The Story of Bob, by Max, in two parts, wood and bronze. In a Facebook posting this morning. There will be two pictures. one in wood, one in bronze.
Bronze Bob
February 25, 2023Ruthie meets the challenge of the unfamiliar
February 24, 2023It’s an old theme on this blog: 6-year-old Ruthie in the comic strip One Big Happy as a constantly entertaining source of efforts to cope with unfamiliar words and larger expressions by assimilating them, in one way or another, to things that are familiar to her. Some examples surveyed in my 2/3/19 posting “Ruthian lexical items in real life”; and then, yesterday, in the posting “Ruthie goes for the donuts”, she understands windchill as Winchell’s (donuts): the unfamiliar element is the technical meteorological term windchill. and Ruthie copes with it by replacing it with a phonologically similar item that’s familiar to her (she’s fond of Winchell’s donuts):
(#1) unfamiliar windchill / familiar Winchell’s
Over the past three years or so, I’ve been accumulating One Big Happy strips in this vein and am now disgorging six of them: a similarity case, in which Ruthie copes with unfamiliar material by treating it as phonologically similar familiar material (as with windchill / Winchell’s); two ambiguity cases, in which unfamiliar material is homophonous with familiar material, so she has to cope with her mistaken interpretation of what she hears; and three more complex cases (one involving portmanteaus, one involving orthographic abbreviations, and one involving Ruthie’s own analogical creation — Ruthie is indeed ingenious).
Ruthie goes for the donuts
February 23, 2023In my comics feed today, a One Big Happy originally from 1/6/03 (20 years ago, and that turns out to be important) in which Ruthie eggcorns the weatherman’s technical term windchill (factor) to Winchell’s (the name of a chain donut shop), which is more familiar to her — but not perhaps to most readers of the strip, even in 2003, when there were a lot more Winchell’s shops around than there are now. But the strip:
(#1) windchill / wind-chill / wind chill is a N + N compound meaning roughly ‘chill caused by wind’, but is in fact a technical term in metereology (and its connection to chill and wind might not be clear to someone who in passing hears tv reports mentioning the factor)
Especially the connection to wind, since pronunciations of wind chill in ordinary connected speech lack a [d].
More from the Cavewoman Culture Club
February 22, 2023The CCC — last seen in action in my 2/18 posting “A Neanderthal breakthrough”, in which an inventor cavewoman carves the first definite article out of stone — strikes again in the Piccolo / Price Rhymes With Orange cartoon of 5/21/21, in which a cavewoman devises a precursor of the candlelit dinner:
(#1) An announcement in Caveman Talk of the first romantic dinner for two; since these beginnings, it has evolved into a elaborated cultural practice
Cultural innovations often come with bold experiments in form at the outset (consider the history of photography and film) — in this case, apparently, in the adventure of scented fire.
Happy P Day, Mr. President
February 20, 2023(men’s bodies and sex between men, illustrated just a bit shy of a X-rating and described in vivid detail in street language — tons of F for P day — so entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)
It’s Presidents / President’s / Presidents’ Day — P Day, for short — in my country, and suppliers of gay porn flicks have mounted P Day sales of their wares. Their ads sometimes display an image from such a flick, ornamented with patriotic symbols (American flags, stars, plenty of red, white, and blue); the image itself usually has nothing whatsoever to do with P Day, but is an illustration of the deeply satisfying fantasy sex a man-desiring man can get off to by watching one of the flicks on sale. Often the sale ads are just gigantic displays of the covers of the merchandise, so you can search for what might work for you by scanning the titles and cover photos.
Two images from this year’s crop of P Day sale ads. One, from the Falcon company, shows an image of Flying Cowboy, an image in which a grateful citizen thanks his President by serving as the receptive partner in this acrobatic approach to anal intercourse. (The emotional landscape of the actual act is very different from this: the President is working hard to provide pleasure for his constituent.)
The other image is just one of the many covers in the Gay Empire ad for its P Day sale — a cover for a costume flick about pedication among the Norsemen.
