Two cartoons in my feed yesterday, both turning on ambiguities: a One Big Happy involving foot, a Mother Goose and Grimm involving pawn:
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Archive for the ‘Toys and games’ Category
Feet in footage, pawns at the pawnshop
September 9, 2016Business news from our house
September 3, 2016In 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.
Rainbow toys
August 13, 2016Following up on two rainbow toys in my posting of the 9th “The old curiosity shelf”, seven more such toys (from a much larger number available on the market).
Three for the 30th
March 30, 2016Three language-related cartoons for the day: a Zits with terms of venery; a Rhymes With Orange with an absurd portmanteau; and a One Big Happy in which Ruthie runs afoul of synonyms and homonyms:
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Morning name: Botticelli, the game
March 17, 2016Huge backlog of morning names; this one is from 2/28.
From Wikipedia:
Botticelli is a guessing game which requires the players to have a good knowledge of biographical details of famous people. The game has several variants, but the common theme is that one person or team thinks of a famous person, reveals their initial letter, and then answers yes/no questions to allow other players to guess the identity.
The game takes its name from the famous person having to be at least as famous as Sandro Botticelli, who is also the answer to the archetypal question, “Did you paint a picture of Venus rising?”, referring to his painting The Birth of Venus.
The painting has been parodied endlessly.
As for the game, back in the 60s I played it a lot, with friends, including colleagues at the MITRE Corp. We eventually had to institute a special rule enjoining one of our number from using the names of baseball players within a certain time range, because he had an essentially encyclopedic knowledge of the players from that period (the result of an intense childhood enthusiasm).
Join in their penguin games
June 7, 2015Advertised in several places (I saw it in the NYRB), a children’s game called Pengoloo (maybe a portmanteau of penguin and igloo, though there are no igloos in the game):
From the makers, on amazon.com:
Go on an eggs-pedition with this enchanting memory game for children. Detailed wooden playing pieces transport you to the South Pole where our quirky little penguins are ready to play with you! Roll the dice and look for the matching colored eggs underneath the penguins. A good memory and a little luck will help you be the first to collect six penguins on your iceberg to win! Pengoloo includes 12 penguins, 12 eggs, 4 scoring icebergs and 2 dice. [ages 4 and up]
One of those games that little kids are often better at than adults — and that’s a good thing.