For Woo(l)ly Mammoth’s #82: a fresh greeting formula, a morning hummer, and a fairy woodland bouquet. To which I’m adding some carrot cake and coffee ice cream: it’s not only my birthday, it’s also National Coffee Ice Cream Day, which I’m honoring all aslant (with coffee gelato), as I do so many things. To alter a family saying (If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly): If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing eccentrically (for other occasions: If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing outrageously).
Three greetings for 9/6/22
September 6, 2022Cartoon-cat fame-naming your cat
September 5, 2022From my 8/15 posting “Fame-naming and family history”:
My intention was to get on with Cats 4, about naming cats for / after famous cats — in particular, famous fictional cats; in further particular, cats in cartoons and comics. If I name my cat Stallone (after the actor) or Rocky (after the fictional pugilist), I’m fame-naming a cat; if I name my cat Cheshire (from Alice in Wonderland) or Pyewacket (from the Salem witch trials and then various films, for example the wonderful Bell, Book and Candle (1958)), I’m cat-fame-naming my cat; if I name my cat Garfield or Sylvester, I’m cartoon-cat-fame-naming my cat. This is intricate, but pretty straightforward. And the topic of Cats 4 will in fact be the cartoon-cat-fame-naming of cats.
This is Cats 4. Where you could, if you were so moved, name your cat Garfield:
(#1) A lined notebook / journal for cat lovers (available via Amazon)
The character of a creature
September 5, 2022… as explored in the playful animal artwork of photographer Yago Partal, available for inspection in his 2017 book Zoo Portraits and for sale from his on-line site. The book cover, which shows a panda character holding a portrait of a koala character:
(#1) The portraits are meant to bring out characteristic features of a creature — not, however, as abstractions, but as embodiments in highly individual animal personages, with their own personal names: Bao the giant panda, Cooper the koala
Yes, I’m playing with two senses of character. From NOAD:
noun character: 1 the mental and moral qualities distinctive to an individual: running away was not in keeping with her character. … 2 a person [AZ: perhaps, better a personage / a figure / an individual] in a novel, play, or movie: the author’s compassionate identification with his characters.
The vine and the fritter
September 4, 2022Two notes from my life, one botanical, one gastronomical. The first has to do with the trellis, fencing, and wall plantings in my Palo Alto condo complex, which depend entirely on plants that are described in reference guides with the adjectives rampant and invasive and the verb smother. Originally, Chinese wisteria, Wisteria sinensis, and English ivy, Hedera helix. But then after the dry-rotted wooden arches in the complex were pulled down and replaced a while ago, new supertough vines were planted; my condo now has Dolichandra unguis-cati, cat’s-claw creeper, in front of it; and yesterday I noticed that some other condos have been planted with what appears to be Ipomoea indica, blue morning glory. Both of these newcomers are, omigod, contending — visibly and vigorously — with the ivy. (Yes, there will be pictures.)
Then, yesterday, in an Asian noodle mood, I decided to try the offerings from Tommy Thai (Thai and Cambodian food) in Mountain View (delivered by GrubHub). My first venture with the place, so I tried one noodle dish and one dish meant to go on rice (with a multidimensional range of options within those large categories), plus an appetizer that I hadn’t had before: Thai corn fritters (tod man khao pod). Which took me back, unexpectedly but satisfyingly, to my Pennsylvania Dutch grandmother’s corn fritters. (Only two photos here — one Thai, one Pa. Dutch. Invasive flowering vines are a lot more picturesque than little pancakes.)
Bedroom eyes
September 2, 2022(Below the fold, a hot guy flashing bedroom eyes in nothing but a white low-rise basic brief that leaves little to the imagination: a matter of taste.)
A Daily Jocks flash sale — their term — for the Labor Day weekend. Work it, thick Nipaman!
I post this here for Nipaman’s lean, muscular body (very much to my taste) and of course for his remarkable bedroom-eyes performance, but also as a playful release at the end of a 9/2 day that began with a 12:30 am automated message informing me that my adjunct appointment at Stanford (and my use of Stanford e-mail, library services, and more) would be terminated on 9/4 (actually, the library services — access to the OED! — had already been terminated on 9/1), setting in motion 8 hours of heart-pounding Woo(l)ly Mammoth Crisis Time, temporarily resolved by my department’s paying for a year of these services for me while the issue of my appointment by the dean is settled.
But now I am yours, Nipaman. Work your sex magic on me.
CalWord: the Calvin Theory of Word Use
September 1, 2022🐇 🐇 🐇 (the commencement of September) The Calvin and Hobbes comic strip from 9/1/92, reprised in my comics feed on 8/30:
(#1) We can achieve intergenerational incommunicability! Yes we can!
