just has to imagine as different roughly cylindrical animals — here an earthworm, here a snake, here (where we break up in laughter) a lowly nematode (most nematodes are tiny, less than 2.5 mm long) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)
A brief follow-up to my 11/2 posting “poetite”, about the NYT’s Spelling Bee puzzle, in which I wrote:
Spelling Bee’s dictionary is mighty persnickety. Editor Sam Ezersky uses some standard dictionaries as a rough basis for his puzzle dictionary, but his judgments are strongly personal, and consequently often fiercely disputed. Grievances are sometimes unloaded in Facebook.
A comment that led to a Facebook exchange between Karen Davis and me.
From a reader on 8/24:
Are you involved in collecting eggcorns? In case you are, I thought you might be interested in a potential one that I’ve encountered “in the wild” (i.e., a Reddit post). This person wrote jig solve puzzles instead of jigsaw puzzles:
I should have been diagnosed [with ADHD] as a child but it was the early 90s in a poor rural area. Special ed at my school didn’t diagnose me with anything specific … they just told my mom I needed to spend time doing jig solve puzzles. So, I forced my way through. (Reddit posting)
My response:
I certainly have been involved in collecting eggcorns. But there are only so many balls you can juggle at one time, and I am now a old man with not a lot of time left, so I’ve been pretty much out of the eggcorn business. But you will be pleased to hear that jigsaw > jig solve isn’t in the eggcorn database and hasn’t come up in the eggcorn forum, so I might post on it.
And now I am.
The Batman from Batman Returns (1992), his suicide bombers — don’t feel bad if you don’t remember, the plot was extraordinarily busy (details below) — were penguins. Mind-controlled penguins.
And of course they inspired toys. That was over three decades ago, so the toys are now collectibles. Plastic surprises that the South Dakota Department of Propaganda satire/parody website (“Lies to Tell the Truth, Truth to Tell Lies”) has mocked, as Michael Palmer informed me this morning:
(#1) Batman Returns Penguin Commando action figures made by Kenner, marketed in 1991-92 (from the SDDP site)
In today’s Zippy strip, the muu-muued Pinhead is at the arcade, celebrating the game of skee-ball in verse in which he identifies with — becomes one with — inanimate objects, the material elements of the game:
(#1) Zippy’s self-reflective poem, which I’ll title I Am Th’: three quatrains — of metered but unrhymed verse — that steadily build in complexity, to end in a self-reflective version of Zippy’s tag line Are we having fun yet?
Now: a few words on the poetry of I Am and then on to skee-ball, skee-ball machines, and the games of my childhood and adolescence.
🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for ultimate December; it’s New Year’s Eve, so tomorrow’s rabbits will accompany the enfant terrible 2025, while my end-of-the-year e-mail brings me two male nudes, of very different resonances, to ride the wild tigers of 2024 off
First, on the soc-motss private group on Facebook on 12/26, for Hanukkah, a piece of digital art by Vadim Temkin that’s a playful sexual tease, like the Warwick Rowers calendar photos. Then, a male nude sculpture, in the Western tradition of heroic statuary, exhibited very publicly (in a prominent location on a college campus).
