Igor®, the Siberian shape-shifter

November 14, 2017

(Men in underwear, sexual fetishes, plus a caption of mine. Not to everyone’s taste.)

Via Daily Jocks yesterday, this fetishwear vision:

(#1) Igor®, the Siberian shape-shifter

lifelike manikin for
Maskulo fetishwear,
fashioned in warm-
touch silicone —
model sexbuddy,
broad-chested
codpiece lover,
tough dream in
glowing neon green

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Environmentally responsible derivation

November 13, 2017

It starts with an ordinary noun source and an ordinary verb sustain and eventually works its way to the adverb sustainably as a modifier of a verb source, strikingly in the split infinitive construction to sustainably source, which Wilson Gray reported in an ADS-L posting on the 11th, citing a General Mills ad in which to sustainably source oats figures prominently.

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Orchids on the march

November 13, 2017

Starting in May, we had a series of extraordinary heat waves, with record-breaking high temperatures again and again (sometimes 10 degrees F. above the record for the day). Then the heat waves broke and temperatures dropped by about 40 degrees, to something like normal. This seems to have convinced winter-blooming plants, like my cymbidium orchids, that winter had come, so they started sending up flower shoots. By Halloween, about six weeks early, we had this:

(#1) Yellow cymbidium in bloom

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From social media to the comics

November 13, 2017

The One Big Happy from the 8th:

(Thanks to John Baker — see the comments — this is a good copy of the cartoon, to replace the Denver Post version, sent to me by Benita Bendon Campbell, in the first draft of this posting. GoComics will eventually release the strip on-line.)

Bonnie’s comment:

“So on fleek” is news to me.

Well, it’s genuinely recent.

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This week’s news for pickles

November 12, 2017

Back on the 3rd, in “The pickle watch”, a survey of matters concerning pickles (pickled cucumbers) as food and as phallic symbols — and now fresh pickle news comes from Mike Pope, who encountered this remarkable object at McLendon Hardware in Renton WA, on a shelf of stuff from Archie McPhee:

(#1) The electronic yodelling pickle, combining in one small battery-operated package the double risibility of pickles with the quaint ridiculousness of yodelling

From the Archie McPhee site:

Are you sick and tired of trying to convince a jar of pickles to yodel using melodious mind bullets and sheer force of will? So were we. At last, the Electronic Yodelling Pickle that you have always hoped for! Each 5-1/4” long plastic pickle yodels its little heart out at the push of a button. Batteries included.

You can listen to the EYP’s siren song on the site.

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Food rebellion

November 12, 2017

Yesterday’s posting “Rice pudding in the land of quilted steel” focused on diner rice pudding, but the Wikipedia article covers quite a large territory, including rice puddings in different cultures around the world and rice pudding in popular culture. On the latter front, there’s a humorous poem “Rice Pudding” by A.A. Milne (of Winnie the Pooh fame) that Benita Bendon Campbell has reminded me of. The poem takes off from the Anglo-American tradition of rice pudding as plain food for children or invalids — and shows young Mary Jane’s rebellion against the tradition: “She won’t eat her dinner – rice pudding again”.

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A tale of two flowers

November 12, 2017

Plant 1 and Plant 2. They are both immensely attractive as nectar sources to pollinators (butterflies, moths, hummingbirds, especially). They both have spires of (often) purple flowers, which frequently arch over rather than standing erect; and both have opposite lancelolate leaves. They both often grow in clumps a foot or two high:

(#1) Plant 1

(#2) Plant 2

But viewed up close, they are clearly very different plants.

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Rice pudding in the land of quilted steel

November 11, 2017

Today’s Zippy takes us to the Schuyler Diner (500 Schuyler Ave.) in Lyndhurst NJ (20 miles west of Manhattan), where Zippy and Griffy debate quilted steel while on the prowl for rice pudding: diner chic. And the diner staff are sore pressed (“Sometimes I think I shall go mad”, one cries out, literarily.)

(#1)

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At the Little Tavern in Laurel

November 11, 2017

Yesterday’s Zippy goes out for sliders:

(#1) Zippy chats with counter man Sid at the Zipworld counterpart of the Little Tavern, 115 Washington Blvd. in Laurel MD, where donuts now roll alongside the sliders

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The silence of the H’s and the nastiness of the narg

November 9, 2017

Two recent One Big Happy strips on linguistic themes, one phonological / orthographic, the other semantic / pragmatic:

(#1)

(#2)

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