Ahab and the whale

January 12, 2016

It started innocently enough, with a Jack Ziegler cartoon in the January 11th New Yorker:

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Captain Ahab, identifiable through his peg leg and harpoon,  is apparently looking for his whale in a book store (where he will, no doubt, find copies of Moby-Dick, but no whales). Of course, the cartoon isn’t comprehensible if you don’t know the outlines of the story, but more than that, Ahab and the White Whale have become stock figures in popular culture, and, indeed, a conventional theme of gag cartoons: a cartoon meme.

I then went to search on {Ahab cartoon}, so that I could justify the claim that there was such a meme, and was inundated with examples. In fact, I was inundated with examples from the New Yorker alone, including two more by Jack Ziegler. I stopped collecting them when I had 10 single-panel cartoons plus a New Yorker cover. God only knows how many more there are.

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Posted in Cartoon conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Pop culture, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Fractured Didion

January 11, 2016

Today’s Zippy reels out burlesques of quotes from Joan Didion (as the Dingburg writer Joanne Obsidian), with a caricature of the writer in a muumuu:

This follows on two earlier strips (with burlesques of Edgar Allan Poe and Gertrude Stein) that I posted about on January 7th.

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Posted in Books, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

A visit to Kyrgyzstan

January 11, 2016

In my most recent News for Penises posting, I reported on an unfortunate horse penis joke made by a Scot working in the gold mining industry of Kyrgyzstan (a country with an ancient and still vital horse culture), and that recalled for me a high school fascination with the central Asian republics of the USSR: at one point, we were required to memorize the list of the 15 Soviet republics (presumably, this was part of a Know Your Enemy move), and I was especially taken with those in central Asia and the Caucasus as impressively remote and exotic places, with (in addition) truly breath-taking mountain scenery. The central Asian republics also came with the romance of the Silk Road to China. And then Kyrgyzstan stood out  because of its challenging name.

None of this was relevant to the tale of the horse penis guy, but still I was moved to dig up information about Kyrgyzstan and its immediate neighbors and about the path from Kyrgyzstan back to familiar places in Europe and on to various parts of China. Eventually I’ll have things to say about Turkic languages, so it won’t be all travelogue.

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The woolly whale

January 10, 2016

From master archivist Michael Palmer (who also knows that the woolly mammoth is my principal totem animal) yesterday, a notice from the Yale University Library of the book Guide to the Press of the Woolly Whale Records by Sandra Markham. That’s a guide to the

[ Press of the Woolly Whale ]  [ Records ]  ‘records of the Press of the Woolly Whale’

I’ll turn to the Press of the Woolly Whale in a moment, after noting that woolly whales also appear in the name of a British jewelry company and in at least two art works. Who knew? It seems that a number of people have been amused by the idea of a bizarre hybrid of a whale and a woolly mammoth.

I’ll get to the jewelry and the artworks too.

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Posted in Art, Books, Mammoths | 2 Comments »

Get Sporty

January 10, 2016

(Underwear, men’s bodies, and gay sex, though nothing hard-core, and there will be some material on language. Use your judgment.)

Yesterday’s ad from Daily Jocks, with a racy caption of my own devising:

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Sporty is solid working-class
South Boston, accent and all,
Quit high school to
Work construction, realized
Petty crime could be more
Profitable if you had a solid
Gang behind you, got approached by a
Needy fag for sex, discovered he liked
That work too and made a sideline as
Rough trade, looking and acting
Dangerous, slapping johns
Around, treating them like
Shit, but reliably never actually
Hurting them, so now he has a solid
Roster of johns paying good money to
Get Sporty.

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Posted in Books, Captions, Gender and sexuality, Language in advertising, Language of sex, Movies and tv, Underwear | 1 Comment »

Dance time

January 10, 2016

(Mostly about dance and male bodies, with only a bit about language.)

From balletomane (and sometime dancer) Mike McKinley a little while ago, this wonderful photo he found on the Male Ballet Dancers Facebook site (where, as common there,  the poster provided no information at all about the source):

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A beautiful male dancer performing a step in which he appears to be flying in mid-air, exhibiting great power and great grace simultaneously. You don’t have to be into ballet to admire his body and his performance.

Thanks to Google’s image source, I was able to identify the dancer as Jesse Inglis of the Compañía Nacional de Danza España, in a photo by Carlos Quezada. That search led me to three similar performances by other dancers and to a wonderful set of photos of a male couple flying together.

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Posted in Dance, Dancers, Language and the body | 3 Comments »

Iron Man, Captain America, and antique slang

January 9, 2016

From Michael Carden on Facebook recently, this comic strip panel from Marvel, showing an exchange between Iron Man (whose nickname is Shellhead) and Captain America:

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Carden commented:

Marvel has been around long enough that at one time “solid dick” was slang for “straight talk”.

(a story repeated with amazement and mirth on any number of blogs). I was somewhat concerned about the poor quality of the image, but much more concerned that I could find no reference to non-sexual solid dick (or anything like it) in a reputable source on slang.

Then came a small flood of debunking.

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, Slang | 1 Comment »

Signage models

January 9, 2016

Today’s Bizarro:

(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)

Ah, drawing from life, so important for the artist in training.

Note the examples on the wall, to encourage the students. Oh yes, three of them are not signage, but Bizarro symbolage.

 

Posted in Art, Linguistics in the comics, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »

More on the Bundy Bunch

January 9, 2016

Passed on by Gregory Ward yesterday, this clever mash-up (ultimate source not identified), representing the confluence of two very silly themes issuing from an utterly serious news story, about the armed occupation and ensuing standoff in Oregon led by rancher Ammon Bundy:

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The first theme, Occupy Me, is the homoerotic fanfic development I posted about two days ago. The second theme, Send Snacks, is the outgrowth of a Facebook posting by a Bundy Bunch member asking for, among other things, snacks for the group.

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language of advertising, Movies and tv, Parody, Signs and symbols | 1 Comment »

Some favorite music

January 8, 2016

(About music rather than language.)

A few days ago I awoke twice during the night because of the music that was playing on my iTunes feed: two of my very favorite compositions: the wonderfully warm

Mendelssohn, String Octet in E-flat major, Op. 20

and the fabulously joyous

Brahms, Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel (for solo piano), Op. 24

(surely one of the greatest variation pieces of all time).

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