This is the end of the careful talk in this posting. Below the horizontal line, and then the fold, is where the wild things have sex.
Far Side Neanderthals
February 19, 2023Following on yesterday’s posting “A Neanderthal breakthrough”, on a Rhymes With Orange cartoon about the cavewoman who invented the definite article (plus Caveman cartoons from Bizarro and Scott Hilburn), I recalled a Gary Larson Far Side cartoon that I’d been saving since 2021, a cartoon in which Cro-Magnons are viewed as step up from Neanderthals:
(#1) Dining at the Restaurant La Cave, back in the days when Neanderthals shared Europe with the upstart Cro-Magnons
Larson produced a huge number of Neanderthal cartoons in the 15 years of The Far Side, 6 more of which I’ll reproduce below. They’re all set in Caveman locales, with characters that are Cavemen in appearance and dress but otherwise are engaged in social relationships and cultural practices from late 20th-century America — in #1, the two men are vying for the attentions of a woman, the old-fashioned Neanderthal (rubbing sticks together to make fire) pitted against the slick new Cro-Magnon (using a cigarette lighter).
#1 is complex in its handling of the dual nature of its characters, who are simultaneously cavepeople and modern Americans. The larger setting is in a cave (with a cave painting of a deer on the wall), but, more specifically, two of the characters are sitting at a table at a little restaurant while the third brandishes that cigarette lighter.
A Neanderthal breakthrough
February 18, 2023A great moment in fictive human history, captured in a 5/2/21 Rhymes With Orange cartoon:
(#1) Caveman quiz great inventor cavewoman, she make definite article
Well, yes, Hilary Price has her doing it in English, a specific language, which has to stand in for Human Language, because we have no way of representing text in Human Language. And Price has her doing it in English orthography (rather than speech), because this is a cartoon (not an address) and the presentation has to be visual. And, stunningly, Price has her doing it as a sculpture, a piece of 3-dimensional artwork, rather than by making marks on some surface — possibly because women are the creators of beautiful useful things, aesthetically satisfying everyday objects. (Beyond that, Price has her cavewoman explicitly viewing her work as potentially world-changing — an ambition usually associated, these days anyway, with males.)
Today’s exercise in cartoon understanding
February 17, 2023Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro — Wayno’s groan-punning title: “Tuffet Luck” — depends on your knowing one thing from popular culture in the Anglosphere (of, roughly, the past 200 years). If you don’t know that, you’re SOOL; the spider, curds, whey, and tuffet are just weird stuff.
(#1) The spider as ambulatory assault victim; apparently, the spider’s prey was not frightened away, but instead used what they’d learned in self-defense classes (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are (only) 2 in this strip — see this Page.)
Yes, it’s a nursery rhyme. “Little Miss Muffet”, said to have been first recorded in 1805. Traditionally, part of growing up for most children in the Anglosphere (though I wonder if that’s still true), but probably little known elsewhere. And largely opaque to the children who chant it, though I suspect that modern kids are inclined to interpret it as a tale of a male imposing himself on female, and her fleeing from him. Kids would probably understand it as a boy annoying or grossing out a girl with creepy-crawlie things. Older people will think of unwanted advances on the subway, Tyrone F. Horneigh pursuing Gladys Ormphby on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, and the like.
The Bizarro version, on the other hand, is much more up-to-date: Muffet Fights Back. Muffet, in fact, Kicks Ass.
Engorged in hues of blue
February 16, 2023(seriously phallic, so not to everyone’s taste)
The readings for the day, inspired by Max Vasilatos posting on Facebook about weird garden statues:
(#1) The Penisaurus Poems; there will eventually be acknowledgments of Edward Lear and Isaac Watts, respectively
The inspiration for these poetic eruptions was just one of those weird garden statues; from the beginning of my response to MV:
[Max wrote:] “There’s one that might land me in FB jail, though amazon thinks you can put it in your yard. I have known people with this sensibility.” — that would be the blue-headed WPODWO resin Dino-Dick (which, by the way, is clearly pretty small, though the company doesn’t say how small, only that it’s “compact”).