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.

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Posted in Comic conventions, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Penguins, Pop culture | Leave a Comment »

Linebacker or congressional reporter?

August 28, 2022

From MSNBC’s American Voices with Alicia Menendez this morning, under the header “Republicans criticize Justice Dept. for protecting state secrets in Trump documents”:


(#1) Screen shot: Murray, Broadwater, Menendez, Dowd

Former President Trump’s allies are demanding more “transparency” from federal authorities about the stash of classified records at Mar-a-Lago. “This seems to me the weakest part of their argument,” says CountryOverParty founder Matt Dowd. “The more things are put out, the worse it is for President Trump.” Dowd joined New York Times congressional reporter Luke Broadwater and New York University law professor Melissa Murray to unpack the newly unsealed Mar-a-Lago affidavit.

Broadwater’s reporting was nicely done, but my attention was captured at first by the thickness of his neck, closer to a linebacker’s than to a congressional reporter’s. Are the NYT‘s front-line reporters subjected  to repeated head confinements and impacts, as linebackers and wrestlers are? The sort of thing that would build up solid neck muscles supporting their heads? Are Broadwater’s excellent reporting chops just a cover for a secret — or former — life as a jock who can take a lot of abuse?

Broadwater has what is known, informally and metaphorically, as a bull neck (or bullneck). He’s not as extravagantly bullnecked as some linebackers, but, still, he’s definitely a bullneck boy (about his cheeks I cannot say).

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Posted in Language and animals, Language and sports, Language and the body, Metaphor, Movies and tv | Leave a Comment »

Eat Your Woolly Mammoths!

August 27, 2022

I was in the middle of singing along (at home, by Zoom) to the Palo Alto All-Day Sacred Harp Singing (10-4 today), when the following appeared on my screen, representing a fellow electronic participant:


(#1) Image identified as belonging to James Solheim, who I happened to know was actually singing along from Omaha NE, using technology much cooler than Zoom

But whoa! Is this a slogan? Is it a thing? I appreciated that it was surely intended as an exhortation to ingestion, not fellation. But still… The woolly mammoth is my chief totem animal, and Woo(l)ly Mammoth is one of my pseudonyms; I am W M, I am. And I take these things personally.

As it happens, I’ve met Solheim, who sang with the local Harpers a while back, when he was visiting his daughter Jenny, who’s a recent addition to the set of local singers (more on her below). But I had no idea what he did for a living. Turns out he’s an artist and an author, specializing in books for kids. Of which Eat Your Woolly Mammoths! is one.

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Posted in Books, Language and food, Mammoths, Music, My life | 1 Comment »

Moon Over Palo Alto

August 26, 2022

Facebook ads alert me to the fact that the Mid-Autumn Festival is fast coming — mooncakes! mooncakes! time to get your mooncakes! —  and that it’s on the early side this year — Saturday 9/10 (with the holiday extending over the next two days) — so comes just a few days after my 82nd birthday, Tuesday 9/6, which this year is the day after the American end-of-summer holiday Labor Day (also a MascMeatHol, that is, masculine meat holiday, though this posting will be meatless).

I have decided to more or less wrap most of  these things together into a Moon Over Palo Alto event, with red bean mooncakes (no yolk) that I have already ordered, on a day during the 9/3-9/10 period (day, time, and place still to be determined) in honor of 1982, which has lots of good associations, including red bean mooncakes (acquired in San Francisco’s Chinatown that spring for Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky’s 17th birthday, Valentine’s Day regularly coming close to Lunar New Year — another mooncake holiday).

What I’m about to acquire:


(#1) A box of 4 Imperial Palace red bean mooncakes (no yolk); the red beans in question (here, in the form of a sweetened paste filling the mooncakes) are not the red beans of the New Orleans dish called red beans and rice, and the objects called mooncakes are (full-)moon-shaped but are not in the CAKE category of foodstuffs (instead, they’re in the PIE category)

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Posted in Art, Categorization and Labeling, Holidays, Language and food, Language in advertising, Linguistics in the comics, Music, My life | 2 Comments »

The rabbits are gaining

August 25, 2022

From Aric Olnes on Facebook yesterday, the cartoon / gouache painting “The Rabbits are Gaining” by Greg Stones:


(#1) On a snowy slope, four determined rabbits (their ears streaming back in the breeze) in a canoe are gaining on two penguins on skis (one of them looking back, no doubt in anxiety, at their pursuers)

My alternative title: “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you” – Satchel Paige (in a June 1953 Collier’s magazine profile of Paige)

The penguins are one of Stones’s recurring creatures, in his charming, pointed, anxious, goofy, edgy compositions. Two examples on a theme…

