Coalinga Zwicky goes to war

December 7, 2022

Just a tease — it’s been another awful day, with very little time in it for blogging — for a Zwicky family posting on Pearl Harbor Day (side note: best wishes to my cousin Lynda Zwicky Hood, born 12/7/41!). Arriving in my mailbox by happy coincidence this morning: in the mildly lubricious Our Armed Forces at Play genre, Army Air Force Lt. John K. Zwicky (hereafter JKZ) of Coalinga CA, sunbathing with two buddies in the Aleutian Islands in 1944:


This is a remarkable snapshot from the National Archives (in College Park MD), made in some haste by researcher Aubrey Morrison, who’s been tracking down JKZ (the photo reproduced here with his permission). I can report that after the war, JKZ went right back to Coalinga and stayed there, with his wife and three kids (a girl and two boys), working in the local oilfields and living a very long life (into his 100s).

But Coalinga rang a little bell in my head, well, because of the oddness of the name but also, I eventually realized, because it was where photographer Jill Ann Zwicky, the subject of my 7/29/22 posting “The life she lived”, grew up: a place in the middle of the Central Valley, in between US Route 101 and I-5, out in the middle of nowhere (to my mind), but a place she remembered with tremendous affection.

Yes, Jill was JKZ’s daughter.

Well, then I have a lot to say about JKZ and Coalinga and the Swiss diaspora in the US, and Aubrey is still unearthing more stuff.

This posting is just today’s proof that I am Not Dead Yet. Stay tuned.

 

 

Posted in Holidays, Zwickys | 3 Comments »

highfalutin

December 6, 2022

Today’s Mary, Queen of Scots Not Dead Yet posting, some diversion from the difficulties of daily life. I take my cue from Ann Burlingham, posting on Facebook on 12/4:

Last night I was watching Nick Cave being interviewed on the BBC when he used the word highfalutin. I looked it up to confirm my sense that that is a word Americans came up with, and it is, and it’s wonderful.

Now, you need to know, first of all, who this Nick Cave is and why it might be notable that he used the slang adjective highfalutin ‘pompous, pretentious’. Then on to the word and who uses it, with two wonderful bonuses, one supplied by OED3, the other by a winery in the Finger Lakes region of New York State.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Art, Dialects, Slang, Sociolinguistics, Style and register | 3 Comments »

Tailored advertising

December 5, 2022

This is very much a Mary, Queen of Scots Not Dead Yet posting — it’s been a truly terrible day, but I’m still kicking (though I have no speaking voice and have already slept 13 unhappy hours since going to bed last night).

Random discussion on FB about the odd ‘sponsored’ ads that appear there, one contributor baffled by a flood of products (things she had no interest in) with jokey names. Well, of course, everybody else got different sponsored ads, most of them relatable to items they’d been searching or had actually ordered, but some of them mysterious. The selection of ads is done by algorithm, in ways that simple mortals cannot divine.

And then, as if on cue, I got an ad for this pullover hoodie:


(#1) IT’S A N THING – YOU WOULDN’T UNDERSTAND: available in various patterns, where N is a proper name: either a personal name or a family name, chosen from a large stock of available names — a stock that includes the personal name ARNOLD (see below), but apparently not the rare family name ZWICKY, so that in Google-search fashion, if it can’t find the POUTINE you asked for, it offers you instead something whose name is close in spelling to POUTINE: photographs of people POUTING, or, in this case, the family name WICK

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Clothing, Language in advertising, My life, Technology | 1 Comment »

In the mail: an 8-noun pile-up

December 4, 2022

Remarkable e-mail. Two days ago (12/2), a message on Sutter Health’s My Health Online site with the header:

Sutter Palo Alto Center Laboratory Patient Experience Questionnaire

This is an 8-noun pile-up — not by any means a record, but definitely notable, and absolutely baffling as an announcement of a request for feedback from patients using Sutter Health’s services, in particular the services of the laboratory at Sutter Health’s PAMF Palo Alto Center (which I use with regrettable frequency).

I am now going to complain, briefly but with great feeling, about a range of things, starting with Sutter’s extraordinarily user-unfriendly, intensely corporate-oriented on-line interface. That 8-noun pile-up is fine for corporate-internal use in labeling its files, but it’s no way to get people to do a favor for you, which is what filling out  an opinion survey for them is.

