Today on Facebook, Hana Filip passed on a two-sentence poem in prose (an English translation from the German original):
Jan Antonin Baťa, or Bata, the genius entrepreneur who founded the Bata shoe emporium, had in his main headquarters in Zlín (Moravia, Czech Republic), an elevator in the size of a fully equipped office. While sitting in this office, he could move up and down his headquarters building and visit its different departments.
Yesterday on Facebook, Aric Olnes embarked on “14 days / Countdown [to Christmas] with Godzilla” with this especially arresting image:
Godzilla, defender of Santa’s workshop
A search on this image got me to a reference to: A Daikaiju Christmas: Godzilla vs The Ice Monster (1969). Which seems not to be a real movie, but some sort of fan invention (complete with a plot description, in which Godzilla is defending Santa’s workshop against Shimo the ice monster). But no mention of the creator of the image.
According to the label on the can, it
contains product from [in alphabetical order] Bolivia, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Mozambique, Nigeria, U.S.A, Vietnam
It’s high in iron, vitamin E, niacin, magnesium, zinc, copper, and manganese; also in dietary fiber and saturated fat, but with no cholesterol. It has no salt, very low sugars, and a fair amount of (plant-based) protein. It’s crunchy.
What is it?
From Bob Eckstein’s The Bob substack on 1/7/23, this delightful troupe of dancing Santas, created for the monthly comedy newspaper the Funny Times to sell on t-shirts (this year’s offer came to me by e-mail yesterday:
(bob’s text) Funny Times is getting into the Holiday groove with my Dancing Santas. The perfect Secret Santa gift can be found here.
Musings on three things — Nairobi, gorillas, and gorilla suts — en soi (as “just stuff:”) vs. those things serving as symbols, with various values / evoked associations, which are typically conventional: cultural meanings. With specific reference to these three things in the 1950s Ernie Kovacs comedy sketch The Nairobi Trio.
A Pickleball Christmas: just one of the dozens of made-for-tv movies in the crop for this Christmas. I was dumbfounded when an ad for it came up repeatedly on the Lifetime network. What next?, I wondered, will there be A Grand Theft Auto Christmas, with prostitutes in place of Christmas elves? A Lego Christmas? A Stud Poker Christmas? A Stud Hustler Christmas? (gay porn flicks exist with this theme, but not, I think, with this title). Great filmic visas open up.
So: some details on A Pickleball Christmas. And then a few more notable titles from this years crop. And some reflections on Christmas movies
Today’s Zippy strip shows us Bill Griffth’s superhero character Z-Man, the Pinhead Superman. Like Zippy, Z-Man is an onomatomane, luxuriating in a constant warm shower of remarkable words. Like Superman, Z-Man has magic eyes: Superman has X-ray vision, Z-Man can beam information though his eyes. If you have abiblia, or fear that you will contract it — if you’re abibliophobic — Z-Man ‘s gaze can send you all the words you need.
From axolotl to doo-hickey, Z-Man has a word for you
(As a Z-person, I am of course partial to a Z-Man superhero. He flies for me.)
(thoroughly raunchy Christmas porn, in verse of sorts; not for kids or the sexually modest)
Inspired by the appearance of gay porn actor Dean Young partnered with Joey Mills in Joey’s Surf Vacation (yesterday on this blog), I pulled out DY’s photos from the Christmas sextravaganza Cum All Ye Faithful (in which he’s a very naughty elf), and whipped out a few lines of raunchy verse (with a linguistic subtext for the academically inclined):
My morning name for 11/28: The Nairobi Trio (TNT). An instant trip back to my teenage years, the 1950s, when my friends and I were wildly entertained by Ernie Kovacs’s TNT skits on television. Today I’ll give you something like the basic facts about TNT (which involves three people in gorilla suits moving in sync with the tune “Solfeggio”) and its creator. But then I’ll ask the question: why is TNT funny? And eventually the question: why does TNT make many people feel uneasy? (One writer has declared it to be “incredibly controversial” and “completely unacceptable by today’s standards”.)
On this last question, I’ll look ahead and suggest that the twinges would vanish if the skit were called, say, “The Solfeggio Players” — no Nairobi reference — and the gorilla suits were replaced by, say, chicken suits or frog suits. Observations that take us into facts about Africa and gorillas, tons of beliefs and attitudes from common culture, assorted tropes from popular culture, and written and filmed works of imaginative fiction (King Kong! Tarzan!). I’m not sure I can do justice to all of this, but I’ll try to at least skim the surface. Just not today.
A Glen Baxter cartoon in the latest — 12/8/25 — issue of the New Yorker:
The scheduled event will go on, complete with umbrella to shelter the picnickers from the blazing sun, even in the snow; even when polar bears arrive (attracted by the smell of food) to steal bites of avocado toast, the way jays and gulls do in the summer
It’s a feature of local life (on the SF peninsula) that temperatures drop about this time of year to chilly nights and daytime highs hovering around 60, while some guys — I am one — persist in going about in short pants (low today 47, high 59, I am in rainbow flag gym shorts), but with a warm shirt (fleece-lined flannel if necessary); I do not, however, picnic in this weather.
And we are unafflicted by polar bears. Chipmunks, roof rats, squirrels, ground squirrels, jays, crows, gulls, hawks, owls, raccoons, skunks, the occasional lynx, every once in a while a mountain lion, but even the tantalizing scent of Safeway’s jambalaya heated up in my microwave has failed to lure polar bears south from Alaska to Palo Alto. But then we are woefully lacking in ice floes and meaty seals.
