An attempt to describe in some detail and with attention to the unfolding of the affliction over time, what I characterized very briefly in a report on a night five days back on intense ulcer pain (but without bleeding) followed by — today’s focus — body-wracking chills (which I now believe to be an auto-immune condition without a standard name). Which kept me up most of last night, until I fell asleep in exhaustion. Now I’m trying to work at speed here, to crank out this account before the chills / shakes / rigors / tremors fell me again.
Explorations in narrative medicine: spontaneous tremors
January 15, 2023Gingerbread man seeks fortune cookie’s wisdom
January 14, 2023From the world of anthropomorphic (AmE) cookies, a Seeker and the Seer memic cartoon, in the Rhymes With Orange strip for 1/11:
In the cartoon meme of the Seeker and the Seer, the seeker scales a mountainside to seek enlightenment (and perfection) from the master
In the Piccolo / Price strip, you have to recognize the meme, see that the characters are anthropomorphic cookies, and identify the seer as a “Chinese fortune cookie” (with its fortune sticking out). That’s a lot of work in cartoon understanding.
I got all that, and so admired the assembly of these disparate elements in a single, wordless image. Just lovely.
Tropical snowfolk
January 13, 2023The 1/11 Wayno / Piraro Bizarro displays the intersection of two cartoon worlds:
— a polar cartoon world of winter and cold, populated by stereotypical Eskimos and anthropomorphic polar bears, penguins, and (directly relevant here) snowmen (or, more generally, snowfolk)
— a tropical cartoon world of sun and surf, populated by stereotypical tropical islanders (especially Hawaiians), surfers, and the clientele of tiki bars
Oh spit!
January 12, 2023Some of the day was good. My stomach ulcer continues to recede, so that I’m back to eating mostly as before (but no cold-brewed black coffee or spicy stuff); everything else rolls on in crisis as before, but it’s familiar crisis, and leaves a bit of time for my work and writing. In preparation, three postings on recent cartoons: a Bizarro, a Rhymes With Orange, and a Bob Eckstein (all of which made me laugh in delight on first viewing, all of which illustrate nice points about cartoons, language, and culture).
Then came a comment offered about yesterday’s “Cat people” posting:
Is there a way to view this such that it can be read? The writing is too small to be read, even when embiggened by multiple zoom in steps.
I could read it, with my impaired vision, as it stood, and it was quite clear with one zooming (I’d warned people that embiggening might be necessary). No one (else) had complained about legibility, and several people commented on points in the text, so they’d clearly read it.
Hours wasted in fruitless discussion on the legibility issue. One low point:
Reader: As you can see, …
AZ: Look, you have to understand that I CANNOT SEE WHAT YOU ARE SEEING. You see what your software does with the file I posted on the hardware you’re using; I see what my software does with this file on the hardware I have.
Cat people
January 11, 2023From the New York Times Book Review, 1/8/23 in print, p. 23:
Sketchbook / Cat People / By Bob Eckstein and Nava Atlas. Famous authors and their beloved feline companions.
From Ursula LeGuin through Patricia HighsmithBob Eckstein is a best-selling author and the world’s only snowman expert. His new book is “The Complete Book of Cat Names (That Your Cat Won’t Answer to, Anyway)”.
Nava Atlas is a cookbook author and the creator of Literary Ladies’ Guide.
(You’ll need to embiggen the image to appreciate the pleasures of the text.)
The LSA handbook ad caper
January 10, 2023This is, again, supremely, a Mary, Queen of Scots Not Dead Yet posting, coming after several days of wildly painful and deeply unpleasant afflictions (I had some yogurt for breakfast, a few crackers with hummus for lunch, and will probably do the same for dinner tonight; I have hopes for better tomorrow); the details involve a stomach ulcer, body-wracking chills, industrial-strength narcolepsy, severe dyspnea on exertion, and flaming-sword osteoarthritis, all at once, and you really don’t want to hear about them. In the midst of all this, the LSA handbook ad caper.
It’s about this ad:
Rainbow benches
January 9, 2023Today’s Mary, Queen of Scots Not Dead Yet posting, mostly courtesy of Tim Evanson posting on Facebook. Tim posted this photo of three gay park benches:
(#1) TE: Forest Hill Park, Cleveland Heights. Yesterday.
They had one rainbow bench. It was vandalized. Now there are three.
The Norman door
January 8, 2023This is supremely a Mary, Queen of Scots, Not Dead Yet posting: a brief posting that I hope you’ll find both entertaining and informative, while showing that I’m Still Standing, despite a run of extremely unpleasant days, taken up almost entirely with writhing in pain and with sleep, the sleep of exhaustion and scary narcoleptic sleep. But here, a moment of sunshine.
Supplied by Mike Pope a few hours ago with this photo from real life:
(#1) MP writes: Documentation solves another design issue … An interesting variant on the Norman door
(MP is a regular source of material for this blog; WordPress tells me I have cited him in 30 postings so far. He is also — and this is absolutely relevant to his comment — a technical editor at Google. Explanation and documentation are his business.)
But wait! There’s Balthazar!
January 6, 2023(Definitely a Mary, Queen of Scots Not Dead Yet posting, signaling that I’m still here, after several deeply awful days of medical afflictions — an experience I’ll record in a separate posting, rather than get in the way of an egregious pun for today’s celebration of the Three Magi.)
To get the joke in this Epiphany texty circulating on Facebook (hat tip to Evan Randall Smith) you have to supply background from two (unrelated) domains of cultural knowledge — (A) the Christian mythic tale of the Three Wise Men and the gifts they bring to the baby Jesus; and (B) the pop-cultural splendor of the Boardwalk product pitch famously used by tv adman Billy Mays:
(#1) To understand the thing at all, you need to know (A); but if you don’t know (B), there’s no joke, just a flat-footed recital of the Wise Men’s gifts
The drawing
January 4, 2023Of me. Done by Max Vasilatos after a visit to me on 1/2. To make clay forms of items of mine for bronze casts — still to come — and share holiday carrot cake and commiserate over the pains and inabilities of our poor afflicted bodies, notably the weather-induced agony of our metal hip joints. But the drawing:
(#1) In my bathrobe, sitting in my home office