This is a follow-up to yesterday’s posting “In the mail: the sleep of reason produces snowmen”, on e-mail announcing the holiday issue of the New York Review of Books. Just notes on stuff that turns up in my e-mail.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Abbreviation, Compounds, Initialisms, Language and medicine | Leave a Comment »

In the mail: The sleep of reason produces snowmen

December 3, 2022

In today’s e-mail, announcing the holiday issue of the New York Review of Books:


(#1) The text is all about Marcel Dzama’s cover art,The sleep of reason produces snowmen — an explicit homage to Goya, with a touch of Krampusnacht (12/5); not your daddy’s jolly Xmas snowman

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Art, Books, Holidays | Leave a Comment »

The buildings are barking

December 2, 2022

In the 12/1 Zippy strip, a moment of somniloquy that would be an excellent donnée for a poem:


(#1) Another loving memorial by cartoonist Bill Griffith of his late wife, cartoonist Diane Noomin, adding to what he wrote in an 11/20 strip (reproduced in my 11/20 posting “A touching memorial”)

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

In the realm of the footstools

December 1, 2022

🐇 🐇 🐇 the rabbits of December take us to the hidden spot in the tropical jungle where ottomans rule among the palm trees, as depicted in this John McPherson Close to Home cartoon of 2/14/15:


(#1) A pun on Ottoman Empire, the Turkish realm, and ottoman, a kind of footstool

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Ambiguity, Cartoonists, Linguistics in the comics, Metonymy, Puns | Leave a Comment »

The boy-girl thing

November 30, 2022

🐅 🐅 🐅 three tigers for Ultimate November, which is also St. Andrew’s Day, the national day of Scotland (a day for unicorns, thistles, and heather; and haggis, shortbread, and whisky)

The One Big Happy strip from 10/7, another in a series on boys and masculinity:


James and Joe, playing with their cars — and contemplating how to negotiate the shift away from the significantly homosocial world of childhood to the more complex heterosocial worlds of adolescence

Note that Monica signals her openness to further exchange with Joe — and that she picks Joe rather than James; if you know the strip’s characters, you will see that she has chosen wisely.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Gender and sexuality, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity | 1 Comment »

Home front news: the chirping comatose refrigerator

November 29, 2022

Adventures in appliances on Ramona St. Beginning the evening of Saturday 11/26 — yes, the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend in my country — when I opened the refrigerator to get things for dinner and the thing appeared to be stone-dead, for how long I couldn’t be sure. Infuriating, because the appliance was only a couple of years old; it’s an emergency replacement, installed during pandemic lockdown, for its predecessor, which experienced the mechanical equivalent of sudden total organ failure.

Now the sad story in some detail. I remind you that the chirping comatose refrigerator is happening right along with all the other challenges and afflictions of my life (not all of which I have yet posted about; the Land of Urinals posting, in particular, is still to come).

The appliance. In white, in the smaller of two available sizes.


From the Samsung site; freezer at the top, refrigerator at the bottom (with a Slide and Reach Pantry tray at the top, and crisper drawers at the bottom); my fridge opens from the other side, but that’s adjusted during installation

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Furnishings and tools, My life | Leave a Comment »

The ASC project

November 28, 2022

Alienizing, scapegoating, and cleansing (ASC) — what was intended as a very complex posting following on two occasions: the shootings at the Colorado Springs gay bar Club Q just before midnight on Saturday 11/19; and yesterday’s Harvey Milk Day, remembering the 11/27/1978 assassination of SF Supervisor Harvey Milk, killed because he was the driving force behind the city’s first gay rights bill.

Over the Club Q shootings I was consumed by fits of red-hot rage combined with body-wracking weeping sorrow, not to mention fear over where events are taking us. As I said yesterday in my posting “Lest we forget”, about Milk’s assassination,

I would say NEVER AGAIN — but it is far far too late for that.

The social mechanisms at work in these wrenching cases involving homosexuals — what I’ll call alienizing, scapegoating, and cleansing — reappear with other groups, in particular Jews and Blacks, leading to murderous assaults on the locations of supportive and protective community, on “safe spaces”. At, for example:

— the Pulse (gay, leaning Latino) nightclub in Orlando FL in June 2016

— the Tops Friendly Market (in a predominantly Black neighborhood) in Buffalo NY in July 2022

— the Tree of Life synagogue, in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood (about 40% Jewish) of Pittsburgh PA in October 2018

Meanwhile, my life is a mess. At the moment, much of every day is consumed by narcoleptic sleep, and my many disabilities cause me to take about five times as long to do everyday tasks as a fully able-bodied person would, so I’ve been having trouble finding the time to put the ASC posting together from the materials I’ve been assembling.

My solution is to post, as often as I can, collections of some of these materials, hoping that eventually I’ll be able to knit it together. (Some of these materials will be surprising to you. My first collection will probably be one that starts with Donald Sutherland screaming. Yes, it’s relevant.)

Posted in Language and politics, Language and race, Language and religion, Language and sexuality | Leave a Comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »