In anticipation of a visit to Palo Alto’s Gamble Garden with motss.conners on Saturday, two items from my last visit to the garden (on 7/31): blue flax-lilies, which are neither flax nor lily plants, but do have bright blue berries; and dark purple, almost black, hollyhocks.
Il Leopardo di Sparta
August 14, 2019(About men’s bodies and fetishwear, so not to everyone’s taste.)
Today’s bulletin from the Daily Jocks company, introducing a new brand (Sparta’s) on their site, with the image below — to which I’ve added a caption in free verse:
(#1) Il Leopardo di Sparta
Contamination by association
August 13, 2019(Regularly skirting or confronting sexual matters, so perhaps not to everyone’s taste.)
Yesterday’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro takes us back to the Garden of Eden:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)
The bit of formulaic language for this situation is a catchphrase, a slogan with near-proverbial status (YDK, for short):
YOU DON’T KNOW WHERE IT’S BEEN
The leaves are conventionally associated with modesty, through their having been used to cover the nakedness of Adam and Eve in the Garden — a use that then associates the leaves with the genitals, from which the psychological contamination spreads to the entire plant, including the fruits. You don’t know where that fig has been.
Deux clouseauismes
August 11, 2019Morning names from early this past week: fondly remembered quotations from Peter Sellars’s Inspector Clouseau character in The Pink Panther (1963) and the series of movies following it. Both involve a bold effort by Clouseau to fix or remedy some situation, resulting of course in devastation — and clueless insouciance on the inspector’s part.
Besides the absurd situations, there’s Sellars’s deft timing and his control of the physical comedy, and, delicious cherry on top: his way-eccentric Clouseau-franglais syntax and phonetics (with pronunciation governed largely by a rigid constraint against back vowels, especially rounded back vowels, though even [ʌ] is affected, as in monkey > minkey). The transcripts below are in standard English orthography, so you should listen to the film clips.
Cats in hats
August 11, 2019Yesterday’s Bizarro, a Wayno/Piraro collabo, an homage to hats:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)
Wayno himself, on his Facebook page, titles this his “Sartorial Autobiography”, and provides a thumbnail of himself in the hat.
Meanwhile, I posted the cartoon on the FB page of Steven J. Levine, who is sartorially celebrated on several fronts, including his immense affection for fedora-style hats.
Cheeseburger mouse
August 10, 2019Today’s Zippy takes us to restaurant or diner whose mascot is a mouse offering a cheeseburger:
(#1)
The intersection of two genres: the cheese mouse mascot, in fiberglass images indigenous to Wisconsin; and the fiberglass cheeseburger, as advertising icon or pop-arty work.
Minimal pears
August 8, 2019The morning name for Thursday was a linguist’s joke, the punning name minimal pear. In the morning, visions of sugar-pears danced in my head — cute little Seckel pears, specifically. Along with the linguists’ minimal pairs, like seat – sheet for /s/ vs. /š/ in English. (And, since there’s always someone who thinks of this when minimal pairs are mentioned: small testicles or breasts.)
Annals of social learning
August 8, 2019Two recent One Big Happy strips about the cartoon’s kids in the process of acquiring — internalizing, rehearsing, and displaying — two sociocultural complexes of beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors.
Ruthie is learning to fit into modern American commercial culture, where she is urged to judge products not on their intrinsic qualities (such as the taste and nutritional values of breakfast cereals) but on their symbolic associations as pushed in their marketing (cartoon characters as the representatives of breakfast cereals in commercials).
Meanwhile, Joe is learning normative masculinity in modern America, absorbing the lesson that successful manhood requires the stringent rejection of everything feminine — both anything associated with girls and also anything associated with the conventional role of the mother as taming boys, civilizing them.
Gloating over them apples
August 6, 2019In an advertising poster, for actual apples:
(#1)
and on a tongue-in-cheek sticker, reproducing a gloat:
(#2)
