Today’s (9/4) Wayno / Piraro Bizarro offers an elegant but complex pun:
Model chip (the snack), pun chimp (the ape) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)
Edible primate
September 4, 2026
The cleansing elves of the night
September 3, 2026(fecal matters in street talk; you might find it offensive)
Previously on this blog, in my 9/1 posting “Send in the rabbits”:
Made it back to my apartment, at which point the enema kicked in and I pretty much exploded with shit, everywhere, in piles. Vast amounts of cleaning up to do, and I still have to get someone in to scrub my workroom carpeting, which is beyond my (dis)abilities.
Keeping house
September 3, 2026Another little posting on the minutiae of my daily life. Today: housekeeping.
Every day is housekeeping day.
My name
September 2, 2026I’m attached to my FN Arnold — because it comes from my father and grandfather, who I am pleased to honor. But (as I’ve written about many times on this blog) in the modern US, it comes with a load of awkward associations, and people are inclined to see it as somewhat weird, funny — maybe, ugh, foreign. So they misremember it, as something more palatable to them.
Just this morning alone, in quick succession, I was addressed as:
Albert, Harold, and Donald
I could start a law firm for us.
(Correcting people just annoys them — legitimately, because it breaks whatever kind of everyday interaction we were having.)
This is the sort of thing that led me to develop my alter ego Alex Adams (more postings on that). But Alex is there for (various) special occasions, not for everyday use. I do treasure Alex, but he’s a different guy.
Meanwhile, I have had to learn that I might be expected to respond to pretty much any trochaic male name (there are more: Arthur and Herbert, especially, but I’ve occasionally gotten Aaron and Henry, too). You learn to be flexible. But this morning I felt the powerful surge of anti-Albert revolt. When it came to Donald, I wanted to snap back: CALL ME ISHMAEL, the outcast.
(My father, in these very circumstances, just took his college nickname, Zip (an admirable name for him), and used it for everyday purposes all of his life; everybody, including my mother, called him Zip, and when my man Jacques came into the family as a second son for him, Jacques called him Zip too. Of course.)
cell farming
September 2, 2026From the annals of mishearing (a continuing series)
Caught in tv commentary this morning, what I heard as an alert about cell farming. Cell farming — the production of cultivated meat — is a real, though still very fringe, thing; the meat-simulacrum is expensive to produce, and many people are deeply wary of it. But there it is.
Then a visual flashed by — of a wrist scored by cuts — and it became clear that the warning was about self-harming.
Santa Maria! La Piña!
September 2, 2026Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro offers a pun using the available resources sparingly: piñata coladas — piña coladas as made by (anthropomorphized) piñatas:
Helpfully, with a recipe (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)
Low spark
September 1, 2026🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit for September, in the middle of another run of AZ-connected birthdays (not of famous people, however admirable; but of (still living) people who are important to me): 8/27 Ken Rudolph of soc.motss (85); 8/30 Ellen Sulkis James, a long-ago companion of mine on the staff of the Reading (PA) Eagle (86); 8/31 Benita Bendon Campbell, dear friend since Princeton in the 1960s and my connection to the late Ann Daingerfield (Zwicky) (90); 9/2 Mike Jankulak of soc.motss (57); and 9/6, yes, me (86)
9/1 came to me with a morning name: The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys — from what experiential or mental source I know not. But with a shiver of delight.