Caught my eye on Pinterest this morning and tingled my appetite:
Taco Pie, from the Food City (grocery store) site, along with a recipe for the stuff
On to the recipe. A lot of the cooking details aren’t specified in Food City’s recipe; I’ve silently added the obvious stuff. Plus a number of explicit comments, mostly adjusting things to my taste, and away from bland Amurrican cuisine.
The Rhymes With Orange strip of 5/9/21, with a play on two senses of self-starting (and self-starter):
(#1) The strip illustrates the noun self-starter, very roughly ‘an independent go-getter’, which has a derivative adjective self-starting; but the strip is about making sourdoughs, which come in two types, the first of which is said to be self-starting (in its fermentation), while the other type needs a push from baker’s yeast to ferment properly
So: a kind of pun — indeed the best sort of pun, in which the meanings of both of the expressions involved (whether homophones, as with self-starter (and self-starting) here; or merely near-homophones, in “imperfect puns”) apply to the situation in the joke or cartoon. In #1, the sourdough is a self-starter both in the go-getter sense (through the miracle of personification, in which the dough is a human-like being) and, since no yeast is required, also in the self-starting sense.
The weekend winner in the phallic vegetable competition; all cucumbers are phallic, but this one takes cuke phallicity to a new level. From Kristin Landis Lowry on Facebook yesterday, reporting from her growhouse:
— KLL: This was bound to happen 😂😂😂
A brief note on this intense item from the Daily Jocks DJX sale announced in e-mail this morning:
This might be semiotic overkill, with two gay gay gay messages each of which would have been clear on its own: hot pink socks, socks with Rainbow Flag bands — piercing, man, piercing
Well, they’re on sale (for $13), along with a bunch of other stuff from Daily Jocks. It’s high summer in my hemisphere, high winter in DJ’s hemisphere, off-season for Pride in both.
(Well, yes, I have given up on wearing socks, as just too difficult and painful to put on. But I can still assess clothing that I wouldn’t wear myself, so I can say that, in a sock-friendly universe, I would certainly consider buying the plain white version of these Rainbow Flag socks, also on sale for $13.)
In the current issue of the New Yorker, in the Talk of the Town section, a Paris Postcard by Lauren Collins: on-line on 8/7, with the title “Bartender, There’s a Beer in My Wine: Paris has been blanketed by posters for vière, a mix of vin and bière drunk from a wineglass, whose name, its creators say, started out as a joke”; in print on 8/14, with the title “Vière here” — about the hybrid beverage with a portmanteau name. Beginning:
From the New Yorker issue of 8/14 (arrived in my mailbox yesterday), two cartoons about interpreting what we perceive — on what we see, a Stephen Raaka cartoon on the perils of pointillism; and on what’s been said, a Will McPhail drawing paired with this issue’s winner in the caption contest, with a text about literal vs. figurative understandings.
Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro (Wayno’s title: Big House Brew — an alternative would have been Big House Hooch), with an outrageous pun on Pinot Grigio:
(#1) A vintage cellmate (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are in this strip — see this Page)
The model is the wine noun Pinot /pínò/, the pun is the prison adjective penal /pínǝl/: pretty close in sound, worlds apart in meaning (which is what makes the pun outrageous).
A comment from Bill Stewart this morning on my posting from yesterday, “The states of matter: coconut X”, with reference to the third of the (temperature-sensitive) states of coconut X considered there: not the free-flowing oil nor the spreadable semi-solid fat / cream, but a firm solid:
You remind me that I can take advantage of this unwanted by you hardening to make our own Magic Shell. Not that we need the ice cream anyway, or even the decadent indulgence of Magic Shell, which we’ll impose upon our grandson.
What caught my eye was the treatment of Magic Shell, obviously a proper noun (and a brand name), as a common noun (and a generic name): you can make your own.
But then I had to face up to the hard truth that I was utterly ignorant of what (commercial) Magic Shell or (homemade) magic shell might be. From Bill’s context, some sort of killer dessert, with coconut X as an ingredient.
So, the first order of business was to learn about Magic Shell. Then some recipes for making your own stuff. Then some comments about the generification / genericization of brand names, and the commonification (my term) of proper nouns.
Yesterday’s Zippy strip, set in Sparta WI:
(#1) Ben Bikin’ astride his high wheel, with an attitude
A follow-up to this morning‘s posting “Crotch pong” (note the lower-case p), about crotch stink, and to Wendy Thrash’s comment on Facebook, right after I posted this:
I am SO disappointed that this isn’t a new game
to which I observed:
I really should have seen that coming.
— meaning that I should have expected someone to hope for a game Crotch Pong (note the upper-case P), somehow combining the ping-pong-ish features of the Atari game Pong with hard-core genital action (the mind reels).
But let me pass over the melding of the common noun pong and the proper noun Pong — they are homophones, after all — and look back (with some fondness) at Pong, which can be credited with helping to establish the video game industry.