Calvin articulates a view of word use, call it CalWord, which comes in two parts:
Endless lability. Any word can be used to convey any meaning. In the CalWord view, a word is merely substance — pronunciation or spelling — that can be put to any use. So words are the stem cells of the linguistic world. From NOAD:
compound noun stem cell: Biology an undifferentiated cell of a multicellular organism which is capable of giving rise to indefinitely more cells of the same type, and from which certain other kinds of cell arise by differentiation.
Social fencing. Socially distributed variants can serve as social fences, separating the Ins from the Outs and impeding the Outs’ ability to comprehend and communicate with the Ins — impeding, for example, one generation’s ability to comprehend or communicate with the generations after it. The fencing effect is very noticeable for lexical variants — different bits of substance for the same use (soda vs. pop, say); or, especially relevant here, different uses for the same substance (gay ‘lighthearted, carefree’ vs. ‘homosexual’ vs. ‘foolish, stupid, unimpressive’, say).
Who was that winged man?
August 31, 2022🐅 🐅 🐅 (three tigers for the last day of the month, ultimate August) In search — not for the first time — of an attractive image of Apollo Resplendens, I fixed on this guy, who’s only roughly one-quarter Apollo and (for my Sacred Harp purposes in the search) regrettably lacks a musical instrument:
(#1) Apollo, Mercury, Eros, and Mars (well, at least these) folded together in Richard de Chazal’s homoerotic conceptualization of the Zodiacal sign Virgo (late August through late September — like, right now), the province of people who are intelligent, analytical, and attentive to detail, but also practical and commonsensical
Apollo’s male beauty surmounted by rays of sunlight, the messenger Mercury’s wings, Eros’s wings and heart, the bellicose Mars’s bandolier and metal armguards (on his left, topman, arm). But no musicality.
Why do I care about the musicality of my Apollo figures? In my 8/29 posting “Sacred Harp numerology for my birthday”, I report on a Sunday (8/28) Sacred Harp singing in which I produced
the strongest, most sonorous singing I’ve managed in years. Utterly surprising, and totally fabulous. … Weep not for me, my friends — for a little while yesterday I was Apollo Resplendens.
I’ll get back to de Chazal in a while. First, musical Apollo and Apollo Resplendens, as represented in artworks of various kinds.
Breaking through the wall
August 30, 2022Today’s Piccolo / Price Rhymes With Orange strip is a play on specific American tv commercials (with some gentle old-age mockery folded in), so will be baffling to any reader who doesn’t recognize the Kool-Aid Man mascot or know the wall-breaking “Oh Yeah!” tv ads featuring KAM:
(#1) There is, however, a hint to the reader in the “So not kool” (with kool instead of cool) in the title panel; note also the generational disparity reinforced by the GenX so there (see my 11/14/11 posting “GenX so“)
Sacred Harp numerology for my birthday
August 29, 2022That’s where this is going, aimed at SH82t (Bound for Canaan) and SH82b (Edgefield) — ’cause I’m about to be 82 and so have been posting about 1982 — and SH96 (Few Happy Matches) — ’cause my birthday is 9/6. All of this triggered by someone’s having chosen to lead SH82t (which I’m fond of; it’s a Joy of Death and Transfiguration song and a shouting song: Hallelujah! I’m going to die!) at yesterday’s Marian Bush Memorial Half Day Singing in Palo Alto, which I participated remotely in because of my medical conditions. So I’ll have to tell you about my birthday, about Marian, about my afflictions, and about this weekend’s singings (Saturday 10-4, Sunday 1-4). But the numerology is the point, so I’ll talk about that first, but save the actual 82 and 96 songs for the end of this posting.
More from 1982
August 29, 2022… and on comic conventions. Following up on my 8/26/22 posting“Moon Over Palo Alto”, on my 82nd birthday, with reminiscences of 1982: from Berkeley Breathed’s Bloom County Facebook site, posted yesterday (my thanks to George V. Reilly on FB today):
(#1) 🐧 Opus tries to get in to see an R-rated shark-from-space archaeologist-adventure flick (a nearly naked Indiana Jones does battle with the Sharknado from Mars) — hoping, perhaps, for some intense violence (disembowelments!), or at least for the whiff of sex (a little skin!)[BB on the strip for:] July 13, 1982. A good place to point out what often isn’t obvious to pop-culture fans: there had rarely been comic strip animals that talked to people. Take a moment to consider this (I never did, not surprisingly). In movies and comics, animals talked to each other… but hardly ever to us. Aside from Bugs Bunny (slapstick license, one supposes) and Winnie the Pooh (the imagination of Christopher Robin), it remained, with very few exceptions, an invisible suspension of reality they never dared to go. -bb
FB commenters noted passing animal-human exchanges in various strips, but Opus interacts with humans as a matter of course. Though he’s a penguin, nothing human is alien to him. Or to his buddies of various species.