Two cartoons in today’s feed: the 4/5/10 One Big Happy, in which James copes with an unfamiliar technical label by assimilating it to a name he knows; and the 3/21 Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, with a cute play on hex wrench.
Auntie Em and the hex wrench
March 21, 2022Half-assing things
March 20, 2022(It’s all about some English expressions using the bodypart-term ass, but without any reference to human buttocks. The verb fuck (up), figuratively ‘mishandle, damage, ruin’, puts in a cameo appearance at the beginning. But: no actual bodyparts, no sexual acts, presented either verbally or visually.)
Advertised in my Facebook feed yesterday, this t-shirt, available from many sources (this via Amazon, in five colors):
The verb half-ass, here ‘do (something) incompletely or incompetently’ — as opposed to totally messing it up
We start with the racy slang verb half-ass and work back from there.
A festival of the worst excesses of consumerism
March 19, 2022The Iconsiam luxury shopping mall in Bangkok, which is both mind-bogglingly immense (like the Mall of America) and absurdly high-end (like the Stanford Shopping Center), so resembling South Coast Plaza in Orange County, except that it takes over-the-top golden glitziness to a level I don’t think has ever been attained in North America. This in a 3/16 Facebook report from my old friend Ry Schwark, who is being touristic in Bangkok and sending reports back to us. The Iconsiam complex, in the center of the city:
(#1) It all glows gold, as if the Man with the Golden Toilet had run amok along the Chao Phraya River (the two hotel towers are part of the complex)
Then two photos by Ry from the interior:
35 years of the CHSP
March 18, 2022Announcements now out with the program for the 35th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing — that is, the 35th meeting of the Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing — at UCSC, the University of California at Santa Cruz, on 24-26 March.
The CHSP 2022 logo, with its mascot Chuspie; Chuspie appears to be a sea otter (clutching a statistical distribution), unrelated to the UCSC mascot Sammy the banana slug
Two nomenclatural matters: the designation of the conference’s subject as human sentence processing; and the change in this year’s title, the 34 preceding meetings having been the Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. The purely historical reference to CUNY (specifically, to the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where the conference was founded in 1988, by Janet Dean Fodor) now having been elided.
Disillusioned affection and onomatomania
March 17, 2022Two psychological phenomena of ordinary life in One Big Happy strips from 2010 (replays of which have come by in my comics feed in the last few days) — the Purple Snot strip (from 3/31/10) and the Ninkey Schlintl strip (from 4/1/10):
Lunch with saucy Porchetta and Chimichurri
March 16, 2022Those luscious ladies, Porchetta Banh Mi and Chimichurri Aioli, waiting for our lunch date at District Seven in San Jose (south of Palo Alto). Or so the restaurant’s owner, John Le, announced in a posting yesterday:
Coming soon for lunch: Porchetta Bánh Mì, Chimichurri Aioli & Truffle Fries.
Well, it was late in my day; I hadn’t yet looked down at the photo; and I was momentarily led astray by those capitalized names, which I took at first to be delightful feminine names: flirtatious Porchetta, fandangoing with a rose clenched between her teeth, and silk-gowned Chimichurri, gliding elegantly through the restaurant’s doors.
For some centiseconds I disregarded the suspiciously alimentary surnames Bánh Mì and Aioli. Until I got to the businesslike Truffle Fries, when the foodie truth dawned on me.
And I looked at the picture:
The fiberglass bakery
March 15, 2022Today’s Zippy strip takes us to the near suburbs of Philadelphia, on the New Jersey side of the Delaware River, to Del Buono’s Bakery (and Carmen’s Deli) in Haddon Heights (Camden County) — a serious commercial bakery whose store is home to a large family of fiberglass creatures, roadside icons goofily congregated around the bakery building:
(#1) The strip scarcely does credit to the zaniness of the place; meanwhile, their baked goods get high marks from the locals
The Tides of March
March 15, 2022For the 15th of March, Tim Evanson created this image (reproduced here with his permission):
(#1) Tim used a picture from a “Kittendales” calendar; a free clipart calendar page of March; and pictures of Tide products from the Target web site
The occasions of mid-March
March 14, 2022The year has rolled around again to Four Days in March:
— 3/14, today, Pi Day, a holiday both mathematical and alimentary
— 3/15, the Ides of March, also (in my household) Higashi (Removal) Day, the day in the distant past when my man Jacques and I would set off from Palo Alto to drive east (higashi) across CA, AZ, NM, TX, OK, MO, IL, IN, and OH to Columbus, to trade universities
— 3/16, National Panda Day, a significant occasion for several of my ailuropodotropic friends
— 3/17, the culmination in St. Patrick’s Day
So this morning came a New York Times mailing for Pi Day with five pies — well, five things from the PIEESQUE category, embracing pies, tarts, flans, quiches, etc. — for us “to bake in the name of science”.
The self-rising mascot
March 13, 2022(Considerable discussion of sexual practices in this posting — largely in cautious language, but some may find the topics — male masturbation and male-male sexual acts — distasteful.)
To understand the brilliant 3/11 Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, you need to marshal detailed information about the Pillsbury Doughboy, the Roman Catholic confessional, the language of male masturbation in English, and self-rising flour (I wonder what, say, a Japanese exchange student in the U.S. would make of the cartoon; there is just so much culturally specific knowledge needed to understand it):
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)
You must recognize the central figure as Poppin’ Fresh the Pillsbury Doughboy (though you can’t see the Pillsbury label on his chef’s hat), the dough-creature mascot of the (American) Pillsbury baking brand since 1965; and you must recognize that he’s at the grill, or screen, separating the penitent from the priest in the confessional box of a Roman Catholic Church, where he is confessing his sins (seeking absolution from the priest); then you must understand that the particular sin he’s confessing is masturbation (stimulating his penis by hand to become erect — to rise — for the purpose of sexual pleasure), and that this is a grave sin, requiring confession; and finally, and crucially, you have to see that his reference to his masturbating as self-rising (metonymically causing himself to rise) is a play on words, the ordinary use of self-rising being to flour (available mostly in the US and the UK) with added ingredients that will cause dough made from such flour to swell — to rise — on its own.
What makes the cartoon so delightful is that all of this is woven together by the fact that Poppin’ Fresh is an anthropomorphic being — a male one, with the desires of a sexually mature male — made of dough.