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Posted in Art, Linguistics in the comics, Penguins | Leave a Comment »

A journal of my thoughts

August 24, 2022

The old Calvin and Hobbes — from 8/25/92 — that came up in my comics feed yesterday:

This blog is, in a sense, a journal of my thoughts:

— responses to things I’ve come across (things people have said, events I’ve seen, events I’ve experienced, news reports, cartoons and comics, movies and tv, music, artwork, food, plants, animals, whatever);

— reports on my life history, family and friends, emotional and physical states, beliefs and opinions and guiding moral principles; reports on research (mine and other people’s) in linguistics and  psychology and in g&s (gender and sexuality studies, though Gilbert & Sullivan do occasionally appear; I do not, however, deal in goods & services);

— and creative writing (fiction and poetry) and artwork (mostly my collages).

The responses and reports are not just passing on of things but attempts to place these things in some context (which often involves exposing my personal involvement with them, sometimes in open and unsparing detail), to analyze them, to interpret them, to connect them (sometimes in unexpected or surprising ways) to other things, and often to play with them, to use them to entertain — in displays of Martians attacking Indianapolis, so to speak.

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Posted in Academic life, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Stanford, This blogging life | 2 Comments »

Osanna!

August 22, 2022

From the annals of joy: I awoke this morning to the radiant sound of the Osanna from Bach’s Mass in B minor — on my Mac’s Music: English Baroque Soloists, John Eliot Gardiner, and the Monteverdi Choir (Archiv, released 2006). Osanna in excelcis ‘Hosanna in the highest’ — a most auspicious beginning to the day, a hopeful sign of a turn-around (in progress) from several dire weeks on the medical front, just barely getting through the days. But now I’m writing you about joy. (Oh, yes, Bach’s Osanna has all the glorious trumpets and tympani I require in orchestral music of joy.)


(#1) The cover of the Gardiner CD; the cover art is from a van Eyck masterwork to accompany Bach’s masterwork — some details of The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb below

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Posted in Art, Music, My life | 3 Comments »

It’s a nose! It’s a thumb! It’s a dick!

August 21, 2022

It’s a nose! 👃 It’s a thumb! 👍 It’s a dick! (well, it’s an eggplant 🍆 but we all know what that means)

A Solanum melongena  that’s all of these, and more. Because that aubergine is a symbol.

The brinjal in question, posted by Bob Eckstein on Facebook yesterday:


(#1) Bob Eckstein: You have to be looking for it to find it.

And then we were off:

— Kimberly Krautter: It’s like a Rorschach test or one of those “what do you see first” optical illusions. I first saw a thumb and a mitten. Then I saw a face with a big nose.

— AZ: Is it a nose? Is it a thumb? Is it a penis? Is it a handle? It’s all of these, and more [and more will come, below], ’cause it’s a symbol, and symbols can stand for many things.

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Posted in Art, Language and animals, Language and plants, Language and politics, Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv | 1 Comment »

Zhug it up!

August 21, 2022

As a Z-person, I notice occurrences of the letter Z, especially word-initial ones. As an English linguist, I notice occurrences of word-initial ZH, because they’re so rare. Outside of proper names in Chinese, Russian, and Ukrainian, it’s pretty much all about the verb and noun zhuzh (which comes with an entertaining gay-inflected history); zhuzh has recently made it into the Oxford dictionaries, but it’s still waiting for entry to the Merriam-Webster dictionaries and the American Heritage.

So my lingy sense tingled when this morning’s e-mailing from bon appétit magazine was headed:

Store-Bought Zhug + Greek Yogurt = the Ultimate Chicken Marinade

Yes! Zhug that chicken! In fact, ba promises (though not in these words) that zhuging it up will zhuzh it up. The magical substance:


(#1) A bowl of zhugurt (photo by Isa Zapata)

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Posted in Language and food, Slang | Leave a Comment »

Three peanuts meet in a bar

August 18, 2022

Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, requiring a boatload of popcultural knowledge to understand:


(#1) The easy part: these are three anthropomorphic peanuts, M, M, F from left to right, and they are sitting at a bar, with drinks in front of them (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)

Somehow the meeting of these three exemplifies the N1 + N2 compound N wingnut / wing-nut / wing nut (which has 4 senses in NOAD, plus a bunch more you can imagine). But how?

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Posted in Ambiguity, Language and food, Language of sex, Libfixes, Linguistics in the comics, Logos, Mascots, Masculinity, Metaphor, Metonymy, Portmanteaus, Signs and symbols, Snowclonelet composites, Understanding comics | 4 Comments »

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