Is that an American flag in your crotch?

February 6, 2021

(Fit young men wearing nothing but scraps of the American flag pattern, so not for those who are modest about displays of the male body or offended by casual disregard for the flag, but there’s nothing actually raunchy here.)

In the great avalanche of underwear ads that’s been rolling over my Facebook — wretched excess, even for someone with my tastes — there came, this morning, this arresting JockStraps.com ad offering a JOR US flag bikini jockstrap (which looks like a (mini-)brief from the front) — plus one of the model’s armpits):

Read the rest of this entry »

Morning name: houndstooth check

February 5, 2021

(No, I have no idea why these things pop up in my mind.)

From Wikipedia:


(#1) The houndstooth pattern

Houndstooth, hounds tooth check or hound’s tooth (and similar spellings), also known as dogstooth, dogtooth, dog’s tooth, or pied-de-poule, is a duotone textile pattern characterized by broken checks or abstract four-pointed shapes, often in black and white, although other colours are used.

Read the rest of this entry »

Two remarkable cartoon books

February 5, 2021

… edited by Bob Eckstein and published by Princeton Architectural Press:

The Ultimate Cartoon Book of Book Cartoons (by the World’s Greatest Cartoonists), 2019. (33 contributors)


(#1) Bob and the Book Cartoons cover

Everyone’s a Critic: The Ultimate Cartoon Book (by the World’s Greatest Cartoonists), 2020. (37 contributors)


(#2) The Critic cover

The books are physically beautiful; they are also affectionate tributes to independent bookstores and to cartoonists as a group. (The very American boast world’s greatest points to the strongly American focus of the books — a very heavy concentration of New Yorker cartoonists, in fact, though others are included.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Two from the 2/8/21 New Yorker

February 4, 2021

… both about N + N compounds: about weather bar in a Roz Chast cartoon, (implicitly) about bear hug in a wordless Will McPhail cartoon.

Read the rest of this entry »

anaphylaxis

February 4, 2021

Today’s morning name, a little exercise in etymology. From NOAD:

ORIGIN early 20th century: modern Latin, from Greek ana- ‘again’ + phulaxis ‘guarding’.

From Michael Quinion’s Affixes site on ana:

Read the rest of this entry »

The Stranger

February 2, 2021

The Orson Welles movie of 1946, and today’s morning name. The theatrical poster:

(#1)

Read the rest of this entry »

Ethical Surrealism

February 2, 2021

An antic cartoon by Tom Gauld in the latest New Scientist magazine. combining surrealist images with a famous ethical dilemma from the philosophical literature:

(#1)

Read the rest of this entry »

Out at college, sent home by the pandemic

February 1, 2021

A story that has surely been repeated at many colleges in the past year. This is Stanford’s story, as told in the Stanford Daily, “They were out at Stanford. Then the pandemic sent them back home.” by Kate Selig on 1/28/21:

Read the rest of this entry »

Two parrots and a pear tree

February 1, 2021

On Pinterest recently, a board devoted to Bizarro cartoons, including a fair number relevant to this blog but not previously posted here — from which, the three below (all the work of Dan Piraro alone, without Wayno’s collaboration). Two are about parrots and crackers (the first is also an instance of the Psychiatrist cartoon meme); the third offers a groaner pun on a sexual idiom previously discussed on this blog. (I’ll start with a digression on the most common way parrots figure in cartoons, as adjuncts to pirates.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Frequently asked questions

January 31, 2021

A Roz Chast cartoon in the latest (2/1/21) New Yorker:

Questions asked often enough that they border on clichés. They’re frequently asked questions — but they’re not Frequently Asked Questions, Frequently Asked Questions being an idiomatic expression usually reduced to an alphabetic abbreviation, the noun FAQ.

Read the rest of this entry »