The 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
Some 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.
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.)
This 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:
Today’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.
This 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.)
(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
Of 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
(On the personal background, see my Zardoz posting; the posting below is one I started yesterday but was unable to finish. Hard days.)
Yesterday’s Rhymes With Orange cartoon shows a collection of (apparently all male, to judge from the prickly body hair) penguins putting on their (tuxedo-like) overcoats for journeying home after a winter party:
(#1) Translation between worlds: the characters are all penguins, but they are also human beings in a modern social situation
These penguin suits are overcoats (somewhat resembling tuxedos); in the classic penguin-suit cartoon, however, the suits are actual tuxedos.
A personal note: I’m just barely hanging on here, with extravagant hip pain and cramping up of my hands — both apparently connected somehow to the current weather — plus DoE (dyspnea on exertion) so severe that I’m exhausted by walking from the bedroom to the living room, and recurrent narcoleptic episodes with elaborate, hard-to-shake visual hallucinations.
But along came this remarkable image of Sean Connery as Zed in the film Zardoz, which despite being a Z-person (note boldface) and a longtime fan of Connery’s, I missed completely when it came out in 1974. Material from the film is being distributed in the mistaken belief that it’s set in 2023 — it’s actually 2293 — but this is what we get:
(#1) Connery, hot as hell and giggle-inducing too, hypersexual and, oh yes, ridiculous
